Mediaboss Marketing

Could be GI Green there on the other side of the planet

There's plenty of it in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave as well

For Westerners who enjoy living in democracies, its easy to answer the question of whether or not censorship is desirable. It is not. But in China, which doesnt respect free speech, thats not an especially useful question. A more uncomfortable question would be: Just how different is Chinas censorship from ours?

New data released by Google as part of its Transparency Report shows that government agencies in many Western democracies have asked the company to remove political content that users had posted to its services. Its alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect Western democracies not typically associated with censorship, wrote Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post yesterday.

In the second half of last year, for example, US agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts, or archives of online videos a 718 percent increase from the first half of the year. During the same time period, US law enforcement agencies lodged 187 take-down requests, including one related to a blog post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.

Google received numerous similar requests from Spain, Italy, Australia, Germany, Poland, Canada, and others. It did not comply with most of them, but the company did act in response to 42 percent of removal requests from the US in the second half of 2011.

Google was also at the center of the highest-profile censorship debate related to China. In 2010, much was made of the companys partial withdrawal from the country in response to what it said was a sophisticated cyber attack that targeted the Gmail accounts of dozens of China-connected human rights activists. No sane person would contend that such hacking was justified. But few could feign surprise. Government surveillance of its citizens is an unfortunate fact of life not just in China, but also in other, supposedly free countries. The Bush Administrations warrantless wiretapping program, a huge breach of privacy and human rights conducted with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, is the most obvious example of that.

Supporters of that wiretapping program, carried out as part of that embarrassment to freedom known as the Patriot Act, might protest that it was conducted in the name of stamping out terrorism, and that casting such a wide net monitoring thousands of innocent Americans was justified for the good of the country. The CCP would argue, too, that their surveillance is also for the good of the country. That is particularly true when it comes to the sensitive topic of spreading online rumors.

Just last weekend, it demonstrated how seriously it takes that by arresting two people for spreading rumors that a cloud of pollution over the city of Wuhan was caused by an explosion at a chemical plant that leaked toxic gases. Spreading rumors falls into one of the nine categories of information that the government deems harmful and therefore bans. As we all know, it also has no qualms about blocking specific news sites and thwarting searches for key terms (three of which begin with the letter T).

Originally posted here:
Internet Censorship Isn't Just for China

GENEVA The government of Israel, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza are all unduly limiting free speech through restrictive laws, intimidation and censorship, a U.N. human rights expert said Tuesday.

The global body's independent investigator on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, said the measures have had a chilling effect on the work of journalists and peaceful activists, and urged Israel and the Palestinians to uphold international standards on free speech.

"I am concerned by the recent attempts to limit criticism of Israel regarding its policies and practices of occupation, and questioning of Israel as a Jewish state," La Rue said as he presented his report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

He cited a law adopted last year that allows Israeli authorities to fine publicly-funded institutions that commemorate the so-called "Nakba," or catastrophe, an Arabic term used by Palestinians to describe the displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish residents during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948.

"The law severely undermines their right to freely express their opinion, preserve their history and culture, and to their right to commemorate the Nakba, which is an integral part of their history," said La Rue.

He also questioned an Israeli law that makes it a civil offense to call for a boycott against Israel and its products, as well as those produced in the settlements in the West Bank.

"Calling for or participating in a peaceful boycott is a legitimate form of expression which is internationally recognized," La Rue said in his report. "Moreover, given that lawsuits can be brought against individuals without any proof of damages, it creates further incentives for self-censorship, including on the Internet, to avoid litigation. "

He voiced similar criticism of a bill to amend Israel's defamation law, which would sharply increase fines without the need to prove damages.

"If adopted, it will create a significant chilling effect and will discourage investigative journalists, human rights NGOs and individuals expressing critical views," said La Rue.

Israel should also drop the practice of having a military censor review articles on issues of national security prior to publication, he said.

Read the original post:
UN free speech expert criticizes censorship by Israel, Palestinians

We all know that China and the Internet arent exactly BFFs. The Great Firewall of China has been around for over 15 years now, and it shows no sign of crumbling. For years, its been conventional wisdom that the Chinese government does not tolerate online speech against the state and that Beijing employs a massive surveillance, filtration, takedown, and propaganda regime to counter all that happens online. Indeed, this week, Chinese network engineers outlined a policy to create new independent root DNS servers that would allow the country to control its domestic Internet even furthera policy that is highly unlikely to come to fruition.

But new academic research from Harvard published Monday suggests that Chinas filtration policy may be more complex, and oddly, more open than had been previously thought.

"Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content," write Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts in their paper, which was published online on Monday. King is a professor of social science and the latter two are doctoral candidates. "Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the futureand, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet."

The team created a software tool that searched over three million posts on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and the popular blogging platform Sina.com, and over 1,300 other sites, finding that only 13 percent of all social media posts were censored.

