Category Archives: Censorship

This week, the local-to-me Moms For Liberty contingent lost their bid to get Gender Queer removed from Barrington School District 220. Parents and community members who supported the right to read and queer students and educators in the district showed up to the meeting, and the committee reviewing the book found it to be appropriate for their high school library.

As this was happening, a new billboard showed up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, which is just a few miles west of Barrington. The billboard said that districts in the town needed to stop sexualizing children, and at their school board meeting the same night, a regular right-wing staple showed up and spoke about government conspiracies related to the 1918 pandemic (shes been mad about a book in their school library since at least January). That individual filed three FOIA requests in a span of minutes to the school district. The first, which was denied, demanded to know the sexuality of educators and students in the district. The second and third were requests that could be Googled.

Snuggled in between Crystal Lake and Barrington is Cary, which has its own breed of right-wing parents itching to get their say in education.

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Barrington, Cary, and Crystal Lake are close to Lake In The Hills, where UpRising Bakery was vandalized in July because they were hosting an all-ages drag show brunch in their private business. The event was canceled as they cleaned up the damage from the individual who drove over an hour to destroy the space the night before the show, and what followed was a lawsuit from the ACLU against the town because of how it decided to proceed. The queer-owned bakery was able to host the show to a sold-out crowd just days later.

UpRising also sent educators in Barrington a welcome back feast to kick off the school year and support them as they endure continued attacks by groups who have agendas and no background in education.

Never fear, though. The local Moms For Liberty group tweeted their support of educators as parnets (yes, misspelled that way), then showed up to the board meeting to talk about indoctrination.

Im sure Im not saying anything that will shock readers here, but if its not clear already, perhaps this makes it clear: while this is about the books, it is in no way about the books. Its about the systemic erasure of queer people. If the books arent available and the teachers are called any number of names, then queer people disappear, right? And if a private business is vandalized by someone who was at the January 6 insurrection its not about education or indoctrination, is it?

I was unable to make the board meeting in Barrington to support queer members of the district. Despite that, and despite not being a citizen of the community but one of a town nearby, I wrote a letter. Im sharing it here in hopes that this can help others looking for ways to act and how to approach letter writing. You are welcome to copy and modify as appropriate.

Ive shared a template before. This is that template expanded. In addition to offering support for the book and for queer community members, I took the time to lay out who the people behind these pushes to curtail intellectual freedom are and the where and how of these coordinated movements.

In addition to sending the letter to the board, I also emailed every teacher librarian in the district and thanked them for their hard work. One board member thanked me for that, as they knew how much ugly rhetoric and discussion around these hard-working members of the school community were fielding.

So much for the Joyful Warrior parnets supporting educators.

I wanted to share the above story because much of this is news to me this week. I live here, I spend a lot of time researching book bans and access to information, and yet, I did not know what was happening in Crystal Lake. It was a reminder how wide-spread this right-wing nationalism is and, more, how local media fails to keep their eye on these things its being put on citizens to share this information and to band together, show up, and make sure that student rights are at the forefront of education.

This is not the beginning nor the end of challenges in Barrington. The district retained Lawn Boy earlier this year, and several other books are on the docket for review. Those include Flamer, This Book is Gay, Fighting Words, and All Boys Arent Blue.

It is equally disturbing that, aside from Chicago Media Collective, not a single Chicagoland media outlet had reported on this story until Thursday (the meeting was on Tuesday). They gave space to those who created the queer panic earlier this summer, but it has been radio silence still. This means parents who want to show up in support of education as a means to expanding world views remain completely in the dark about whats happening.

The lack of local media, as well as the focus of legacy media on only the clickiest stories, is in no small part why we are where we are and why well continue to be plowed by these well-organized, well-funded hate groups.

The Get Ready Stay Ready toolkit, built by parents and librarians, is one way to be prepared as an average citizen. This on-going effort is an incredible resource for staying up to date on issues relating to censorship and how you can prepare and fight back against these agendas. There are letters and templates you can use to contact school and library boards, training and educational resources to up your knowledge, and and resources aplenty for civic engagement, for supporting queer people, and for seeing and boosting voices of marginalized people. Save this and refer to it often as you continue your work ensuring access to information and ongoing support for queer and BIPOC students, educators, and library workers across the country.

