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Oh, bother. Winnie the Pooh has found himself in another sticky situation.

Just two days before a British horror flick starring a murderous version of the famous talking yellow bear was set to hit cinemas in Hong Kong, its distributor abruptly announced with great regret that the films scheduled release in the city as well as in the neighboring Chinese enclave of Macau had been cancelled.

VII Pillars Entertainment told Screen Daily that they were notified without explanation that 32 theaters across both territories would not go ahead with screenings of filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfields Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey as previously planned. We are pulling our hair, of course, very disappointed, a spokesperson told Reuters.

One screening organizer, Moviematic, posted an Instagram story that said the release was called off due to technical reasonsa rationale Frake-Waterfield disputes. They claim technical reasons, but there is no technical reason, he told Reuters. The film has showed in over 4,000 cinema screens worldwide. These 30+ screens in Hong Kong are the only ones with such issues.

The cancellation has raised fresh concerns of increasing censorship in Chinas so-called special administrative regions. I assume #CCP and their #HongKong quislings worry that viewers might think it wasnt a movie but a documentary about #XiJinping, tweeted Benedict Rogers, the London-based founder of Hong Kong Watch, an organization monitoring human rights in the Chinese territory.

A protester holds a poster of Xi Jinping and a Pooh plush during a demonstration in Bangkok, where the Chinese leader was attending APEC in November 2022.

Varuth PongsapipattSOPA/LightRocket/Getty Images

The cartoon bear had previously been blacklisted in mainland China after critics of President Xi Jinping frequently pointed out the characters resemblance to the leader. The ruling Chinese Communist Party scrubbed pictures of Pooh off its restricted cyberspace in 2017, and the next year it blocked a Disney-produced live-action Pooh film.

Hong Kong, a former British colony that has touted greater Western-style freedoms under a one country, two systems policy since being ceded to China in 1997, has mostly enjoyed screening films with comparably less oversight until recently. After Beijing passed a controversial national security law in 2020 that covers even territories outside its jurisdiction, Hong Kong implemented censorship rules to comply with the policy, though the local government has claimed that it does not stifle free speech or freedom of expression.

Hong Kongs censorship board denies that the Pooh slasher was suppressed. The citys regulatory Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration told TIME that the film passed the local screening assessment and had already been issued the required certificate of approval to be released. The arrangements of cinemas in Hong Kong on the screening of individual films with certificates of approval in their premises are the commercial decisions of the cinemas concerned, it added.

Kenny Ng, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist Universitys Academy of Film, tells TIME that the pullout could be self-censorship due to the political climate rather than overt censorship imposed by authorities. The act of withdrawing a licensed film from public exhibition may not be too surprising in the current situation or indeed has become a decent way of respecting the red line, he said in an email. Surely any reference, however vague and imaginative, to political leaders in films are taboos in cinema today.

Would-be viewers may not be missing much, according to critics, who universally panned the film. Still, poor reviews havent stopped the movie from raking in big bucks at box offices in markets where it was released: since its debut in January, the low-budget Blood and Honey has earned more than $3.6 million worldwide.

More Must-Reads From TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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'Winnie the Pooh' Movie Pulled from Hong Kong Cinemas, Raising Censorship Concerns | Time - TIME

The Simpsons appears to have predicted the unfortunate reality of a parental uproar at a Florida charter school.

Years ago, in the animated sitcoms ninth episode of its second season (1991), titled Itchy & Scratchy & Marge, Marge Simpson is horrified by the violence depicted on her childrens TV show Itchy & Scratchy.

After failing to convince the production company to tone down the violence, she forms an angry mob named SNUH (Springfieldians for Nonviolence, Understanding, and Helping) to join her in protesting the shows studio.

Meanwhile, Michelangelos David is sent around on a tour of the US, with an expected stop in the Simpsonss city of Springfield, angering members of SNUH.

They urge Marge to protest the famed sculpture, claiming its offensive and inappropriate. However, Marge, being an artist herself, insists its a masterpiece. Shes later pointed out for her hypocrisy in differentiating what art should be censored.

Marge eventually concedes to give up on her anti-TV violence campaign; Michelangelos David is brought to the city and freedom of expression wins the day.

Over two decades later and the events of the cartoon appear to have played out in the US city of Tallahassee, although ending in greater consequences.

