Polyethylene Terephthalate Resins (PET Resins) Market Explores Overall Study to Revenue, Demand, Growth and Predictions up to 2026 | Competitor like…

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Polyethylene Terephthalate Resins (PET Resins) Market Explores Overall Study to Revenue, Demand, Growth and Predictions up to 2026 | Competitor like...

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have something in common; Malta raises the price of citizenship – Coda Story

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Hello, and welcome to Oligarchy. We are tracking how Covid-19 and the worlds response to it is affecting the super-rich and what that means for power and politics.

There has always been a cliffhanger built into Maltas Individual Investor Program the scheme it created in 2014 to sell European Union passports to anyone who passes the checks it says it imposes. The cliffhanger was this: only 1,800 golden passports could be sold. It was an exclusive club, when all of those 1,800 lucky families had signed up, applications would be closed. Forever.

This raised an interesting philosophical question: the investor program is basically free money. Malta has been earning money from selling successful applicants the right to live almost invariably somewhere else in the EU. All of the benefits accrued to the Mediterranean island country, and yet it had to face none of the potential downsides caused when very wealthy oligarchs start moving into a neighborhood.

When the programs built-in cap was reached, would Malta walk away from all of this free money, amounting to some 50 million euros a year? Decision time is now upon us. At the end of this month, the program will close. If you want to grab one of the handful of places remaining, you have 28 days left.

Or, you could just wait.

The program will be replaced by a new scheme, also super-exclusive, which will have a cap of its own: 1,500 applicants. Surprise! Malta isnt turning away free money.

Its the same with me. I dont sell copies of my books. I just provide an opportunity for exceptionally discerning people to invest in my literary output.

It may seem a bit harsh to compare Maltese citizenship to a limited edition chocolate bar that goes on sale around Halloween, and then becomes widespread if it proves popular, but that is what it increasingly resembles. So how will the new scheme be different from the old one?

The Individual Investor Program is dead, long live the Individual investor Program.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know I have a bit of a thing about the EU saying its taking action against tax havens, when its actually only targeting places too weak, too poor and too irrelevant to matter. In case you havent read the newsletter before, the problem with the EUs approach is that it penalizes places like Vanuatu, while ignoring countries like the United States, while giving the impression that its doing something valuable.

We now have a new data point, thanks to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Developments Global Forum the premier global body for ending bank secrecy and tax evasion which has published a new assessment of nine of its members.

Among the countries assessed was Malta, now rated as partially compliant. That is only one step up from the Global Forums worst rating of non-compliant, and is worse than the British Virgin and Cayman Islands (largely compliant), and worse than Jersey and Guernsey (compliant). Malta now ranks even lower than both St Kitts and Nevis, and the Marshall Islands.

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Will the EU recommend blocking Maltese companies from receiving state aid in the EU? I very much doubt it. Will it continue to pretend to be doing something substantive by bullying places too small to fight back? I fear so.

Excitingly, we have gained another human being with a net worth greater than $100 billion, thanks to the astonishing increase in the Tesla share price this year, and Elon Musks 21 percent stake in the company. He is not just duelling with Jeff Bezos up at the top of the global income distribution, however, he is also duelling with him in space.

Musk is known for his ambition to reach Mars, while Bezos is pushing for a mission to the moon, with the goal of having a full time base there by 2028. I am beginning to wonder if this is the new iteration of seasteading, the libertarian tax-dodging ambition to live out on the ocean to avoid rules created by governments. To date, seasteading schemes have always failed because the weather is so extreme away from land that existence is untenable. In space, perhaps things could be more controllable.

If they are indeed hoping to abandon the planet, then they may prove disappointed in the service Branson will provide, however. He plans to return them to earth just 90 minutes after take-off, and charge them $250,000 for the privilege.

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Its a big week for klepto-literature, with the publication of Bradley Hope and Justin Schecks Blood and Oil, a superb portrait of Saudi Arabias Mohammed bin Salman; and Tom Burgis long-awaited Kleptopia. Im going to be busy.

See you next Wednesday,

Oliver

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Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have something in common; Malta raises the price of citizenship - Coda Story

Longtime Literature Professor, Noted Poet Begins Next Chapter with Retirement – University of Texas at Dallas

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University of Texas at Dallas professor Dr. Frederick Turner, who over the past 50 years has won numerous literary awards, published dozens of books, touched the lives of hundreds of students, and even been quoted in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, retired from teaching Sept. 1.

Dr. Frederick Turner

Turner, the Founders Professor of literature and creative writing, is described by many as a Renaissance scholar, with interests that span poetry and literature to neuroscience and psychology.

He could not have fit more seamlessly into the vision that started UTDallas that is, seeing linkages across disciplines, seeing that the more interesting the problem, the more it demanded seeking multiple modes of understanding it, said Dr. Dennis Kratz, senior associate provost, director of the Center for Asian Studies, and the Ignacy and Celina Rockover Professor. He has been adventurous and willing to address the large ideas underlying the specific concepts that too many academics limit themselves to.

Dr. Nils Roemer, interim dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies, described Turner as an unbound professor who will delve into anything to follow his curiosity.

For Fred, its all connected science, nature, poetry and theres no real separation. These types of scholars are not governed by boundaries or disciplines or a sense of respective expertise. If theres something that interests them something beautiful and aesthetic they are there, Roemer said.

He could not have fit more seamlessly into the vision that started UTDallas that is, seeing linkages across disciplines, seeing that the more interesting the problem, the more it demanded seeking multiple modes of understanding it. He has been adventurous and willing to address the large ideas underlying the specific concepts that too many academics limit themselves to.

Dr. Dennis Kratz, senior associate provost, director of the Center for Asian Studies, and the Ignacy and Celina Rockover Professor

The son of an anthropologist, Turner grew up in Zambia where he learned through correspondence courses. Eventually, he earned his bachelors and masters degrees at the University of Oxford, where he also earned a BLitt (no longer given), which is a terminal degree at the PhD level.

Turner came to UTDallas in 1985 after beginning his teaching career in 1967 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Turner taught a range of subjects, including Shakespeare, Renaissance studies and performance studies, but writing and literature always remained the heart of his work.

Fundamentally, Im a poet, he said. I had my sense of poetic vocation when I was about 10 years old. And although I love teaching and love being a scholar, those were essentially ways of supporting my writing habit. Poets need patrons, and probably the best patron you can have is yourself.

Turner is a winner of the Miln Fst Prize (Hungarys highest literary honor), the Levinson Prize for poetry, the Dallas Chapter Golden Pen Award, The Missouri Review essay prize, the David Robert Poetry prize, the Gjenima Prize, and several other literary, artistic and academic honors. He has participated in literary and TV projects that have won the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award and an Emmy, respectively. He is a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters. Turners Genesis: An Epic Poem, published in 1988, was the first major work of poetry that addressed the idea of terraforming Mars.

Dr. Frederick Turner (right) and Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsvth read testimonies written by concentration camp prisoners during a special Holocaust event in March 2018. Turner and Ozsvth, who also retired recently, collaborated on a number of writings and events, particularly translation projects.

He has published nearly 50 books, which include collections of poetry, book-length poems, literary criticism, cultural criticism and literary translations. Most of the translation books were done with his longtime collaborator, Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsvth, UTDallas professor of literature and history, who also retired recently. The two plan to continue their weekly meetings and translation collaboration. Turner called Ozsvth his closest non-family friend.

Roemer said Turner has been popular even life-changing among students.

You have normal professors, and you have professors with whom students form very deep, long-lasting relationships. Fred is among those professors who have been very transformative to many, many students, Roemer said.

Even though Turner is retiring from teaching, he said he will continue to contribute to the University through talks, advice and institutional memory. He plans to spend most of his time diving deeper into his writing.

You have normal professors, and you have professors with whom students form very deep, long-lasting relationships. Fred is among those professors who have been very transformative to many, many students.

Dr. Nils Roemer, interim dean of the School of Arts and Humanities

For Fred, retirement is about finally being able to do all the other things he wants to do particularly writing, Roemer said. His writing was part of UTDallas, but it also extended beyond that, to the world, which is why I think his teaching is the biggest mark that he is leaving behind.