Continued here:
Defending the Right to Read: Book Censorship News, August 19, 2022 - Book Riot

Russia's failure to secure a quick victory against Ukraine forced Vladimir Putin to adapt.

Over the past six months, Russia has been fighting an information war alongside its military campaign.

How Moscow rerouted the internet

On 30 May the internet connection in occupied Kherson dropped. It returned within hours, but people could no longer access sites like Facebook, Twitter and Ukrainian news.

The internet had been rerouted to Russia. The online activity of those in Kherson was now visible to Moscow and was subject to censorship.

Internet traffic in Kherson was originally routed from network hubs elsewhere in the country and passed through Kyiv.

These connections remained in place during the first three months of the invasion before it was rerouted.

As Russia gained strength in southern Ukraine, reports emerged that it was taking over control of local internet providers in Kherson either through cooperation or by force.

Once in control, Russia could reroute the internet to Moscow via a state-owned internet provider in Crimea.

This briefly happened on 1 May, before Ukrainian officials managed to reverse it. But on 30 May, with Russia now in control of more infrastructure, it happened again. It now appears permanent.

With the people of Kherson now forced to use Russian internet if they want to go online, they are subject to Moscow's censorship.

For three months they have been unable to access Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Some Ukrainian news websites are also blocked.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, an internet monitoring company, says the rerouting has "effectively placed Ukrainian citizens under the purview and surveillance of the Russian state at the flick of a switch."

Internet operators and monitors report internet access in large areas of Kherson is censored to a similar level as experienced in Russia. Some smaller areas are experiencing even tougher censorship, with some Google services blocked.

Ukrainians in Kherson are finding ways to evade Russia's efforts to monitor and censor their online activity.

When Ivanna (not her real name) leaves her home, she deletes social media and messaging apps like Instagram and Telegram in case she is stopped by a soldier who may search her phone.

"You need to be careful," she tells Sky News, using an online messaging app.

She goes online using a VPN (virtual private network) which hides the user's location and allows them to bypass Russian censorship.

Searches for the software spiked in Kherson when internet controls tightened.

Russia has also shut down the mobile phone network in Kherson and new SIM cards are being sold for locals to use.

Ivanna told Sky News a passport is needed to buy the sim cards, prompting fears their use may be tracked.

Cautious, she paid a stranger to buy a SIM under his name.

TV and phone communications targeted

In the unoccupied parts of Ukraine, Moscow has sought to destroy the communication infrastructure - such as TV towers and communication centres.

It's a tactic Russia initially wanted to avoid as it did not want to damage resources that would be useful as an occupying force, explains William Alberque, director of strategy, technology, and arms control for the Institute for Strategic Studies.

"Russia thought they were going to win so fast [so wouldn't] destroy infrastructure as it was going to own that infrastructure," he tells Sky News.

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But by keeping the lines open, Ukrainians were able to communicate with one another and the wider world.

Ultimately Russia moved to destroy what it was unable to quickly seize.

Examples of the attacks on communication infrastructure have been logged by the Centre for Information Resilience, which has been tracking and verifying attacks like these using open-source information.

One incident logged by the group was a communication centre in southern Ukraine.

Russia's attempt to control information has also included targeting TV towers.

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Power cuts in Ukraine have also caused the nation's biggest broadband and mobile internet providers to lose connectivity.

Disinformation has doubled since the war began

Russia has used disinformation during the war to influence those in Ukraine, the country's allies, as well as its own population at home.

Examples of pro-Russian fake news include a clumsily faked video of the Ukrainian president telling people to surrender (known as a deepfake video) and social media posts accusing bombing victims of being actors.

Some of Russia's efforts have been effective. Moscow claimed the invasion was in part to tackle nazism in the Ukrainian government. Searches for "nazi" in both Russia and worldwide spiked in the first week of the war.

The number of disinformation sites has more than doubled since the Russian invasion in February, according to Newsguard, which provides credibility rankings for news and information sites.

In March, its researchers found 116 sites publishing Russia-Ukraine war-related disinformation. By August, that number had risen to 250.

It's not possible to show that all of those sites are run on the orders of Russia, however, Moscow has allocated a boosted pot of funds for its propaganda arm.

The independent Russian-language news site The Moscow Times reported the government had "drastically increased funding for state-run media amid the war with Ukraine".

