Category Archives: Censorship

Its been a while since weve heard anything about Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder thats still hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after the UK approved his extradition to Sweden. During that time, he has entertained a number of guests, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

WikiLeaks shared a verbatim transcript of a five-hour conversation between Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Julian Assange, Jared Cohen, former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, and Lisa Shields, a member of the Council for Foreign Relations. The meeting was arranged so Schmidt and Cohen could speak with Assange about their new book The New Digital Age.

A lot of the conversation comes from Assange as he discusses his motivations for starting WikiLeaks. Many people may already know his motivation to make information free but his conversation with Schmidt provided a few more details. Assange thinks that the current system of sharing information is broken because it has to go through three or four different channels before it reaches the average citizen. He said that WikiLeaks is an attempt at a total system that collects, curates and disseminates primary sources without any of the self or government mandated censorship that crops up in traditional news publishing.

Much of the conversation after that is Assange continuing to discuss state and economic censorship, which the latter he claims is the more prevalent of the two. After a bit of that, however, Assange starts to discuss Bitcoin. He voices full support for the digital currency and advises people to jump in early because he assume that its value is going to skyrocket:

The Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and that is why it is starting to take off. The different combination of these things. No central nodes. It is all point to point. One does not need to trust any central mint. The problems with traditional digital currencies on the internet is that you have to trust the mint not to print too much of it. And the incentives for the mint to keep printing are pretty high actually, because you can print free money. That means you need some kind of regulation. Bitcoin instead has an algorithm where the anyone can create, anyone can be their own mint. Theyre basically just searching for collisions with hashes.. A simple way is they are searching for a sequence of zero bits on the beginning of the thing. And you have to randomly search for, in order to do this. So there is a lot of computational work in order to do this. And each Bitcoin software that is distributed.. That work algorithmically increases as time goes by. So the difficulty in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and harder and harder as time goes by and it is built into the system.

It should be noted that this conversation took place before recent Bitcoin boom and the subsequent crash.

Assange also touched upon how the Internet is inspiring revolution today, particularly in countries with oppressive governments:

The radicalization of internet educated youth. People who are receiving their values from the internet and then as they find them to be compatible echoing them back. The echo back is now so strong that it drowns the original statements. Completely. The people Ive dealt with from the 1960s radicals who helped liberate Greece and.. Salazar. They are saying that this moment in time is the most similar to what happened in this period of liberation movements in the 1960s, that they have seen.

He also says that the Internet is turning the youth of the Western world, who are typically a-political, into political activists thanks to the information they are able to receive on events that they would have otherwise not been exposed to in traditional media.

You can check out the rest of the transcript here. Its incredibly fascinating and definitely worth your time.

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Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt Discuss Censorship, Bitcoin And The Internet In Recently Published Conversation

Internet Censorship in Russia
In Soviet Russia, domains register YOU!! Russia created a unified register to block domain names of sites distributing illegal information.

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Internet Censorship in Russia - Video

By Kevin Chen | More Articles April 16, 2013 |

Investors in China know that Beijing holds relatively tight controls over commerce in its country, but few understand the extent to which China will help domestic companies succeed. In the following video, Fool contributor Kevin reveals just how important Beijing's blessing is to your investments.

When looking at the history of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) in China, we see what The Economist has called political protectionism. While Google -- in a sense -- voluntarily shut down its service in China, Facebook was blocked. Whatever the political reasons behind these actions, it's clear that the winners have beenBaidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) and Renren (NYSE: RENN) .

Even when foreign companies like Yahoo!have been forthcoming in self-censoring themselves, Beijing seems to put up obstacles to favor its domestic companies like SINA (NASDAQ: SINA) , which ultimate profit.

To learn more about the effect Chinese censorship has had on these public companies, watch the video now.

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3 Companies That Lost to Chinese Censorship

Most Americans now know the feeling of typing something into a social media input box, thinking again, and deciding against posting whatever it was. But while it certainly seemed like a widespread phenomenon, no one had actually quantified the extent of this "self-censorship."

But now, new research based on a sample of 3.9 million Facebook reveals precisely how widespread this activity is. Carnegie Mellon PhD student Sauvik Das and Facebook's Adam Kramer measured how many people typed more than five characters into Facebook content-input boxes, but then did not post them. They term this "last-minute self-censorship." The research was posted to Das' website and will presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's conference on Weblogs and Social Media in July.

The numbers are impressively large. Fully one-third of all Facebook posts were self-censored, according to the method Das and Kramer devised, though they warn they probably captured a substantial number of false positives. 71 percent of all the users surveyed engaged in some self-censorship either on new posts or in comments, and the median self-censorer did so multiple times.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the study was the demographic correlations with self-censorship. Men self-censored more often, particularly if they had large numbers of male friends. Interestingly, people with more diverse friend groups -- measured by age, political affiliation, and gender -- were less likely to self-censor.

