Daily Archives: April 26, 2013

Just My Opinion: Prostitute mentality of Hollywood censorship
The movie World War Z starring Brad Pitt has been recut because the Chinese might be offended. And not by chance. China is becoming the largest foreign marke...

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Just My Opinion: Prostitute mentality of Hollywood censorship - Video

Googles latest data shows the number of requests from governments to remove content from its services is higher than ever before.

The Transparency Report was started three years ago, and since then Google has been making public the scale and scope of government requests for censorship around the world.

The latest figures show that between July and December 2012 it received 2,285 government requests for the removal of 24,179 pieces of content. It was a drastic increase from the first half the year when 1,811 requests for the removal of 18,070 pieces of content were received.

The subject of the content requested for removal varies widely but the most cited reason is defamation. On Googles public policy blog it says In more places than ever, weve been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services. In this particular time period, we received court orders in several countries to remove blog posts criticizing government officials or their associates. Other grounds include privacy and security breaches, copyright violation, hate speech, violence and other adult content.

Google by no means agrees to all the submissions, if the request is written informally from a government agency they usually refuse it and let a court decide. From time to time they have even received fake court orders that threaten the company with legal action if certain blog posts are not removed.

The data highlights the significant rise in requests from Brazil and Russia. In Brazil 697 requests were put forward in the 6 month period. The reason for the rise was largely due to the municipal elections that took place last year, with half of the total relating to the removal of alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code which forbids the defamation of candidates.

In Russia, a new law that allows the government to blacklist sites and take them offline without a trial came into effect; the law aims to protect children from harmful content. The Transparency Report shows that requests from Russia grew from a peak of 6 in the first half of the year to 114 in the most recent period, with all but 7 citing the new law. The majority of the requests were related to suicide promotion and drug abuse.

The online video known as The Innocence of Muslims also kicked up a storm of requests. Google reported receiving inquiries from 20 different countries regarding the clip. Google concluded that the video was within the community guidelines but chose to restrict it from view in several countries in accordance with local laws.

The Top 5 countries, ordered by volume of requests are Brazil, The United States, Germany, India, and Turkey. To find out how an individudal country fares in the censorship chart read more of the report that breaks down individual countries submissions.

Copyright 2013 euronews

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Google report highest ever government censorship requests

As part of its Keep Toronto Reading festival, featuring Ray Bradburys 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, the Toronto Reference Library invited John Ralston Saul, president of PEN International, and Charles Foran, president of PEN Canada, to go to the library on Thursday to talk about censorship in the digital age. Here, they give an idea of the issues they will discuss:

Charles Foran: In Fahrenheit 451, a woman self-immolates with her forbidden home library rather than watch the books be burned. The novel suggests that books are where ideas, history, even human consciousness get stored. Is their status different in the digital age?

John Ralston Saul: You look around the world in 2013 and you say: How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison? One or two. How many generals or bankers? Two or three. But how many writers? 850 or so. Plus, the new fashion is, Dont torture or imprison the writers, just kill them. PEN tracks dozens killed every year. Books, words, are more powerful than ever, and more frightening to those in power.

Foran: And yet the perception is that other forms of expression, in particular those associated with digital technologies, now dominate. Are you sure books are still worth dying for?

Saul: We shouldnt obsess about the book in its traditional form. People are always saying its the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, its a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, its a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

Foran: A blogger or tweeter is at greater risk than a novelist or poet.

Saul: Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters arent real writers, and so dont merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PENs attention.

Foran: I wonder about the attention span of digital culture itself, whether it is even built to house those ideas, preserve that history, contain that consciousness. Its too scattered and unfocused.

Saul: The danger is that the sophisticated managers of power can employ these uncertain new mechanisms to shut down freedom of expression. What were witnessing is a war between those who want to use the Internet for freedom and those who want to use it for financial gain, and/or to control.

Foran: Ron Deibert, head of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, talks about the exploding new cyber-industrial complex. Corporations, including Canadian ones, are selling governments cyberspace software that allows them to hack, spy and survey their citizens, sometimes by methods that are illegal within national jurisdictions. Theres big money in aiding and abetting oppression on the Net.

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Censorship in the digital age: ‘Words are more powerful than ever’

Google has published its latest Transparency Report and the results are not encouraging for free speech advocates: governments around the world are asking it to remove more content than ever before.

In the second half of 2012, the number of government requests to remove content from services like YouTube and Blogger increased from 1,811 to 2,285, and the number of items targeted for censorship increased from 18,070 to 24,179. As this screenshot shows, government requests have been rising steadily for years:

Many of these requests appear to have come from politicians who invoke defamation laws to remove content that was damaging or embarrassing. In a section of the report that breaks down requests by country, Google notes it received a request to remove a YouTube video that allegedly showed the President of Argentina in a compromising position. (Google did not comply with the request but did impose age restrictions on the video.)

Google also noted a spike in requests from Brazil where electoral law permits candidates to ban offensive material, and from Russia where a controversial law allows the government to remove content it seems harmful to young people. The company also received requests from multiple countries to censor the Innocence of Muslims video.

The content censorship report is part of Googles ongoing effort to shed light on how governments seek to access its data and suppress content. In the last year, the company has begin issuing the report in two parts one devoted to content takedown and another dedicated to requests to identify users.Under the content section, Google also shows copyright takedown requests from private companies.

Twitter has recently followed Googles example by creating transparency reports of its own. Other prominent social media and content providers, including Facebook, have remained largely silent on the issue.

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Google: government censorship requests jumped 20% in last six months