The article cited figures provided by the Russian government. It said 17.4bn rubles (244m) had been allocated for "mass media" compared to 5.4bn rubles (76m) the year before.

It said in March, once the war was underway, some 11.9bn rubles (167m) were spent. This is more than twice as much as the combined spend of the two months before, which was 5bn rubles (70m).

The research comes as no surprise to Mr Alberque, who says Russia's disinformation campaign has been "constant".

"As they shift into war mode, [Russia] has to go to directly paying salaries and no longer hoping that people will echo its messages but paying them to send a certain number of messages per day," he told Sky News.

Looking forward, Mr Alberque believes the death of the daughter of an ally of Vladimir Putin will be a distraction for those directing Russia's disinformation efforts.

Russia has pointed the finger at Ukraine for carrying out the fatal car bombing in Moscow but Kyiv denies any involvement.

An apparent high-profile assassination in the capital has sparked a number of conspiracy theories, including claims the responsibility may lie with a Russian group looking to influence the war.

"The Russian government is going to have to try to control this narrative," Mr Alberque explains.

He adds that propaganda resources that would be focused on Ukraine may now be drawn into the fallout of the death, saying: "I think it's going to be a huge information sink for them because it's going to take up time and attention."

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Why data journalism matters to Sky News

Originally posted here:
How Putin used internet censorship and fake news for six months to push the Ukraine war agenda - Sky News

Disney+ booth at San Diego Comic-Con 2022.Photo: Chris Delmas/AFP (Getty Images)

Apparently, you can now add farting to the list of abhorrent things worthy of censorship according to Disneys tedious Standards & Practices department. The Guardian reports that Disney+ will re-evaluate their ban on a fart-centric episode of the Australian cartoon series Bluey, after facing backlash for yet another odd case of censoring content on the streamer.

The episode from season three of the Emmy-winning series titled Family Meeting seems as silly and harmless as you can get. Set up as a court case scenario, the anthropomorphic Blue Heeler kiddos accuse their father of a crime most heinous: performing a fart or fluffy in their face. While fart jokes are a tale as old as time in kids television (were reminded of Neds DeclassifiedSchool Survival Guide icon Timmy Toot-Toot), Disneys S&P department decided that this was a joke too smelly for the kiddos of Disney+, removing the episode from the lineup when Bluey was added to the platform.

However, censoring shows and movies isnt anything new for the folks at Disney. In celebration of Gravity Falls 10th anniversary this year, series creator Alex Hirsch documented all the insanity that the series faced against Disneys S&P department, including believing the show was referencing furries and wanting the word crud altered as it was viewed as inappropriate. Thats not to mention the butt-fiasco with Splashs arrival on Disney+, which saw the worst digital addition of hair, all to cover up a quick shot of Daryl Hannahs backside in the film.

After fans begin to spot the missing episode while pointing out how ridiculous the whole thing was, Disney has now backtracked on their initial banning of the episode.

Family Meeting will roll out on US platforms soon, said a Disney spokesperson to childrens entertainment site Pirates & Princesses. Some of the Bluey content did not meet Disney Junior broadcast S&P in place at the time the series was acquired. Now that it is rolling out on other platforms, it is a great opportunity to reevaluate which is what we plan to do.

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While dog families arguing about farting has now been recognized as viewable content for kids on Disney+, this begs the question as to what other ridiculous items are on Disneys S&P banned list.

Here is the original post:
Disney Plus to "re-evaluate" censoring of Bluey episode focused on farting - The A.V. Club

Former kickboxer turned social media sensation Andrew Tate has now officially been banned from Meta platforms. Tate widely gained fame for his controversial views on women and society in general and became one of the most polarizing figures on the internet recently.

Moreover, his ban has sent the internet into a frenzy as people were divided on this decision. Top Gs polarizing personality can be perfectly displayed after his ban as people flocked to two sides. Some came out to support Tate claiming that this was an attack on freedom of speech and expression while others stated that his controversial views should not be spread across the internet.

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Renowned Youtuber Coffeezilla, who even made a video exposing Tates Hustlers university, stated that Tate should not be banned. He claimed that although he did not agree with Top G, banning him was not the answer.

Another controversial Youtuber Sneako defended Tate calling out Meta for promoting an agenda.

Moreover, former MMA champion Jake Shields also defended Top G. He stated that people who call out Tate for manipulating young boys had no problem with models like Kim Kardashian influencing young girls.

