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Fiction writer Anthony Marra joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss how his new historical novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, echoes the rights current embrace of authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally. By looking at censorship in 1940s Hollywood and the fascist regime of Italy during that same period, Marra teases out truths about conservatives current interest in controlling popular opinion.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHubs Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fictions YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*From the episode:

Anthony Marra: Mercury Pictures Presents is, shall we say, a long-awaited novel. It was during the run-up to the 2016 election when I first began to really see the parallels between so much of what these characters are struggling with and what many people in the U.S. in 2016 were in terms of trying to understand this rising threat.

Whitney Terrell: One of the ways that your book works, and I was very impressed by, is by resurrecting stories about life under actual fascism, particularly in Italy. It helped me imagine how such a regime might happen here in the United States. I was particularly interested in the character of Giuseppe Lagana, whos a lawyer, and who gets caught up, sort of at odds with, Mussolinis regime. Could you talk a little bit about him and how he gets into trouble?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. So, Giuseppe is the father of the novels central character, Maria Lagana, and he works as a defense attorney in Rome, primarily defending socialists and anarchists prosecuted by the state. And to me, he is this heartbreaking figure in that he continues to believe in the rule of law and the impartiality of the court and the nobility of defending the accused, even as Mussolinis regime chips and chips and chips away at the underpinnings of the justice system, eventually instituting these tribunals that pass sentences without trials altogether.

And Giuseppes way of trying to quietly resist that is simply to document the lawlessness of these tribunals, which eventually leads to his own arrest. And he is sentenced to

Its one of those things where you can see sort of through Giuseppe, through his gradual realization that the world that he believed he was living in had slipped away much earlier than he had thought, and I always felt as I was working on that during the Trump years, just just seeing how much of things that I believed in about America turned out to be empty, and how many aspects of my own relationship to my country were built on this sort of false mythologythat was certainly something that Giuseppes character helped illuminate for me in my own personal life.

V.V Ganeshananthan: Giuseppe is also one of my favorite characters. I was reminded actually of conversations Id had with lawyers who would tell me that they were documenting for precisely the reason that Giuseppe documents, which made it feel very alive to me. Theres a remarkable early scene where Giuseppe and Maria, who you spoke of, are attending a showing of the movie

In LA after Maria has fled Italy, she and her boss Artie Feldman, battle U.S. censors who consider Arties films decadent and too critical of fascism. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the role of censorship coming from different actors in the novel.

AM: The forces of reactionary conservatism have obviously long embraced censorship as a way to mold society to their liking. And the great irony in all of it, of course, is that its the very people waving around pocket-sized Constitutions who are the first to ban books. In the period covered by this novel, all movies were censored by an organization called the Production Code Administration.

And a lot of this resulted in truly ridiculous forms of censorship as the production code strove to make movies gratuitously inoffensive. For decades, you couldnt show a pregnant woman on screen because it might raise uncomfortable questions about where babies really come from. You couldnt show a couple on the same bed unless both of their feet were planted on the ground. If you remember the movie Psycho, it was chiefly scandalous for the fact that it was the first movie in about 30 years to show a toilet bowl. In the bathroom scene, theres a toilet bowl, and a toilet bowl had not been seen on screen since the early 30s.

Of course, much more insidious than this priggish sense of morality was the production codes prohibition on politics. If you only received your news in the 1930s from your local picture house, you would have thought that the American South was untouched by Jim Crow, and that Europe was untouched by fascism. By the late 30s, filmmakers were beginning to push back against this censorship often by very convoluted means. For instance, there was a movie made in the late 30s, about the Spanish Civil War.

But the only way that the filmmakers could get past the censors was to make it an absurdly unfaithful depiction of the conflict. So they actually brought experts in who had participated in the Spanish Civil War in order to make sure that the movie was meticulously inaccurate. They made sure that the uniforms were all wrong, that the settings were incorrect. And so the only way to make a movie about a true and contentious subject was to turn it into pure fantasy.

In September 1941, there were enough of these anti-fascist movies that isolationists in the U.S. Senate began to hold hearings to investigate so-called Hollywood war propaganda. The heads of the major studios all testified there, and they really acquitted themselves brilliantly. They more or less used the opportunity to reveal the hypocrisy behind the investigations themselves. And three months later, following Pearl Harbor, those filmmakers and executives were fully vindicated.

