Daily Archives: October 12, 2020

Since late May, fact checks, censors, warnings and even removals have appeared on President Trumps social media posts. Throughout the pandemic, social media companies have been exposed for censoring all kinds of voices, like medical professionals, politicians, event organizers and even the president.

The problem many have with this censorship is that the majority of these voices appear to be conservative-leaning. Is it true that companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are silencing those with opinions they dont agree with? Is big tech truly infringing upon the First Amendment and taking away individuals and the presidents right to free speech?

While this narrative has been effective in stirring the emotions of those who agree with the voices being censored, its most likely not the case.

The censorship, which began as far back as March, was introduced by most big social media companies as a method to combat dangerous misinformation regarding the pandemic.

Misinformation is one of the biggest problems related to the pandemic and has made an incredibly complicated issue even more so. Removing harmful, incorrect information from social media sounds like a great step to prevent dangerous underreaction or overaction on a large scale.

However, this was much easier said than done.

Almost immediately, people started to take issue with new censorship policies when posts on Facebook were mistakenly blocked by a bug in their anti-spam system. The blocked posts included sources many thought to be legitimate and well recognized like Buzzfeed and USA Today. The bug was soon corrected, but the conspiracy theories had just begun.

Fox News Tucker Carlson spoke about a viral video on TouTube by doctors who were suggesting that the COVID-19 death count was heavily inflated and that serious policy changes were necessary. The video was taken down by YouTube, and Carlsons main argument was that media giants were silencing any form of dissent from the opinions of those in power. This may sound like something to be seriously worried about, but its actually the exact kind of misinformation that threatens our safety.

The doctors statements, thought by many to be a credible source of information, have since been completely debunked and proved to be filled with a variety of statistical errors. YouTube was right to censor this information as it was false and had it been spread any further, it couldve persuaded the millions who saw it to take the pandemic much less seriously and act accordingly.

On May 26, 2020, Twitter placed the first fact check warning on one of Trumps tweets. The president and many of his supporters were outraged, as it seemed as though Twitter was participating in partisan bias and trying to silence Trump for a difference in political views.

However, when the information contained in the tweet and the surrounding situation is examined closely, it becomes clear why this censorship was justified and necessary for American safety. The tweet was an argument for the theory that mail-in ballots are completely untrustworthy and shouldnt be used in the upcoming election. The reason Trump made this argument wasnt that it was true, but because he knows his supporters are more likely than the opposition to disobey quarantine standards and come out in larger numbers for an in-person event, as they have been for months, to protest the quarantine laws.

The tweet was a political move filled with misinformation that could still put people in danger. This is exactly the kind of censorship that isnt done because of partisan bias, but because false information could put our national health in danger.

Shortly after Trumps tweet was censored, a federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit claiming that these social media agencies were suppressing conservative views.

Evan Holden is a sophomore political science major. Contact Evan at holdened@dukes.jmu.edu.

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Opinion | Is big social media censoring those they disagree with? - The Breeze

The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sundayof one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens.Their denunciationwas marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company rules against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people,is towoefullyunderstate the case.

What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1619 Project, published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Projects principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: that the countrys true birth date is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the 1619 Project has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums,while numerousscholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown Universitys Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the articleskey claims long afterpublication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let aloneexplaining why it made them.

In sum, the still-raging political, historical, and journalistic debate over the 1619 Project has become a majorcontroversy. In his Friday column, Stephens addressed the controversy by first noting the Projects positive contributions and accomplishments,then reviewed in detail the critiques of historians and other scholars of its central claims, and then sided with its critics by arguing that for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize the 1619 Project has failed.

Without weighing in on the merits of Stephens critiques, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not, it is hardly debatable that his discussing thisvibrant multi-pronged debate issquarely within his functionas a political op-ed writer at a national newspaper. Stephens himself explained that he took the unusual step of critiquing his ownemployerswork because the 1619 Projecthas become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, contending that avoiding writing about it out of collegial deference is to be derelict in our responsibility to participate insocietys significant disputes.

But his colleagues in the New York Times Guildevidentlydo not believe that he had any right to express his views on these debates. Indeed, they are indignant that he did so. In a barely-literate tweet that not once buttwice misspelled the word its as its not a trivial level of ignorance for writers with the worlds most influential newspaper the union denounced Stephensand the paper itself on these grounds:

It is a short tweet, as tweets go, buttheyimpressively managed to pack it with multiple ironies, fallacies, and decreestypical of the petty tyrant. Above all else, thisstatement, and the mentality it reflects, is profoundly unjournalistic.