Turner said he hopes UTDallas will continue to focus on its interdisciplinary nature.

The University, of course, has big demands to shine in particular niches or pigeonholes, and thats fine, he said. But I think the soul of the University is in what happens in between the pigeonholes. And I hope we continue with that.

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Longtime Literature Professor, Noted Poet Begins Next Chapter with Retirement - University of Texas at Dallas

Destination Red Planet: For space buffs, this summer has brought multiple Mars bound space launches – The Times of India Blog

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Mars is back in the news. In July, three countries launched missions to Mars. The first was the United Arab Emirates, which sent its Hope orbiter on board a Japanese rocket on July 19; Chinas Tianwen-1 mission followed on July 23; and, finally, the United States launched NASAs Perseverance rover on July 30. A fourth mission, by the European Space Agency and Russia, was postponed to 2022.

It might seem like a race is on to reach the Red Planet, akin to the race to the Moon in the 1960s. But the explanation is a bit more mundane: every 26 months, the Earth and Mars are closest together. This offers a brief window for a quick journey to Mars. If you miss the window, you have to wait another 26 months which is what happened to the ESA/ Russia mission.

Mars has always loomed large in our imagination, and science fiction writers have been depicting voyages to the red planet for centuries. In 1887, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli undertook detailed telescopic observations of Mars and observed a dense network of features on the surface. He called them canali which stands for channels in Italian, implying narrow and long depressions. However, that got mistranslated into English as canals, giving rise to immense speculation and an entire corpus of science fiction, the most famous of which is HG Wells The War of the Worlds.

Theres reason to be fascinated by Mars. The planet has numerous features in common with Earth. Although smaller than Earth, it has a similar rocky composition and marked seasons. NASA missions over the decades have made it clear that an environment different from the cold, dry world we see today once existed on Mars. Liquid water flowed on the Martian surface in the past: there are vast dry gorges and canyons etched by water and ice (Schiaparellis channels). Some scientists think Mars might have harboured life not the advanced aliens of science fiction, but more mundane bacterial life that might today be extinct.

In 2007, when the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, Id asked Arthur C Clarke, famous science fiction writer and visionary, about whether human beings would set foot on Mars soon. During my lifetime, Ive been lucky enough to see our knowledge of Mars advance from almost complete ignorance worse than that, misleading fantasy to a real understanding of its geography and climate, he had replied. He had even gone on to talk about what would make Mars habitable for humans since now we have fairly accurate maps of the Red Planet, and can imagine how it might be modified terraformed to make it nearer to our hearts desire.

In fact, terraforming Mars has been advocated in recent years by Mars enthusiasts and would-be colonisers such as Elon Musk, who has publicly said he wants to die on Mars (although not just on impact). Terraforming or earthforming is a Herculean feat of planet-wide engineering that will change the Martian atmosphere and allow humans to make uninhabitable Mars into a planet fit for natural life. While terraforming has a lot of followers, some recent studies have said it might actually not be possible on the scale humans would need to survive on Mars.

But first humans have to get there. And, hopefully, return. To do that, we would need large, reusable rockets and a plan for humans to be able to survive the entire duration of the roundtrip, which is going to be a few years. In 2010, US President Barack Obama predicted that a crewed mission will orbit Mars by 2030, followed by a landing soon after. President Trump signed an order directing NASA to send astronauts to Mars in 2033.

Russia has also publicly announced intentions to send humans to Mars in the 2040-2045 time frame, and the ESA wants to do so as well. Nations like India, China and Japan have already attempted uncrewed Mars orbiters. Indias Mangalyaan mission was successful, and started orbiting Mars in 2014, but China and Japan have both failed to get their missions into Mars orbit. China is now trying again, and the UAE has become the first Arab country to attempt an interplanetary mission.

Its well documented by now that missions to space are a great catalyst for a nations advance in science and engineering. Many technologies we now take for granted wireless headsets, electrolytic water purification systems, camera phones, CAT scans, to name a few owe a lot to the Apollo missions to the Moon. In fact, some argue that the investment by the US government in the Moon race led to its current science leadership.

Whether geopolitics and rivalries between different nations will speed up the timeline to Mars remains to be seen. Competition can only be healthy, and the world is likely to benefit from the fallout. Like the Moon missions, missions to Mars will probably produce technologies that will benefit humans on Earth as well.

In fact, the question is not if we humans will reach Mars but when. Clarke, who more than most 20th century visionaries had the knack of being proved right, had quipped back in 2007, I have sometimes wondered if there might be a committee to protect the Martian wilderness in the 22nd century!

Meanwhile, the Red Planet continues to yield new surprises. Just this week, NASA announced that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of baffling ridges on the surface of the planet. Some of us will probably witness a Mars landing in our lifetimes. We will certainly know by then if life ever existed on Mars, even if it were a primitive, bacterial kind. Should the answer be yes, it would be another profound milestone in our evolving understanding of humanitys place in the universe, the scientific revolution that started with Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Destination Red Planet: For space buffs, this summer has brought multiple Mars bound space launches - The Times of India Blog

Cool! Heres how Venus would look as a water world – EarthSky

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Its hot enough on the surface of Venus to melt lead. There are also crushing surface pressures and clouds full of sulfuric acid. So theres no water on the surface of Venus today. This planet orbiting next-inward from Earth around the sun is one of the most inhospitable places in our solar system. But scientists think that, a few billion years ago, Venus might have had oceans, perhaps much like those on Earth. Venus might once have been habitable. Even now, some have suggested terraforming Venus, so that it could become a water world once again in the future. What would Venus look like with water? Reddit user Dragonite-2 has created a map, based on spacecraft data about Venus terrain, and posted it to the MapPorn subreddit. It portrays Venus if it were terraformed to become a more Earth-like world, with a similar amount of water to Earth.

The map has now gone viral.

How accurate is it? And what does it show?

Venus is covered with dense clouds. So we cant see its surface. But radar from spacecraft orbiting this world, or (in the early days) from Earth can penetrate the planets clouds and has let scientists make maps of the highs and lows on Venus surface. Thats why Venus has a known topography, which Dragonite-2 used to create his map of Venus as a water world. Radar images show us Venus mountain ranges, volcanoes, quasi-continental formations and other, flatter regions.

Thus, weve known and now Dragonite-2 has helped us see that if Venus had an Earth-like quantity of water, it would have one large continent in its northern hemisphere. Scientists have named this continent already; they call it Ishtar Terra. Its about the size of Australia. The highest point on Venus, the mountain Maxwell Montes, is located on Ishtar Terra. Theres also a second large continent which scientists call Aphrodite Terra located along the equator of Venus. Its the size of South America (if South America were stretched out along Earths equator, instead of running perpendicular to it). Dragonite-2s map also illustrates smaller continents and islands that would be scattered throughout Venus global oceans, if Venus were a water world.

Dragonite-2s map posted to Reddit is based on spacecraft data. Most of our information about what lies beneath the dense clouds of Venus was obtained by the Soviet space probe missions Venera 15 and 16 and by the American Pioneer Venus and Magellan spacecraft during the period 1978 to 1994. Today we have good information about 98% of the surface of Venus, according to this page from ESO. This map comes from NOAAs Science on a Sphere. Its a compilation of Venus radar data, showing Venus topography as its known today. NOAA wrote: Most of Venus appears to be covered with gently rolling plains. Two areas rise up above the rest of the surface and are referred to as continents.'

Writing in Inverse on August 29, 2020, Mike Brown described the new Venus-as-water-world map. He quoted an associate professor of planetary sciences at North Carolina State University Paul Byrne who told Brown that, in one sense, the map is fairly accurate:

in that someone has taken the real-world digital elevation model for Venus and added a sea level to it.

I dont know how realistic the if Venus had as much water as Earth part is, but Im guessing that whoever made this map picked an average ocean depth for Earth and flooded the Venus topography to that same depth.

However, as Byrne also noted to Brown, the surface would look quite different after erosion by rainfall, rivers and lakes. The map portrays Venus surface as-is, without plate tectonics. But a planet with oceans likely would have plate tectonics the gradual movement of land plates on the planets crust, relative to one another just as Earth does.