VVG: One of the ways the different kinds of censorship intersect across borders here is in the figure of Maria, who corresponds with her father, who is confined in the manner that you described earlier. Theyre corresponding and his letters are censored, and then she uses her knowledge of how things are censored or how to get things past censors in the film industry, which I thought was so interesting. There are characters who are in really quiet ways censoring themselves or by strategizing about censorship or who, behaving in response to censorship, are altering what they might say in ways that they almost dont recognize.

AM: I feel like we have a certain number of themes that we keep returning to, a certain number of ideas that kind of animate our work. And for whatever reason, censorship is one that Ive returned to in several of my books. Do you all find that in your own work that youre kind of almost like reshuffling the same deck of cards in each new project?

WT: Yeah, I have themes that I go back to you all the time. Sure, absolutely. I think thats true for everyone. I wanted to point out, back to the lawyer thing, when Trump was appointing so many judges, thats when the way that the legal system in Italy changed in the 30s, to cease to be really a legal system and be like an authoritarian legal system that doesnt apply rule of law any more I started realizing, Oh, that was kind of the idea. Thats why it was so important to him to get judges. If you can end the way the court system works, you get around that, then you start moving toward authoritarianism.

Similarly, when you start controlling information and you start leaning on calling things decadent, you can use decadence, like the kiss in the recent Buzz Lightyear movie, or whatever it is you want to call decadent, to suppress political content that you dont like. And thats what youre also talking about here is that the real reason that censorship was going on in the 30s and 40s, and in your novel, the head censor is a Catholic, surely not an accident, and he is really concerned about not hearing a lot of criticism for fascism. So he uses sex as an excuse to basically censor that political side. And I feel like thats exactly whats happening today.

AM: Yeah, absolutely. Criticisms toward changes in culture are camouflage for these very specific and intense political ideologies and agendas. Im curious what you all think about the changes in censorship over time, because one of the things that I was thinking about over the last several months, just reading the news and seeing, talking about, book bannings and all of that is just how much less effective censorship is today.

Im not sure if its a result of technology, just giving us so much access to information that if your local library bans a particular book, there are just so many more venues for you to find it in. Maybe its also that in the present day, weve just become hopefully somewhat more educated about the intentions and motivations behind the censorship But I could be talking complete bullshit. So Id love to hear your thoughts, Sugi.

VVG: I dont think youre talking complete bullshit, but I guess I wonder who are the we who know how censorship operates? Because theres obviously a whole set of people who are buying whats being sold. Theres this list of books that have been banned in, I think, Utah, thats going around, and it has a huge number of LGBTQIA-associated books, and then some of them are bestsellers.

And so theres this increased surveillance, but then theres also these increased ways to get around it and a population that maybe is better at getting around some of the things that we might expect to be censorship. But then it does seem like theres this other set of people who are whos the audience for the propaganda? Someones putting out the propaganda movies and someone sits in the audience and cheers and feels good about watching it. There are parts of me that like a good montage and a movie with a rousing Hans Zimmer score; I cant pretend that that part of me is not there. How has censorship changed over time? I think that my wariness of the American government has certainly increased. Im curious what you would say about this, Whitney.

WT: We did a couple episodes on book banning earlier on. And one of the things that came out is that when youre in a conservative state or a state thats run by conservatives like Florida, the teachers start getting really worried about what they can and cannot teach. So when youre dealing with public school teachers, or even public university professors, professors are a little bit more protected than school teachers. But I do think that censorship and state rules on what you can and cannot teach really will start to affect what high school and middle school and elementary school teachers feel comfortable teaching. And that actually can change how the kids are educated. I think thats why conservatives are concerned with that.

*

Selected Readings:

Anthony Marra Mercury Pictures Presents The Tsar of Love and Techno A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Others:

Frankenstein Psycho Lightyear S5 Episode 13: Farah Jasmine Griffin: Censoring the American Canon S5 Episode 12: Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Billy Wilder Three Days of the Condor Jason Bourne franchise Ban on 52 Books in Largest Utah School District is a Worrisome Escalation of Censorship PEN America

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Anne Kniggendorf.

