Daily Archives: June 7, 2017

A screenshot of a page from the Virtual Museum of Censorship featuring banned books.(photo bycensorshiplebanon.org)

Author:Florence Massena Posted June 6, 2017

What is censored more often in Lebanon: sex or politics? It depends on the timing, according to the Virtual Museum of Censorship, an online database tracking banned and censored material since Lebanese independence in 1943.

Having become familiar with some of the material, Gino Raidy, the vice president of MARCH, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) behind the museum, told Al-Monitor, Different trends could be observed according to the decades. In the 1940s, it mostly involved mentioning Israel.

Raidy said, In the 1950s-1960s, sexual explicitness was tolerated, but not political discussions. In the early 2000s, there was strong opposition to heavy metal. People would be arrested in the streets for wearing a heavy metal band T-shirt as many thought it was satanic. What stood to be censored became clearer after the Syrian army left in 2005, mostly focusing on sectarian and politics-related material. Nowadays, we note that LGBT art and events are getting targeted more and more.

The virtual museum aims to identify not only what has been banned and censored, but also the reasons behind it, in an effort to present the big picture when it comes to limits on freedom of expression in Lebanon. The database launched on May 24, with an event at Phoenicia University, in Mazraat al-Daoudiyeh, in the south. An exhibition of panels and blackboards with words and names of individuals redacted to symbolize information omitted through censorship was followed by a discussion among free speech experts and activists. Participants included lawyer Hussein el-Achi, photojournalist Hussein Baydoun, author and activist Joumana Haddad, journalist and activist Luna Safwan and graffiti artist Omar Kabbani.

In 2013 in Beirut, MARCH had organized Censorship in Lebanon, An Uncensored Look, a panel discussion on freedom of expression. Looking ahead, the team hopes to organize others in Tripoli after the end of Ramadan and maybe in the Bekaa Valley.

We believe that getting out of Beirut is important not only to inform people about censorship but also to have more discussions, address a different crowd living in rural areas and see what they think about the issue, said Raidy, who is also a blogger. Virtually, anyone can see what cultural material has been banned and censored, as well as what journalists and activists have been through when it comes to the expression of certain issues. We also invite people to submit entries if they hear about something new.

Control over every cultural product in Lebanon is based on a law or decree, as detailed in Censorship in Lebanon: Law and Practice, a 2010 study by Nizar Saghieh, Rana Saghieh and Nayla Geagea, who are lawyers and members of The Legal Agenda, an NGO that follows socio-legal developments in Lebanon and the broader Middle East.

Censorship of films in Lebanon is based on four very vague principles: respect for public morals, respect for the reputation or status of state authorities, respect for the sensitivities of the public and avoiding sectarian or religious incitement, and resisting calls that are unfavorable to the interests of Lebanon, Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer with The Legal Agenda, told Al-Monitor. If the General Security, which is a security agency, wants to ban a film, it must refer it to an administrative committee, which reviews the film and gives its recommendation to the Ministry of Interior, which will make the final decision. The procedure is not transparent, and most of the time, the reason why a film is censored or banned is not given.

To this, Raidy added, From the data we collected, the two main organizations asking General Security for censorship are first the Catholic Information Center and then Dar al-Fatwa, the leading Sunni religious institution in the country.

For example, in Nadine Labakis filmWhere Do We Go Now (2012), a scene with a priest and a sheikh speaking to the public through the local mosques loudspeaker was cut. More recently, a Druze cleric's apparition was masked by a black dot in Philippe Aractingis 2017 filmListen /Ismaii. Both decisions were supposedly based on concerns of sectarian incitement.

The Boycott Bureau for Israel also made sure that the name of Steven Spielberg, who has donated money in Israel, would be removed from posters and films, although we can watch them. This was silly, Raidy said. They also asked that Wonder Woman be banned because the lead actress is Israeli.

Two filmmakers recently challenged censorship decisions before the State Council: Danielle Arbid, for her filmBeirut Hotel (2011), and Reine Mitri, for the banning of her documentary In This Land Lay Graves of Mine (2015), about people displaced during the Lebanese civil war. Arbid lost her challenge, with the State Council deciding that censorship was justified because the filmattacked the reputation of the authorities in regard to the investigation of Prime Minister Rafik Hariris assassination in 2005. The censors had disapproved of a scene that referenced a USB memory stick with documents on it about Hariri's death.