And that movement of crustal plates would, of course, affect the configuration of continents and islands.

Venus as seen in enhanced color by Japans Akatsuki spacecraft. Its surface cannot be seen with the eye alone. Its completely covered with dense clouds. Theres a wonderful article about real images of Venus via Japans Akatsuki spacecraft, at the Planetary Society blog. Akatsuki began orbiting Venus in 2015. The images were put through special processing and released in 2018.

Artists concept of what a terraformed Venus might look like, with Earth-like oceans, continents and clouds. Image via Ittiz/ Wikimedia Commons.

But, of course, in another sense, the map of Venus as a water world doesnt compute under current real-world conditions. As planetary scientist Byrne noted in the Inverse article:

In reality, its not remotely realistic.

Thats because of the extreme conditions that exist on Venus today. A watery ocean cant exist on a world thats hot enough to melt lead. So the map isnt accurate in terms of the real planet Venus now. And now is what this map shows. See the contradiction?

Still, Dragonite-2s map helps us use our imaginations and cast our minds back in time or forward into the future when, according to some visionaries, Venus might be a very different place. Byrne was speaking of the past Venus when he said:

Although a Venus with oceans wouldnt look much like the Reddit image, it is fun to think about what a blue Venus might once have looked like, and why its climate turned into the hellish world it is today.

And we can imagine Venus as a terraformed world, purposely made to be more habitable and Earth-like again. This is a well-known concept for Mars, to transform the dry, cold planet back into a habitable one. Despite the fact that Mars is the most Earthlike world in our solar system, terraforming Mars would be difficult, according to most experts.

But terraforming Venus a world the same size and density as Earth, but not remotely like Earth on its surface would be even more difficult.

That hasnt stopped some people from thinking about it, though. The famed astronomer Carl Sagan was one of the first to propose ways to terraform Venus, back in 1961. Sagan had suggested seeding Venus clouds with algae; later, it was determined that wouldnt work because the atmosphere was found to be too thick. Astronomer Geoffrey Landis mentioned Sagans ideas, and the history of terraforming in general, in a paper from 2011.

Below is a short video animation depicting how the surface of Venus might look during a gradual transformation back into a water world:

Of course, the biggest hurdle in terraforming Venus would be in trying to reverse the runaway greenhouse effect that caused the planet to heat up to the extreme temperatures we see today. That wouldnt be easy. It would require huge amounts of energy and advanced technology. But a terraformed Venus might have some advantages over a terraformed Mars, according to Paul Byrne. As Byrne points out, Venus is almost the same size as Earth, with similar gravity, and it might be easier to remove carbon dioxide which makes up most of the planets atmosphere and causes the greenhouse effect from its atmosphere to cool the planet, than to add gases to Mars thin atmosphere to warm it. Byrne commented:

If we were to terraform anywhere, then Id pick Venus over Mars. But, to be clear: its going to be orders of magnitude more achievable to stop f%#&ing up our own climate here on Earth than trying to make anywhere else even remotely habitable for humans.

Good point.

So while Dragonite-2s map in Reddit might not be all that accurate according to scientists it does give us a reason to think. It provides an interesting glimpse at Venus as weve never known it, but which might have existed in the past. And just maybe it gives us a vision a world that might exist again in the future.

Not ready to stop thinking about maps and worlds made habitable via terraforming? Dragonite-2 posted another imaginary water-world map on the subreddit MapPorn, a few days after the Venus map. Its shared below. It shows what Earths moon would look like, if it were covered with water. Enjoy!

Another great map that depicts the moon if its had as much water as Earth from r/MapPorn

Bottom line: A cool new map by a Reddit user shows what Venus might look like with oceans on its surface.

Via Reddits MapPorn

Via Inverse

Via NOAAs Science on a Sphere

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Cool! Heres how Venus would look as a water world - EarthSky

Don’t ignore Venus Earth’s twin hides surprising opportunities (op-ed) – Space.com

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The planet Venus is fascinating, terrifying, ironic, beautiful, deadly and just possibly alive with organisms.

In many ways, Venus shows us an Earth that could have been; the twin that grew up in a different environment. As one of the few other rocky worlds in our solar system with a thick atmosphere and active volcanoes, Venus can help scientists on Earth learn valuable lessons on global carbon balance, ozone depletion and acid rain. Its wrinkly highlands probably conceal chapters in the origin story of life in the cosmos.

It is faster and easier to get to Venus than Mars. Despite Venus' hellish surface conditions, it may be practical for humans to explore and someday settle the second planet from the sun. Yet no active spacecraft have been sent to its surface since the Soviet Union's Vega 2 mission in June 1985.

As long as there have been human imaginations, Venus has inspired them. A feminine presence in the mythology of ancient Europe and the Middle East, and a masculine spirit in Mesoamerica, the duality of the "Morning/Evening Star" has launched wonder and inquiry about the universe. Interviewing 10 planetary scientists for our documentary film "Venus: Death of a Planet" and its follow-on series "Exploring Venus," we became entranced with the planet's promise. For limited time, Space.com readers can view these films for free at MagellanTV.

Earth and Venus appear to have assembled themselves out of matching materials, very near to one another in the protoplanetary disc of our early solar system. They are nearly identical in mass, gravitation and size; Earth is just 396 miles (638 kilometers) larger in diameter. As of this writing, astronomers have cataloged and confirmed 4,201 exoplanets. But the alien world that most closely resembles Earth's chemical composition, mass, diameter and gravity is actually the planet that orbits nearest to Earth.

"Everything points to Venus and Earth having been twins," planetary scientist David Grinspoon says in our film. "There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that Venus had a more Earthlike environment when it was young. They may have both had warm oceans and all the other conditions necessary for an origin of life at the time when Earth, apparently, had an origin of life."

But not anymore: The Soviet Venera and Vega landers of the 1970s and 1980s recorded temperatures around 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) and pressures equivalent to being submerged 3,051 feet (930 meters) in an ocean on Earth. Studying when and how Venus and Earth diverged so radically from their initial similarities could be essential for sensibly managing our planet in this Anthropocene age.

Venus has been called the poster child for the greenhouse effect. Measurements of the ghastly conditions at its surface have alerted and will continue to inform Earthly climate science. Spoiler Alert: Humans will not succeed in liberating enough carbon to bring about a Venus-like hell on Earth. But, as an outlier in planetary climate data sets, Venus data calibrate and refine models of global warming upon which critical geopolitical decisions will be made for decades to come.

Understanding the cause of and cure for the so-called "ozone hole" over Antarctica arose directly from research into chlorine reactions observed in Venus' atmosphere. The worst acid rain in the solar system falls through Venus' heavy carbon dioxide air, where sulfuric acid solution replaces water as the cycling fluid. In our short film "Venus: Warnings of a Doomed Planet," scientists detail the lessons learned from comparing these macroclimates.

Video: Venus: Lessons from a climate catastrophe

"We need to understand the molecular fossils that are left in Venus' atmosphere: the noble gases of argon, neon, xenon, krypton," Lori Glaze, Director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division, says in our film. "Those gases don't react with anything else."

So, they carry a record of how fast the early Venus atmosphere escaped to space. In particular, Venus' ratio of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen that makes "heavy water") to hydrogen today is roughly a hundred times higher than Earth's, which scientists interpret as evidence that Venus had oceans of water in the ancient past.

What washes over Venus now? Frozen waves of lava. "Most of the surface of Venus is actually covered by volcanoes," Rosaly Lopes, a planetary volcanologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, says in the film. "We think that the volcanism on Venus happened fairly recently. There's like this real zoo of volcanoes."

Some, like shield volcanoes, resemble their counterparts on Earth. Others are like nothing else in the solar system: ones with flat tops that researchers call "pancake domes," some with both radial and concentric fractures resembling spiderwebs and so nicknamed "arachnoids," others called "ticks" with blobby bodies and spiky, leg-like slopes, and widespread tiny cinder cones, some no bigger than a house.

