(September 6, 2020 / JNS)

As storm clouds gather over America and chaos continues to spread in our cities, our culture and the history of our democratic process face dramatic challenges, both regarding our economic recovery and the perceived safety of voting in person. Here are some of those challenges facing us over the next two months:

1) Mail-in ballots may overwhelm USPS and precincts.

Although mail-in voting has been promoted as a safer way to cast our ballots, the system is untested on such a huge scale, and there is a fear that it will overwhelm the Post Office. The Post Office must not only deliver ballots to individual voters, they must then return the ballots to their respective precincts. More than 96 million ballots and mail solicitations have already been sent out and the sheer number of mailed-in ballots may overwhelm not only the Post Office, but the local vote counting systems as well. If that happens, there is the possibility that all the votes may not be counted in time to meet the Electoral Colleges December 20th deadline, when the election results must be certified.

2) Voting lists full of unqualified voters.

The voting rolls are filled with names of people who are not citizens, who have moved away, who are deceased, or who are otherwise unqualified to vote. RealClearPolitics.com reports that voter registration rates exceed 100 percent of the adult population in 378 U.S. counties. Nineteen counties in five statesCalifornia, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginiahave been warned that they could face federal lawsuits because they have failed to update voter rolls.

3) Censoring by social media.

Another challenge facing America is the perception that social media giants are censoring what they consider to be conservative political posts. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in June found that roughly 75 percent of adults in America consider it likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable, and suppress conservative voices. In addition, it found that nearly 51 percent of Americans say they approve of social media companies labeling posts from elected officials on their platforms as inaccurate or misleading, while only 46 percent said that they disapprove of this.

America is the leader of the free world, and both our democratic allies and enemy dictatorships are watching us closely. So it is urgent that we should address these issues in order to ensure the integrity of the electoral process before Nov. 3 and to show to the world that the American democratic process works.

This is what I suggest:

1) Voter guide on election rules.

The Constitution delegates the management of the elections to the states. However, the administration should provide guidance on how to best manage the electoral process within Constitutional norms. This should not be a partisan issue, but one that provides clarity and transparency to every voter, regardless of political leaning. A simple voting guide, defining perhaps 10 voluntary standards, should be provided to every state official responsible for the electoral process, and posted on the internet for the benefit of the voters. This guide would help voters understand what they should reasonably expect from a perfect electoral process.

Every one of the 50 states should then receive a report card which would grade their success in meeting those standards. This report card can be created by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and a small group of independent election experts. The results should be publicly announced a month prior to the elections, if at all possible, so that states might be able to address serious issues.

2) Temporarily federalize the National Guard to shut down the riots and protect voting rights.

The violent riots that are destroying entire neighborhoods in Americas cities must be stopped as soon as possible, before the elections. President Trump said he was ready to use 75,000 federal agents to quell the violence. The Insurrection Act gives him the authority to federalize the National Guard in every place where the violence has escalated to the point of destroying our cities and endangering the lives of the people who live there, when any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law. The Act was last used in 1992 immediately after the beginning of the Los Angeles riots. It is essential to take necessary action to restore law and order as quickly as possible. They should remain deployed until the crisis in Americas cities is over, and calm and safety have been restored.

3) Terrorist designation.

The Treasury, State Department, DOJ and DHS should follow through with the presidents recommendation, the U.S. Senates Resolution 279 and the We the Peoples Petition to the president dated July 6, to designate Antifa and associated groups as domestic or international terrorist organizations. Their leaders and financiers should be investigated, including the legality of funding these violent riots, and their ability to fund them should be stopped, according to U.S. Code 2339C prohibition against financing terrorism.

4) Legal response to defund the police.

All cities and states that defund the police should be sued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for not protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens. All police officers in good standing who are fired or who resign because of defund the police policies, should be immediately hired by the U.S. Marshals.

5) Censorship on social media.

Social media giants have been accused of political bias and of censoring postings that they dont agree with. According to The Hill: Mainstream conservative content was strangled in real time, yet fringe leftists, such as the Young Turks, enjoy free rein on the social media platform.

Conservatives are facing an uphill battle as the censorship by the big tech companies expands and the companies become increasingly powerful. To partially level the intellectual debating environment, a new law classifying social media platforms as broadcasters or news media should be passed, to update the antiquated law, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which gave immunity to any internet provider for content provided by a third party.

That law, which was passed long before social media became the communications powerhouse it is today, states: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Under the proposed law, which would override this portion of the 1996 law, social media sites immunity would be revoked. It would make them liable for slander and defamation, and should include a prohibition against censorship under the First Amendment.

If these changes are not made quickly, we could have a long-contested election, marred by endless lawsuits and senseless violence, encouraged directly or indirectly by the radical left. If Donald Trump wins the election, history tells us that the Democrats would most likely spend the next four years claiming once again that his presidency is not legitimate, and that therefore they are entitled to resist the rule of law, just as Democrats in the south did before and after the Civil War.

If most of these changes are made soon, we may be able to curtail the chaos that is pervading the environment during this electoral season. A relative calm would enable us to genuinely debate the important issues of the day, focus on how best to protect American values and our way of life, and how to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Ken Abramowitz is the president and founder of SaveTheWest.

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The shaky upcoming national election environment can be fixed - JNS.org

It opened up a new world for her. Not in China, but in Canada.

She found people nearby similar to her. Many of her Chinese friends were on it. They found restaurants nearly as good as those at home and explored the city together. One public account set up by a Chinese immigrant organized activities. It kindled more than a few romances. It was incredibly fun to be on WeChat, she recalled.

Now the app reminds her of jail. During questioning, police told her that a surveillance system, which they called Skynet, flagged the link she shared. Sharing a name with the A.I. from the Terminator movies, Skynet is a real-life techno-policing system, one of several Beijing has spent billions to create.

The surveillance push has supported a fast-growing force of internet police. The group prowls services like WeChat for posts deemed politically sensitive, anything from a link to a joke mocking leader Xi Jinping. To handle WeChats hundreds of millions of users and their conversations, software analyzes keywords, links and images to generate leads.

Although Ms. Li registered her account in Canada, she fell under Chinese rules when she was back in China. Even outside of China, traffic on WeChat appears to be feeding these automated systems of control. A report from Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto-based research group, showed that Tencent surveilled images and files sent by WeChat users outside of China to help train its censorship algorithms within China. In effect, even when overseas users of WeChat are not being censored, the app learns from them how to better censor.

Wary of falling into automated traps, Ms. Li now writes with typos. Instead of referring directly to police, she uses a pun she invented, calling them golden forks. She no longer shares links from news sites outside of WeChat and holds back her inclination to talk politics.

Still, to be free she would have to delete WeChat, and she cant do that. As the coronavirus crisis struck China, her family used it to coordinate food orders during lockdowns. She also needs a local government health code featured on the app to use public transport or enter stores.

I want to switch to other chat apps, but theres no way, she said.

If there were a real alternative I would change, but WeChat is terrible because there is no alternative. Its too closely tied to life. For shopping, paying, for work, you have to use it, she said. If you jump to another app, then you are alone.

Lin Qiqing contributed research.

Link:

Forget TikTok. Chinas Powerhouse App Is WeChat. - The New York Times

Lin Wood, one of the lawyers representing Kyle Rittenhouse, plans to sue Twitter and CEO Jack Dorsey after his account was temporarily locked following him advocating for his client on Twitter.

Twitter claimed his account glorified violence then later reinstated it and admitted it was mistakenly suspended.

17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse is in jail in Illinois, charged as an adult with two counts of first-degree murder.

Cell-phone footage from witnesses shows him opening fire on pursuers in Kenosha during a riot. He shot and killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz.

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However, according to his lawyers, he is innocent and acted in self-defense. Lin Wood started tweeting about raising funds for the defense of Rittenhouse. As a result, he had his account briefly suspended for glorifying violence.

After his account was reinstated after a nine-hour suspension on Tuesday night, he wrote:

I was arrested today & confined in Twitter jail falsely accused of glorifying violence. I was exonerated this evening by a finding of incorrectly actioned. I am free tonight.

Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested on 8/26 & is confined in Illinois jail falsely accused of murder. Kyle will be exonerated when truth is revealed by a finding of incorrectly actioned. Kyle will be free soon, Wood continued in his series of tweets.

Speaking to Fox News, the lawyer said that the suspension is just more proof that Twitter silences conservatives voices. He plans to sue Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey.

Im going to take Jack Dorseys ass down.

He has been abusing the First Amendment of this country for his own agenda, Wood explained.

Wood continued to say he expected Twitter to try and shut him down for supporting Rittenhouse so he was extra careful to follow Twitters community standards and policies.

He then said that he has been gathering evidence to prove that Twitter suppresses free speech.

A spokesperson for Twitter told Reclaim The Net, This account was incorrectly actioned. This has been reversed and the account reinstated, but didnt elaborate further.

