Mediaboss Marketing

Elon Musk, who owns X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, announced on Thursday that his company plans to take legal action against those involved in what he describes as an advertising boycott racket.

Mr. Musks declaration came after watching a video of Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the Daily Wire, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee during a session titled Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media on Wednesday.

Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket, Mr. Musk wrote on his social media platform. Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.

Mr. Shapiro laid out a slew of facts that illustrate how advertisers boycott conservative news sites.

Were in the midst of a trust crisis in the world of media, which is because so many in the legacy media have lied in order to preserve left-leaning narratives, he said.

The question isnt really why the legacy media have lost Americans trust. We know that answer. The question is why despite that loss of trust the legacy media continue to gain share in the advertising market. And the answer is simple. There is, in fact, an informal pressure system created by Democratic legislators, this White House, legacy media, advertisers, and pseudo-objective brand safety organizations. That system guarantees that advertising dollars flow only to left-wing media brands, Mr. Shapiro said.

The author and podcast host cited the left-wing informational safety group Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which he said sets brand safety standards, objective standards by which advertisers and platforms can supposedly determine just what sort of content ought to be deemed safe for advertising.

Companies targeted by GARM, like the Daily Wire, Breitbart, Fox News, and so many others, reach hundreds of millions of people with opinions and beliefs long established as within the mainstream of American conservative thought. GARM and its members have no respect for the beliefs of those people. They would like them marginalized or squashed. Its time to stand up for the First Amendment in this Congress, he said.

Mr. Shapiro said Congress should investigate the informal and perhaps formal arrangements between censorship cartels like GARM and executive branch agencies. And he said lawmakers should stop engaging in violation of free speech principles.

We all know what these government actors, what some people in this room are doing. Youre using the tacit threat of government action to compel private companies to throttle viewpoints you dont particularly like. The First Amendment was not designed to enable workarounds by elected officials. It was directed at Congress, at you, he said.

And youre abdicating your fundamental duty when you exert pressure on private companies to censor speech, Mr. Shapiro said. Some in this room have been doing just that for years. We in the non-legacy media have been feeling the effects. In the name of the Constitution and the name of democracy, this should stop.

See original here:
Musk Vows To Sue Ad Giant After Bombshell Congressional Hearing on Censorship of Conservative Media - The New York Sun

Today the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) expressed alarm at the cancellation of an exhibition at Craft Alliance, an art organization in St. Louis, MO. Following a complaint from a volunteer, the venue asserted that the project, which draws attention to the plight of Palestinians, was in violation of its policies on diversity, equity, inclusion, violence, and bullying.

While cultural institutions are justified in wanting to create spaces free of violence, discrimination, and harassment, DEI initiatives should not be weaponized to censor art. Concerns about artwork on view, and whether it violates noted policies, should be objectively assessed with consideration of the artists intent and the context in which the work is presented. Otherwise, artists ability to participate in exhibitions will be at the mercy of individuals who may object to their work, no matter how few they are, or how broadly they misinterpret the work.

In addition to adopting a policy upholding artistic freedom, NCAC urges Craft Alliance to establish procedures for receiving and responding to complaints against artworks.

Read NCACs full letter to Craft Alliance here: Click here for a full-screen view:

Read the rest here:
NCAC Decries Exhibition Cancellation at Craft Alliance - Blogging Censorship

Carrie Wolinetz, former Chief of Staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), claimed Thursday that the so-called lab leak theory was not censored during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the Senate Homeland Security hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., questioned Wolinetz about her involvement in censoring online discussions about the theory, which proposed the virus escaped from a Chinese lab. Hawley asked whether she regrets not opposing censorship efforts from her boss, former NIH Director Francis Collins, or from Anthony Fauci.

Do you regret your role in helping censor millions of Americans who were kicked off social media, who were disciplined at work for saying maybe a lab was involved? Hawley asked.

I do not believe I ever had the role that you are describing, Wolinetz said.

Hawley asked directly, Do you regret not opposing the censorship?

I dont believe censorship took place, sir, Wolinetz responded.

Due to Wolinetzs denial of censorship efforts, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., whointroducedlegislation to create a board overseeing federal funding for high-risk life sciences research and ensuring agency accountability,statedthat Wolinetz would not be considered for a position in the proposed independent entity within the Executive Branch.

The FBI and Energy Department have stated theres strong evidence supporting the plausibility of the lab leak theory.