Visit link:
Fascism Past and Present: Anthony Marra on What the Censorship of 1940s Hollywood and Italy Can Teach Us - Literary Hub

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo defended his interview with a former Trump campaign chairman Tuesday after receiving backlash from a social media user.

Cuomo interviewed Paul Manafort on his podcast, The Chris Cuomo Project, to discuss the FBI raid in Mar-a-Lago, Trumps potential presidential run in 2024, and the Mueller investigation following the 2016 presidential election. One social media user called the interview pathetic.

So you didnt listen. Didnt watch. And already know what you think, Cuomo responded. Thats why there is no progress. Change the game. Listen to who and what you oppose. You will sharpen your own arguments. Censoring is not the answer.

Cuomo has made an effort to cross partisan lines in his comeback to the media since CNN fired him over his involvement in his brothers sexual assault allegation case. The former anchor questioned Manafort on him being too generous to the former president regarding his storage of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago. (RELATED: Egregious And Insulting: Don Lemon Battles With Chris Cuomo For Bringing Rick Santorum On His Show)

I think your analysis is a little too generous, no? Cuomo asked.

No, I dont agree, Manafort said. Theres more to come out as there always is in instances like this. I think the affidavit redacted to keep names of things protected that would explain what the motivations were. You can say its such an egregious act that there has to be something there. But after going through five years of Russian collusion has to be real, I dont know whats real anymorethis sends a terrible example around the world.

In 2018, a federal jury found Manafort guilty of eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud surrounding accusations that he hid income as part of his consulting work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The government alleged that he hid money in companies located overseas.

Trump pardoned Manafort in late December 2020, while he served his sentence at home due to COVID-19 protocols.

During his podcast in early August, Cuomo accused the January 6 Select Committee of playing the gotcha game since they know those investigated will not face criminal charges.

Fomenting tension, lying to inflame just to create more outrage, wanting to watch a run on the Capitol, ignoring violent intentions, these are all terrible, he said. But treason? You wind up undercutting your purpose when you exaggerate the desired outcome or consequence the January 6 hearings lose their impact on consensus because of the intended consequences pursued.

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'Censoring Is Not The Answer': Chris Cuomo Defends Interview With Paul Manafort - Daily Caller

Published

2022-08-22 15:03

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August 22, 2022

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After a year of escalating book bans and resulting backlash, public schools are increasingly relying on soft censorship to limit which books students can access.

In addition to banning books outright, school districts are separating titles about so-called sensitive subjects from others in school libraries, placing warning labels on them or requiring parents to sign opt-in slips allowing children to read them paperwork that can easily be missed among the piles of other forms families have to fill out at the start of the school year.

Free speech advocates say these practices are as troubling as bans particularly when the books singled out overwhelmingly have themes related to race, gender and sexuality and are written by authors who are women, LGBTQ+ and/or people of color.

The First Amendment actually prohibits viewpoint-based restrictions on access, said Jason Groth, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Utah, where the states largest district has put book restrictions in place. So putting disfavored books in another part of the library that needs parental permission, or adding some other sort of restricted access, goes against the First Amendment. One of the considerations to keep in mind is that it creates a stigma on the content of those books.

In a typical year, PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, receives a handful of reports related to book banning. That changed dramatically over a nine-month period from 2021 to 2022, when the organization identified 1,586 cases of book banning concerning 1,145 unique titles by 874 authors. Of the banned books, 41 percent contain protagonists or other major characters of color, 22 percent of the books discuss race, 33 percent have LGBTQ+ themes and 25 percent feature content about sex, puberty or relationships.

The rise of book bans comes after states have passed laws limiting what schools can teach about race, sex and gender. The legislation coincides with the rise of parents rights groups that have gained momentum during the pandemic and demanded more say in what children learn in class. Politicians have capitalized on the concerns of such parents, many of whom were spurred to action after conservatives began spreading the idea that public schools are teaching students critical race theory and indoctrinating them into a radical left agenda. As education has become the epicenter of the nations culture wars, teachers and administrators have faced harassment and hostility from the communities they serve.