Political commentator Mike Cernovich stated that former Illumisoft CEO Dan Price was accused of far worse things than Tate. However, there was no call for him to get banned.

Furthermore, Youtuber Daz Black took shots at the left wing claiming that they can get anyone banned.

Social media insider KeemStar called out people for harassing him because he thought Tate should not be banned.

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Moreover, Instagram personality George Resch stated that Tate got banned because he said things everyone was too afraid to say.

This was not all as internet personality LizardKing stated that censorship was not the answer to the problem.

Twitch streamer InfernoOmni was shocked by this ban and asked his audience whether the ban was justified.

However, some people thought that this ban was justified as feminist page Whor*sofYore tried to troll Top G.

Another influencer Mattxiv, whose initial post calling out Tate went viral on Instagram, stated that freedom of speech does not apply on social media platforms. He claimed that Tate had a right to free speech, but his being on the platforms was entirely up to them.

However, Youtube sensation Jake Paul also came out to address both sides of the issue. He stated that he didnt agree with Tates opinions and also did not agree with censorship.

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While many people may not agree with Tates opinion, censoring him will only add to the problem. We have seen many cases where banning a controversial figure only adds to their popularity. Moreover, the argument that social media platforms have a right to ban people should be debated heavily. In todays world, the integration of these platforms in our lives has made it impossible to voice our opinions without them, and as history tells us the key to a good society is healthy discourse and debate, not censoring individuals that some people dont agree with.

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WATCH THIS STORY Five Infamous Altercations of Mike Tyson outside the Ring

Do you think Tate should be banned? Let us know in the comments.

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Censorship Is never the Answer: Influencers Flock to Twitter Over Wild Ban on Andrew Tate - EssentiallySports

The IDFs Military Censor finally admitted to what everyone already knew, that the IDF uses armed UAVs to target its enemies.

It was found that there was no impediment in publishing the IDFs use of attack drones as part of its operational activities, a statement from the censor said on Wednesday evening.

Until now, the censor blocked Israeli journalists from officially confirming that Israel used attack drones despite the fact that foreign media outlets regularly reported on the phenomenon and Israel is a world leader in UAV technology.

In 1991, Israel began operating in adherence with the guidelines of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a multinational informal agreement to limit the proliferation of missile technology.

However, perhaps due to the fact that the use of armed drones is now so ubiquitous, Israels silence on the matter has ended.

(YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem)

See the rest here:
After Yrs. Of Censorship, IDF Admits To Using Attack Drones

Former President Donald Trump called on Congress to investigate the anti-American practice of censorship rampant across Americas corporations and big tech platforms.

Trumps comments came during Turning Point USAs Student Action Summit on Saturday in Tampa, Florida.Trump said:

But Ill talk about the next critical fight we need is for your energy to be put behind the battle to restore free speech in America. There is no such thing as a democracy that does not have free speech. We dont have free speech anymore. We have canceled culture we have fake news media that reports certain news incorrectly.

He also called out corporate media for its biased coverage of political issues and for being partners with the Democrats:

And if its positive about the other side, they make it much better and if its bad about the other side, they wont even report it. We saw that in the election where they wouldnt report bad news about the other side. Its a disgrace. The media has taken a place in our culture and our history that nobody ever thought would be possible. They are no longer respected.

Trump warned that if censorship continues to grow across the country, America will turn into Venezuela on steroids. He said:

If debate can be silenced, if dissent can be suppressed. If conservative ideas can be systematically shut down, then very simply, we do not have a free country anymor. Thats what happened with communism and various countries. Thats what happened with Venezuela.

Trump added that the next congress and the next president have a civic duty to be ruthless in going after this new censorship regime.

We have to, because if we do not destroy censorship, censorship will destroy America. Our country will rot from the corruption confusion, he urged.

As soon as we have the power. Congress should immediately launch a full scale investigation into the rise of totally anti American practice, Trump declared.

Link:
Trump Calls for Investigation into Anti-American Censorship

Laws barring businesses and schools from teaching anti-racist ideas, such as Floridas Stop WOKE Act, mimic the same intolerance displayed by woke progressives. The better path is to encourage open debate, not censorship.

The Stop WOKE Act prevents businesses, schools and other institutions from subjecting students and employees to training or teachings that promote various anti-racist ideas. These include the idea that a person, by virtue of his race, color, national origin or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously and the idea that virtues such as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular [group] to oppress members of another [group].