Continued here:

Kyle Rittenhouse lawyer Lin Wood threatens to sue Twitter over censorship - Reclaim The Net

By Aruna SankaranarayananSep. 2, 2020

This time last year, I was a new graduate student, fresh off the boat, who started early in the summer. Being the first from my undergraduate alma mater in India to come to MIT, and with most of my cohort starting in September, I lacked easy access to a community here and was not having a particularly social summer.

It was during this time that I read about the revocation of Article 370 in the Indian constitution, which would enforce full control of the Indian government over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The act erased the quasi-independent status of Jammu and Kashmir by removing several protective clauses pertaining to the area from the Indian constitution. More frighteningly, the Indian government house-arrested several local leaders to prevent resistance, increased army presence in an already densely fortified area, and cut off internet and telecommunication access from the region of Kashmir. The lack of communication effectively subjugated more than nine million people by snipping their ties from the world. Most Indians, particularly majoritarian Hindus, rejoiced at the revocation of Article 370.

One of my thoughts last summer was, Are there Kashmiri students at MIT? If yes, how are they coping? If I couldnt communicate with family back home in one of the most heavily militarized areas in the world, I would have crumbled. If I, with a family in a safe metropolis, lovely housemates, and some scattered family in the U.S., were feeling lonely and empty, I could not imagine what a Kashmiri student from back home was going through. I decided to write to Sangam, the largest community of Indian students at MIT, to reach out to Kashmiri students it was a distant possibility that they would be on that list, but I wanted to try.

Surprisingly, my email was not published, and I did not receive an explanation about why it was censored. A week later, I reached out to the moderator of the mailing list seeking an explanation. Irrespective of where their support lay with respect to the revocation of Article 370, surely they would understand why it was imperative to reach out to Kashmiri students at MIT.

My email was deemed softly political, thereby disqualifying it from an apolitical forum that existed primarily to share events on campus and in Boston. Both Sangams charter and their website make no claim in this regard; in fact they emphasize the importance of building well-integrated communities of students from the subcontinent in a world far away from home. After attempting to convince the moderator, and through them the executive board of the group, over several emails, I was eventually forced to give up.

I try, one year later, to objectively explain why I was deeply struck by this incident. When I consider the reasons for such censorship, at best I can assume that the moderators operate on implicit guidelines that only allow for sharing event posts in order to avoid unnecessary traffic on the list, and at worst, assume that they are themselves majoritarian and see this as a scandalous view that must be discouraged. Is this the cost of empathy these days?

Sangam has since published mails from MISTI and notable alumni on events that are not necessarily apolitical (and to their credit, not particularly majoritarian) about South Asians and the BLM movement, and casteism and majoritarianism in the sub-continent, and also published non-event posts, but it did not give me permission to publish information about a Harvard and MIT student-led protest (an event post) against a contentious bill passed by the Indian government or share a document to collect signatures of students and staff requesting the government to reconsider the act. Arbitrary censorship of emails (that are not spam, or fomenting extremism or hate) is in itself deeply problematic since it imposes the biases of the moderator and the executive committee, and sometimes majoritarian views, on the members of the group. If such censorship excludes certain sections of the community, it is inherently cruel, and depending on who is being excluded, undeniably political. Being apolitical is a luxury accorded to the privileged; usually an apolitical stance is simply an implicit expression of a majoritarian stance.

This is not a piece about Sangam the groups executive committee pours in a lot of unpaid labour for it to exist, thrive, and evolve, and I acknowledge that. I am simply most familiar with the workings of Sangam since it is my community; however, I am also aware that such occurrences happen in international groups across the campus. From informal conversations with non-Indian international students, I have heard similar stories of opinion suppression, majoritarian views, and exclusion based on academic pedigree in their communities at MIT. Since entry into institutions like MIT is a self-selecting system that commonly filters out those at the lower rungs of privilege, this selection also trickles down to student associations and their leaderships, leading to incidents like the ones I describe. Further, it is often the case that the leadership of international groups at universities of MITs stature is connected to the consulate, visiting political leaders, and other spheres of influence. What is problematically political, then, is also something that might adversely impact these relationships between the group and influential circles of the community. Such imposition, and selective bias, does not bode well in a polarized world, and most definitely not in a melting pot of countries and cultures like MIT.

Through this piece, I reach out to you, the wider MIT community, to urge you to enlarge your windows, expand your perception, and deliberate on that oft-forgotten world outside your own with the same rigour that you bring to science. It is only by understanding each other, particularly those of us who are not adequately represented, that we can truly calibrate the factors that make up a just and safe campus and world.

Aruna Sankaranarayanan is a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab.

More here:

Finding human territory in a fractured world - The Tech

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She is the daughter of former NT minister Bess Price and a controversial figure for many Aboriginal Australians for her views on domestic violence and child protection in Indigenous communities.

"Yes, we are aware that Jacinta Price is potentially disruptive but that is exactly why we have chosen to invite her to this festival," Ms Allen said.

"The State Library does not believe in censorship or that Ms Price has crossed a line, which means her views should not be aired or given a platform.

"We acknowledge that the local Noongar community does not share this view."

This is not the first time Ms Price has faced controversy ahead of a scheduled public speaking event.

In September 2019, NSW traditional owners called for Ms Price's Mind the Gap Tour event in Coffs Harbour to be cancelled, saying the Alice Springs councillor was "not welcome".

In a statement a group made up of nine local Aboriginal organisations said Ms Price had vilified Aboriginal peoples and cultures for years and ridiculed their "compounding pain and suffering".

Ms Price fired back at critics, saying the group's move was "political correctness gone absolutely bonkers" and adding she would not request permission from elders to enter Australian land.

Ms Allen said journalist Stan Grant would be another keynote speaker at this year's event, who would likely "provide a different opinion to Jacinta Price".

"We will also invite members of the local Noongar community to join Jacinta on a panel to discuss her ideas," she said.

"Libraries best serve their communities when they openly and freely support citizens in accessing and understanding information of different kinds, even when this information may include views that are considered controversial."

Ms Allen said while Ms Price had accepted the invitation to speak at the festival she was unlikely to attend due to COVID-19 restrictions limiting interstate travel to WA.

Ms Price was contacted for comment.

The free Disrupted Festival of Ideas will take place at the State Library of WA on November 7. This year's festival will be centred around the theme 'A Better World' and include activities for children, music performances and panel discussions.

Marta is an award-winning photographer and journalist with a focus on social justice issues and local government.

See more here:

We dont believe in censorship: Controversial Aboriginal commentator to lead WA festival amid fear of backlash from Noongar people - WAtoday

When the novel coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country responded aggressively, placing tens of millions of people into strict lockdown. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was just as forceful in controlling how the health crisis was portrayed and discussed among its own people.

Politically sensitive material, like references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, have long been forbidden on Chinas highly censored internet, but researchers at the University of Torontos Citizen Lab say these efforts reached a new level during the pandemic. The blunt range of censored content goes beyond what we expected, including general health information such as the fact [that] the virus spreads from human contact, says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the associate director of Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on technology and human rights.

Citizen Lab's latest report, published earlier this week, finds that between January and May this year, more than 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users in the country. Many of the censored terms referenced events and organizations in the United States.

Unlike in the US, internet platforms in China are responsible for carrying out the governments censorship orders and can be held liable for what their users post. Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not comment in time for publication. WeChat blocks content via a remote server, meaning its not possible for research groups like Citizen Lab to study censorship on the app by looking at its code. We can send messages through the server and see if they are received or not, but we can't see inside of it, so the exact censorship rules are a bit of a mystery, Crete-Nishihata says.

For its latest report, Citizen Lab sent text copied from Chinese-language news articles to a group chat it created on WeChat with three dummy accounts, one registered to a mainland Chinese phone number and two registered to Canadian phone numbers. They used articles from a range of outlets, including some based in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Chinese state-controlled publications. If a message was blocked, the researchers performed further tests to identify which words triggered the censorship. Some of the blocked messages had originally been published by Chinese state media. In other words, while a person or topic may be freely discussed in the government-controlled press, its still banned on WeChat.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.

The Citizen Lab report demonstrates the extent to which the Chinese government tried to control the narrative from the beginning. As residents in Wuhan remained in lockdown, WeChat blocked phrases about Li Wenliang, a local doctor who warned colleagues about a new infectious disease before it was disclosed by the government, and who became a popular hero for free speech after he died of Covid-19 in February. WeChat also blocked its users from discussing an announcement by Chinese officials that they had informed the US government about the pandemic for the first time on January 3, almost three weeks before they said anything to their own citizens. And it censored mentions of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the organization was coupled with the word coronavirus.

By March, Covid-19 had become a global pandemic, and WeChat began blocking some mentions of international groups like the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. It also censored references to outbreaks in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Citizen Lab found that the majority of blocked words related to international relations were about the United States, the subject of the third portion of the report.

Read more from the original source:

How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic - WIRED

San Francisco The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined forces with Protect Democracy and Cooley LLP to represent five advocacy organizations suing President Trump and others in his administration for an unconstitutional executive order threatening their ability to receive accurate information free from government censorship. The plaintiffs are Common Cause, Free Press, Maplight, Rock the Vote, and Voto Latino.