Book restrictions, which include soft bans, are really creating a crisis situation for our educators and for students that just doesn't need to exist, said Shirley Robinson, executive director for the Texas Library Association, which recently formed a statewide advocacy coalition made up of more than 3,000 Texas residents to advocate for students to have the freedom of inquiry. The thing that's really scary to me is that parents don't realize that this is happening because obviously an opt-in policy means that if you missed that piece of paper, among the thousand pieces of paper that you get when your child goes back to school at the beginning of the year, your child will not have access.

Robinson added that some librarians and teachers are self-censoring by removing certain reading materials or genres before anyone complains or simply not purchasing books they suspect will lead to complaints. She added that the fears of these educators arent unreasonable given that conservative groups are teaching Texans how to run for school boards, oppose library books and monitor teachers and librarians on social media.

PEN America found that 41 percent of book-banning cases it tracked over nine months are connected to politicians calling for books to be removed from schools. Policymakers will continue to play an important role in book banning as PEN America expects school oversight bills to continue getting passed next year. These bills call for curriculum transparency, silence on LGBTQ+ issues in schools and book banning.

In Texas, a list of 850 books that state Rep. Matt Krause flagged for containing potentially objectionable content continues to influence which reading materials school districts feature in their collections. Krause first introduced the list last fall, and today, Texas leads the country in book bans, with 713 book removals during the nine-month period PEN America analyzed. Along with total bans of books, Texas schools are imposing soft censorship on titles. Districts such as Keller, Cy-Fair and Richardson allow parents to decide if students can access the entire catalog of books.

Restrictions on books largely stem from bias against historically marginalized groups, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The fact is that gay, queer and transgender people, African Americans, Latin people, Indigenous people have finally found a voice and a place in our society and have found a voice and a place in libraries, she said. Now we're seeing an effort to erase those voices, to stigmatize those individuals and send a message of exclusion that, given these are public institutions, should not be happening at all.

Using soft censorship to limit access to school book collections isnt unique to Texas. In states such as Utah, Virginia, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Florida and California, school districts have enacted policies that give parents more oversight of what students read, alarming critics who argue that these restrictions violate the free speech rights of students, ignore the training of school librarians and send harmful messages about the books targeted.

Alpine School District, Utahs largest, decided in July to remove 52 books by 41 authors, including Jodi Picoults Nineteen Minutes, Judy Blumes Forever and Mariko Tamakis This One Summer, all books by women with sex scenes or LGBTQ+ storylines. In fact, 42 percent of the books the district singled out have LGBTQ+ characters or themes, PEN America found.

The decision stemmed from the March passage of House Bill 374, a Utah law prohibiting sensitive materials in public schools after groups such as Utah Parents United pressed policymakers to take action to get books deemed obscene or inappropriate removed from schools. After public outcry about its decision to pull dozens of books from school libraries, however, the Alpine school board temporarily held off on its plan to remove these books from library shelves. Instead, it will place these books in restricted areas of school libraries and allow parents to decide if their children may check out these titles.

The boards reversal of the book ban is a step in the right direction,Jonathan Friedman, PEN Americas director of free expression and education programs, said in a statement. But he added that the new policy still constitutes a barrier to the books.

Alpine School District did not respond to The 19ths request for comment.

One Florida district, Collier County Public Schools, recently garnered headlines for placing warning labels on more than 100 books, many of which featured racial or LGBTQ+ themes. The warnings explain that some community members have found the books unsuitable for students.

A Florida law enacted this year, House Bill 1467, will allow residents to challenge library books they deem pornographic or otherwise offensive. The law requires school districts to report all such complaints to the education commissioner, and from there, the state Department of Education can include the titles on a list of book challenges distributed to schools. The goal, PEN suspects, is to discourage schools from including any books on the list in their libraries.

Caldwell-Stone said that book challenges are spreading due to the efforts of a small number of groups that have been particularly vocal about reading materials. They have been able to seize control of the process and really cause a moral panic over books that are both age- and developmentally appropriate but address topics they disagree with, she said.

Started by two former Florida school board members, Moms for Liberty is a national group that advocates for parents to have more oversight over their childrens education. Cofounder Tiffany Justice told The 19th in March that some books in school libraries, such as George M. Johnsons All Boys Arent Blue, are too graphic for students. That book is a coming-of-age memoir, told through essays, about growing up Black and queer.