At the other end of the volcanic size range are huge caldera-like circles, with concentric cracks, called "coronae." Oddly, at the edges of the larger coronae, some sections of Venus' crust seem to be diving under others. But Venus doesn't have the kind of crustal plates geologists see on Earth. "Why do we see evidence of subduction, yet it hasn't developed into plate tectonics?" asks Suzanne Smrekar, a planetary geophysicist at JPL, in our film. "[Perhaps] the lithosphere is too hot, and that prevents the huge faults that define the edges of the plate from being maintained over a long term. Another idea is that we need surface water to help lubricate those faults and allow plates to slip past each other."

With no tectonic means to gradually vent its internal heat, Venus may undergo spasms of planet-wide eruptions. "The vast majority of Venus' surface is geologically very young," says Anthony Del Genio, Research Scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. "Something happened, 500 million to a billion years ago, that created tremendous amounts of volcanism and essentially overwrote most of Venus' surface."

Left standing above the global lava fields are creased and furrowed highlands called "tesserae" that may hold confirmation of ancient oceans. "That's where we want to go," says planetary geoscientist Martha Gilmore. "These rocks are the only rocks from the first 80% of the history of Venus. Were there evidence of ancient environments that would support life? Whatever the science is to form life on Earth, everything that we know about chemistry, about physics, about geology, suggests that those conditions were there on Mars and Venus too."

Gathering evidence of past life on Venus will not be simple. Mission planners are contemplating an armada of orbiters, balloons, landers and rovers. Our short film "Venus: Doing Science in Hell" explains the engineering challenges and some promising solutions.

Watch few clips for free here: "Venus Demands Extreme Engineering and Radical Robots"

But the biggest challenge in finding evidence of past life on Venus may be to assemble a critical mass of public and governmental support for big Venus missions.

There's no evidence of premeditated sedition against Venus in the science or space agency communities. Yet Mars, despite its smaller mass, clearly exerts stronger gravitational influence on policy and program planning. Why?

More Mars data is available, drawing more graduate students. Thus, more careers are building around the Red Planet. It's harder to land on Mars but much easier to do surface science: Optics and electronics much prefer the cold, thin Martian atmosphere to the viscous blast furnace of Venus. If we "follow the water," we won't find any on the landscape of Venus.

Related: Scientists want NASA to send a Flagship mission to Venus

We've seen a lot more of Mars' surface and it looks like Earth; so much so that lay observers easily forget its fundamental unfriendliness to biology. Visiting and populating the landscape of Mars is going to be a lot more challenging for humans than those inspirational illustrations from SpaceX, NASA and others make it look. Still, a certain Martian chauvinism persists.

In the quest for other bioworlds, Venus offers more frequent optimum launch windows and shorter trip time than Mars; much shorter than to Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moons Enceladus or Titan. But can anything live on Venus? Likely not on the superhot surface! But rise up 25 to 45 miles (45 to 70 km) into the Venus clouds and you'll notice the temperature and pressure drop to that of sea level on Earth. And there's an anomaly floating in these temperate altitudes.

For more than 100 years, astronomers have photographed dark patches appearing in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. "These patches are because something is absorbing sunlight in the clouds of Venus,' says Sanjay Limaye, a senior scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Some of the properties of terrestrial bacteria mimic the spectral absorption that we see on Venus. And we hypothesize that maybe there are some microorganisms, given the fact that Venus maybe had liquid water. It had all the conditions to evolve life," Limaye added. Researchers have found bacteria in the clouds of Earth, as well as every other Earthly environment ever checked.

There's more discourse on this question, from Limaye and other scientists, in our short film "Is There Life in the Clouds of Venus?" on MagellanTV.

You can see a few clips here: "Does Life Survive in Venus' Atmosphere?"

The cloud-climate appears to shift on a scale of decades. The dark absorption patches ebb and flow. And this "living mist" concept is not new: In 1967, biologist Harold Morowitz and astronomer Carl Sagan speculated on the possibility of cloud-borne biota floating over Venus. If they are there, it should be a simple matter to find them. No landing is required, just a mission to the cool cloud tops.

"Venus winds are extremely fast," says Limaye. "On Earth it'll take you a month to fly around the Earth, whereas, on Venus, the clouds go around every four to five days and even less time than that at a higher latitude." In 1985, the Soviet Vega 2 balloon probe rode these turbulent hurricane-force thermal currents to travel more than 6,900 miles (11,100 km) at an average speed of 150 mph (240 km/h). It found the clouds at 33 miles (53 km) altitude to be warm; about 100 degrees F (38 degrees C).

Imagine what might be discovered using materials and electronics developed over the past 35 years. Geoffrey A. Landis, engineer and scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio believes we can do better than just floating at the mercy of the winds. Picture a semi-buoyant electric airplane, dispatched into the cloud layer. Sunlight, bouncing around the clouds, scatters in every direction so the plane can employ solar panels on many surfaces. In addition to analyzing the atmosphere perhaps searching for microbial life this flying platform can serve as a relay station, in contact with landers or rovers on the surface and with orbiters overhead.

"Most of the processing power, most of the computers, most of the things that run the mission would be in an airplane, that's flying 50 kilometers above, or maybe in a satellite," says Landis in our film. "And it controls the probe on the surface, almost like you'd be controlling a radio-controlled car."

Northrop Grumman Corporation's Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) proposes a dirigible flying wing, plying the atmosphere. NASA's High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) envisions the beginnings of crewed sorties to the temperate zones of Venus' atmosphere.

Landis and other visionaries imagine going even further: Permanent human outposts in the clouds, depicted in our films "Venus: Death of a Planet" and "Cloud Cities of Venus"

You can see a few clips here: "Could astronauts explore Venus (and live there permanently)?"

"You could float habitats in the atmosphere of Venus," says Landis, "And the habitats could be very large. They could be kilometers in scale. You wouldn't even need hydrogen or helium. Because the atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen ordinary breathable air would float. The air that's holding you up is also the air that you can breathe. The lifting gas is your environment."

"I love the idea of a human crewed mission to a cloud city on Venus," says Jonathan Sauder, senior mechatronics engineer at JPL. "You would just need to wear some type of suit that would provide you with oxygen to breathe as well as protection from the chemical air. But you wouldn't necessarily need a pressure suit."

Sauder, however, also sees the downside: "Humans tend to not like the idea of not being able to be on firm ground. And the idea that you have to stay floating above this furnace essentially, in some ways is a hard sell!" It also requires a very powerful rocket to launch back out of the atmosphere and to pull away from Venus' Earth-level gravity for your return to our planet.

As long as we're stretching our imaginations into advanced technologies, what would it take to break the planet's global greenhouse and let the heat out? On Earth, rain pulls carbon out of the sky and into the crust, then a few active volcanoes release CO2 back into the air; a (usually) healthy balance between what scientists call "sources and sinks."

"If you wanted to scrub the Venus atmosphere, you would need an ocean, and you would need weathering," says Gilmore. "Then the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can link with calcium and form rock. That's what sequesters our CO2. Four and a half billion years ago, Earth's atmosphere was also CO2 rich; that is the original atmosphere of the terrestrial planets."

Over the border between currently practical engineering and science fiction lies the idea that we may, someday, be able to remodel the entire second planet to be more like the third. Terraforming the transformation by technology of an object to have Earth-like climate characteristics can be an entertaining mental exercise. But is it remotely realistic for Venus?

"Well, you know, our more immediate task is to avoid "Venera-forming" Earth right now, says Grinspoon. "However, the mental exercise of imagining how we would terraform another planet is, I think, very valuable for learning how we would manage ourselves on Earth better, because it forces us to ask: How would we interact constructively with the planet?"

For Venus, constructive interaction means collapsing the heat trap, perhaps by dusting the air and getting the CO2 to condense out onto the landscape. To bind it into rock, we would need water; lots and lots of water. "If this was your goal," says Grinspoon, "there are a lot of stray icy objects in the solar system; I would take some large number of them and crash them into Venus."

In 1991, British scientist Paul Birch proposed transporting trillions of tons of hydrogen from the gas giant planets, like Jupiter, to convert atmospheric CO2 to oceans of water plus mountains of graphite. And he suggested shielding Venus from the sun's heat with enormous shade-panels; collecting solar energy while shrinking the atmosphere.