Hope Carrasquilla, a Florida charter school principal, has been forced to resign after three parents complained that their children were upset by images of Michelangelos David shown in their sixth-grade history class, according to reports from local outlet Tallahassee Democrat.

One parent reportedly branded the statue pornographic, saying they wish they had been informed ahead of time that their children would be shown such images.

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The news comes amid the states attack on public education, drag shows, abortion and more. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is currently fighting to ban, what he considers, the woke indoctrination of public schools.

Through his approved legislation, the state would review reading materials and limit classroom discussion of gender identity, and race books could be pulled indefinitely or temporarily from the curriculum.

At the moment, DeSantis will likely be former President Donald Trumps Republican party nominee rival in the 2024 election.

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The Simpsons eerily predicts parents demands to censor Michelangelos David in school - The Independent

BEIJING - Search giant Baidu's lacklustre unveiling of its chatbot exposed gaps in China's race to rival ChatGPT, as censorship and a US squeeze on chip imports have hamstrung the country's artificial intelligence ambitions.

The highly anticipated preview of "Ernie Bot" last week was limited to a pre-recorded demonstration with simple questions to summarise the plot of a sci-fi novel and solving a straightforward algebra equation -- to avoid politically and factually incorrect answers.

From cloud computing to autonomous driving, none of the array of services Baidu had earlier promised its Ernie Bot could do were on display.

The firm's shares plunged as much as 10 percent during the unveiling, although they rallied the following day on positive reviews from brokerages including Citigroup, whose analysts were among a small group of people invited to test the bot.

A flurry of Chinese companies including Alibaba, JD.com, Netease and TikTok-parent Bytedance have rushed to develop services that can mimic human speech since San Francisco-based OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, sparking a gold rush in the market.

Google on Tuesday invited people in the United States and Britain to test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its own push to catch up.

The popularity of ChatGPT in China -- where users have to scale Beijing's internet firewall using virtual private networks (VPNs) and foreign phone numbers -- has left Baidu and others scrambling to regain its dominance on home turf.

"OpenAI probably spent as much time just testing GPT-4 as Baidu spent building Ernie Bot," said Matt Sheehan, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"China's tech ecosystem doesn't have a tradition of funding open-ended research that doesn't have a clear path to profitability."

- Chip supply -

Ernie Bot is fluent in Mandarin, as well as other regional languages including Hakka spoken in South China and Taiwan, and targets the Chinese market with more than one billion internet users.

A headache for developers is Beijing's heavy-handed censorship of anything seen as challenging the Communist Party -- including a one-time purge of Winnie-the-Pooh after the cartoon bear was compared to Xi Jinping.

When asked if the president of 10 years is "a good leader", one of China's best-performing publicly available ChatGPT-style models, developed by Beijing's Tsinghua University, says: "The input may contain ethical content. Please try a different input."

The strict restrictions on the Chinese internet mean companies have "significantly less data resources for training purposes compared to Western competitors", Lauren Hurcombe, a technology lawyer at DLA Piper, told AFP.

Ernie Bot has not yet been launched for public use.

China has announced ambitious plans to become a global leader in the field of AI by 2030, and consultancy group McKinsey estimates the sector could add about $600 billion every year to China's gross domestic product by then.

Most of the growth will come from producing driverless cars, adding more robots to assembly lines and healthcare breakthroughs, according to McKinsey, and the government has also used AI to beef up its mass surveillance programme.

However, Washington has moved to suffocate China's technology ambitions, blocking through sanctions its access to high-grade chips, chipmaking equipment and software used to design semiconductors.

This has made it difficult for Chinese companies to buy chips including Nvidia's A100 and its successor H100, considered the gold standard for large-scale AI training systems.

"There is a real question whether a domestic supply can be generated in the short term," Hurcombe said.

- AI gap -

But the effect of the US measures will take time to make a dent because Chinese companies rushed to stockpile high-end chips before Washington announced the export controls in October.

Baidu has its own chip design arm, Kunlun, and the company says it is capable of mass-producing a seven-nanometre chip that is partly used to power its AI systems.

Dou Shen, head of Baidu's AI Cloud group, shrugged off questions about the impact of the US restrictions during a call with investors in November, saying: "We think the impact is quite limited in the near future."

For years, China has bragged about filing more artificial intelligence patent applications than the United States.