Our clients want to make sure that voting information found online is accurate, and they want social media companies to take proactive steps against misinformation, said David Greene, EFF's Civil Liberties Director. Social media platforms have the right to curate content however they likewhether it is about voting or notbut President Trumps executive order punishes platforms for doing just that. Misusing an Executive Order to force companies to censor themselves or others is wrong and dangerous in the hands of any president. Here its a transparent attempt to retaliate against Twitter for fact-checking the presidents posts, as well as an obvious threat to any other company that might want to do the same.

Trump signed the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship in May, after a well-publicized fight with Twitter. First, the president tweeted false claims about the reliability of online voting, and then Twitter decided to append a link to get the facts about mail-in ballots. Days later, Trump signed the order, which tasks government agencies with concocting a process for deciding whether any platforms decision to moderate user-generated content was done with good faith. If found to be in bad faith, the order then asks for social media companies to lose millions of dollars in government advertising, as well as their legal protections under Section 230. Section 230 is the law that allows online serviceslike Twitter, Facebook, and othersto host and moderate diverse forums of users speech without being liable for their users content.

In the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California today, the plaintiffs argue that the executive order is designed to chill social media companies from moderating the presidents content in a way that he doesnt likeparticularly correcting his false statements about elections. In fact, since the order, Trump has tweeted multiple falsehoods about voting without any flagging by Twitter.

Voters have a constitutional right to receive accurate information about voting alternatives without government interference, especially from a self-interested president who is lying to gain an advantage in the upcoming election. So when Trump retaliates against private social media companies for fact-checking his lies, its not only a First Amendment violationits the kind of behavior youd expect to see from a dictator, said Kristy Parker, counsel with Protect Democracy. In the midst of a global pandemic, when far more voters than usual may opt to vote by mail to protect their personal health, the presidents authoritarian actions are especially egregious.

We joined this cause to protect voters access to accurate information about voting during the pandemic, free from unconstitutional governmental meddling that is being done to advance a particular political viewpoint, said Michael Rhodes, who chairs Cooleys global cyber/data/privacy and Internet practices. We want all voters to be able to make informed and independent political choices and that requires protecting online platforms ability to curate information without fear of reprisal from the federal government.

For the full complaint in Rock the Vote et al. v. Trump:https://www.eff.org/document/rock-vote-v-trump

Original post:

Voter Advocacy Orgs Sue Trump Administration for Executive Order Threatening Social Media Censorship - EFF

After banning almost 5,000 books in the last seven years, Kuwaits government has relaxed its book censorship laws in a move that has been welcomed by writers and free speech activists.

Kuwaiti state media reported that the countrys parliament had voted 40 to nine in favour of lifting the Ministry of Informations control over books imported into the country. Previously, the ministry had blacklisted more than 4,000 books since 2014, with titles including Victor Hugos The Hunchback of Notre Dame and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garca Mrquez falling foul of its censorship committee. All books published in the country had to receive prior approval from a 12-member committee that met twice a month before they could be released, with offences ranging from insulting Islam to inciting unrest and committing immoral acts.

The new rules mean importers and publishers will only have to provide the Ministry of Information with book titles and author names, with the importer alone bearing responsibility for the books contents. According to the National, only an official complaint from the public will spark legal action against a book, with a ban only to be implemented by the courts, rather than the Ministry of Information.

The International Publishers Association said the ruling put an end to the mandate of the Kuwaiti book censorship committee.

Congratulations to those in Kuwait who have successfully encouraged this change in favour of the freedom to publish, said the chair of the IPAs freedom to publish committee, Kristenn Einarsson. This is an important step forward and I hope that more positive changes will follow.

Kuwaiti-American author Layla AlAmmar told the Guardian that the change was a major and positive step in the right direction.

Abolishing the committee is a major accomplishment that is worthy of celebration, and the credit for it rightly goes to writers and activists like Bothayna al-Essa and Abdullah al-Khonaini, who lobbied tirelessly for this cause, she said.

AlAmmar said that, in the nearly 15 years that the committee was in place, almost 5,000 books were banned in a largely arbitrary fashion and that the law had throttled an already fledgling publishing industry and market where piracy is rampant.

Campaigners have both welcomed the news and shared reservations. The Ministry of Information is no longer the judge when it comes to books and I believe this is a most important achievement, Essa told Gulf News. We will continue to work towards achieving greater freedoms.

But Khonaini said: The freedom of expression is already restricted in Kuwait on multiple levels. This law doesnt fix it. The amendment shifts the power of censorship away from the executive branch to the judicial branch. We still need to work on the prohibition section in the law, which needs a stronger political lobby and mature political and societal awareness.

AlAmmar pointed to the case of International prize for Arabic fiction winner Saud al-Sanousi, who went to court to get a ban on his book annulled. It remains unclear what the fate of the banned books is: does the ban automatically lift? Must they pass through some other authorising committee or bureaucratic procedure before their sale is allowed? None of this has been addressed, she said.

See the original post:

Kuwait relaxes book censorship laws after banning thousands of titles - The Guardian

By: Lifestyle Desk | New Delhi | Published: August 26, 2020 6:24:56 pmAuthors have welcomed this decision. (Representational image)

According to a report in The Guardian, the Kuwait government has become more lenient with its censorship laws pertaining to books. This comes after it banned almost 5,000 books in the last seven years. The report further states that the countrys parliament voted in favour of Ministry of Information exercising no control over imported books. The same report further states that under the new rules, publishers need to give book titles and names of authors to the Ministry. In the past, books like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hunchback of Notre Dame were banned.

Congratulations to those in Kuwait who have successfully encouraged this change in favour of the freedom to publish, Kristenn Einarsson, the chair of the International Publishers Associations freedom to publish committee was quoted as saying.

Abolishing the committee is a major accomplishment that is worthy of celebration, and the credit for it rightly goes to writers and activists like Bothayna al-Essa and Abdullah al-Khonaini, who lobbied tirelessly for this cause, Kuwaiti-American author Layla AlAmmar was quoted as saying in the report.

The freedom of expression is already restricted in Kuwait on multiple levels. This law doesnt fix it. The amendment shifts the power of censorship away from the executive branch to the judicial branch. We still need to work on the prohibition section in the law, which needs a stronger political lobby and mature political and societal awareness, Khonaini said.

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Kuwait eases censorship laws after banning 5000 titles in last 7 years - The Indian Express

Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series which celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on TV. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.

Next up, we're speaking to Amber Benson about her game-changing role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.

That's true for more reasons than I could ever list here, but when Buffy said this to Dawn, younger me also found these words strangely comforting. Being a teenager is never easy, no matter who you are, or where you come from, but it's safe to say that all the loneliness everyone feels is amplified even more when you're queer. And hearing someone else acknowledge that on screen shifted something inside of me.

Buffy didn't choose to be a Slayer, just like I didn't choose to be gay, but there's a strength to be drawn from being different and embracing what makes you special. Of course, that's easier said than done. For the longest time, I fought to deny this part of myself with even more strength than Buffy battling another apocalypse.

But then something magical happened. A new character called Tara Maclay appeared on the show and for perhaps the first time ever, I saw my own shy, queer insecurities reflected directly back at me on screen.

Looking back at her first day, Amber Benson recalls walking onto the 'Hush' set in season four and coming across the Gentlemen on wheeled platforms:

"Someone was pulling them, and they just couldn't get it to work right. So for two hours, it was everyone trying to get the Gentlemen to float properly [laughs]. I was like, 'What have I walked into?'"

It's fitting that in an episode where people lost the power to speak, Tara's debut ended up giving a voice to countless queer viewers watching at home. As her role gradually became more prominent, this shy young character shifted the show and TV as a whole towards something more inclusive, and that was thanks in large part to her relationship with Willow.

Sure, there had been other LGBTQ+ romances on TV before, but it's safe to say seeing Tara and Willow fall in love saved more lives than even Buffy herself ever could. Almost twenty years on, Benson tells me that both she and co-star Alyson Hannigan "feel honoured" still by how fans react to their story:

"I'm so lucky," says Amber. "It's the thing I'm most proud of as an actor. I look back at Buffy, and I'm like: we did something that wasn't just television. I think that was a beautiful thing. I think it changed the landscape a bit."

"I look back at Buffy, and Im like: we did something that wasnt just television."

Before Willow fell under Tara's spell, TV was pretty much a full-on Hellmouth when it came to any kind of positive queer representation. Sure, some important strides were made in the '90s, but they often came at a cost.

Shows like Friends often reinforced cringeworthy stereotypes, and even when Ellen DeGeneres came out in her sitcom, the subsequent backlash led to its eventual cancellation. Readers who grew up during this time will recall that queer characters were even rarer in genre TV. Looking back, Xena and Gabrielle must have slipped a disc carrying the whole queer fantasy fandom on their shoulders.

And then Tara arrived. Just by proudly loving Willow on TV, Amber's character told fans that; "If you find somebody to love, it doesn't matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. If you find somebody, you're lucky. That's a beautiful, wonderful thing, and everyone should have that opportunity."