Under the law, teachers cannot teach these ideas to students, businesses cannot impose training that promotes these ideas, and licensing institutions or membership associations cannot require such training as a condition of a license or membership.

The ideas that Florida seeks to suppress are bad. The peddlers of wokism sow discrimination and division, blacklist dissenters, and scorn individual freedom. But we should not fight this illiberalism with more illiberalism. The Stop WOKE Act would trample free speech in its enthusiasm to oppose bad ideas.

The First Amendment protects ideas that we truly hate. Private businesses have a First Amendment right to tell their employees that all whites are privileged oppressors or that colorblindness is racist, though there may be some limits if training creates a hostile workplace. And while grade-school teachers may face curriculum constraints, college professors have a First Amendment right to argue that slavery was an essential rationale behind the American Revolution, or that minorities deserve reparations from white taxpayers who played no role in their oppression. Yet under the Stop WOKE Act, such speech is unlawful discrimination.

Conservative lawmakers should appreciate the problem with this approach, given their opposition to anti-discrimination laws that compel businesses to violate their beliefs, such as forcing a wedding photographer to work a same-sex marriage ceremony or city ordinances that seek to ban Chick-fil-A restaurants because of owners donations to support traditional marriage. The underlying principle is the same: Government cannot impose dogma on its citizens.

Government bureaucrats are not qualified to decide which ideas deserve protection and which deserve censorship and scorn. In the Supreme Courts words, If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

Not only do these laws violate the freedoms they purport to protect, but history warns that censorship often backfires. Consider what happened when the Nazi race-baiter Julius Streicher was imprisoned for accusing Jews of ritual murders in the Nazi newspaper Der Strmer. Not only did this fail to stop antisemitic speech, but Nazi propagandists won public support by spinning Streicher as a martyr. This recoil effect is visible today as progressive politicians whip up the left over conservative fearmongering about race.

Efforts to censor woke ideas are also based on the flawed premise that Americans are fragile and gullible. But the First Amendment assumes that citizens in a free society are tough enough to hear and reject offensive ideas. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained, Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.

There are better ways to grapple with bad ideas than censorship. Foremost, we should let ideas do battle on equal ground. As John Milton put it, rather than doubt the strength of truth, we should let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. Sometimes we are too quick to muzzle opponents because we dont trust our message. To foster debate, legislators should promote transparency by requiring schools to make training and teaching materials available to public scrutiny. And while lawmakers cannot tell businesses what to say to their employees, they can prohibit the government from rigging the debate by compelling students or employees to adopt or promote ideas they disagree with.

Free speech is a net gain for society, even when it protects odious ideas. In 1977, Jewish attorney David Goldberger defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors. Goldbergers courage stands in stark contrast to the ill-fated imprisonment of Julius Streicher. He understood two things we must remember: that the First Amendment does not play favorites and that truth need not fear its enemies.

Ethan Blevins (@ethanwb) and Daniel Ortner (@dortner1) are attorneys at Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans individual liberty and constitutional rights.

Excerpt from:
In fighting woke politics, censorship is not the answer - The Hill

In a report from TheBlock, the team behind the Ethereum (ETH) protocol Aave addressed the concerns about their address screening process. The decision to partner with compliance firm TRM Labs has been gaining a lot of attention after several high-profile personalities were blocked from accessing the platform.

These individuals and smaller users include TRON founder Justin Sun, Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano, CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong, and others. Over the weekend, these names were blocked from using Aave until an update to the platforms frontend re-instated some with access to the protocol.

As Bitcoinist reported, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on decentralized exchange Tornado Cash. This unleashed controversy in the crypto community and prompted some users to dust, and send small amounts of ETH to high-profile individuals as a form of protest, leading to some users being lockout by the protocols front end.

The team behind Aave confirmed that the address screening process is being implemented on the protocols website (frontend), but a deeper implementation would require community approval, according to the report:

The wallet monitoring here is only at the front-end layer, as for on-chain, contract-level [wallet monitoring] as it applies to the Aave Protocol, the Aave smart contracts are decentralized no one person or entity can change, control, update or shut down the protocol. For any change to occur to the protocol, an AIP (Aave Improvement Proposal) would have to be proposed, voted on, and approved by the Aave DAO.