"The censors are not shy, and so we found it straightforward to distinguish (intentional) censorship from sporadic outages or transient time-out errors," they wrote. "The censored web sites include notes such as Sorry, the host you were looking for does not exist, has been deleted, or is being investigated and are sometimes even adorned with pictures of Jingjing, an Internet police cartoon character. Although our methods are faster than the Chinese censors, we conclude that the censors are nevertheless highly expert at their task."

The paper quotes two Chinese-language posts (and translates them into English) that clearly critique government policies on the one-child policy and on local political corruption.

"These posts are neither exceptions nor unusual: We have thousands like these," the authors write. "Negative posts do not accidentally slip through a leaky or imperfect system. The evidence indicates that the censors have no intention of stopping them. Instead, they are focused on removing posts that have collective action potential, regardless of whether or not they cast the Chinese leadership and their policies in a favorable light."

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, and an expert on the Internet in China, e-mailed Ars to say that this research is the largest scale and most quantitative that shes seen. MacKinnon argued similar points in the third chapter of her 2011 book, and pointed to research that she has conducted in recent years that has yielded similar findings.

"It brings empirical evidence to support an argument I have been making for several years: that the purpose of Chinese Internet censorship is not to control all criticism of the government," MacKinnon wrote to Ars.

"The purpose is to keep the communist party in power. By allowing people to have more freewheelingeven criticalconversations online, Weibo contributes to a feeling among many Chinese Internet users that it is possible to speak truth to power in ways that weren't previously possible. But at the same time censorship prevents people from using social media for the kind of wide-scale organizing and movement-buidling that was possible in Egypt and Tunisia. The result is that people are not only unable to organize opposition movements with social media but they also feel more hopeful and positive about being able to have more of a dialogue with the government through social media without requiring total regime change. This combination maximizes the chances that the Chinese Communist Party will maintain power at least for the short to medium term."

See the original post:
Chinese online censorship targets "collective action" posts

Google recently announced that the United States and several other Western governments drastically increased the number of censorship requests during the second half of 2011. The most recent Google Transparency Report, which is Googles fifth transparency report since 2009, indicates that the U.S. government has increased the number of censorship requests by an alarming 718%. Dorothy Chou, Googles Senior Policy Analyst, wrote in a recent Google blog post that the trend indicates free expression is at risk:

This is the fifth data set that weve released. And just like every other time before, weve been asked to take down political speech. Its alarming, not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspectWestern democracies not typically associated with censorship.

For the last three consecutive time periods reported, Google has substantially reduced the compliance rate relative to the number of requests received by the U.S. government:

July to December of 2010: 1,421 censorship requests with 87% removal January to June of 2011: 757 censorship requests with 63% removal July to December of 2011: 6,192 censorship requests with 42% removal

As the above numbers indicate, the percentage of requests that resulted in censorship dropped from 87% to 42% over an 18-month time period. Some of the recent content removal requests included the following:

Google received court orders to remove 218 search results that linked to defamatory websites. However, Google only removed 25% of the web sites. A local law enforcement agency requested that Google remove a blog post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official, but Google chose not to comply with the request. A separate law enforcement agency requested that Google remove 1,400 YouTube videos on the grounds of harassment, but Google did not comply with the request.

Do you think the increased number of censorship requests is merely due to the increasing amount of web content and government monitoring of such content? Or do you feel that the increasing number is an indication that freedom of speech is at risk?

Sources Include: Official Google Blog, CNN, & Google Transparency Report Image Credit: Shutterstock

See the article here:
Google Reports U.S. Government’s Censorship Request Volume “Alarming”

Written by Erin Vanjo Tuesday, 19 June 2012 17:54

The New York Times bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey is the most recent book to fall victim to censorship in a handful of libraries throughout the United States, but it is unlikely any books will be censored by Kent State University Libraries.

Barbara Schloman, associate dean of University Libraries, said academic libraries do not ban or censor books, and Cindy Kristof, head of Access Services for University Libraries, said there has never been a book censored by University Libraries before.

University Libraries has a collection development policy which lays out the collection parameters that are designed to guide the acquisition of materials to support university research and teaching, Schloman said.

Censorship is more likely to be seen in public libraries because the environment is very different from an academic library.

Public libraries have a much different environment, Schloman said. They are developing their collections to address the various needs and interests within the community.

While academic libraries build their collections over time, public libraries change theirs according to demand, Kristof said.

Censorship is also more common in public libraries because of differences in audience.

While collegiate libraries have to answer to university administration and the needs of the universitys community, public libraries are accountable to their library boards and to members of the community as they go for levy support, Schloman said.

Public libraries are more likely to face censorship because of the communities they serve, Kristof said. Members of the community are likely to want their library to conform to what they perceive as community standards.

See the article here:
Censorship is unlikely in University Libraries