Back in the early noughties, it was still rare to see two women share this kind of affection on screen; "You just didn't see that." So while Tara and Willow's relationship was groundbreaking for a number of reasons, Benson admits the network was still "very, very wary" about showing the physicality of their love.

"Standards and practices were like, 'Hmmm. No. We don't want them touching. We don't want them kissing', which I always thought was kind of absurd, because you have a show where people are having sex on gravestones. Really? You can't have two women just holding hands? [laughs] I don't understand. It seems a little hypocritical there, guys?"

Benson and her co-star Alyson Hannigan were naturally both "very upset" about this. "We felt it was disrespectful to the relationship, how they were censoring things on the show." However, it's important to remember that Tara's relationship with Willow still made an impact regardless, just by virtue of existing:

"One of the guys in the art department came over to us, and he was gay. He was like, 'Look, in the grand scheme of things, yes, it would be awesome if you could show the physical aspects of the relationship. But what's important is that you guys are going into people's houses every week, and introducing them to a wonderful, loving relationship two people that just both happen to identify as female, who are together, and love each other. You're changing people's perceptions.'"

At a time when queer people were almost non-existent on screen, even a censored version of this relationship still mattered. Just ask 14-year-old me. And that made it even more special when the network did finally relent and start to show the physical aspects of Tara's love for Willow.

"To be in bed together, and to kiss, and to hold each other, and to hold hands. I think all of that was really important and really necessary."

"You have a show where people have sex on gravestones. You can't have two women just holding hands?"

As the relationship evolved, Tara grew too. Benson recalls how her character started out "very shy, very insecure," at first. "We really worked on portraying that in a physical way. She's almost holding herself. She was so hunched, and almost protecting herself. And by the end, she was standing straight, and her stammer had mostly gone away. She was very integrated into the Scooby Gang."

When Giles left in season six, Tara became "the moral centre of the group," and Benson thinks "that could only have happened because Tara took that journey from a shy, insecure person, to a loved human. The relationship changed her."

That's what real love does. It changes you for the better. But when you're a young queer kid living in a small town somewhere, it's easy to start thinking you'll never find love like that. Most queer storylines back then punished LGBTQ+ characters for daring to be themselves, or just neutered them completely.

And it's also worth noting that when Buffy first aired, stigmas surrounding AIDS were still prevalent, which led many queer teens to wonder if they would even survive long enough to experience the love they deserve. But by showing Tara and Willow physically enjoy their relationship on screen, it taught young people like myself that we too were worthy of love.

The best example of this can be found in 'Once More With Feeling', otherwise known as 'That wacky Broadway nightmare' or 'The Best Buffy Episode Of All Time'. As a now integral part of the Scooby Gang, Amber's character was given her own song called 'Under Your Spell' where she sang of how Willow's love helped set her free.

"I heard that song, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I got the best song on the whole album!'" Benson laughs. And for what it's worth, she's not wrong either. "I love everybody's songs, but my song is a magical, little song. People listen to that song at their wedding. They play that song when they walk down the aisle."

But what these couples might not realise is 'Under Your Spell' is also a rather "naughty song". Even over Zoom, it's clear how much Benson loves that aspect of the song, and she even sings a couple of these double entendres to me, like "Spread beneath my willow tree" and "You make me come plete".

Younger me would have lost his mind hearing Amber sing what was basically the soundtrack to my youth, and honestly, even now, I had trouble containing my excitement.

"You can't work with a group of people for three years, and not feel like they're your family."

However, it's also important to recognise how these little moments actually celebrated queer sex pre-watershed at a time when most TV shows failed to even acknowledge its existence.

Amber says filming the musical was her biggest highlight on the show, even if it was "probably the most intense thing" to shoot. And that's saying a lot given how Benson's time on Buffy came to an end.

Countless words have been written about Tara's death and perhaps even more tears have been shed since 'Seeing Red' first aired in 2002. Looking back on that episode, Benson remembers "everyone was very emotional" on set:

"We had a cake. It said 'RIP Tara'. There was a little gravestone. I cried. Sarah [Michelle Gellar] cried. My last stuff was with Sarah. It was very, very emotional. You can't work with a group of people for three years, and not feel like they're your family."

For many watching back home, Tara was their "family" too, which is why fans were so devastated by how her story came to an end. As traumatised viewers might recall, Tara was killed by a stray bullet just after she and Willow had finally got back together, cutting their reconciliation short.

Outrage ensued amidst a wave of frustration and sadness. Not only did fans love the character dearly, but many felt that Tara's death was actually some form of punishment because of the queer love scene that preceded it.

Executive producer Marti Noxon has since expressed regret over Tara's demise, but to this day, her death is still referred to as a quintessential example of the 'Bury Your Gays' trope.

Speaking about the moment she found out Tara's fate, Benson remembers Joss Whedon taking her aside while filming season five's finale:

"He was like, 'Hey! Guess what? It's so exciting! We're going to kill your character!'"

"I was like, 'Oh oh, yes. That sounds awesome yeah.'" [laughs]

However, as time went on, it became clear that Whedon's excitement for this might have faded somewhat. Amber tells us that Joss "kept putting it off," and in fact, Tara's death was actually supposed to happen at the beginning of season six.

"I truly believe that if he'd understood the impact of Tara's death, Joss would never have done it."

"He just kept pushing it further back. It kept getting pushed further and further down the line [laughs]. I think there was a part of him that didnt really want to do it."

But what does Amber think about it all now? No-one was affected by this decision more than Benson herself, but she doesn't bear any ill will towards Joss and the writing team. In fact, Amber even defends their choices, although she believes hindsight would have helped them "find a different way to deal with Tara's death".

"I feel like Joss did such a beautiful job with her," says Benson. "I truly believe that if he had understood the impact of Tara's death, Joss would never have done it that way. He's not vindictive or hurtful."

According to Amber, Joss was looking at this decision "from a story point of view", planning Tara's fate to support Willow's addiction storyline:

"How do we get Willow to become dark Willow? Well, she has to lose the most important thing in her life. It's her lover, her person... What Joss was trying to do was really impactful and beautiful. I just think how it happened was a little intense, and there could have been a better way had we all had a conversation about it."

Despite there being a general "lack of thoughtfulness" on TV back then, Amber maintains that the intention was never to "screw" with people. "If we were doing this now, I guarantee you, Joss would be super-aware of the conversation around 'Bury Your Gays'."

Since leaving Buffy, Benson has become a prolific writer with multiple books to her name. One story in particular, The Witches of Echo Park, may even follow in Buffy's footsteps and make the move to TV. A pilot has already been written, and Amber plans to work behind the scenes as showrunner alongside her friend Mo Perkins.

Given her success as an author, I was keen to know if Amber would have handled Tara's story differently if she'd been involved in the writers' room all those years ago.

"I understood why it needed to happen," Benson reflects. "And looking back, there was probably a better way to do it. A way to maybe not kill her. Maybe sending her to another universe. Who knows? There's all kinds of ways to get rid of somebody for a while."

"We could talk all we want about Tara's death, but the fact she existed transcends all that."

Amber jokes that "Buffy's died like five times," so it would have been easy to 'kill' Tara without really killing her. While there was some talk of bringing her character back in the final season, Benson says the dates conflicted with another job, and in hindsight, she feels that this was for the best.

Joss planned for The First to take Tara's form, torturing the friends she left behind on Earth, but Amber didn't want her character to return as a villain. "I think that would have been hard for people... If the show had gone on, we could have gone a different way to bring her back. Kind of like what they did in the comics. I thought that was really lovely."

These comic book cameos were mostly flashbacks, but Amber has a perfect idea for how Tara's life could have continued if she'd survived:

"I picture her being a very cosy lady. I think she would be that mum that was very invested in Dawn. Like, 'Whats going on with Dawn? Dawn's moving to Los Angeles to go to UCLA? Guess what, Willow? We're moving to Los Angeles, so we can be near Dawn!'"

"She'd be that kind of mum. She'd totally be into macram, probably with a scrapbook."

Despite everything that's happened, it's comforting to imagine Tara living out the rest of her days in domestic bliss. After all, "We could talk all we want about Tara's death, and how awful it was, but the fact that she existed, that that relationship existed, transcends all of that."

And Amber's right. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it, but characters like Tara and Willow help make life a little bit easier to bear, especially for young queer people who might feel alone and unseen. Buffy was a hero we can all aspire to be, but so was Tara. In her own way, she saved the world too.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is currently available to stream or download on Amazon Prime Video. It's also currently available via All 4 in the UK.

Digital Spy has launched its first-ever digital magazine with exclusive features, interviews, and videos. Access this edition with a 1-month free trial, only on Apple News+.

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Buffy's Amber Benson on censorship, the musical, and Tara's death - digitalspy.com

(Image: Adobestock)

Human beings are innately wired for progress. It is in our evolutionary DNA. History has shown that, often, much is sacrificed in the name of advancement.

At the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, few would have predicted that the burning of fossil fuels would have such deleterious effects on our environment. Through lobbying the global world, via policy summits, 13,000 scientists explicitly called for bold and drastic transformations inclusive of economic and population policies. These policies led to legislative change, resulting in enormous positive effects that just may save the world we live in.

