New York Times: A Singing Xi Jinping Look-Alike Battles the Censors in China. “The long stares and startled whispers — Is that him? — begin as soon as Liu Keqing, an imposing Chinese baritone, enters any room in China. With a square face, closely cropped black hair and a portly figure, Mr. Liu bears a striking resemblance to Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. Mr. Liu, who has spent his career in opera houses, used to welcome the attention. But now, in China’s increasingly authoritarian system, his resemblance to Mr. Xi has drawn him into an Orwellian saga in which his name, his face and his very likeness are considered sensitive by the Chinese authorities.”
censorship
Business Insider: Chinese social media deletes Modi’s remarks on border row
Business Insider India: Chinese social media deletes Modi’s remarks on border row. “Known for government control and censorship, Chinese social media has now removed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech and India’s official statements on the border row.”
CNBC: Zoom will no longer allow Chinese government requests to impact users outside mainland China
CNBC: Zoom will no longer allow Chinese government requests to impact users outside mainland China . “Video-calling service Zoom said Thursday it will not comply with requests from the Chinese government to suspend hosts or block people from meetings if those people are not located in mainland China.”
Bangkok Post: Shuttered Zoom accounts raise China free speech fears
Bangkok Post: Shuttered Zoom accounts raise China free speech fears. “Several Zoom meetings involving Chinese users were ‘disrupted’, the video messaging app acknowledged Thursday, after activists in the United States and Hong Kong revealed discussions on the platform of Beijing’s deadly Tiananmen crackdown had been closed down.”
France24: Marie-Antoinette and lover’s censored letters deciphered
France24: Marie-Antoinette and lover’s censored letters deciphered. “Love letters between the ill-fated French queen Marie-Antoinette and her lover, which contain key passeges rendered illegible by censor marks, have been deciphered using new techniques, the French National Archives said on Wednesday. The revealed passages are further confirmation of the steamy relationship between Marie-Antoinette and Count de Fersen, who were writing to each other two years after the 1789 French revolution.”
EFF: The Executive Order Targeting Social Media Gets the FTC, Its Job, and the Law Wrong
EFF: The Executive Order Targeting Social Media Gets the FTC, Its Job, and the Law Wrong. “The inaptly named Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship seeks to insert the federal government into private Internet speech in several ways. In particular, Sections 4 and 5 seek to address possible deceptive practices, but end up being unnecessary at best and legally untenable at worst.”
Exclusive: Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources (Reuters)
Reuters: Exclusive: Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources. “Facebook’s local servers in Vietnam were taken offline early this year, slowing local traffic to a crawl until it agreed to significantly increase the censorship of ‘anti-state’ posts for local users, two sources at the company told Reuters on Tuesday.”
New York Times: China Police Detain Three Linked to Censored Coronavirus Archive
New York Times: China Police Detain Three Linked to Censored Coronavirus Archive. “Chinese police have detained two people who contributed to an online archive of censored articles about the coronavirus outbreak, a friend and a family member of one told Reuters on Monday. The two – Chen Mei and Cai Wei – have been out of contact since April 19, when police detained them in Beijing, Chen Kun, Chen Mei’s brother, told Reuters.”
Reporters Without Borders: RSF opens “The Uncensored Library” – The digital home of Press Freedom within a global computer game
Reporters Without Borders: RSF opens “The Uncensored Library” – The digital home of Press Freedom within a global computer game . “In many countries around the world, there is no free access to information. Web- sites are blocked, independent newspapers are banned and the press is controlled by the state. Young people grow up without being able to form their own opinions. By using Minecraft, the world’s most popular computer game, as a medium, we give them access to independent information.”
Pho noodles and pandas: How China’s social media users created a new language to beat government censorship on COVID-19 (Amnesty International
Amnesty International: Pho noodles and pandas: How China’s social media users created a new language to beat government censorship on COVID-19. “To fully appreciate conversations on China’s social media platforms, merely knowing Chinese is not enough. To evade the most extensive internet censorship system in the world, netizens have no option but to create their own vocabulary to discuss ‘sensitive issues’. This language keeps evolving as the government constantly adds new topics and terms that are prohibited. And there’s no better example of this linguistic cat-and-mouse game between China’s social media users and the country’s legions of online censors than the current COVID-19 epidemic.”
The Verge: WeChat has been censoring keywords about coronavirus, study finds
The Verge: WeChat has been censoring keywords about coronavirus, study finds. “China’s most popular messaging app, Tencent-owned WeChat, has been censoring keywords about coronavirus since as early as January 1st, an analysis found. Popular Chinese livestreaming platform YY has been censoring coronavirus content, too.”
Reclaim the Net: Chinese citizens turn to GitHub to archive coronavirus outbreak events in a bit to avoid censorship
Reclaim the Net: Chinese citizens turn to GitHub to archive coronavirus outbreak events in a bit to avoid censorship. “As ever with any loss or grievance, we have on one hand the human desire to forget bad experiences in order to be able to move on with your life – and on the other, the urge to keep some memories, regardless of how traumatic they may be. In China, this is even more involved and difficult, as citizens are racing to preserve coronavirus memories against censors. And on GitHub, as it happens to operate both in China – and ‘beyond the Great Firewall.'”
Vox: China has censored the Archive of Our Own, one of the internet’s largest fanfiction websites
Vox: China has censored the Archive of Our Own, one of the internet’s largest fanfiction websites. “The Archive of Our Own (AO3), the Hugo-winning fanfiction website, is the latest casualty of Chinese censorship, amid a continued crackdown in the country on queer content, sexually explicit content, and websites based abroad.”
Columbia Journalism Review: Preserving a ‘national memory’ of an outbreak
Columbia Journalism Review: Preserving a ‘national memory’ of an outbreak. “The project has become a tribute to the Chinese documentarians who’ve tactfully recorded the complex and often murky realities of life during the coronavirus outbreak amid threats of censorship. In the first weeks of coronavirus news coverage, Chinese news outlets published deep dives and government investigations, reporting on conditions in Wuhan under lockdown that many international organizations could not access. Their published stories are a win for press freedom in a country where the information flow is often strictly supervised. ”
New York Times: Facebook, Google and Twitter Rebel Against Pakistan’s Censorship Rules
New York Times: Facebook, Google and Twitter Rebel Against Pakistan’s Censorship Rules. “When Pakistan’s government unveiled some of the world’s most sweeping rules on internet censorship this month, global internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were expected to comply or face severe penalties — including the potential shutdown of their services. Instead, the tech giants banded together and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness.”