But the average number of citations of its patents -- an indication of the importance and originality of its inventions -- lagged behind the United States and other developing countries in 2020 and 2021, according to Stanford University's AI Index 2022 report.

The United States also had twice as many AI startups as China, and had three times more private investment flowing into the sector in 2021, according to the report.

The Chinese government's top-down approach to spurring innovation has failed to deliver results.

The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, established in 2018, introduced a ChatGPT-like product two years ago.

Wu Dao was described by its creators as "the world's largest" AI language model with 1.75 trillion parameters, which is significantly larger than OpenAI's previous GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters. But it never really caught on.

The rest is here:
Chip war and censorship hobble Chinese tech giants in chatbot race - Bangkok Post

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Are political action committees turning public schools into political battlegrounds?

There's growing support from some local school board members with ties to these national committees to suspend, and in some cases, ban books with sexual or violent scenes and regulate what's taught in classrooms.

This is happening most notably in Berrien County, where a group called "We The Parents" is helping elect school board members that enforce what they call "traditional American values of faith, family, and freedom."

The group has been most successful in the Brandywine school district in Niles where last year, four candidates were elected to a seven-member board.

The growing movement to censor books in schools is a nationwide issue and is directly linked to political pressure. School districts are removing books from libraries at a record pace, according to Pen America. During the 2021-22 school year, 138 school districts in 32 states banned more than 2,500 books.

Jen Unger, a Brandywine Parent, is concerned about what the trend means for her young children.

"I want my children to be able to go into those libraries and look at any books that they want, Unger said."

Unger is a parent of three first-grade students at Merritt Elementary in Niles.

She's struggling with the idea that her kids won't be able to access books that she believes are important to their educational development in the future.

In February, Brandywine school board voted to suspend the addition of any sexually explicit or violent books from entering the middle and high school libraries. They also moved to create an 'Explicit Material Book Review Committee' to evaluate the books already in the school library.

Tiffany: "So, do you think the school board is acting in the best interest of the community?"

Jen: "I do not. I think they're acting in their best interest and not on what's going to be the best for the students and then the staff at the schools that they're supposed to be serving."

This is all part of a bigger picture issue, with school board races across the country becoming more political and more parents wanting a say in their children's education.

The 20-22 school board elections at Brandywine Community Schools brought four new faces to serve the district, all of whom are supported by We The Parents, a parental rights group financially backed by the 1776 Project, a conservative political action committee or PAC.

The committee formed back in 2021 to push back against the New York Times' 1619 Project, which provides free lesson plans that center U.S. history around slavery and its lasting impacts.

The super PAC received $3,00,000 in donations in 2022, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.

In Michigan alone, Transparency USA, a group tracking money in state politics, shows over $56,000 in contributions went to "We The Parents last year.

The group supported almost 30 school board candidates across 10 different schools in Berrien County but they were most successful in Brandywine.

"It seems that they have a more political agenda than focusing on the needs of the students of our district," Unger said about the recently elected We The Parents backed school board members.

On November 9th, 2022, after Board President Thomas Payne, Secretary Angela Seastrom, and Trustees Michelanne Mccombs and Elaine Mckee won their elections, The 1776 Project PAC tweeted, "We just flipped the Brandywine school board from liberal to conservative."

Unger voted for all four We The Parents backed school board members and it's something she says she now regrets.

"I just didn't do my part as a parent and as a taxpayer to make sure I knew what I was voting for," Unger said.

The We The Parents group touts a mission of recruiting, equipping and retaining a new generation of school board candidates that are grounded in the traditional American values of faith, family, and freedom.

At face value, Unger says it sounded like a good option but after taking a closer look at the group's push to "remove all forms of sexual, racial, political and gender indoctrination" from schools, she's realizing she disagrees with them.

"If you recognize the name, and you're not necessarily even doing some homework or have children in the district, I think you're just voting for by popular knowing their name, versus what they're running for," Unger said.

The big question is why are books that have been in school libraries for centuries getting challenged now?

Interview requests sent to We The Parents and the 1776 Project PAC went unanswered.

ABC57 also did not get a response for an interview request from Brandywine School Board President Thomas Payne, until showing up in person.

When requesting an interview with Payne at the March 27 board meeting he said, "Not tonight. But I will email you back and I'll my put phone number on there and then we can potentially set up a time. I'm really not doing interviews but let me think about it."