Enter the digital revolution with its interesting dynamic, pitting the hard-won right to freedom of speech against the imperative for social cohesion and the protection of personal dignity the age-old debate in democratic nations around balancing rights and responsibilities.

The penetration of new technologies and the reliance on digital forms of information and entertainment in South Africa is undeniable. In the first quarter of 2020, daily newspaper circulation declined by 14% over the previous year, with weekend newspapers declining by 17%, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation of South Africa. At the same time, according to statistics from the DataReportal, mobile connections in South Africa increased by 3.1 million between January 2019 and January 2020, to 103.5 million. Internet penetration stood at 62% (an increase of 3.1% year-on-year) and social media penetration at 37% (an increase of 19% year-on-year).

This trend is not new, as media convergence sees consumers opting to access their news, information and entertainment online. At the same time, a significant power shift has occurred. The gatekeeper role of curated information, once held by traditional media, is starting to dissolve with ordinary citizens being able to share their opinions far and wide using social media.

Enter a whole new debate: fact versus fake news. A certain high-powered state leader on Twitter being a prominent case in point.

In South Africa, a strong Constitution has won global acclaim for its ability to balance rights and responsibilities. Our legislation and regulations take their tenor from this solid basis. The Films and Publications Amendment Act of 2019 (FPAA) is no different, recognising that no right can be absolute insofar as it holds the potential to infringe on a contrasting right.

In simple terms, as an example, the freedom of one citizen to express their opinions online has, in the past, come into direct conflict with the rights of fellow citizens when these opinions constitute hate speech. The right of a child to not be exposed prematurely to content of an adult nature comes up against uncontrolled posting of sexually explicit images on mobile applications.

The FPAA activates a system of consumer advisories, employed to provide the public with advance knowledge of the types of content they are likely to encounter in a film or game.

This balancing act between rights and responsibilities is by no means a simple equation, due in part to the diverse and nuanced nature of human existence. In recent weeks, a draft set of regulations developed to align with the Films and Publications Amendment Act of 2019 has been published for public and industry inputs, after the Amendment Act was assented to by the president in September 2019. The Amendment Act and the regulations, once finalised, will come into operation simultaneously.

So, in the wake of this new and improved legislation designed to protect us and our children, articles and social media posts proliferate that misrepresent its intention and its consumer protection elements, which go to the heart of the Film and Publications Amendment Act.

Fact or myth: The Films and Publications Amendment Act (FPAA) and draft regulations

The intent of the Act has always been to ensure that citizens of South Africa are protected from content in films, games and certain publications that could cause them moral, emotional or psychological harm. Precepts of the act, and the regulations that implement them, create that fine balancing act between the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The Amendment Act brings the law in line with advancements in digital technologies to protect against harmful content online.

Censorship versus classification

Often accused of being a law that seeks to censor, this misunderstanding stems from opponents not taking into consideration the mechanism by which content is mediated. It completely overlooks the fact that in a democratic South Africa we do not ban content, unless the content is unlawful and damages social cohesion in the country (i.e. hate speech, incitement of imminent violence, propaganda for war, child pornography, etc). This unlawful content is set out in the Constitution, to which the FPAA is aligned.

Instead, the FPAA activates a system of consumer advisories, employed to provide the public with advance knowledge of the types of content they are likely to encounter in a film or game. The content is not banned or censored unless it contains illegal content it is, rather, allocated a consumer advisory prior to distribution. This is a very important and fundamental distinction.

The process of the classification of content is informed by Classification Guidelines which are used to assign ratings and classifiable elements to every film and game prior to their distribution in the country. Using this consumer advisory as a guide, the public chooses what content they or their children expose themselves to. These Classification Guidelines are subjected to a substantive review and to public scrutiny every five years to ensure alignment to new laws and new child development theories, so that they correspond with social values and the best interest of citizens.

An age rating, for example, alerts a parent that the content might cause developmental, emotional or psychological harm to their children under that age. An SV element on the other hand warns survivors of sexual violence that the content may contain portrayals of sexual violence and might thus trigger their previous trauma. A P element assigned would warn about prejudicial themes against a certain religious, racial or interest group. This is a somewhat oversimplification, as the Classification Guidelines take into consideration the artistic or pedagogical intent of the creator and the impact of the format in which the content is distributed (e cinema or DVD).

Films and games, which are distributed by a person who conducts the business of such, are classified before legal distribution can take place. The FPAA allows the public to lay a complaint against, or object to, any publication (except for newspapers, magazines and broadcast content which is exempt regardless) such as a book or piece of art. This content is then assigned a classification retrospectively.

The FPAA affirms that commercial digital content, distributed on online platforms such as Over-The-Top (OTT) and Video on Demand (VOD) falls into the ambit of its pre-classification for legal distribution.

Commercial digital content vs social media

Another common misperception is that the FPAA seeks to control social media content. While the content shared on social media does potentially contain content that can cause harm, the FPAA does not in fact relate to social media generally. It does, however, make inroads into protecting the public from specific types of social media content that directly harms the dignity of a citizen. This content is referred to in the FPAA as revenge pornography and aims to provide recourse for survivors of cyber bullying perpetrated online, when intimate images are shared without the consent of the person depicted in the content.

The chicken-and-egg debate about South Africas high rate of violence vis--vis the type of content we consume illustrates the question of impact of content consumption on the population.

Prior to the FPAA being signed by the president, a distributor of physical content (i.e. cinema-style exhibitions, DVD or CD) needed to ensure that the content is assigned an age rating and element classification before it is distributed.

Mechanisms are now being put in place through the FPAA draft regulations to provide greater clarity and direction on how content that is distributed online for commercial gain is classified. This gives the public the option to consume content or not, based on the consumer advisory that is assigned to the online content.

This amendment to the law now places it beyond doubt that viewers of online commercial films and games will be protected through consumer advisories in the same way that they have been protected from content distributed through traditional methods previously. The onus is placed on the distributor of such online content to ensure that a classification rating is assigned and displayed when content is viewed.

Importantly, this excludes content that is not shared for commercial gain online and on social media platforms.

The nature of online distribution channels is vastly different from traditional distribution channels: the FPB is consulting stakeholders from the creative and distribution industry to simplify the process of classifying commercial online content. This includes the possibility for these online service providers to self-classify, based on the South African classification system, or apply for the accreditation of a recognised and aligned international classification system that industry has been trained to use.

After three weeks of interaction with industry in this regard, the majority of our creative sector has welcomed the robust and sincere dialogue with the FPB on the draft regulations to implement the FPAA in the interest of protecting the public while easing the administrative burden on distributors.

Better safe than sorry

These are some of the misunderstandings of the FPAA clarified.

Reflecting on other advancements in humanitys relentless quest for progress that have resulted in both positive and disastrous impacts on society, proactively trying to counter such negative effects makes good sense.

The chicken-and-egg debate about South Africas high rate of violence vis--vis the type of content we consume illustrates the question of impact of content consumption on the population.

Does our content reflect our social values and mores, or does immersing our children in such content ramp up the normalisation of violent actions? Equally, we see the devastation to personal dignity caused as a result of various forms of cyberbullying, such as revenge pornography, and in its most extreme form suicide.

Should we as a nation rather be safe than sorry? DM

Lynette Kamineth is the Communications and Public Education Manager at the Film and Publication Board, the content regulator and agency of the Department of Communications. She uses her expertise to highlight the work being done by the organisation to protect the children of South Africa from exposure to potentially harmful content.

Laurie Less is the Shared Services executive at the Film and Publication Board. She was previously the Executive Manager at Wits University Clear-AA, a specialist M&E centre and in various government agencies. In the development sector she worked as a senior programme manager for both Swedish SIDA and the Open Society Foundation of South Africa.

Pandelis Gregoriou is Manager of Legal and Regulatory Affairs at the Film and Publication Board. An attorney of the High Court of South Africa, he obtained a BA and LLB degrees from Wits University. He has worked at the South African Human Rights Commission as its Head of Legal Services, leading the execution of the protection mandate of the institution.

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Film and Publications Amendment Act: Protecting, not censoring, our citizens in the digital age - Daily Maverick

The new national security law by the Hong Kong government has been sending shock waves through artists living in the city, especially the ones that have covered the pro-democracy protests in some fashion.

The law, which has been enacted since June, is supposedly to punish terrorism, secessionism, or collusion with foreign forces. The punishment terms including a probability of a lifetime in prison have caused massive unrest among a huge number of artists across Hong Kong as they know its mostly being used to punish those who dont submit to Chinas wrath.

Fearing that they may potentially violate the law, many artists have started fleeing the country, leaving the city, or simply self-censoring themselves. Whats more, pro-democracy books have already been taken off the shelf everywhere and you can no longer find shops and retail outlets where imagery and decorations related to the protest are publicly displayed.