As it did with ancient peoples of Earth, Venus is still stimulating creativity! Some distant day, human ingenuity and machine intelligence may guide Venus onto a path more like the Earth. But in the nearer term, human recklessness could tip Earth's climate toward the present hellish conditions of Venus. Either way, these twin planets will grow more alike. Now, here in the Anthropocene, let's choose wisely.

Dave Brody writes and directs non-fiction documentary television. He was formerly Executive Producer at Space.com and Supervising Producer of Original Programs at Syfy/USA Networks. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSkyBrody. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

MagellanTV is an ad-free documentary streaming service run by filmmakers, available on iOS, Android, Fire TV, Roku, Comcast, Samsung, Vizio and the websiteMagellanTV.com. New programs are added every week, curated by MagellanTV's team of award-winning documentary filmmakers.

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Don't ignore Venus Earth's twin hides surprising opportunities (op-ed) - Space.com

Call Trumps Attacks On The 1619 Project What They Are Censorship of American History – Forbes

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On Sunday morning, President Trump tweeted an attack on the 1619 Project, threatening to withhold funding from California schools teaching the popular journalism project focused on the rise and impact of slavery in the United States.With his newest tweet, the Presidents actions raise a troubling question:

Why is the Trump administration threatening to censor the way schools teach about the history of slavery and racism in the United States?

The Presidents assertion came in response to a tweet from an unverified account stating that California schools were teaching the 1619 Project curriculum. In response, Trump tweeted: Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!

Engraving shows the arrival of a Dutch slave ship with a group of African slaves for sale, ... [+] Jamestown, Virginia, 1619. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The 1619 Projectis a long-form journalism and multimedia initiative ofThe New York Times Magazine,started in August of 2019, 400 years after African slaves first landed on the shores of America. In its own words, the project aims to reframe the countrys history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Recently, the 1619 Project teamed up with the Pulitzer Center todevelop school curriculumto use 1619 Project content in classrooms.

Trumps Sunday morning tweet continues a trend of his administrations provocative actions regarding educational approaches to racial injustice in America.

For example, on Friday, the Trump administration announced that it was planning to cease diversity training that it deemed anti-American.In a two-page memo addressed to the leadership of federal agencies, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought specifically directed federal executives to begin the process of identifying contracts with race-related content that it finds offensive.

All agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on critical race theory, white privilege, or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil, the memo states.

Despite the timing, Trumps tweet isnt the first instance the Trump administration and its allies targeted the 1619 Project. InJuly, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introducedcongressional legislation, titled the Saving American History Act of 2020, with the stated purpose of preventing federal funds from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary schools and secondary schools.

The proposed legislation claims that an activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration [of Independence] but rather on slavery and oppression. It goes on to state that the 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.

Both Trumps tweet, as well as Cottons proposed legislation, beg a troubling question: why are Republican leaders trying to censor the teaching about the history of slavery and racism in the United States, and why now?

During a time when the United States is engaged in an emotional, and increasingly confrontational, dialogue over the legacy of its racist past,educators across the United States are also exploring waysto better teach the narratives of racial privilege and injustice that have led to the pervasiveness of institutional racism in America. By threatening to censor content that it finds objectionable, the Trump administration is not only treading dangerously on the underlying principles of a free and democratic society; it is also acting in a deeply hypocritical manner, as it otherwise generally endorses local autonomy on issues of education and school choice.

But perhaps most troubling of all, Trumps tweet and the arguments of his administration and allies demonstrate a belief that history should be taught in a a way that limits criticism of the United States. Further, Trump himself has shown that his is willing to take actions to constructively censor those whose views of history conflict with those of the administration.

Thats not teaching history, that is shaping national propaganda.

For a president who proudly proclaims that he has done more for the Black community than any other President in American history, his efforts to censor the painful story of the Black experience in America are a slap in the face of every Black person who lived that history from the past to the present.

American descendants of slavery deserve more than patronizing claims of support from Trump or any politician.The deserve recognition, justice, and reparations. And at the very least, they deserve to have their story told...

Starting with 1619.

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Call Trumps Attacks On The 1619 Project What They Are Censorship of American History - Forbes

Facebook is bringing an updated content censorship term for its users from October 1st – Digital Information World

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Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is often seen advocating and making tall claims about providing complete freedom of speech on the platform. However, time and again his claims have been found in complete contradiction to what Facebook actually does.

Recently, Facebook has announced that it is bringing an update in its terms of service. This update is more like a censorship warning which entails that Facebook will remove or restrict access to any content on the platform that can bring legal or regulatory risks for the company all over the globe. This term will come in effect from October 1st, 2020.

Many users in Australia,India and the US have reported that they have received notification updates from Facebook in which the company has warned the users of its changed policy. And the notification further reads that this action will come under section 3.2 of Facebooks terms of service and will start from 1st October.

The company has recently indicated that they are planning to block people and news publishers in Australia from sharing news. This plan has come into existence after Australia proposed an anti-trust law that asked tech giants like Facebook to pay a fair share of money to Australian media outlets for the news they provide to the platform.

However, now this new change in content moderation and policing is not going to be limited to Australia only, as Facebook has said that this update is going to be global, and it will give more flexibility to the company to change their services in Australia and rest of the world so that the companys operation is not hampered.

Now also, the timing of this update is crucial and people all over the world are just joining the dots to connect this move with the upcoming US Presidential Election in November. This change will give authorities in the US and India the power to police content on a greater scale now, and all of this seems to be well-planned and staged for the upcoming election where everyone knows that Facebook would play a pivotal role!

This update is facing a lot of opposition from users all over the world.

Photo: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Read next: Facebook announces a new research partnership to examine the impact of both Facebook and Instagram on key political trends in the upcoming elections

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Facebook is bringing an updated content censorship term for its users from October 1st - Digital Information World

Will Joe Rogan Have The Guts To Call Out Spotify For ‘Censorship’? – CCN.com

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It looks like Joe Rogan has been censored.

Rogan, who has a history of denouncing social media censorship, as seen below, just found his most controversial episodes omitted from the Spotify platform.

After a ground-breaking $100 million deal with the streaming giant, one has to wonder if Rogan has that same energy for his new bossesor if its enough to shut him up.

In the past, Joe Rogan interviewed some people that didnt deserve to have a platform. Milo Yiannopoulos, Chris DElia, and Stefan Molyneux were just a few of the many awful people that Rogan gave a platform to while hiding behind the guise of free speech to legitimize their disgusting philosophies.

And lets not forget the time that Joey Diaz bragged about coercing female comics to have oral sex with him.

These episodes and more are missing from Spotifys library, though its unclear if its due to Joe Rogans choice, Spotifys choice, or just a technical oversight. And thus far, neither Rogan nor Spotify has commented on the matter.

But that hasnt stopped people from wrongly crying about censorship.

Its shocking how few people including Joe Rogan understand what the First Amendmentreallyentails.

Far too many people believe that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that people can say what they want, when they want, without fear of recourse or consequence.

But thats not true.

The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individuals religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.

The emphasis is mine, but notice the keyword in the phrase: Congress. That means thegovernmentcannot arrest you for speaking out against it, nor can thegovernmentthrow members of the press in jail for writing dissenting opinions against it (as often happens in other countries).

The First Amendment doesnotapply to private companies which means that Spotify is under no obligation to host episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience that goes against its corporate policy. And lest you think this is a political move, and Spotify is a leftist liberal company, the company has also excluded episodes of the show that featured left-leaning heroes like Tommy Chong.

This fun little webtoon about the First Amendment sums it up.

Joe Rogan isnt going to speak up against Spotifys alleged censorship of his show because evenheknows that theyre well within their rights.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.

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Will Joe Rogan Have The Guts To Call Out Spotify For 'Censorship'? - CCN.com

Joe Rogans Spotify move condemned by fans over right-wing censorship claims – The Independent

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Joe Rogans arrival on Spotify has sparked a backlash among fans, after episodes featuring controversial right-wing guests appeared unavailable on the platform.

However, fans have claimed that a number of past episodes have not been added to Spotify, many of which feature appearances from far-right figures including Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

One Rogan fan tweeted that Spotify 86d the Alex Jones episodes, plus more controversial guests in the early hours of 1 September, leading to many other right-wing fans claiming that episodes had been censored.