Via their official Twitter, the team behind the Ethereum protocol claimed that the address screening system has been implemented to provide users with more security. This system identifies all users that have interacted with Tornado Cash, including dusted addresses.

The team behind the project confirmed that they implemented their address screening system following the U.S. Treasury sanctions on Tornado Cash. Aave claims that it will continue to mitigate any issues with this system and will continue testing the integration with TRMS API.

In that sense, and in light of recent events, Aave said:

The Aave Protocol is and remains decentralized and governed by the DAO. We encourage the community to remain engaged and actively fight for equitable finance. The Aave team will continue to innovate. We encourage the community to remain engaged and actively fight for open and fair finance.

Several digital rights organizations and crypto think tanks have expressed their concerns about the sanctions imposed on Tornado Cash, and the consequences: developers arrested, users blocked from certain platforms.

Coin Center is one of the organizations questioning the Treasurys decision as they believe it crossed a line and an important distinction between entities with the capacity to jeopardize the financial system and neutral technologies.

In a recent report, the organization claims that the sanctions are an overstepped of the institutions legal authority. Coin Center revealed that it will cooperate with other organizations to pursue administrative relief, and potentially challenge the sanctions in court.

View post:
Why Aave Will Submit Address Censorship To A Community Vote - Bitcoinist

The news: Researchers have used deep learning to model more precisely than ever before how ice crystals form in the atmosphere. Their paper, published this week in PNAS, hints at the potential to significantly increase the accuracy of weather and climate forecasting.

How they did it: The researchers used deep learning to predict how atoms and molecules behave. First, models were trained on small-scale simulations of water molecules to help them predict how electrons in atoms interact. The models then replicated those interactions on a larger scale, with more atoms and molecules. Its this ability to precisely simulate electron interactions that allowed the team to accurately predict physical and chemical behavior.

Why it matters: If researchers could model how ice forms more accurately, it could give a big boost to weather prediction overall, especially those involving whether and how much its likely to rain or snow. It could also aid climate forecasting by improving the ability to model clouds, which affect the planets temperature in complex ways. Read the full story.

Tammy Xu

China has censored a top health information platform

China has censored DXY, the countrys leading health information platform and online community for Chinese doctors. On August 9, DXY fell silent across its social media channels, where it boasts over 80 million followers. While Weibo offered the vague explanation that the platforms five channels had violated relevant laws and regulations, Nikkei Asia reported that the order came from regulators and wont end without official approval.

In the increasingly polarized social media environment in China, healthcare is becoming a target for controversy. The suspension has met with a gleeful social reaction among nationalist bloggers, who accuse DXY of receiving foreign funding, bashing traditional Chinese medicine, and criticizing Chinas health-care system, illustrating just how politicized health topics have become. Read the full story.

Zeyi Yang

Podcast: How to craft effective AI policy

Link:
The Download: AI to predict ice, and healthcare censorship in China - MIT Technology Review

With the U.K.'s Conservative Party closing in on deciding who will inherit the mess left by Boris Johnson's tenure as prime minister, that country's governing apparatus will soon get back to the important business of intruding into people's lives.

At the top of the to-do list is the long-coming Online Safety Bill which, as has become traditional for legislation, does nothing that its title suggests. In fact, those who offend the government with their online speech or efforts to protect privacy may soon be a lot less safe.

"If the Online Safety Bill passes, the U.K. government will be able to directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn't like," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Joe Mullin cautioned last week. "The bill empowers the UK's Office of Communications (OFCOM) to levy heavy fines or even block access to sites that offend people. We said last year that those powers raise serious concerns about freedom of expression. Since then, the bill has been amended, and it's gotten worse."

The Online Safety Bill is sold as a measure to protect children from predators and pornography, society from terrorists, and the public from all sorts of vaguely defined "harmful" content that might offend sensibilities, but it takes on that enormous task in an inevitably broad way. Mullin is far from the first civil liberties advocate to warn of the dangers inherent in allowing the British government's regulatory Office of Communication, commonly called Ofcom, sweeping powers over people's use of the internet.