Ive chosen to leave. For the moment, I want to protect myself, said Lau Kwong Shing, an illustrator known for his fine-line drawings around the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Shing is not the only artist to feel so. As a matter of fact, nearly 2,000 artists and cultural workers said to Reuters that they were experiencing a climate of fear and self-censorship due to the new law that was passed.

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Other artists, such as Him Lo, are strategically shifting their artworks to museums in Europe and elsewhere to ensure that they are preserved. Im worried artworks will be seized, said Lo. We also have artists such as Childe Abaddon who are climbing the ladder of success through their publications are now being apprehensive to release updates and newer editions.

Abaddons Voices contained a number of protest works submitted by anonymous contributors. It was lucky that we put out the book before. The book sold well, but we wont consider publishing any more, said Abaddon. Considering the current security laws and the gravity of the situations, artists across Hong Kong are backing down from creatively showcasing their viewpoints.

Hong Kongs government, however, says that the new law is put in place to respect and protect human rights. The legitimate rights of Hong Kong citizens to exercise their freedom of speech, such as making general remarks criticising government policies or officials, should not be compromised, said the Hong Kong government in a statement.

Nonetheless, artists have already started self-censoring themselves to ensure that they stay safe and do not get entrapped under the law and serve prison time. With mass surveillance of social platforms in the region, many artists think its only a matter of time until they get caught for dissent.

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Chinas wrath on Hong Kong is causing artists to self-censor - Reclaim The Net

Bloomsbury India decided to withdraw a book on the Delhi Riots on Saturday after being bullied into the decision by a left-wing outrage mob, comprising of liberals, Congress supporters and Islamists. Later, it was revealed that Left Historian William Dalrymple had contributed prominently towards that decision. The book, Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, was authored by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Dr Prerna Malhotra.

Since they announced their decision to withdraw their book, Bloomsbury India has come under significant criticism from people across the spectrum with multiple authors withdrawing their books from the publication house in protest. However, liberals continue to defend them even when they engaged in blatant censorship of freedom of expression.

Liberals are now coming up with ridiculous explanations in order to justify Bloomsbury Indias decision to withdraw the Delhi Riots book. They now claim that censoring the book is not a freedom of expression issue at all. Their justification for the deliberate censorship of contrarian political opinion is that the book is supposedly hate speech and lies. Here, we shall look into the various arguments given by the outrage mob to justify censorship.

Liberals have made it clear that they wish to exercise a monopoly over what constitutes truth and they want us to trust their words over our own eyes. Lies is not a free speech issue, declared Swara Bhasker. Amusingly enough, she has not even read the book because it was not even released. How could she then know if it contains lies or not? What happened to the famous liberal dictum of Watch the movie before outraging?

Rana Ayyub demonstrated the intimate relationship between Islam and Communism. She claimed that it was an issue between the oppressor and the oppressed and one of freedom of speech. Meanwhile, her almost sudden rise to fame in western media circles is rather intriguing and only reveals the pits that journalism has fallen to in the West.

It is a bit rich coming from someone whose book Gujarat Files was trashed by Supreme Court as based on surmises, conjectures and suppositions.

Arfa Khanum Sherwani, journalist at leftist propaganda website The Wire, justified the withdrawal of the book by calling it a work of propaganda. It is ironical indeed.

Times Next Gen Leader Gurmehar Kaur was the most honest among all of them. She said quite clearly that freedom of expression is a virtue worth protecting. In fact, according to her, freedom of expression is a tool of oppression. The rest of her statement is borrowed from the SJW mob in Universities in the United States that regularly censors Conservative speech.

Make no mistake, what Gurmehar Kaur is really saying is that people must not be allowed to speak as they see fit and liberals should have the authority to dictate what speech is permissible. Hate Speech is, of course, a convenient term invented to disguise their lust for power under a cloak of virtue. What she is effectively condemning is free speech itself.

Then, there was the usual snobbery. It is important to realise here that they feel no shame at all about censoring contrarian political opinion. They consider it a victory whenever they manage to bully a platform into withdrawing its support for non-left speech. Liberals are quite like Radical Muslims in that way.

While the rest of the world looks on with horror at the devastation wreaked by Islamic Terrorism, Radical Muslims actually celebrate it with great pomp and vigour. It is the same with liberals. While everyone feels bile rising through their throat watching the distasteful tactics of the Left, liberals wear it as a badge of pride.

All of this again goes on to demonstrate that liberals do not care about principles, they only care about power. They will advocate action that enhances their power even if it is seemingly inconsistent with the principles they claim to espouse. A justification, no matter how twisted, can always be produced later on to claim that their actions were never in contradiction with their principles.

The reason for this is simple, liberals do not seek to convince anyone. They only wish to ensure that their absolute control over power is not threatened. And in order to achieve that objective, they will go to any extent necessary. Principles are minor inconveniences that can always be rectified to suit ones objective.

Thus, quite clearly, liberal support for freedom of expression comes with various terms and conditions. The most important one, of course, is bending the knee and serving their nefarious agenda.

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Here are 5 excuses liberals have put forward in defence of modern day book burning, and why it makes them look like total morons - OpIndia

Back in June, two bodies were found in suitcases by teenagers on a Seattle beach and now the victims aunt wants the viral TikTok video removed.

Gina Jaschke has done an exclusive interview with the BBC in which she speaks about her niece, and argues that the video must be removed from the app. However, TikTok disagrees, claiming that it does not violate their guidelines.

Seattle Police have opened a murder investigation on the case and are appealing for information.

Back in June, three teenagers were making TikTok videos on a beach in Seattle when they made a shocking discovery.

Whilst socialising on the beach, they saw that there were a pair of suitcases that had washed up onto the shore. Upon opening the cases, they found two dead bodies.

The teens uploaded the video to TikTok, which quickly went viral, and the news rapidly spread around the world. The video has now has now had a huge 5.5 million likes.

It does not contain any graphic scenes, but does show the teens opening the suitcase. Watch the TikTok video at your own discretion here.

The bodies were later revealed to belong to Jessica (Jessie) Lewis, 35, and her partner Austin (Cash) Wenner, 27.

Jessica was a mother to four children, and their families are offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who can provide information, reports The Metro.

Both were revealed to have gunshot wounds, and Seattle Police opened an ongoing murder investigation on June 19th. They are currently appealing for information.

A new BBC interview with Jessicas aunt reveals that she desperately wants the TikTok video to be removed.

Gina Jaschke said: That video went viral and theres nothing we can do to change that.

She then goes on to say that she wants to thank the kids who found the bodies, because wihtout them they may have never found out what happend to Jessica and Austin.

However, she then addresses the fact that she thinks the video should be removed:

I wouldve thought by then that they would know better to put it down. That these bodies that were found in these bags, in these suitcases, that smelt awful, that they have faces now that they could see. And they were people. And I thought that they would have known too that they were people. And they would have taken it down of of respect for that.

However, the video still remains on TikTok, and the social media site argued it does not violate their guidelines as it did not include any visuals of the remains.

Watch the full BBC interview here.

In other news, Twitter: Fans ask 'Does Bryce Hall have Covid' following huge LA birthday party!

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Jessie and Austins aunt vs TikTok the debate around censorship of Bodies in the Suitcase video - HITC

A drone flies over the roof of Wuhan's huge train station, which is seems to be cowering under a gray sky. The viewer sees barren train tracks and then a group of stationary trains comes into focus. The message is clear: No wheel is turning anymore. Life has come to a standstill.

To stop the spread of the unfamiliar virus, China's authorities completely shut down a metropolis of 11 million people.

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei

Wuhan was the first city to undergo the lockdown to help prevent the global spread of COVID-19, which Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's film shows with emotional images. Theartist, who now lives in Cambridge, England, directed his 115-minute documentary remotely from Europe: "We are releasing Coronation, our film about Wuhan, China, as a tribute to all the doctors and nurses who are fighting COVID-19," he wrote onTwitter.

His team in China analyzed almost 500 hours of film material for the documentary, Ai Weiwei told DW. Drone shots of Wuhan were used for this, as well as shots from hospital security cameras and video clips of the medical staff treating COVID-19 patients. According to the filmmaker, "ordinary citizens" were responsible on location for the shooting of Coronation.

While the rest of the world was still lulled in a sense of security, Coronation shows how Wuhan's streets were already deserted.

In short sequences, the trailer shows the courtyard of a hospital as well as hectic scenes in hospital corridors and intensive care units. Nursing staff express their commitment to their work. A just-deceased person, wrapped inan airtight package, is hoisted onto a stretcher. A person wearing a gas mask and bright yellow protective gear drives silently on an electric scooter through the streets spraying disinfectant. People wearing masks stand in line waiting to be tested for the coronavirus. Meanwhile, rotating spotlights project the insignia of communist China onto the facades of skyscrapers, rendering the whole scene quite bizarre.

In Coronation, Ai Weiwei punctuates political intentions. As stated on his website, the film addresses the "specter" of Chinese state control from the first to the last day of the lockdown. The film illuminates the "brutally efficient" and militarized response on the part of the state to control the virus, the website says.