Payne did send an email the next day, but ABC57 was unable to set up an interview. A final email asking for at least a statement, went unanswered.

Former Brandywine School Board President Dennis Hinsey did agree to an interview request. He served on the school board for 16-years, until Payne was voted into the role last year.

I held every position from trustee to Secretary Treasurer, Vice President and most recently President up to December 31," Hinsey said.

Hinsey isn't surprised that the incumbents on the Brandywine school board were voted out in 2022.

With PACs pouring money into school board races, its fairly easy to flip control of who governs a school and for much less than it would cost to elect someone to the house or senate.

The 1776 Project PACs website shows theyve endorsed candidates all over the country, even impacting bigger school board races like in Miami-Dade County in Florida where over 300,000 students are enrolled.

Being a part of a political action committee is there's money funneled in all over the country to help advertise," Hinsey said. "And knowing that there were mailers going to homes, there was text messages, there was sponsored social media post, that all costs a lot of money, that the average person just trying to help his school or her school, they just won't do it. So, they had, you know, huge signs. It was basically name recognition.

Winning local school board races can impact education on a national scale as were seeing now with the push to censor books in schools with several states passing new laws.

In Indiana, lawmakers passed a bill in February to ban books harmful to minors in school libraries.

In Michigan, House Bill 4136 was also introduced in February. Called the library privacy act," it doesnt ban specific books, but calls for books with obscenities to be kept in age-restricted areas of a library.

Pen America, a left-leaning organization dedicated to promoting free speech and journalism, says 40% of book bans in the last year have been connected to political pressure or legislation designed to restrict and reshape teaching.

Hinsey thinks the push to ban books has become a talking point for politicians and it's not a real issue.

I went back and there was some push back last fall when I was President and we double checked, and I double checked, that in the last almost 20 years, there has never been a challenge from a parent for a challenge from anywhere about a book in the library [at Brandywine]," Hinsey said. We're not talking about kindergarteners, what do you consider sexually explicit? A National Geographic? You know, I mean, that's such a broad line. And we want kids, students to be able to maybe see something that they could be uncomfortable with, and ask, and because if we don't let them, they're going to find it. They're going to they're gonna learn about it one way or the other.

In the Brandywine school district, Hinsey explains that parents have always had the right to be involved in their childs education. He sees it as creating problems that dont exist.

The director of the American Library Associations Office for Intellectual Freedom, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, echoes that sentiment.

I can't think of a single public library for example that doesn't have a reconsideration policy in place that allows someone to raise a concern and talk about it with a librarian," Caldwell-Stone said.

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest non-partisan organization dedicated to library services in the world. Censorship challenges in school libraries are something Caldwell-Stone says can be detrimental to a childs educational success.

"When young people are allowed to read freely, they gain something from that and they're better citizens, they are better prepared to enter College, be effective parts of the military force, or join the workforce. And so, when we narrow their opportunity to learn, when we treat education as indoctrination rather than an opportunity to expand horizons, we can see the real impact on young lives," Caldwell-Stone said.

Caldwell-stone believes that book banning is the most widespread form of censorship in the united states and, arguably, the most dangerous form too.

She says banning books can have major impacts on children, and society as a whole, by creating gaps in knowledge for young learners and undermining efforts to teach students to think for themselves.

We've seen quadrupling of the reports of censorship in school libraries in public libraries in the last year," Deborah Caldwell-Stone said. Ive done this work for 20 years and I've never seen numbers like this in the past and we're just really deeply concerned about the impact on young people's education, their ability to read widely about the world in general about their lives in particular and what it means for our democracy to have government agencies trying to tell individuals and tell families what they can and can't read.

According to the American Library Association, the number one most banned book in the last decade was "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie

"Captain Underpants" (series) by Dav Pilkey is actually the second most banned book in America.

"Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher ranks third, and "Looking For Alaska" by John Green is the fourth most banned book.

"Looking for Alaska" was recently challenged in the Coloma, Michigan school district. So far, no specific books have been banned locally, but the conversation over potential censorship in school libraries is ongoing.

You can read the full list of the most frequently challenged books here.

Go here to read the rest:
"The Battle Over Books:" Nationwide trend of book censorship ... - ABC 57 News

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While it may not always dominate the headlines, the debate over free speech in the U.S. remains at the forefront of our political conversation.