To start with, this is a case of journalists using their union not to demand greater editorial freedom or journalistic independence something one would reasonably expect from a journalists union but demanding its opposite: that writers at the New York Times be prohibited by management from expressing their views and perspectives about the controversies surrounding the 1619 Project.In other words: they are demanding that their own journalistic colleagues be silenced and censored. What kind of journalists plead with management for greater restrictions on journalistic expression rather than fewer?

Apparently, the answer is New York Times journalists. Indeed, this is not the first time they have publicly implored corporate management to restrict the freedom of expression and editorial freedom of their journalistic colleagues. At the end of July, the Guild issued a series of demands, one of which was that sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.

For those not familiar with sensitivity reads: consider yourself fortunate. As the New York Times itself reported in 2017, sensitivity readershave been used by book publishers to gut books that have been criticized, in order tovet the narrative for harmful stereotypes and suggested changes. The Guardian explained in 2018that sensitivity readers are a rapidly growing industry in the book publishing world to weed out any implicit bias or potentially objectionable material not just in storylines but even in characters. It quoted the author Lionel Shriver about the obvious dangers: there is, she said, a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship.

As creepy as sensitivity readers are for fiction writing and other publishing fields, it is indescribably toxic for journalism,which necessarily questions or pokes at rather than bows to the most cherished, sacred pieties. For it to be worthwhile, it must publish material reporting and opinion pieces thatmight be potentially objectionable to all sorts of powerful factions, including culturally hegemonic liberals.

But thisis a function which the New York Times Union wants not merely to avoid fulfilling themselves but, far worse, to deny their fellow journalists. They crave a whole new layer of editorial hoop-jumping in order to get published, a cumbersome, repressive new protocol for drawing even moreconstraining lines around what can and cannot be said beyond the restrictions already imposed by the standard orthodoxies of the Times and their tone-flattening editorial restrictions.

When journalists exploit their unions not to demand better pay, improved benefits, enhanced job security or greater journalistic independence but instead as an instrument for censoring their own journalistic colleagues, then the concept of unions and journalism is wildly perverted.

Then there is the tattletale petulance embedded in the Unions complaint. In demanding enforcement of workplace rules by management against a fellow journalist they do not specify which sacred rule Stephens allegedly violated these union members sound more like Human Resources Assistant Managers or workplace informants than they do intrepid journalists. Since when do unions of any kind, but especially unions of journalists, unite to complain that corporate managers and their editorial bosses have been too lax in the enforcement of rulesgoverning what their underlings can and cannot say?

The hypocrisy of the Unions grievance is almost too glaring to even bother highlighting, and is the least ofits sins. The union members denounce Stephens and the paper forgoing after one of its [sic] own and then, in the next breath, publicly vilify their colleagues column because, in their erudite view, it reeks. This is the same union whose members, just a few months ago, quite flamboyantly staged a multi-day social media protest a quite public one ina fit of rage becausethe papers Opinion Editor, James Bennet, published an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton advocating the deployment of the U.S. military to repress protests and riots in U.S. cities; Bennet lost his job in the fallout. And many of these same union members now posturing as solemn, righteous opponents of publicly going after ones colleagues notoriously mocked, scorned, ridiculed, and condemned, first privately and then publicly, another colleague, Bari Weiss, until she left the paper, citing these incessant attacks.

Clearly this is not a union that dislikes public condemnations of colleagues. Whatever principle is motivating them, that is plainly not it.

Ive long been a harsh criticof Stephens (and Weiss) journalism and opinion writing. But it would never occur to me to take steps to try to silence them. If they were my colleagues and published an article I disliked or expressed views I found pernicious, I certainly would not whine to management that they broke the rules and insist that they should not have been allowed to have expressed what they believe.

Thats because Im a journalist, and I know that journalism can have value only if it fosters divergent views and seeks to expand rather thanreduce the freedom of discourse and expression permitted by society and by employers. And whatever one wants to say about Stephens career and record of writing and Ive had a lot of negative things to say about it harshly critiquingyour own employers Pulitzer-winning series, one beloved by powerful media, political and cultural figures, is thetypeof challenge to power that many journalists who do nothing but spout pleasing, popular pieties love to preen as embodying.

Therehas never been a media outlet where I have worked or where I have been published that did not frequently also publish opinions with which I disagree and articles I dislike, including the one in which I am currently writing. I would readily use my platforms to critique what was published, but it would never even occur to me take steps to try to prevent publication or, worse, issue pitiful public entreaties to management that Something Be Done. If youare eager to constrict the boundaries of expression, why would you choosejournalism of all lines of work? Itd be like someone whobelieves space travel to be an immoral wasteof resources opting to becomean astronaut for NASA.