People say, Oh, the stuff that's in the books, the kids see all the time anyway, she said. It doesn't make it OK. George Johnson wrote a book [in which] he discusses the fact that he was molested by an adult. He was a victim of pedophilia. Horrible things happen to kids, but does every child have to be ready for that trauma?

A March 2022 American Library Association survey of 1,000 voters and 472 parents of public school students found that 82 percent of voters and 81 percent of parents agreed that the ability of young people to have access to books from which they can learn about and understand different perspectives should be protected. Seventy-six percent of voters and 72 percent of parents also agreed that individual parents can set rules for their own children, but they do not have the right to decide for other parents what books are available to their children. And 74 percent of parents said they have a great deal of confidence in public libraries in their local school district to make good decisions about what books to include in their collections.

In Utah, Groth raised concerns that Alpine School District failed to properly review the books it has restricted. In July, the school board said that it had reviewed 275 books in just three days, opting to remove the 52 in question, with plans to do the same to 32 other books when they could read them cover to cover. That admission led the boards detractors to doubt that school officials read any of the books singled out in such a short time frame, suggesting that those titles were targeted because of their themes.

The way they talked about it at the board meeting, they didn't actually read the books, said Marissa Bischoff, president of the Utah Library Association. So we don't know what kind of evaluation they got, but it wasn't the full evaluation that it needed. It's really concerning because we want tobe careful to look at and see the merit of these books and not just go by one passage or the title and make these big decisions.

Tamakis This One Summer was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book, a label recognizing the graphic novel as a distinguished picture book. Other award-winners on Alpines restricted book list include The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow, who, like Tamaki, is a woman of color. Durrows book won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. All Boys Arent Blue has received multiple honors, including from the Young Adult Library Services Association. But last year, it was one of the nations most challenged books, according to the American Library Association.

Students and people in general should be able to experience art and literature that depict the rich human experience that is life as we know it, and that includes the experiences of LGBTQ people, said Marina Lowe, policy director of Equality Utah, which works to secure equal rights and protections for LGBTQ+ Utahns.

Singling out books with LGBTQ+ themes sends the message that the subject matter covered is a problem and, by extension, the students who belong to those communities are a problem, Lowe said. Shes also distrubed by restrictions on such books because she said no one is forcing students to read or check them out. They are available to patrons in school libraries who want to read them, she said.

They're not required reading, but they should be accessible, Lowe said. At the end of the day, we really do sort of a disservice to our students if we don't allow them to have access to materials that can be challenging in some circumstances, perhaps, but allow them to grow and learn.

Nationally, book bans took place in 86 school districts in 26 states from July 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022, PEN America found. The districts include 2,899 schools with a collective student population of more than two million. Ninety-eight percent of these book banning cases did not follow best practices developed by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Library Association. These guidelines include the filing of complaints about books by community members; the development of book review committees made up of librarians, teachers, school leaders and local residents; and maintaining student access to the books in question until they are officially banned. Books should first be challenged at a specific school, and, if a decision is appealed, then the district would get involved. So, school board officials making unilateral decisions to restrict or ban books conflicts with established guidelines.

As banning and restrictions increase, the American Library Association is mobilizing its supporters. In April, it launched Unite Against Book Bans, an online toolkit that individuals can download to understand how book bans happen, the best way to fight them and how to team up with other community members as grassroots activists.

When individuals stand up and speak out against censorship at board meetings, boards are less likely to act in an arbitrary or precipitous manner and remove books simply because someone in the audience is complaining about a book, Caldwell-Stone said. But it also requires a long-term commitment of being engaged locally knowing who is being elected to school boards and library boards, participating in those elections, making sure you vote and making sure that your friends and relatives vote and support free access to information when they vote.

Continued here:
What is soft censorship? When school districts dont ban books, they still limit student access - The 19th*

The Ethereum community, which is known for a sunny rainbow-and-unicorns vibe, is unusually serious as of late. Following a recent move by the U.S. Treasury Department to target a batch of crypto-related open source code, one word keeps coming up in Ethereum circles: censorship.

The concern surfaced earlier this month when the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency mixer that allows users to obfuscate transactions, and a series of Ethereum addressesbarring all Americans from interacting with both the mixer and the addresses.