Much of this discussion has centered on social media. Companies like Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook, have said that some regulation of speech is necessary for the platforms to work properly. With no regulation at all, they argue, social media would be overrun with snake-oil health remedies, hate speech, threats and intimidation, and incitement to real-world violence.

Other companies founded as alternatives to the bigger platforms, such as former President Donald Trumps Truth Social, quickly found that they, too, needed some form of content moderation.

When it comes to social media, few would argue that platforms should allow any and all content. Truth Social, for example, bans all sexual content and explicit language, which are not strictly prohibited on Twitter.

But Republicans charge that the big social media companies, such as Twitter, have engaged in a coordinated attempt to suppress conservative speech and amplify liberal voices.

These companies have faced calls to limit real-world dangers by constraining the spread of false information, and their efforts to do so have led to complaints of censorship.

Censorship has become a top political topic, a source of outrage and anger for many Americans. It has also become a powerful source of influence for media figures on both the left and right, whose audiences have grown as they have become known for challenging what their followers see as rigid orthodoxies.

One challenge in debating this topic is imprecise language. Words and phrases are often used as political weapons rather than as tools for understanding and illumination. Here are a few commonly used terms, an examination of how they are used and misused, and what they actually mean.

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Merriam-Webster defines the verb to censor as meaning to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.

Story continues

The debate over censorship, when it comes to social media, often comes from the political right. The most recent example is the publication of a few internal documents from Twitter showing that certain conservative figures had their accounts set so that they could not appear on a trending list, or that made it harder to find their account in the search function. This is also sometimes called shadow banning.

These revelations in what has been called the Twitter Files, however, did not provide any context or details for why these accounts were placed on the trends blacklist or the search blacklist.

It is possible that the accounts were flagged for a violation of Twitters terms of service. Twitter said for years that it limited the reach of certain accounts if they violated the platforms policies.

Since at least 2018, Twitters help page has said, When abuse or manipulation of our service is reported or detected, we may take action to limit the reach of a persons tweets, wrote New York magazines Eric Levitz.

Twitter also listed Limiting tweet visibility as an enforcement option under the companys terms of service, writing, This makes content less visible on Twitter, Levitz noted.

In other words, it wasnt a secret that Twitter sometimes made use of shadow banning. Whats still not known are the reasons for many of these decisions. The answer may be nefarious. It may also be innocuous.

Sometimes censorship and its problems are more obvious, however. Twitters decision to suppress a since-verified New York Post story on Hunter Bidens laptop for roughly one day, in the weeks before the 2020 election, was an obvious mistake, company officials have admitted.

Conservatives claim that those on the right have been targeted because of their political views, but so far evidence of such intentional political discrimination at Twitter has not been produced. Twitter conducted a study in 2021 showing that its algorithm was, unintentionally, favoring the political right wing.

Conservatives have scoffed at this, noting that Twitter employees have overwhelmingly made donations to Democratic politicians.

Some do not like the term "censorship" because they think it casts a pall over something that is actually a necessary public good.

"Social media has been a vector of strong, divisive, unfounded opinions and lies for over a decade. ... We have built tools that give an asymmetric advantage to liars and lunatics, author Sam Harris said in a recent podcast interview with Renee DiResta, a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and journalists Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger. Weiss and Shellenberger are among the handful of journalists who were given access to the Twitter Files by the company.

The idea that we are powerless to correct this problem because any efforts we make amount to censorship is insane. It's childish. It's masochistic. And it is demonstrably harming society, Harris said.

But, he added, this is a hard problem to solve."

If judged by the simple definition of the word censor, some of what Twitter has done is technically censorship, and the debate really is over whether censorship is always bad or sometimes needed.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who has sponsored a bill requiring more disclosure of when government officials make moderation requests to social media companies, said essentially this in a recent speech on the topic.

The government needs to be very careful about how they wade into regulating social media platforms but thats not an excuse for taking no action at all, Lummis said.

And sometimes censorship is used to describe things that are simply what DiResta called counterspeech and contextualization, such as when Twitter has affixed labels and fact-checking to tweets with clearly false claims.

DiResta noted that those who cry foul over claims of censorship have a responsibility to say what they do want. If they do not want to use fact-checking labels, or to reduce the reach of false information, or to take down incitements to violence, then is the alternative simply a viral free-for-all, at all times, with every unverified rumor going viral and the public being left to sort it out? DiResta asked.