Perhaps these tawdry episodes should be unsurprising. After all, one major reason that social media companies which never wanted the obligation tocensorbut instead sought to be content-neutral platforms for the transmission of communications in the mold of AT&T turned into active speech regulators was because the public, often led by journalists, began demanding that they censor more. Some journalists even devotesignificant chunks of their careerto publicly complaining thatFacebook and Twitterare failing to enforce their rules by not censoring robustly enough.

A belief in the virtues of free expression was once a cornerstone of the journalistic spirit. Guilds and unions fought against editorial control, notdemandedgreater amountsbe imposed by management. They defended colleagues when they were accused by editorial or corporatebosses of rules violations, not publicly tattled and invited, even advocated for, workplace disciplinary measures.

But a belief in free expression is being rapidly eclipsed in many societal sectors by a belief in the virtues of top-down managerial censorship, silencing and enhanced workplace punishment for thought and speech transgressions. As this imperious but whiny New York Times Guildcondemnationreflects, this trend can be seen most vividly, and most destructively, in mainstream American journalism. Nothing guts the core function of journalism more than this mindset.

Update: Oct. 11, 2020, 8:40p.m. ETThe New York Times Guild moments ago deleted its tweet denouncing Stephens and the paper, and thenposted this:

Original post:
The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues - The Intercept

Citing national security concerns, the government is attempting to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment right to inform the public about secret government surveillance orders. For more than six years, Twitter has been fighting in court to share information about law enforcement orders it received in 2014. Now, Twitter has brought that fight to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. EFF, along with the ACLU, filed an amicus brief last week to underscore the First Amendment rights at stake.

In 2014, Twitter submitted a draft transparency report to the FBI to review. The FBI censored the report, banning Twitter from sharing the total number of foreign intelligence surveillance orders the government had served within a six-month period. In response, Twitter filed suit in order to assert its First Amendment right to share that information.

Over half a decade of litigation later, the trial court judge resolved the case in April by dismissing Twitters First Amendment claim. Among the several concerning aspects of the opinion, the judge spent devoted only a single paragraph to analyzing Twitters First Amendment right to inform the public about law enforcement orders for its users information.

That single paragraph was not only perfunctory, but incorrect. The lower court failed to recognize one of the most basic rules underpinning the right to free speech in this country: the government must meet an extraordinarily exacting burden in order to censor speech before that speech occurs, which the Supreme Court has called the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.

As we explained in our amicus brief, to pass constitutional scrutiny, the government must prove that silencing speech before it occurs is necessary to avoid harm that is not only extremely serious but is also imminent and irreparable. But the lower court judge concluded that censoring Twitters speech was acceptable without finding that any resulting harm to national security would be either imminent or irreparable. Nor did the judge address whether the censorship was actually necessary, and whether less-restrictive alternatives could mitigate the potential for harm.

This cursory analysis was a far cry from the extraordinarily exacting scrutiny that the First Amendment requires. We hope that the hope that the Ninth Circuit will say the same.

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EFF and ACLU Ask Ninth Circuit to Overturn Government's Censorship of Twitter's Transparency Report - EFF

KSPP withdraws televised election address due to censorship by State-owned TV

The Kachin State Peoples Party (KSPP) has become one more in a series of ethnic parties who have withdrawn from their election right to broadcast their policy statement on State-owned TV after censorship carried out by the Union Election Commission.U Naw Khu Na, Youth Secretary of the party explained The UEC delete our policy about the allocation of resources. The UEC wants the party to use the wording Both the Kachin people and citizens shall enjoy the States resources which would dilute the KSPPs policy the Kachin ethnics shall fully enjoy the States resources.The issue here is currently the National State and government controls all the resources of the ethnic states and most of the ethnic policies are campaigning for greater autonomy within a federal state and greater control over their natural resources.Last week the UEC censored about 50% of the election address of Tai-Leng (Shan-ni) Nationalities Development Party. The censored pieces covered weak points of the 1947 Constitution, youth development and dictatorship. The UEC has also interfered with the election address of the CNLD- The Chin National League for Democracy.

As The Kachin-based KSPP has designated the rights of people in Kachin State as the partys policy, and the KSPP does not want such censorship U Naw Khu Na continued The KSPP will broadcast it via its page. U Shwe Min, Chair of the Lisu National Development Party admitted: Some parties faced censorship but considered others did not encounter it. Our party was invited to Nay Pyi Taw for the recording of the election address. The party has directly sent it to the media due to the spread of COVID-19. The party planned to record it in Myanmar and Lisu languages. Due to the urgent condition, the party sent a Myanmar-language address only. The UEC did not censor the partys address.On September 20, Lisu National Development Partys election address was telecast. More than 50 political parties have presented their election addresses via the State-owned TVs. Lawow National Unity Party in Kachin State.The telecast of election addresses by the political parties via the State-owned MRTV channel has started since September.More than 90 political parties will compete in the 2020 General Election. Of them, more than 70 parties will contest in the whole country while the remaining parties will compete in the relevant regions and states, according to the statement by the Union Election Commission (UEC).