While the researchers declined to speculate in this study about why people may or may not have self-censored, earlier research with a small group of users found five reasons people chose not share what they'd written: aversion to sparking an argument or other discussion, concern their post would offend or hurt someone, felt their post was boring or repetitive, decided the content undermined their desired self-presentation, or were just unable to post due to a technological or other constraint.

For Facebook users, the main takeaway here is probably: Feel free not to share. Facebook, on the other hand, has to have a more complex relationship to this research. Their interaction and business models depend on sharing, but it's not hard to imagine some circumstances in which it would be better not to share: racist content, say. So, Das and Kramer say that future research should address when the non-sharing is "adaptive," (which I think means good, in this context) and when, in the words of Das and Kramer, "users and their audience could fail to achieve potential social value from not sharing certain content, and the [social-network service] loses value from the lack of content generation."

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71% of Facebook Users Engage in 'Self-Censorship'

Dear Snake, Re: Censorship
Happy I could be of assistance. (Open Me!) Snake #39;s video: http://youtu.be/Viq-dOzEcNM Shouting match in the streets: http://youtu.be/nvYyGTmcP80 Lecture inte...

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Dear Snake, Re: Censorship - Video

1996: Cyber censorship attempt unleashed the largest media storm yet!
In the wake of a global censorship assault on the Zundelsite, young cyber warriors worldwide defeated the Jewish enemies of Freedom by cloning the besieged w...

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1996: Cyber censorship attempt unleashed the largest media storm yet! - Video

Free staters descend on "censorship central" after Manch mayor attempts camera resrictions
Sponsor: http://KeeneVention.INFO - Free staters descend on "censorship central" after Manch mayor attempts camera resrictions in City Hall. Details, other m...

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Free staters descend on "censorship central" after Manch mayor attempts camera resrictions - Video

YouTube partner fights back on Revere MA Slumlord court video censorship with 3rd video!
http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2013/04/kingcast-sees-youtube-up-to-their-old.html OK so here #39;s the latest bullshit from YouTube: Just because someone a...

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YouTube partner fights back on Revere MA Slumlord court video censorship with 3rd video! - Video

LONDON - A 70-year-old song is giving the BBC a headache.

The radio and television broadcaster has agonized over whether to play "Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead," a tune from "The Wizard of Oz" that is being driven up the charts by opponents of Margaret Thatcher as a mocking memorial to the late British prime minister.

A compromise announced Friday the BBC will play part of "Ding Dong!" but not the whole song on its chart-countdown radio show is unlikely to end the recriminations

This is not the first time Britain's national broadcaster, which is nicknamed "Auntie" for its "we-know-what's-good-for-you" attitude, has been caught in a bind about whether to ban a song on grounds of language, politics or taste.

Here's a look at some previous censorship scandals:

SEX, DRUGS AND DOUBLE ENTENDRES

The 1960s and '70s saw several songs barred from airplay for sex or drug references, including The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," for a fleeting and implicit reference to smoking marijuana.

For The Kinks' 1970 hit "Lola," the trouble was not sex or drugs, but product placement. The line "you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola" fell afoul of the public broadcaster's rule banning corporate plugs. The brand name had to be replaced with "cherry cola" before the song could be aired.

The BBC frequently has been targeted by self-appointed moral guardians, most famously the late anti-smut activist Mary Whitehouse, who campaigned for decades against what she saw as pornography and permissiveness.

In 1972, Whitehouse got the BBC to ban the video for Alice Cooper's "School's Out" for allegedly being a bad influence on children. The controversy helped the song reach No. 1 in the charts, and Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers. He later said she had given his band "publicity we couldn't buy."

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Ding-dong over Thatcher song is latest censorship controversy for BBC

Bogota, April 12 (IANS/EFE) South African-born Nobel literature laureate J.M. Coetzee offered an impassioned critique of censorship during a seminar at the Universidad Central de Bogota.

Drawing from the themes of his 1996 book, "Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship", the famously reticent 73-year-old author recounted personal experiences with censorship in apartheid South Africa.

Though his novels "In the Heart of the Country" (1977), "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1980) and "Life & Times of Michael K" (1983) were all critical of apartheid, government censors left them untouched because he was a white, middle-class intellectual who did not write "for mass consumption", Coetzee said.

The writer recounted how he came to learn that some of the members of the "anonymous committee of censors" were respected intellectuals and personal acquaintances of his.

Once dubbed "the writer of writers" by the late Carlos Fuentes and hailed as "one of the best living novelists" by fellow Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Coetzee has imbued his fiction with a symbolic, sometimes allegorical, style that questions all forms of racism and subjugation.

The seminar, Three Days with J.M. Coetzee, ended in the author's receiving an honorary doctorate from Universidad Central.

--IANS/EFE

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J.M. Coetzee rails against censorship