According to Treasury officials, Tornado Cash has laundered over $7 billion in cryptocurrency since its creation in 2019, and has become a favorite destination for the infamous North Korean hacking outfit known as the Lazarus Group.

The Tornado Cash announcement marked a watershed moment for the crypto world. Although the Treasury has long targeted financial criminals and those who support terrorist activity, its unusual for the agency to sanction a piece of technologyin this case a mixerdirectly.

All of this set off concern within the Ethereum community about whether the blockchain is resistant to government censorshipconcern that has only increased as Ethereum approaches its highly anticipated merge upgrade next month.

Though applications existing on Ethereum can be censored, as weve seen with Tornado Cash, whether the Ethereum blockchain itself can be subject to censorship has been a topic of debate, especially with Ethereums upcoming merge.

Thats because the merge will shift Ethereum from a proof of work (PoW) consensus model to proof of stake (PoS), and, in turn, validators will have the responsibility of creating new blocks on-chain and verifying transactions, rather than miners. To become a validator, one must deposit 32 Ethera sum, currently worth around $50,000, that is intended to ensure that participants have a stake in the success of the network.

A single entity, however, can also run multiple validators, so long as the entity can afford it, and in doing so arguably garner more control. As a result, some within the Ethereum community have become concerned about the emergence of powerful, centralized entities after the mergeentities that could be pliant when it comes to carrying out government censorship requests.

Those concerned about censorship have raised various hypotheticals: Might a validator refuse to confirm a block to the Ethereum blockchain because it contains Tornado Cash transactions? Would fear of legal repercussions lead them to ignore or reject such blocks?

It is unknown whether any of this will happen, or whether the government will target validators, but such questions have been at the center of debate onlineespecially as it circulated on crypto Twitter that 66% of the Beacon Chain [or proof-of-stake chain] validators will adhere to OFAC regulations, including Coinbase and Kraken.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin weighed in on this discussion himself, and signaled his support in slashing the stake of any validators that censor the Ethereum protocol if asked by U.S. regulators.

Even Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong suggested hed rather stop the staking business of his cryptocurrency exchange than comply with any potential censorship.

Another concern post-merge involves MEVmaximal extractable value (formerly miner extractable value)and potential MEV-Boost issues, and how these could increase the potential for censorship.

MEV describes the profit a validator can earn by selecting or reordering transactions within blocks, while MEV-Boost is an optional software built for proof-of-stake Ethereum.

MEV-Boost allows validators to outsource block production to maximize their reward. Though there are upsides to MEV and MEV-Boost, both can also be used by bad actors in a malicious way. Specifically, some within the Ethereum community are worried about censorship of MEV-Boost relay operators, or entities that connect validators to block builders; the fear is that the existence of these relay operators offers a big new target for censorship.

The concern is so widespread that it was addressed during the most recent Ethereum Core Developers meeting.

If we allow censorship of user transactions on the network, then we basically failed. This is the hill that Im willing to die on, developer Marius van der Wijden said during the call. If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum then this whole thing doesnt make sense, and I will be leaving the ecosystem.

Most Ethereum developers, however, sounded hopeful that potential MEV-related issues, especially involving censorship, would not be prevalent threats, and remained focused on building Ethereum as a censorship-free protocol.

While some may take the topic more seriously than others, experts in the cryptocurrency space dont believe censorship-related fears are overblown, especially if blockchains are more widely used by normies as time goes on.

If crypto is going to go mainstreamits going to have to exist within a modern regulatory framework. That means adhering to OFAC sanctions, allowing for strong protections from money laundering, and so on, Matt Hougan, Bitwise CIO, tells Fortune. The question vis--vis ETH validators, however, is whether that adherence should occur at the foundational technological layer, or on the application and user side.

Hougan made an analogy involving the internet, asking whether libel and hate speech should be banned by the internet itself, or handled at the user and application layer instead. History suggests that freedom, innovation, and growth are best served when technologies are allowed to be credibly neutral, and we police bad acts by policing bad actors, he said.

And though the merge hasnt happened yet, weve already seen forms of censorship on Ethereum in a few ways.