"There are many reasons to be concerned about the #OnlineSafetyBill, the latest manifestation of which has just been launched, to a mixture of fanfares and fury," Paul Bernal, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia Law School, warned in March. "The massive attacks on privacy (including an awful general monitoring requirement) and freedom of speech (most directly through the highly contentious 'legal but harmful' concept) are just the starting point. The likely use of the 'duty of care' demanded of online service providers to limit or even ban both encryption and anonymity, thereby making all of us lessand in particular childrenless safe and less free is another. The political control of censorship via Ofcom is in some ways even worseas is the near certain inability of Ofcom to do the gargantuan tasks being required of itand that's not even starting on the mammoth and costly bureaucratic burdens being foisted on people operating online services."

That's a lot to worry about packed into a few words. But that's because the Online Safety Bill takes on a vast challenge in trying to make the internet "safe" from a vast array of dangers real, potential, and imaginary. Bernal attributes the overreach to lawmakers' obsessive concern with the online world's flaws. He likens it to a fixation with warts on a human face "and a desire to eradicate them with the strongest of caustic medicine, regardless of the damage to the face itself."

Bernal may be excessively charitable in attributing this massive piece of legislation to an honest misunderstanding of the online world. In June, Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia, noted that the Online Safety Bill is part of a wave of legislation around the world that seeks to control the internet, including the European Union's recently adopted Digital Services Act.

"These regulatory efforts follow in the footsteps of the German Network Enforcement Act of 2017 and oblige online platforms to remove illegal content, including categories such as hate speech and glorification of terrorism, or risk huge fines," Mchangama wrote. "However, in liberal democracies committed to both equality and free expression, this approach raises a number of questions and dilemmas. Moreover, current hate speech laws have already caused collateral damage to political speech and protests in Europe. Further restrictions risk significantly suffocating pluralism and open debatethe flow of vital oxygen without which democracies cannot thrive."

Notably, the U.K. isn't exactly short of censorship powers even before adopting the Online Safety Bill. Earlier this year, Reason's Scott Shackford highlighted the case of Joseph Kelly of Glasgow, who was criminally convicted for mocking the death of 100-year-old Captain Sir Tom Moore, a military veteran and high-profile fundraiser for the National Health Service. In the United States, under the protections of the First Amendment, such behavior would have earned criticism. In Britain, that drunken tweet brought prosecution and community service in lieu of jail time.

Yet, British lawmakers think they have insufficient power to punish people on the internet.

Like the German Network Enforcement Act (widely known as NetzDG), the Online Safety Bill would offload much of the enforcement burden to social media companies and online services. Under that approach, government bureaucrats slap private companies with stiff fines if they fail to intervene to the government's satisfaction. The EFF's Mullin points out that the bill grants exceptions for "recognized news publishers" and other established media; smaller operators, then, are at the greatest risk of scrutiny and penalties if they guess wrong about officials' opinions of what content promotes terrorism, child abuse, or "psychological harm." That creates an incentive to muzzle more rather than less.

"The Network Enforcement law and its imitators create big incentives for social media companies to overregulate online speech and risk pushing extremists towards platforms that are even harder to survey," Justitia's Mchangama observed in 2020.

"When governments around the world pressure websites to quickly remove content they deem 'terrorist,' it results in censorship," Mullin adds. "The first victims of this type of censorship are usually human rights groups seeking to document abuses and war."

At least for now, the First Amendment shields Americans from similar attempts to control online activity. But North America as a whole isn't entirely immune. When the Online Safety Bill was first introduced last year, Canada's ruling Liberals proposed a similar measure. It died as the government called a general election, which the ruling party (barely) won. The government threatened to reintroduce the legislation, but that plan has been delayed by the inability of experts to agree on what should be regulated and how. Some members of the panel seem concerned about intruding on freedom, while others want private communications controlled, not just public postings.

"The advisory panel tasked with making recommendations for Canada's pending legislation on online safety has failed to come to an agreement on how online harms should be defined, and whether dangerous content should be scrubbed from the internet altogether," the Toronto Star reported July 9.

But an inability to define harmful speech and the legitimate boundaries of regulation didn't stop German and EU lawmakers, and it's not really slowing legislators in the U.K. Canadians are well-advised to look to Britain and Europe to see where their country is likely to go in terms of online government intrusion. The U.K.'s Parliament is expected to resume consideration of the Online Safety Bill this fall. If the measure becomes law, as seems likely, Britons online will be a little less safe.

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U.K.'s Online Censorship Bill Causes More Harm Than It Prevents - Reason