The State Council even ruled that General Security can exercise prior censorship of film plots itself, which is a very broad interpretation of the law and an infringement on freedom of expression, Frangieh said. But it hasnt yet ruled on Mitris film, and we hope that the ban will be overturned in the end. Giving a voice to the victims of displacement during the civil war cannot be viewed as inciting sectarian tensions. It is very important for a Lebanese artist to have access to her or his main audience in Lebanon.

According to Raidy, the social impact of censorship in Lebanon is clear. People arent allowed to speak about very important and unsolved things, he said.

About the taboo on discussing the war and displaced people, he said, This is reality. It is silly to forbid people to talk about it. Plus, the country is very proud of its freedom of speech, and maybe it is not as bad as in the other countries, but not as good as it could be.

Raidy also warned against the dangers of self-censorship, stating, Journalists just dont investigate anymore for fear of getting in trouble. Even local filmdistributors dont procure a filmthat could be a problem for the General Security.

Indeed, many things must remain unsaid in a country that is proud of its liberty.

Read More: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/lebanon-censorship-museum-freedom-of-expression.html

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Online database gives uncensored look into Lebanon's censorship - Al-Monitor

NEW YORK (AP) President Donald Trump may be the nation's tweeter-in-chief, but some Twitter users say he's violating the First Amendment by blocking people from his feed after they posted scornful comments.

Lawyers for two Twitter users sent the White House a letter Tuesday demanding they be un-blocked from the Republican president's @realDonaldTrump account.

"The viewpoint-based blocking of our clients is unconstitutional," wrote attorneys at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York.

The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The tweeters one a liberal activist, the other a cyclist who says he's a registered Republican have posted and retweeted plenty of complaints and jokes about Trump.

They say they found themselves blocked after replying to a couple of his recent tweets. The activist, Holly O'Reilly, posted a video of Pope Francis casting a sidelong look at Trump and suggested this was "how the whole world sees you." The cyclist, Joe Papp, responded to the president's weekly address by asking why he hadn't attended a rally by supporters and adding, with a hashtag, "fakeleader."

Blocking people on Twitter means they can't easily see or reply to the blocker's tweets.

Although Trump started @realDonaldTrump as a private citizen and Twitter isn't government-run, the Knight institute lawyers argue that he's made it a government-designated public forum by using it to discuss policies and engage with citizens. Indeed, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump's tweets are "considered official statements by the president."

The institute's executive director, Jameel Jaffer, compares Trump's Twitter account to a politician renting a privately-owned hall and inviting the public to a meeting.

"The crucial question is whether a government official has opened up some space, whether public or private, for expressive activity, and there's no question that Trump has done that here," Jaffer said. "The consequence of that is that he can't exclude people based solely on his disagreement with them."

The users weren't told why they were blocked. Their lawyers maintain that the connection between their criticisms and the cutoff was plain.

Still, there's scant law on free speech and social media blocking, legal scholars note.

"This is an emerging issue," says Helen Norton, a University of Colorado Law School professor who specializes in First Amendment law.

Morgan Weiland, an affiliate scholar with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, says the blocked tweeters' complaint could air key questions if it ends up in court. Does the public forum concept apply in privately run social media? Does it matter if an account is a politician's personal account, not an official one?

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. declined to comment. The tweeters aren't raising complaints about the company.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed from Washington.

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Twitter users, blocked by Trump, cry censorship - CBS46 News - CBS46 News Atlanta

CRAIG F. WALKER / GLOBE STAFF

The Johnston Gate at Harvard Yard.

An Ivy League course on the consequences of dumb and offensive behavior on the Internet just played out at Harvard. And for at least 10 kids who had already been admitted to the university, the fallout of sharing offensive images among themselves were profound and potentially life-changing.

By now, the story is well known: The teens were part of a larger Facebook group chat where they posted the vile images as Internet memes. When the university discovered the content, it rescinded their admission.

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A debate about free speech has ensued, pitting Harvard as the ruthless censor clamping down on kids goofing off. But thats the wrong way to look at the controversy. Like all universities, Harvard has wide discretion in its admissions process. Had the school discovered the memes before the students were accepted at the school, its safe to guess that Harvard would have denied them admission, period, without triggering a free-speech brouhaha. The college admissions process is inherently subjective. There are many considerations, including that of judgment, character, and ethics, and sharing puerile and offensive posts is generally not the path to the Ivy League.