The apparent missing episodes have led many of Rogans fans to demand answers, with some threatening to abandon the show altogether.

Joe is dead to me if he doesnt address this, wrote one Reddit commentator. This goes against his we need to talk to everybody shtick. Im not interested in listening to curated podcasts by his employer.

Another added: Joe sold out. Its coming to us as a surprise, but this had to be part of the plan. He can talk the talk as a free speech advocate all he wants, but when push came to shove, he took the money and agreed to be censored. Pretty disappointed, but whatever.

As part of Rogans Spotify deal, the radio personality will produce podcasts and accompanying videos for the platform.

Towards the end of 2020, his show will be made exclusive to Spotify, meaning that listeners will no longer be able to tune in on platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Stitcher. Rogans YouTube channel will remain intact, albeit will no longer publish full episodes of his programme.

In a statement in May, Rogan said: It will be the exact show. Im not going to be an employee of Spotify, were going to be working with the same crew, doing the exact same show. The only difference will be it will now be available on the largest audio platform in the world. Nothing else will change.

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Joe Rogans Spotify move condemned by fans over right-wing censorship claims - The Independent

Apple reacts to censorship censure – Mobile World Live

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Apple hit back at criticism over moves to comply with government censorship, emphasising its backing for freedom of information and expression in a statement outlining its human rights policy.

The company stated it believes in the critical importance of an open society in which information flows freely, which it explained sometimes results in conflict with government bodies.

With dialogue, and a belief in the power of engagement, we try to find the solution that best serves our users, their privacy, their ability to express themselves, and their access to reliable information and helpful technology.

In February, investors pushed Apple to respond to concerns related to its decision to remove VPN services from its App Store in China, calling for a public commitment to freedom of expression.

Apple faced further backlash in the middle of the year when it reportedly removed thousands more apps from its marketplace in China to comply with local laws.

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Apple reacts to censorship censure - Mobile World Live

Shadow banning and its role in modern day censorship – Cherwell Online

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It is no secret algorithms dominate our online social lives it is not as if we arent making our own decisions when it comes to who we talk to or what media we consume, but it would be wilfully ignorant to ignore how systems have been programmed to categorise, collect, and suggest data just based on our likes and follows. This exposes us to content, people and ideas that we just would not have found on our own but it begs the questions of how much control do these systems have in restricting what we see?

This brings us to shadow banning.

Shadow banning is the decision of a social media platform to partially or wholly obstruct a persons content from being interacted with preventing new people from searching for your content, ensuring you do not appear under hashtags or even limiting how often you are suggested as a person to follow are just a few ways this can be achived. Platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok rarely acknowledge the claims of this nature but rather point to their right to remove posts that do not align with their Community Guidelines and how agreeing to use the platform is consenting to their power to do so.

In the grand scheme of things, having your videos taken down or fewer people finding and engaging content is not the greatest detriment to the world, but there is a significant pattern to who is being shadow banned. If I refer back to Tiktoks community guidelines, they claim to scrap videos created to facilitate harm onto others but within the guidelines, they make an effort to reiterate that they allow educational, historical, satirical, artistic, and other content that can be clearly identified as counterspeech or aims to raise awareness of the harm caused by dangerous individuals and/or organisations. This quote and their statement to show support of the Black Lives Matter movement will come as surprise especially to the number of black creators that have seen their engagement rates fall and their videos be taken down on their app.

Instagram has shown itself to be just as complicit in this there has been significant backlash from sex workers, sex educators and often queer inclusive sex-positive spaces on the app. Chante Joseph in her Guardian piece exposed the grey area that is not as clearly defined as Instagrams no nudity policy where the administrators can flag content as sexually suggestive; many people argue that this is necessary to ensure children are not exposed to inappropriate content rather than parents taking accountability or social media platforms at least attempting to introduce any form of age restriction, the onus is placed on creators. But consider, for example, LGBTQIA+ creators; their accounts are providing information that young people who may not have even come out to themselves would otherwise be able to access so they can process and understand their feelings in a healthy space that wasnt available to them just a decade ago. In essence, these guidelines about what a person is allowed to share is being defined by some arbitrary moral standard where discussions of sex specifically those outside the realm of the heteronormative are something to be protected from, even though there are very few spaces that allow for them in real life either.

Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook all are often steeped in their reputation of being superficial and resting on the self-gratification of people wanting to be seen (which isnt even itself a bad thing), but besides that they can be used to share ideas, political thoughts and knowledge. So when black creators attempting to inform the masses are restricted from sharing information or when sex workers messages on misogyny are inaccessible because their page is considered too sexually suggestive (a term not defined so therefore difficult to avoid), the silence is deafening. Shadowbanning is a threat to us because it maintains for us the illusion of control. Yet the whole idea is synonymous with censorship and the obstruction of information. Further, this obstruction is dictated by what platforms see as appropriate so the power we assumed we had in our voices can still be silenced.

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Shadow banning and its role in modern day censorship - Cherwell Online

TunnelBear Circumvents Iran VPN Block, Launches 10GB Monthly Offer in the Country – Business Wire

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TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As TunnelBear supports individuals in countries like Venezuela and Belarus that have recently experienced internet censorship by providing short-term crisis solutions, the VPN company has made a commitment to providing long-term solutions for those that face ongoing internet censorship in their country. TunnelBear today announced its next step in the fight against online censorship with an offering of 10GB/month of free usage on TunnelBears VPN network for those in Iran.

Months of development have led to the ability to provide access to TunnelBear in Iran, where many VPNs are blocked. The VPN provider has spent months working to combat online censorship in Iran through a structured four-stage technical development framework, which addresses VPN distribution, API blocking, connecting to a VPN, and maintaining a VPN connection.

Iran is the only country - aside from mainland China - where internet users experience censorship across all four stages of the VPN technical framework.

All TunnelBear users in Iran will have a free 10GB monthly allowance. This is equivalent to around 20 hours of browsing otherwise blocked social media sites, or around 800 hours of secure web browsing.

Were proud of the technical progress weve made over the past several months to make TunnelBear available to internet users in Iran, said Justin Watts, head of engineering at TunnelBear. TunnelBear will always be on the side of an open and uncensored internet, and our upgrade for Iran is the first of many anti-censorship improvements to come.

Irans policies are some of the worst in the world for internet freedom. The countrys government and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operate an advanced internet filtering system to prohibit social media sites, anti-religious content, some gaming platforms, and more. Last winter, Iran experienced a country-wide internet shutdown for one week in the wake of protests against gasoline prices and the government response.

TunnelBear, along with several other VPN providers, is currently blocked in Iran. This means that people have to resort to alternative app stores and social media channels to access digital security tools like VPN. Watts added, There were many roadblocks on the way to tackling such a robust censorship ecosystem, and we are still learning with the help of our friends on the ground.

The VPN provider believes the technical strides made in Iran across the four stages of censorship framework will help their user base in other censored countries as well.

TunnelBear built support for the Encrypted Server Name Indicator (ESNI) TLS extension into their Android application, making it the second app to ever have full ESNI support.

ESNI is the next frontier in online privacy, Watts continued. It allows us to encrypt a privacy loophole within HTTPS. Weve found that much of the time for our users, ESNI works when other anti-censorship techniques fail. Weve open sourced our ESNI work, and we encourage other providers and applications to adopt this, as ESNI is most effective when used at a wide-scale.

Beyond TunnelBears focus on anti-censorship in Iran, the provider is monitoring censorship on a global scale, to ensure they can deploy solutions and technical updates as censorship spikes in countries or regions across the world.

About TunnelBear

TunnelBear is a very simple virtual private network (VPN) that allows users to browse the web privately and securely. It secures browsing from hackers, ISPs, and anyone that is monitoring the network. TunnelBear believes you should have access to an open and uncensored internet, wherever you are.

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TunnelBear Circumvents Iran VPN Block, Launches 10GB Monthly Offer in the Country - Business Wire

Facebook is changing its Terms of Service, and users are not happy – Windows Central

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Facebook has announced changes to its Terms of Service that will allow it to remove content or restrict access if the company thinks it is necessary to avoid legal or regulatory impact.