A still from Ai Weiwei's new documentary

"They made a good decision to seal off Wuhan," Ai Weiwei told DW.At the same time, he criticizes the authorities' methods: "The method of sealing the city should not have been through literally sealing off people's doors, placing people in detention, or hiding the truth about the situation. This has caused a great panic."

The government should have also told people the truth about the situation, he said. "Before the authorities sealed off Wuhan on January 23, there was a month or two when they knew the coronavirus was human-to-human transmissible. They covered up the number of infected and the death toll," Aistressed.

There may have been several reasons for this, the artist pointed out: the National People's Congress scheduled for February, for instance. Or the signing of an important trade agreement with the US that was also imminent. The state wanted to prevent bad news from being spread, he said, and this can only happen through strict censorship.

Ai Weiwei is not the first chronicler of the events. Chinese writer Fang Fang previously recorded the fate of the people in the lockdown in an online diary, which was then published in English in May 2020 as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City.

She described the freedoms that people in Wuhan lost without being asked and the mistakes the authorities made. She wrote about the panic, the helplessness, the fears and the tension especially in the early days of the lockdown. She criticized the "incompetent cadre."

Chinese writer Fang Fang faced backlash as critics said she was providing fodder to countries that have slammed China's handling of the pandemic

Writing each evening, she filled her blog with new posts that spread quickly before the censorship cracked down.

In the view of Western experts, China's leadership lost a great deal of trust among its own people through its coronavirus crisis management. For one thing, Beijing learned nothing from previous epidemics, political scientist Maximilian Mayer told DW. "It was also surprising for many Chinese just how comprehensive the government's possibilities for control actually are," he said.The Chinese state uses all the tools available to that end, including the employment of drones, artificial intelligence and other intelligent surveillance systems, Mayer said.

Much of this is now also evident in Ai Weiwei's film Coronation. "China was not a role model in this case," the artist said. Instead,he added, the leadership intensified the surveillance and controlling of its people,restricted freedom of speech, and further undermined the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive branch.

Translation: Louisa Schaefer

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Artists Ai Weiwei and Fang Fang's depictions of the Wuhan lockdown - DW (English)

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.

I published a social history of U.S. censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US.

I found that military and civilian officials in the U.S. sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the publics understanding of radiation from the bombings.

Heavy handed

Although everything related to the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was defined at the time as a military secret, U.S. officials treated the three main effects blast, fire, and radiation very differently. They publicized and celebrated the powerful blast but worked to suppress information about the bombs radiation.

The world learned a month later a few details about that radiation that some type of atomic plague related to the atomic bomb was causing death and illness in the two bombed cities. But for years radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects.

To this day we have no fully accepted accounting of the atomic bomb deaths in both cities; it has remained highly contested because of the politics surrounding the bombing, because of problems with the wartime Japanese census, and, importantly, because of the complexity of defining what constituted radiation-caused deaths over decades.

In my research, I found U.S. officials controlled information about radiation from the atomic bombs dropped over Japan by censoring newspapers, by silencing outspoken individuals, by limiting circulation of the earliest official medical reports, by fomenting deliberately reassuring publicity campaigns, and by outright lies and denial.

The censorship of the Japanese began quickly. As soon as Japanese physicians and scientists reached Hiroshima after the bombing, they collected evidence and studied the mysterious symptoms in the ill and dying. American officials confiscated Japanese reports, medical case notes, biopsy slides, medical photographs, and films and sent them to the U.S. where much remained classified for years -some for decades.

Historians note the irony of American Occupation officials claiming to bring a new freedom of the press to Japan, but censoring what the Japanese said in print about the atomic bombs. One month after the war ended, Occupation authorities restricted public criticism of the U.S. actions in Japan and denied any radiation aftereffects from exposure to the nuclear bombs.

In the US, too, newspapers omitted or obscured anything about radiation or ongoing radioactivity. Military officials encouraged editors to continue some kind of wartime censorship especially about the bombs radiation. Four official U.S. investigating teams sent to Japan in the months immediately after the surrender wrote reports about the biomedical effects of the two atomic bombs. Several of the reports minimized the radiation effects and all received classifications as secret or top secret so the circulation of the majority of their information remained constrained for years.

Traditional combat bomb

The censorship has several explanations. Even Manhattan Project scientists had only theoretical calculations about what to expect about the bombs radiation. As scientists studied the complex effects in the next years, the U.S. government classified information from Japan as well as related radiation information from medical research and the atomic bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site.

American officials wanted reassurance that Allied troops landing in Japan would not be endangered by any remaining radiation. Based on pre-bomb calculations, U.S. officials did not think that U.S. troops would be endangered by exposure to residual radiation but the concept of radiological weapons and uncertainty created fear.

An additional explanation for the censorship of information pertaining to radiation is that U.S. officials did not want the new weapon to be associated with radiological or chemical warfare, both of which were expanding in scope and funding after the war. Those associated with the atomic bomb wanted it to be viewed as a powerful but regular military weapon, a traditional combat bomb.

The results of the radiation censorship campaign have been hard to pin down both because of the nature of the silencing itself (including its incompleteness), and because knowledge leaked into public awareness in many ways and forms.

Historian Richard Miller observes that, In the long run, the radiation from the bomb was more significant than the blast or thermal effects. Yet, for years that radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects.

Legacy of secrecy

Censorship about the radiation deaths and sickness from the atomic bombs in Japan was never, of course, entirely successful. American magazines featured fictional stories about cities ravaged by radiation. John Herseys searing account, Hiroshima, became a bestseller in 1946 just as the summers Crossroads atomic bomb tests in the Pacific received massive publicity including reports about the disastrous radioactive spray that contaminated eighty of the Navys unmanned test vessels.

Campaigns from governmental officials as well as military, scientific and industrial leaders sought to ease the publics fears with the alluring promises of miraculous medical cures and cheap energy from commercial nuclear power.

Historians have described the American publics reactions to Hiroshima as muted ambivalence and psychic numbing. Historian John Dower observes that although Americans demonstrated a longterm cyclical interest in what happened beneath the mushroom cloud, the nations more persistent response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been the averted gaze.

Secrecy, extraordinary levels of classification, lies, denial, and deception became the chief legacy of the initial impulse to censor radiation information from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

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A Radioactive Plague: The secrecy and censorship surrounding civilian deaths from World War II - Milwaukee Independent

Amid geopolitical conflicts with China, India has banned TikTok. Its looking into banning more China-based apps like Alibaba. With the U.S. having similar conversations about TikTok, sources are becoming concerned that were facing an age of internet censorship.

Lets take a look at whats happening in India and globally surrounding new apps like TikTok. What should cause more concern, data mining, or censorship? Lets find out.

Indias official reason for banning TikTok has to do with privacy concerns. Like most apps, TikTok mines data from users to show targeted ads and to bring up content individual TikTok users want to see.

TikTok works quickly to parse out videos users want to interact with. From likes within the first hour of use, TikTok makes suggestions based on the videos you interact with. Like dancing? TikTok shows you more dance videos. Liking DIY instead? Your FYP (For You Page) scroll will be full of home improvement and craft projects.

Concerns stem from TikTok tracking macro-data on users all over the world. If an app is privy to viewing trends in a specific country, in theory they can use the information to sway elections. Many supporters of the ban point to possible Russia interference in the U.S. 2016 election that monitored user data to spread false information.

TikTok was banned in India amid privacy concerns, but is that the only reason? The two most populous countries have had negative relations with each other for decades. Deadly border clashes are escalating, including one last month that left twenty dead at the India/China border.

Also, the Indian government isnt the only force driving TikToks ban there. After rising tensions, the Indian population is calling for a ban on Chinese goods and services, especially technology like apps.

Current U.S. President Donald Trump is entertaining the idea of banning TikTok in the U.S. Like India, his reasoning has to do with national security. According to Secretary of state Mike Pompeo, American users shouldnt download the app unless they want their private information in the hands of the Chinese communist party.

A spokesperson for TikTok released a statement about the possible ban, denying that they have ever given information to the Chinese government, and they wouldnt do so if asked. The statement also pointed out that TikTok is owned by an American CEO.

Critics of Trump say the reason has more to do with wounded pride than national security. Thousands of teenagers sabotaged attendance at Trumps rally past month thanks to a TikTok campaign. TikTok users would claim tickets and wouldnt show up, driving down attendance.

Short answer: even with an executive order, it may not stick. Even if Trump directed the FCC to shut TikTok down, civil liberties groups like the ACLU are waiting in the wings to take him to court. Theyre ready to argue that banning an entire platform is a violation of The First Amendment safeguarding free speech.

However, thats not stopping Donald Trump and his administration from seriously looking into banning TikTok. One way theyre looking to weaken the platform is to have an American company like Microsoft buy the app. Trump was opposed to the plan at first, but now he supports it as long as the U.S. government gets a substantial cut.

Its unclear whether the U.S. Department of Treasury can actually take a cut if TikTok gets bought out by an American company. Trumps requirement that a portion of the deal goes to the U.S. has no basis in antitrust law according to financial experts.