Needless to say, Harvard reserves the right to rescind admissions at any time before enrollment, for many reasons, including whether the prospective student engages in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity, or moral character. Its tough luck for the admitted applicants, perhaps, that they werent yet officially Harvard students when the images were discovered. If they were, the universitys response might have been different; student-athletes who were recently caught writing offensive, sexually charged lists about classmates were not expelled from the school.

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Its likely the meme-sharing students, who had been admitted to the class of 2021, were trying to impress each other, engaging in the type of silly, provocative one-upmanship that teens gravitate toward. Its not likely that the students, who included the daughter of a major Harvard donor, were going to start committing hate crimes when they arrived in Cambridge. But they did show a marked lack of judgment. Among the posts: a suggestion that child abuse was sexually arousing; sexual jokes about the Holocaust; and an image that poked fun at suicide and Mexicans with a piata.

Did the school miss an opportunity to educate those students about their foolish actions? Perhaps, although the incident remains a teachable moment for the kids nonetheless. And Harvards swift response sends a reassuring message of the importance of principles, civility, and standards for the rest of the university community.

For many young people, memes the wild variety of funny captions over memorable images are a second language.

Censorship, this is not. The students remain perfectly free to express themselves with any offensive or provocative memes they choose. And should the students choose to reapply to the college someday, they should be able to write quite an essay about learning lessons the hard way.

Read more:
A teachable moment, but not censorship, at Harvard - The Boston Globe

Facebook moderators have just seconds to decide whether to delete content. The company said the decision had been made in error. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

Facebook censored a group of supporters of Chechen independence for violating its community standards barring organizations engaged in terrorist activity or organized criminal activity, the latest example of the social network mistakenly censoring government dissidents.

The Facebook group, Independence for Chechnya!, was permanently deleted by Facebook in late May, according to the group administrator, an Estonian human rights activist who asked to be identified by her initials, MP. She said she was shocked when she received a message from Facebook informing her of the deletion. We do not support terror, MP said. We support [a] political[ly] legal way for returning Chechen independence.

After the Guardian contacted Facebook about the group, it was reinstated. A company spokesperson said that the deletion had been made in error and pointed out that with millions of reports each week, the company sometimes gets things wrong.

The case is just the most recent example of how Facebooks mission of creating a more open and connected world can be compromised by its gargantuan task of policing billions of pieces of content.

In recent weeks, the company has censored a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for publishing a series of posts alleging corruption by Maltese politicians and an abortion rights organization for violating its policy against the promotion or encouragement of drug use. In all of those cases, Facebook reversed its decisions after it was contacted by the Guardian.

Facebook is also facing complaints from critics who argue the network is not censorious enough and is failing to stamp-out extremist or abusive content.

The Chechen independence group, which had about 6,000 members, had existed for almost a decade and was originally created by a resident of Chechnya, according to MP, who said she took over administration of the group after the original administrator was forced into hiding due to threats to his relatives. The group is supportive of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, an unrecognized government consisting of exiled leaders from the wars for independence.

While some Chechen separatist groups, such as the Caucasian Emirate, are considered terrorist organizations by the US government, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria is not. Indeed, the group is specifically listed as not violating in a list of terrorist groups that the Guardian reviewed as part of the Facebook Files. One Facebook moderator told the Guardian that content reviewers have less than 10 seconds to make a decision about whether content should be censored or not, making the careful policing of extremist content a mission impossible.

MP said that her group was used to spread news about what Chechens really want and how they think because there is no real free media in Russia. My friends and me, we wanted to give the Chechen point of view.

Its a modest but difficult goal: press freedom is tenuous in Russia as a whole, and basically non-existent in Chechnya, a Russian republic ruled with an iron first by Ramzan Kadyrov.

Local media works according to one principle: Do not make Kadyrov angry, an anonymous Chechen journalist wrote in the Guardian last year. Today, I do not know a single journalist here who would agree to work on a story that was anything other than positive about life in post-war Chechnya.

Kadyrov was selected to lead Chechnya by Vladmir Putin, and he has been linked to the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemstov and accused of various human rights violations, including the reported detention and torture of hundreds of gay men.

The Chechen leader has a particularly authoritarian attitude toward social media. He enthusiastically documents his lifestyle to his 2.7m followers on Instagram, while retaliating harshly against Chechens who voice even mild dissent on social networks. A favored tactic is public humiliation forcing those who wrote negative comments to appear on local television to renounce their views and apologize.