Users of Facebook's app have started receiving notifications regarding a change to its Terms of Service which states:

Effective October 1, 2020, section 3.2 of our Terms of Service will be updated to include: "We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook."

This particular section of the Facebook TOS includes agreements about who can and can't use Facebook and the things that you are and aren't allowed to do on the platform.

The reaction on social media, in particular on Twitter has been mixed to say the least. One user commenting: "Facebook's terms of service update translated to plain English: "We will remove content not because it is incorrect, misleading, illegal, or spreads dangerous misinformation, but because removing it might help prevent us from getting caught allowing it." One user said the update was "absolutely terrifying."

Another commented "smells like Election interference and censorship to me!" and a human rights commenter further noted:

Disturbing new addition to #Facebook terms of service that could be used to justify online censorship, particularly with govts using restrictive national laws to order social media platforms to censor information critical of the govt or monarchy in violation of #OnlineFreedom

The new clause in the TOS is quite wide and vague, but it seems reasonable to think that it could indeed be used to justify removing content at the behest of a government or nation if Facebook thought it was being threatened by some kind of legal action or regulatory scrutiny.

Some users were much more upbeat about the change, suggesting it could lead to more false news and misinformation being removed.

The move could be linked to recent changes in Australia, where the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is preparing a bill that would require both Facebook and Google to compensate news outlets when stories are published on their respective platforms.

As noted, the changes to Facebook's terms of service take effect from October 1, 2020.

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Facebook is changing its Terms of Service, and users are not happy - Windows Central

End the blacklist of the World Socialist Web Site on Reddit! – WSWS

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By Kevin Reed 5 September 2020

Earlier this year, the World Socialist Web Site was officially blacklisted from r/politics, the largest political subreddit on the link-sharing social media site Reddit, with no explanation given.

On August 28, an article entitled, Trump runs for Fhrer inexplicably made it past the blacklist, having been shared by a Reddit user in the r/politics subreddit. It quickly won thousands of upvotes, received over 600 comments, and was elevated onto Reddits front page.

The r/politics moderators immediately sprang into action. They labeled the WSWS article as coming from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion among Reddit members.

As we reported on Saturday, the censored WSWS articlewhich analyzed President Trumps nomination acceptance speech at the 2020 Republican National Conventionbecame instantly popular because it said what the establishment media refused to. It exposed Trumps law and order response to the mass protests, his appeals to the police, military and federal paramilitary forces, and his tirades against socialism and Marxism as part of an attempt to establish a personalist presidential dictatorship and create a fascist movement in the US.

The articles thousands of upvotes were accompanied by overwhelmingly supportive comments, including the following:

These events make clear the nature of Reddits censorship of the WSWS. It is aimed at silencing left-wing criticism of the US political establishment, under conditions in which broad sections of its own readers are hungry for news and analysis from just such a perspective.

Moreover, the WSWS analysis pointed out that the only reason Trump has been able to take his dictatorial plans as far as he has is because of the spinelessness of his Democratic Party opponents. As the article explained, the Democrats have consistently blocked any appeal to the broad majority of the population and, in particular, the working class, and this is because, as one of the two parties of Wall Street and big business, the Democrats are just as terrified of, and hostile to, the growth of mass popular opposition to capitalism as Trump is.

However, for the r/politics moderators, this analysis by the WSWS is considered unacceptable. And, approximately nine hours after the WSWS article was sharedand after it had received 9,200 upvotes (93 percent of those who voted) and more than 600 commentsthe r/politics moderators labeled the article from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion.

The subreddit moderators political censorship of the WSWS article Trump runs for Fhrer comes as no surprise given their previous removal of wsws.org from the r/politics domain whitelist.

On May 26, Reddit users attempting to post links from the World Socialist Web Site to r/politics were informed that the wsws.org domain had been removed as a recognized source of news and analysis on the subreddit.

Subsequent attempts by users to publish links to articles from wsws.org were returning an automated system message that says, Your submission was automatically removed because wsws.org is not on our approved source whitelist. r/politics has a number of conditions that domains must adhere to in order to be approved as an acceptable source.

As we explained in an earlier article on April 3, regarding the banning of the World Socialist Web Site from the r/coronavirus subreddit, the removal of the wsws.org domain by moderators is unmistakably an act of political censorship designed to block our analysis of the unfolding crisis from reaching the public.

In the case of the r/coronavirus ban in April, moderators claimed that WSWS articles were off-topic political discussion. In the more recent case of r/politicsa subreddit specifically devoted to political topics and political discussionthe moderators have resorted to a cruder form of censorship: the false claim that the World Socialist Web Site is unacceptable.

We have also pointed out that the World Socialist Web Site is recognized internationally as a major source of authoritative Marxist journalism and analysis. Articles on the site are frequently quoted by leading authors and journalists around the world and in dozens of academic papers. Articles and statements on wsws.org are translated into 24 languages and the site is followed daily by a growing international audience of hundreds of thousands of readers.

Both recent instances of political censorship by Reddit moderators were recently noted by Matt Taibbithe freelance journalist and contributing editor for Rolling Stonein his May 29 blog post Planet of the Censoring Humans, which surveyed a series of recent online censorship actions by the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit.

Taibbi wrote, In late April, the World Socialist Web Sitewhich has been one of the few consistent critics of Internet censorship and algorithmic manipulationwas removed by Reddit from the r/coronavirus subreddit on the grounds that it was not reliable. The site was also removed from the whitelist for r/politics, the primary driver of traffic from Reddit to the site.

The subreddit r/politics was created in August 2007 and is one of the most widely used forums on Reddit. Out of 1.2 million subreddits on the news aggregation platform, r/politics ranks at number 56. It has 6.5 million members with tens of thousands actively participating users at any one moment. At the time of this writing, for example, there are approximately 150,000 users participating in live online political discussions on r/politics on a range of topics.

There are more than 1,020 news source domains included on the r/politics whitelist. These include newspaper publishers (359), policy think tanks (188), web publishers (183), magazine publishers (118), television networks (48), international news agencies (39), polling and research organizations (37), radio broadcasters (19), US government agencies (10), news wire services (10) and political parties (9).

The r/politics whitelist includes numerous right-wing publisherssuch as The Federalist, Breitbart.com and theWashington Timeswho engage in promoting racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and completely false and dangerous information about the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Socialist Web Site had been previously whitelisted nearly three years ago by the subreddit and, since August 2017, hundreds of article links have been shared. These articles have resulted in some of the most popular discussions on r/politics and produced a combined total of hundreds of thousands of upvotes and tens of thousands of comments.

We demand answers from the moderators of r/politics to the following questions:

Finally, we call upon all Reddit users and others who defend free speech rights to demand an end to political censorship by r/politics moderators and that the World Socialist Web Site be restored to the subreddit whitelist with an accompanying official statement to this effect.

The author also recommends:

Reddit moderators censor WSWS article on Trumps speech at Republican convention [29 August 2020]

Reddit bans 2,000 communities in major censorship action [2 July 2020]

Why is the World Socialist Web Site banned from the subreddit r/coronavirus? [3 April 2020]

Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Site from search results.

To fight this blacklisting:

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End the blacklist of the World Socialist Web Site on Reddit! - WSWS

Kahle: Upholding the public trust – The Register-Guard

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Don Kahle| Register-Guard

The presidential campaign will consume Americans attention for the next two months. Debates begin in less than four weeks. Media companies can do extraordinary work to meet a deadline. They have only a few dozen days to reset their broadcast practices. They must learn new ways to enforce the community standards that inform them.

Broadcasters lease the public airwaves. This arrangement has always required them to uphold certain community standards. A code of ethics was broadly applied to the entire industry. For many years, certain behaviors and words were not allowed over the public airwaves.

This is not censorship. Maintaining standards, understood in advance and applied in all situations, is integral to the public trust. Freedom of speech should have no practical limits, but amplification carries certain responsibilities. If theres a microphone involved, standards must be upheld.

Even and especially when a speaker wont abide by the standards, the broadcasters must even if that speaker is a candidate for or the current president of the United States. Granted, its not a good look to be turning off the microphone of the most powerful person on the planet, but decorum shouldnt eclipse decency.