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Censorship on the internet in 2020: The potential effects of TikTok - Film Daily

Our nation has always defended free speech and the right to express different viewpoints. Until recently, it was fair to assume U.S. internet companies were committed to those same rights. But in the last few years, reports have uncovered a disturbing trend of online platforms censoring conservative speech.

In 2018, for example, Twitter was exposed for shadow banning prominent conservatives on the platform, meaning their profiles were made difficult for users to find. Some of the more well-known figures who were shadow-banned include Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, former Congressman and current White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Donald Trump Jr.

And just days ago, Facebook and Twitter removed posts from President Trumps accounts, while incendiary statements from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Irans Ayatollah remain.

Google has also done its share to frustrate conservatives.

Recently, Google threatened to block the conservative news site The Federalist from receiving ad revenue because they had not removed certain offensive content in their comment section. The comments may indeed have been derogatory and unacceptable, but it is telling that Google singled out a conservative website for special scrutiny. Google has not applied that same standard to other platforms with comment sections including YouTube, which Google happens to own.

Americans recognize tech bias

Googles selective hostility towardThe Federalistrevealed what most Americans already believe: that tech companies are politically biased. According to a 2018 Pew study, seven out of 10 Americans believe social media platforms censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable.

These concerns are all the more weighty given the immense power that these corporations wield in our society. More and more of our daily business is taking place online, and our dependence upon internet firms is only accelerating with the pandemic.

As we near the 2020 election, Americans have real concerns about whether online platforms will treat campaigns on both sides of the aisle fairly and equally. And these concerns are justified. Americans are right to be worried about interference by powerful tech firms that are increasingly out of touch with mainstream political views.

Reforms to protect a diversity of views

Tech companies are able to censor a wide range of content thanks to provisions in the Communications Decency Act. Passed in 1996, this law protects interactive computer services, like Facebook, from being sued for content posted by their users. It also allows these companies to censor content they consider to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.

I am concerned that platforms have abused the term otherwise objectionable and have used it to suppress content that they simply disagree with or find distasteful. When Congress passed the law in 1996, the intent was to protect companies when they censor obscene or indecent material not political views they do not like. If the abuses continue, this law risks negating the values at the heart of our First Amendment.

Given recent cases of censorship, Congress should revisit the Communications Decency Act and make it clear that companies cannot enjoy special immunity from lawsuits if they censor political speech. Recently the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet convened a hearing to consider this issue.

As chairman of the full Commerce Committee, I intend to pursue this matter thoroughly and evaluate what changes are needed to the law.

Congress needs to ensure the internet remains a free and open forum where diverse political views can be expressed. Doing so can help preserve our great tradition of free speech in the digital age.

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Wicker: Time to address online censorship - The Vicksburg Post - Vicksburg Post

SEATTLE, Washington In response to the continued suppression of internet freedom, including access to social media and online news sources by authoritarian regimes, a bipartisan group in the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced a bill to expand global internet freedom. The Open Technology Fund Authorization Act would direct the nonprofit Open Technology Fund (OTF). OTF currently funds the creation of ways to counter censorship efforts by small tech groups. It develops technologies to skirt government censorship and enables people to access websites that their governments have blocked.

As House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. noted that the internet is a powerful tool to spread unbiased information to increasingly bigger audiences in countries without free press. This information could threaten the governments of these countries, which is why the internet is censored. The internet can be a key tool in the fight against tyranny.

According to House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the internet age has ushered in a new era of tyrannical governments exercising control over their citizens. Surveillance and censorship of the internet have become a growing trend in repressive regimes like China, Iran and North Korea. As a result, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has sought to expand internet freedom globally. By supporting projects that promote free communication on the internet and that counteract government censorship, censored countries can achieve internet freedom.

The bill confirms the need for the protection of internet freedom. Currently, more than two-thirds of people around the world live in countries where the internet is restricted. Authoritarian regimes spend billions of dollars every year on internet censorship and surveillance. Furthermore, the Chinese government not only restricts its own peoples access to the internet but it also exports technologies used for surveillance and censorship.

The purpose of the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act is to combat internet censorship and expand internet freedom globally. To do so, the Act would amend the United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994 by adding Sec. 309A Open Technology Fund. This new section would make yearly grants available for the purpose of supporting unrestricted access to uncensored sources of information via the internet. This would empower journalists to produce and spread the news and allow their audiences to receive such information.

This act would establish the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a grantee entity which shall carry out the provisions of this section. The mission of the OTF will be to promote freedom of the press and unrestricted internet access overseas. To sum up the goal of the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act, Representative Engel explained, If a repressive regime builds a wall [around the internet], the OTF is working to build an even taller ladder.

Rep. Michael McCaul [R-TX-10] introduced the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on April 24, 2020. The bill has six cosponsors (3R, 3D). The bill was assigned to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and is currently in the first stage of the legislative process.

Limiting and blocking access to the internet is a tactic of authoritarian regimes. According to Rep. McCaul, Knowledge is power, which is why information blocking has long been a hallmark of oppression. Oppressive governments censor the internet in order to maintain their grip on power. The Open Technology Fund Authorization Act would thus empower and enable people around the world to utilize the internet to further their own welfare and human rights.

Sarah FrazerPhoto: Unsplash

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Open Technology Fund Authorization Act - BORGEN - Borgen Project

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Following the Clean Network Program initiative from theU.S. Department of State, the Trump administration further escalated its aggression against Chinese mobile applications, particularly WeChat and TikTok. On August 6, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order addressing the threat posed by WeChat. Accusing WeChat and TikTok of censoring political content and identifying them as potential vectors for disinformation campaigns, the Trump administration prohibited transactions related to WeChat by any person or property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States after 45 days.

There are many details yet to be released by U.S. officials about implementing the executive order. It remains unclear what actions are considered to be transactions. And the impact that the executive order will have on average WeChat users is also vague. But many view the order as a plan to ban WeChat from operating in the United States.

A petition calling the federal government not to ban WeChat has received 60,415 signatures as of August 10 While Chinese Americans can give up a leisure app among the many that exist, they cannot give up the only app linking them to their families in China, the petition argues. During this pandemic, WeChat plays an even more important role in helping families stay connected and updated.

Different from TikTok, most Americans are not familiar with WeChat, a mobile application developed by the Chinese company Tencent. A Statista Survey in 2018 shows that 87 percent of U.S. internet users have never used the application, and only 4 percent of the surveyed individuals use WeChat every day.

The majority of WeChat users in the United States, and other democratic countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, are Chinese-speaking immigrants with significant ties with the Peoples Republic of China. In other words, expanding on its success in China, WeChat arrived in the United States, Canada, and many other countries through immigration. The Chinese mobile application has shaped the Chinese communities in these countries significantly. Instead of searching through yellow pages, local community bulletin boards, and online forums, newcomers with language barriers can now find many services available through the application. From buying groceries to purchasing a property, WeChat can help.

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Thus WeChat is more than a mobile application used to send messages to friends and relatives. It also includes functions to send and collect payments, as well as sharing words, pictures, and videos on your friends content feed.WeChat is a super app that covers the feature of several mobile applications that we are more familiar with.

While WeChat facilitates daily life for many of its users, the application is also involved in several significant issues. WeChat has not been able to successfully combat misinformation, fake news, and hateful messages, which are prevalent on the platform. Because WeChat posts target users who may have difficulties in reading local newspapers and conducting fact-check research, misinformation on WeChat from misinformation on drugs to fake news regarding COVID-19 is concerning and may cause more damage to democratic institutions.

Censorship from the Chinese government is the other significant problem facing WeChat. The Citizen Lab from the University of Toronto conducted in-depth research on WeChats efforts to use overseas data to boost its censorship apparatus. In addition to censoring articles, websites, and social media posts critical of the Chinese government, WeChat also stores, monitors, and intercepts messages in private conversations between individual users. With no protection of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, WeChat also became a tool for Chinese state media to reach out to the countrys overseas diaspora groups. While WeChat denies censorship allegations, numerous and robust evidence are suggesting otherwise.

Those issues are not only raising flags in the United States but also are recognized by other countries around the world. Canadas House of Commons directed members of parliament and staff not to use WeChat due to cybersecurity risks. Australian media The Canberra Times calls WeChat the channel for China disinformation campaigns.

The petition pleading with the U.S. government not to ban WeChat is right about one thing: WeChat is one of the few mobile applications that can be used by users both in and outside of China. But it would not be fair to blame the outsized impact of potentially banning WeChat on the Trump administration. Chinas Great Firewall prevents other messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram from operating in China. With its major competitors blocked in China, WeChat obtained unfair advantages by complying with Chinese government censorship and influence operations. WeChat is very unlikely to disobey orders and censorship requests from the Chinese government and that leaves other countries with limited options to regulate the mobile application.

While WeChat serves as a tool for people to connect through the Great Firewall, it does not exonerate the application from engaging in mass censorship and influence campaigns in the free world. Democratic countries, including the United States, must step up and investigate further options to maintain their democratic integrity while minimizing the cost and inconvenience that any proposed policies may bring to diaspora groups.

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The Logic of a US WeChat Ban - The Diplomat