Weiss, who is widely considered a free speech advocate by her readers and fans, agreed that some form of what others call censorship is needed online.

Anyone who's honest will say that these platforms shouldn't just let actual lies and misinformation rip and that they should have some moderation policies, she said.

The question for many who dig into the details, then, is not one of whether to censor, but of how best to do so. Conservatives have claimed that social media censorship has had a partisan tilt, and that the Twitter Files proved this.

But there is not yet hard evidence that Twitter applied a partisan lens to its moderation or filtering.

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These two terms may sound similar, but they have different definitions.

Misinformation is simply false or inaccurate information nothing more, nothing less. In other words, its just someone getting their facts wrong, which we do all the time, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Disinformation, however, is false or misleading information peddled deliberately to deceive, often in pursuit of an objective.

In other words, if youre purposefully trying to deceive someone, thats disinformation. If you just dont know what youre talking about, thats misinformation.

Nonetheless, the two terms are often used interchangeably, which can lead to problems.

There are real risks in rushing to label communication disinformation without a full understanding of a speakers motive or the facts. In a complicated and fast-changing world, whats labeled disinformation today can be recognized as fact tomorrow, FIRE said.

DiResta said that the misinformation label is often bandied about too liberally and that overuse of it was egregious during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media companies were overly aggressive in labeling some COVID-related claims as true or false, when a better approach to some claims would have been to say that the truth of the matter was not yet known, she said.

We were looking at rumors, not misinformation, DiResta said of the moment when COVID was new and poorly understood. You have rumors circulating ... in an environment where the truth cannot be known.

So the policies that say, 'This is true, this is false,' just completely misinterpret what is actually happening."

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This phrase describes an online forum similar to a physical public gathering space. Its a place, like Twitter, where people come to discuss whats on their minds.

Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a unanimous 2017 Supreme Court decision overruling a North Carolina statute that prohibited sex offenders from using social media, defined those websites as a modern public square.

But a detailed comparison of an online public square with a physical one reveals some important distinctions and raises questions about the viability of an online version.

Online, there are few rules and little formal structure. But in the physical world, places designed for conversation and debate usually have more guardrails and restrictions. A town hall meeting, for example, typically has a moderator of some kind, just as a classroom has a teacher to guide the discussion.

Conservatives are fierce defenders of this rule-based system in real-world settings, decrying attempts by left-wing students on college campuses to interrupt or drown out the speech of a figure they do not like.

But online, conservatives tend to be more skeptical of a rule-based system, favoring more of a free-for-all approach.

When Elon Musk closed the deal to buy Twitter last October, he said he wanted the platform to be "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.

But in practice, the online public square has become a place where everyone is shouting all the time and anyone who doesnt like it just stays home, wrote Jean Burgess, professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

In a physical town square, people do not have a mass conversation. The only way speech is conducted among large groups in the physical world is with clear rules for who can speak when. Creating an online town square has proved to be much more difficult, in part perhaps because the comparison may be unhelpful, DiResta told Harris.

We're expecting these public squares to be the be-all and end-all of sense-making, and they're just not cut out for that. They are just not designed for it. So there's a kind of unrealistic expectation component to this as well, she said.

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It is certainly anyones right to go into any public space and start talking, but those rights are not absolute, despite broad constitutional protections under the First Amendment.

The Supreme Courts 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio found that speech that is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" is not protected under the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court has defined a few other limitations on free speech, ruling that the First Amendment provides no protection for obscenity, child pornography, or speech that constitutes what has become widely known as fighting words, according to the Congressional Research Service. Fighting words require an immediate risk of a breach of peace.

Often overlooked is the distinction between free speech and amplification.

If a random person starts shouting in a public space within the broad limits of protected speech they may be allowed to do so, but they do not have the right to have their speech broadcast electronically to thousands or millions of people, which is what social media does.

This is one of the key differences between a real-world public square and the internet: The potential reach of any person is much wider online than it is in the physical world.

Money, power and influence can amplify someones voice on TV. But online, the willingness to be outrageous and even absurd is a form of currency, because these things draw attention.

Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main or often the only reward thats available is attention, wrote Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of internet research, in his 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention, Lanier wrote.

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Censorship? Disinformation? Defining some key terms in the social media debate - Yahoo News