While the Chechen group has been restored, the case raises concerns for press freedom advocates about how Facebook is wielding its power to censor. Not every group of dissidents will catch the attention of a news organization or advocacy group, said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of free-speech advocacy group PEN America, and that seems to be a much more reliable means of redress than Facebooks official system for appealing censorship decisions.

If that dissident group doesnt have the channels or access to power to get through to Facebook at a higher level, they may just find themselves silenced, said Nossel. What is necessary is a more accessible, transparent, timely process of individual appeal and the provision of rationale that make this incredibly powerful hand that Facebook and other platforms wield something that is more understandable and can be a subject of public debate.

Link:
Facebook blocks Chechnya activist page in latest case of wrongful censorship - The Guardian

Google has just announced that it is establishing new guidelines to determine whichcontent is ineligible to receive advertising dollars on its YouTube platform. More than any of the otherdebatesabout fake news and bias in media, this kind of financial muscle (censorship) is whats really going to haveimpact on the content business in the long-term. And, at the moment, the real leverage is held by the very small number ofgatekeepers which control large scale distribution and major ad dollars on the internetchief among them Google and Facebook.

YouTubesnew clarificationwill prevent ad money from being allocated to content in which family entertainment characters (think Mickey Mouse)are shown engaging in violent, sexual,or otherwise inappropriate behavior. Hard to argue with that one, though some satirical news outlets might still ask how YouTubes algorithm can really determine context and nuance.

The updated guidelines also take cash away from content that isgratuitously incendiary, inflammatory, or demeaning. Specifically, no more money for videos that are gratuitously disrespectful or language that shames or insults an individual or group. Imagine applying that test to the mainstream political debate. Basically, a good portion of cable news, talk radio, and political punditry would be un-monetizable.

This might translate into defunding videos from CNN or The Young Turks in which pundits call President Trump despicable and disgusting and all sorts of other things which are undeniably hateful.On the other side, imagine if youre a hardcore member of the alt rightand the incendiary voices of Alex Jones or Glenn Beck are financially censored?

So who actually makes these decisions on what is acceptable, or rather how to program the algorithm of financial acceptability? Is it some crusty Capital J journalism professor hired as a consultant? Perhaps some actual practicing journalists? Or maybe a panel of voices from different economic backgrounds, geographies, and intellectual viewpoints as well as the more conventional definition of diversity including varying racial, ethnic, and gender make-ups?

No, not really. Its most often some well educated, perhaps well intentioned, Silicon Valley executive who has climbed thecorporate ladder enough to be trusted, or saddled, with this sort of issue, which is the opposite of what a tech company actually wants to be handling.

Enter the product manager.

While its not possible for us to cover every video scenario, we hope this additional information will provide you with more insight into the types of content that brands have told us they dont want to advertise against and help you to make more informed content decisions, VP of Product Management Ariel Bardinwrote in the blog post directed at publishers who choose to let YouTube sell their ad inventory in return for a cut of the proceeds. According to LinkedIn, Bardin is a Stanford and USC grad who has been at Google for the last 13 years working inAdwords, Payments, and now YouTube.Not the usual resume for a key arbiter of the national conversation.

Perhaps itsa good thing after all that its next to impossible for large news brands to earn enough money on YouTube to meaningfully sustaintheir businesses. But thats not the case for smaller upstarts and individuals who may well havecontent which is no more or less inflammatory than the stuff which gets slung around on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News.

Moreover, these same issues of objectionable content and the questions about the real value and placement of ad dollars have all existedfor adecade or more. Google is just now reacting to the howling of a bunch of advertisers.Companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, The BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4, Toyota, McDonalds, and even the British Government allwithdrew advertsfrom Google-owned sites, including YouTube, claiming tobe deeply concerned about their ads appearing alongside content on YouTube promoting hate.

In this case, the big brands, and the agencies that manage their ad spend, saw an opportunity for some leverage. If youre a big consumer brand and you want audience reach thats going to move the needle, Google and Facebook are currently capturing most of your dollars, so why not goose them a bit when you have the chance? Certainly they are entitled to allocate their marketing dollars as they see fit.

The bigger issue here is the advent of a truth algorithm. Thats not what Google says its doing. But in the end its the money that matters.

Steve Alperin is the CEO of DSA Digital Holdings

The rest is here:
Youtube's Financial Censorship: the 'Product Manager' as Ultimate ... - Heat Street