Broadcasters have tried to uphold standards for truth and honesty, but real-time fact-checking is usually impossible and always ineffective. Debunking a lie requires first repeating it, focusing attention on the false assertion, further amplifying its reach.

Instead, media companies must expand their skill set. They must learn to avert their gaze. Most media companies do not allow reporters and camerapersons to film a premeditated, ongoing crime. They are trained instead to call authorities and do what they can ethically to prevent the crime.

Youve never seen a hostage-taker negotiate his demands over the public airwaves with a news team inside, broadcasting an exclusive scoop. This is why.

I grew up watching the Chicago Cubs play baseball on TV. If a fan jumped onto Wrigley Field and interrupted the game, security would corral and remove the overly exuberant fan. At least thats what I assume happened, because broadcasters refused to show the intruder scampering across the outfield.

The same lesson applies here.

Republicans made hash of the Hatch Act during their convention. From the White House, their candidate taunted his adversary (and the media) by bragging about their willful violation: The fact is, were here and theyre not.

Media companies knew in advance that the administration intended to use the White House as a campaign backdrop. Their legal council could have told them the Hatch Act would be violated. If this event amounted to a premeditated crime, they had ample time to inform the campaign that their cameras wouldnt be attending.

Likewise, debate moderators have time to inform both campaigns about real-time consequences for misbehavior. Both candidates could be given a list of misstatements they have made on the campaign that have been determined to be false or misleading. Repeat any of these untruths, and your microphone will be turned off for 90 seconds.

All sides hope for clarity in November. News outlets must demand clarity and reject confusions from the candidates.

DonKahle(fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs atwww.dksez.com.

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Kahle: Upholding the public trust - The Register-Guard

Science protections must be enforceable | TheHill – The Hill

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The old bromide that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own set of facts has certainly lost almost all currency in the kaleidoscopic world of Trump.

Manipulation and suppression of science was supposed to have been solved in the last administration. When the George W. Bush era ended, years of blatant alteration of science on topics ranging from climate change to reproductive health forged a political consensus that such abuses should not recur. The solution announced by the Obama White House in March 2009 was to direct agencies to adopt policies to protect the integrity of scientific information as well as the scientists who face reprisal for doing this work.

Because this effort relied upon agencies to set aside their own institutional agendas and to self-police, the Obama initiative was largely a failure. Different agencies produced a hodgepodge of aspirational goals with little follow-through or enforcement. One indication of how weak this effort was is embodied in an EPA Scientific Integrity Policy that is so limp that it was repeatedly embraced by Scott PruittEdward (Scott) Scott PruittConspicuous by their absence from the Republican Convention EPA looks to other statutes to expand scope of coming 'secret science' rule EPA ordered to reconsider New York efforts to tame downwind pollution MORE, secure in the knowledge that the policy would not impede him in the slightest, no matter how hard he put his thumb on agency scientific scales.

A key lesson we should draw from this experience, amplified by the Trump administrations evermore ham-handed interventions to contort government science is simply this: Counting on self-restraint or self-enforcement from the executive branch in safeguarding the integrity or accuracy of official science is utter folly.

Consider the science integrity legislation previously introduced. Congress appears poised to make the same mistake again. Merely mandating that agencies develop and somehow enforce scientific integrity standards appears destined to produce rhetorical results, as there is no enforcement mechanism to correct deviations from vague legislated standards of integrity. Instead, Congress should consider measures that are both absolutely clear and are judicially enforced.

A basic challenge is that federal scientists and their work products presently havescant legal protection. To remedy this deficiency, Congress should consider two proposals calculated to make real differences:

One would protect scientists by classifying participation in the peer review process, whether as an author or reviewer, as a protected activity enforced in the same way and through the same legal processes employed by the federal Whistleblower Protection Act.

Since federal scientists are not typically reporting waste, fraud or abuse, government scientists often find themselves and their work with little legal protection. Instead, these scientists are simply doing their jobs too well, on issues with political sensitivity.

Congress could change this by declaring that scientific work is itself legally protected activity. Significantly, this proposal would extend legal protection from reprisal to scientists targeted due to the political implications of their work for compiling data or reaching findings that conflict with official talking points.

Protecting participation in the peer review process would also provide the scientific community, the public and Congress with an unvarnished and ongoing view of the best available science as it evolves, trumping current agency restrictions.

The second proposal would protect science by statutorily requiring that all scientific or technical work, whether still in draft form or even if officially rejected, be included in the administrative record made available to litigants in any court challenge. Demands for production of the full record would be judicially enforced through the discovery process.

This proposal would accomplish two critical functions: one, undo Trump-ordered censorship of records to exclude dissenting information or reports kept in prolonged draft status; and two, empower specialists to supplement the record with inconvenient facts for which the agency would have to account in litigation. To the extent that official censorship of the record becomes legally futile, the organizational incentive to try to suppress information would be diminished.

Since the beginning of the Republic, high government officials have sought to control the message and prefer to hide information that undermines that message. But today, these engrained bureaucratic tendencies are now not just tolerated but encouraged to run rampant. Not only is Congress itself a victim of the executive branchs scientific manipulation, but leaving these dynamics unchecked threatens to further erode public confidence in the truthfulness of their government.

Recognizing that things have gotten so out of hand, Congress must enact new, strong enforcement mechanisms to free us from the grip of alternative facts. Failure to do so will mean we did not learn the hard lesson of the Trump experience and we have left the door open for it to be repeated.

Jeff Ruch is the Pacific director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Follow the organization on Twitter @PEERorg.

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Science protections must be enforceable | TheHill - The Hill

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

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(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

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

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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.

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

Reddit isnt happy about President Trumps anti-censorship executive order – Reclaim The Net

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The social media platform Reddit is now asking the Federal Communications Commission to reject a petition filed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Reddit says that accepting the petition would change the very trajectory of the internet.

After the petition was filed, the FCC has been reaching out to the public and collecting comments about the amendment. Reddit shared its opinion about the amendment and urged the FCC against making the amendment.

The current Section 230 gives online platforms immunity from the liabilities that stem from the posts made by their users and third parties. It has generally been described as one of the most valuable privileges that internet platforms have.

President Trumps executive order states the following:

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It is the policy of the United States that the scope of that immunity should be clarified: the immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use their power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.

And

When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph (c)(2)(A), it is engaged in editorial conduct. It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph (c)(2)(A) and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider.

Some key points from Reddits response, which is worth reading in full:

As a small, privately-held company with limited legal resources, we will leave it to other Commenters to argue whether the Petition is retaliatory, unconstitutional, or fatally flawed in its gross misunderstanding of Section 230 and Congresss intent in passing it. Instead, Reddits most valuable contribution in this matter comes from our status as among the most popular forum-based websites in America, and the primarily user-led way in which content moderation on Reddit happens.

It is our view that the debate on Section 230 too often focuses solely on very large, centrally moderated platformsand individual grievances with themto the exclusion of smaller, differently organized websites that take an alternative approach.

However, the most important point that we offer, as we hope to make clear in this filing, is that with regard to Reddit and other community-moderated websites, Section 230 protects our individual users just as much as it does us. Their continued protection is crucial to the viability of community-based moderation online.

Reddits argument is that the subreddits on its platform are generally managed by moderators who take it upon themselves to remove information that should not belong in their community. But if the petition gets accepted, every individual reader would be burdened with the additional responsibility of having to self-police themselves.

The platform has also presented a testimonial from LGBT subreddit moderators who explained the significance of Section 230 in allowing them to take down abusive content. The moderators had also said that changes to the section would affect their ability to keep their community safe for marginalized users.

Imagine a universe where trolls could use Section 230 loopholes to sue based on the decisions of these individual moderators. That is the universe that the Petition is leading the internet towards, the platform argued.

To allow this to happen would change the very trajectory of the internet. The health of the internet, and users right to create their own online spaces, hangs in the balance, and for these reasons, the Commission should not undertake a rulemaking proceeding based upon NTIAs petition.

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Reddit isnt happy about President Trumps anti-censorship executive order - Reclaim The Net