Ethereum infrastructure companies Infura and Alchemy have blocked access to Tornado Cash. Circle, the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, froze Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, has also reportedly blocked Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Even Ethermine, the largest Ethereum miner, stopped processing Tornado Cash transactions, being dubbed the first hard evidence seen of censorship actually happening in block production online.

Looking ahead, only time will tell how, or if, censorship resistance is maintained.

Some online predict the decentralized finance (DeFi) space will continue to split into two: one being a regulated, compliant version of DeFi, and the other being badlands DeFi, as Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, wrote on Twitter. Most blue-chip projects will embrace the former.

To Hougan, an interesting part of this process is that the Ethereum community is determining through discussion how important decentralization is as a core value. Different blockchains will decide on different answers to this question, and it will be interesting to see which answer the market rewards and punishes.

Until then, the debate surrounding censorship on Ethereum is likely to get louder.

The rest is here:
The Ethereum community is worried about censorship as the merge approaches. Heres why - Fortune

Elon Musk is back in the headlines this week. The founder and CEO of Tesla contributed a piece to China Cyberspace, the official publication of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the government's cyber censorship arm. It's a big deal, and proof of how deeply entangled Musk is with a regime hostile to free speech, and to the human rights of its people more broadly.

Worse, Musk's closeness with the Cyberspace Administration of China raises important questions about whether Musk, who has a Giga factory in China and has taken over $1 billion in loans from the country, has fallen prey to China's Military Civil Fusion disclosure laws. And the stakes are high: Is Musk supplying China with classified information he gains by working with the U.S. space program and other national security-sensitive projects?

Not only does the Cyberspace Administration of China control and often choke the flow of information into and out of the country, but it also provides data security for Tencent, a giant logistics conglomerate controlled by the Communist Party of China that owns 5 percent of Tesla.

The scale of Musk's operations in China makes him vulnerable to intimidation by its communist leadership, and should make us wary of his pending deal to buy Twitter. Do we really want Twitter's owner to be someone entangled substantially with one of the most repressive governments on earth, one with a long history of forcing private companies to serve its interests?

Twitter is banned in China, along with many other media companies that don't toe the party line. But some Chinese dissidents do manage to use the platform inside the country, as do many outside the country to coordinate resistance. While Musk initially claimed to be a free speech absolutist, on April 27, he clarified that he would comply with the government laws that restrict free speech.

Of course, Musk is far from the only tech magnate who has raised concerns. Amazon has catered even more directly to the censorship needs of the Communist Party of China, like when it partnered with a propaganda arm of the government to market a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings published on a Chinese website in 2020. When Amazon customers began to publish unflattering reviews of the collection, the Chinese government ordered the reviews removed and the comment feature disabled for not just this but all products sold in China.

Moreover, the CCP has partnered with Amazon on a project known as China Books, which offers 90,000 Chinese books for sale but generates little revenue. The project is widely seen as a sop to keep the government happy so Amazon can function. The company stated in an internal document back in 2018 that "ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the Communist Party to achieve and maintain its success. We are not making judgment on whether it is right or wrong."

Meanwhile, Google is working on a China-only search engine that will black out websites and search terms the government considers threateninglike those pertaining to human rights, democracy and religion.

And Twitter has worked with the Chinese Communist Party to whitewash the abuse of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government. According to reports, Twitter promoted more than 50 tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state-run media outfit, that deliberately mislead users on how the Uyghurs are treated in the detention camps in which they're forced to live.

Every day, we see stories of corporations making the choice to participate in everything from censorship to masking drastic human rights violations, in order to retain access to China's lucrative market of 1.3 billion people.

Fortunately, the days of this problem being ignored are ending. Already Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) are working to learn more and perhaps develop legislation to guide these exchanges.

Stewart wants hearings to determine exactly what confidential information may fall into China's hands as a result of Big Tech's cowardly capitulation, and Rubio is interested in reforming contracting procedures to make sure we're not going into business with Chinese Communist Party-aligned businesses.

A variety of approaches are possible. But one thing is clear: It is past time we learn more about what it means for an American corporation to do business in sensitive industries in China. We may be shocked at what we find.

Jianli Yang is founder and president ofCitizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of For Us, the Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Big Tech Is Fully Cooperating With China's Censorship Regime. It's Got to Stop | Opinion - Newsweek