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KSPP withdraws televised election address due to censorship by State-owned TV - Burma News International

Earlier this month, Christies auction house announced the sale of a digital portrait of the Bitcoin code for more than $130,000 when the first estimated price was $12,000$18,000. It was the first time a nonfungible token was auctioned at one of the major auction houses for traditional art.

One of the last events, Bridge to Metaverse, presented by Snark.art, showed tokenized artworks by both established and emerging contemporary artists. A group exhibition brought leading artists of our time the Kabakovs, Kendell Geers, AES+F, Recycle Group and others to the blockchain space, and a series of panel discussions worked as a bridge between the traditional and blockchain-based art worlds with its own systems of distribution.

One criticism of the crypto art market has been the perceived naivety of the works. Although people were being distracted by the emergence of memes and CryptoKitties, there have also been some serious artists who have made their presence felt in the crypto world.

The traditional position of arts has been a commentary on the current state of affairs. A way to subversively criticize and, at the same time, to magnify the truth of what we are living through.

This is a perfect match with the emergence of the anonymity of blockchain technology in the new climate of being constantly tracked by our everyday gadgets.

Related: Painting a different picture: How digital artists use blockchain

Will the emerging artists in the new field of crypto art be influenced by traditional artists bringing their works into a shared blockchain space? With strong voices raising political, race, gender and inequality issues, their influx in these current times may create a shift in the way art is created, collected and viewed.

The traditional art market brings with it not only artists but also gallerists and curators who are naturally also drawn to growing markets. In fact, we are already seeing a move toward more classic ways of buying, with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles purchasing works from artists to exhibit them in its own permanent collection.

Of course, this will also open the door to Crypto Art Basel, Biennale and other curated events whose crypto artworks will break sales records at Christies or Sothebys.

Fifty years from now, those first NFT artworks by world-acclaimed artists could become highly valuable, just like what happened with the first animations of John Whitney, the father of computer animation, who created the first animated art on his computer back in 1960.

Serious contemporary artists mirror and even magnify the truth of our reality without censorship. In the current political world, a marriage between the established artists and crypto art with no censorship is virtually a perfect match.

Misha Libman, co-founder of Snark.art, certainly believes this is a challenge to not only take on but to relish in, and he stated that:

Therefore, is the crypto art audience ready to be challenged with serious statements of shifting toward digitalization? Especially as established artists now find themselves with a new technological medium and a way to reach audiences they never had before.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Alexandra Luzan is a Ph.D. student researching the connection between new technologies and art at Ca Foscari University in Venice. For about a decade, Alexandra has been organizing tech conferences and other events in Europe dedicated to blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. She is equally interested in the relationship between blockchain tech and art.

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NFT and crypto art can magnify the truth of our reality without censorship - Cointelegraph

America was founded on defianceAt least, thats what Patrick Morgan, an English professor at ULM believes. So he, along with Sigma Tau Delta, hosted a banned books reading last week as an act of defiance against censorship.

Students, faculty and staff gathered on a cold, rainy day in October to share their love of literature by reading books that have been banned in multiple countries.

The annual reading was hosted in the Chemistry and Natural Science Building. Together, attendees read excerpts from books that were all banned at one point or another due to controversies. Some of the pieces of literature referenced were Moby Dick, Red Azalea and several poems from Shel Silversteins A Light in the Attic.

Its a chance to celebrate the freedom to read, the freedom to read any text, even the pieces of literature that have been barred throughout history, Morgan said.

Morgan said that he loves to see students share their interest in literature and learn about their relationships through literature. In the past, some of the books included Lord of the Flies, 1984 and Huckleberry Finn.

Kaylee Sadler, a junior and member of Sigma Tau Delta, said, I enjoyed listening to passages from banned books in history, and the discussions centered around the absurdities of censorship.

Sadler also read passages from Red Azalea, a novel that was banned in China due to its themes of homosexuality and anti-communism.

I hope more people will show up at the next reading, Sadler said. I think some people would be surprised with whats been banned.

A similar event that takes place in the spring is the Ides of March, an event where poetry lovers, students, faculty and staff alike, gather around a tree on campus and read their favorite poems.

Sadler encourages more literature lovers to attend the next banned books reading to celebrate their passion for literature together.

Read more:
Students fight censorship with banned books reading - The HawkEye