The Register: China launches yet another crackdown on social media. “The Cyberspace Administration of China has continued its drive to clean up the internet, on Sunday taking aim at the behaviours of independently operated content producing accounts on sites like Weibo and WeChat, known as ‘self-media.’”
CNN: China censors women modeling lingerie on livestream shopping – so men are doing it. “Donning a sassy piece of silk lingerie, a male model grooves to the beat and forms a heart shape with his fingers during a livestreaming session on Douyin, one of China’s most popular video-sharing platforms. His modeling performance is the latest illustration of the kind of entrepreneurial innovation sometimes needed to bypass China’s rigorous internet censorship, a dragnet that can ensnare seemingly innocuous activities – in this case retailers selling women’s underwear online.”
Brookings Institution: Politics and school libraries: What shapes students’ access to controversial content. “My school library sample consists of 5,240 elementary/middle and 1,391 high schools in 48 states. This sample includes schools in rural and urban areas, schools in counties with conservative and liberal political leanings, and schools that serve students of very different backgrounds. I use these data to identify patterns in library resources and content, especially as they relate to political preferences, state laws, and book bans.”
Mashable: Snowflake helped Tor users thwart Russian censorship. Now the VPN is branching out as Snowstorm.. “For years, Tor has been a thorn in the side of censorious rulers looking to stop its citizens from freely accessing the internet, but the Russian and Iranian governments have learned its weaknesses and succeeded in blocking direct access to the Tor network at certain times. But unlike other services blocked by these governments, Tor has been deployed alongside the traffic-channeling tool Snowflake, enabling its network to function amid efforts at censorship.”
Bloomberg: Wikipedia is blocked in Pakistan over ‘sacrilegious’ content. “Pakistan has blocked Wikipedia services in the South Asian nation after the platform failed to remove ‘sacrilegious’ content. The action was taken because some of the content is still available on Wikipedia after the expiry of a 48-hour deadline, Malahat Obaid, spokesperson for Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, said by phone.”
Daily Beast: Russia’s Google, Yandex, Fixes Results So ‘Bald F*cker’ and ‘Bunker Grandad’ Reportedly Won’t Show Putin. “Russia’s biggest search engine secretly put blocks in its code to stop images of Vladimir Putin showing up in the results of potentially embarrassing searches, according to a report, with Nazi iconography also allegedly scrubbed out of the results of queries for the ‘Z’ symbol signifying support for the war in Ukraine.” Headline censored by me so this has half a chance to get to you.
Poynter: Mongolia moves to seize power to shut down internet, control social media. “The Mongolian parliament passed a multipronged law last week that would ban users from posting information about any public official without express government consent. Any information shared in an online group of more than three will be subject to inspection, and the minister of internal affairs can shut off the internet.”
Hollywood Reporter: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bows to India Request to Censor Links to BBC’s Narendra Modi Doc. “Despite the Twitter owner’s self-proclaimed stance as a ‘free speech absolutist,’ the platform has removed all links to videos from a documentary exploring allegations against Modi for fanning the flames of prejudice against Indian Muslims.”
The Hindu: Internet Archive takes down upload of BBC’s Modi documentary. “The Internet Archive, a US-based repository of webpage archives and media uploads by users around the world, has taken down a widely circulated upload of the first episode of the BBC’s The Modi Question, the documentary that was ordered off of YouTube and Twitter by the Union government, The Hindu has found.”
TechCrunch: India blocks YouTube videos and Twitter posts on BBC Modi documentary. “The Indian government has ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down videos and tweets about a BBC documentary that is critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
The Conversation: How British theatre censorship laws have inadvertently created a rich archive of Black history. “Between 1737 and 1968 British theatre censorship laws required theatre managers to submit new plays intended for the professional stage to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for examination and licensing…. In essence, this meant that the government collected, monitored and frequently censored new dramas. In this way, the licensing of plays has inadvertently produced an extensive historical archive of surveillance and censorship. This includes records of early Black theatre-making, at a time when the British state did not routinely collect and preserve the work of Black playwrights.”
AFP: Robert F. Kennedy Jr sues media outlets over misinformation initiative. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr, son of the slain US presidential candidate, and other anti-vaccine activists have filed a lawsuit against several news organizations that have banded together to fight misinformation. The nearly 100-page complaint…accuses the media outlets and social media companies of colluding to censor other online publishers with alternative Covid narratives.”
Associated Press: China Suspends Social Media Accounts of COVID Policy Critics. “China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government’s policies on the COVID-19 outbreak, as the country moves to further open up. The popular Sina Weibo social media platform said it had addressed 12,854 violations including attacks on experts, scholars and medical workers and issued temporary or permanent bans on 1,120 accounts.”
The Marshall Project: The Books Banned in Your State’s Prisons. “Over the past year, reporters for The Marshall Project asked every state prison system for book policies and lists of banned publications. About half of the states said they kept such lists, which contained more than 50,000 titles. We’ve created a searchable database so you can see for yourself which books prisons don’t want incarcerated people to read.”
TorrentFreak: Google Reveals Surge in Questionable Removal Requests From Russian Government. “Russia has sent a record number of takedown requests to Google in the first half of this year. In the past, copyright infringement was the most cited reason for action but that has been replaced by ‘national security’, currently a top priority for Russia. Google, however, is wary of overbroad censorship and hasn’t complied with most requests.”
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