Despite Wolinetzs denial, several instances indicate censorship did, in fact, occur.

Facebook censored reports related to the lab leak theory, labeling it a false claim. The Biden White House requested Facebook to suppress what they termed disinformation, including requests for them to censor private WhatsApp messages, as revealed in a series of emails released in 2023 during the discovery phase of the free speech case Missouri v. Biden.

Since Elon Musks release of the Twitter Files, it was exposed that Twitter (now X) significantly expandedits practice of accepting content moderation requests from the intelligence community, the State Department, and various federal and state agencies during the pandemic.

Along with social media giants, the government colluded to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, blacklist prominent conservative voices, and shadowban conservative content. Additionally, the files revealed both the Trump and Biden administrations pressured Twitter to moderate pandemic-related content according to their preferences.

Records obtained by House Republicans indicate that former Fauci adviser David Morens downplayed the lab leak theory to the media at Faucis behest.

The documents also suggest that you may have used your personal e-mail to avoid transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), potentially intentionally deleted federal records, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, wrote in a letter to Morens.

Arianna Villarreal is a summer intern at The Federalist.

View original post here:
Former NIH Chief Of Staff Denies Lab Leak Theory Censorship Despite Overwhelming Proof - The Federalist

Wikipedia's days may be numbered in Russia, as Moscow's long-standing bid to replace the online encyclopaedia comes to fruition.

A "new version of history is taking shape", on RuWiki, said The Economist, as an expert said that Russia's internet is starting to resemble the heavily censored and closely controlled version in China, where Wikipedia is blocked.

RuWiki is "mostly a straightforward copy" of Wikipedia, but the "most sensitive moments of history" have been "left out or rewritten". It "might be called Orwellian", if only the author "were not himself occasionally censored". The rewriters "hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology", producing mangled rewrites on topics including "LGBT rights, oral sex" and "Soviet history".

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Russian "atrocities" in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022 are "reimagined" as a "Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign" and the execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers in 1940 is rewritten to "cast doubt on the archive documents proving it was done by Soviet secret services".

RuWiki takes a "different direction" from its inspiration, said PC Gamer, portraying a world where the late Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin "just happened to explode in mid-air". The article on the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal "goes to great lengths" to "express Russia's official stance" on the episode.

According to an analysis of the site by an independent Russian media outfit, the vast majority of the new edits are being made during weekday working hours, which might suggest teams of paid writers are performing the edits, rather than the Wikipedia model of volunteer editors.

Wikipedia has "faced trouble" from the Kremlin since the start of the Ukrainian war in 2014 , said The Economist, and is now one of the few surviving independent sources of information in Russia.

Following a state crackdown on online news media after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin gave his approval to new alternative platforms. Things stepped up a gear last year, when "glitzy ads" for RuWiki appeared across Moscow, said The Economist.

"Heavy investment" in the project suggests that Wikipedia's "days are numbered". So, although the Russian internet "isn't yet built like the Chinese one", said Sergei Leschina, a former member of the Russian Wikipedia team, "it's the direction we are heading, and quickly".

Since 2015, Wikipedia has been banned in China and in its place is Baidu Baike, a Chinese-language internet encyclopaedia. Unlike Wikipedia, it complies with the Chinese Communist Party's demands for censorship "so it's easy to see why it's the government's preferred (and homegrown) option", said The Independent.

There has also been censorship of Wikipedia by governments in other countries including Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.

In another example of information censorship, Hamichlol, meaning "the entirety", is an online encyclopaedia for Haredi Jews, which mainly censors any mention of homosexuality, content that contradicts a creationist world view, and behaviours deemed immodest.

To continue reading this article...

Create a free account

Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.

Already have an account? Sign in

Subscribe to The Week

Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.

Cancel or pause at any time.

Already a subscriber to The Week?

Unlimited website access is included with Digital and Print + Digital subscriptions. Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.

Read more:
RuWiki: Russian Wikipedia rival that censors everything from Ukraine to oral sex - The Week

Weekly Newsletter

The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox!

The standards we use to analyze films for appropriateness have evolved in the last century. In the 1900s, there was no such thing as a PG-rated movie or a Viewer Discretion Advised warning. In fact, movies werent categorized at all. But in the early 1900s, movies started to be monitored with a harsh eye that cut vast sections from films before they made it to the theater, and other films were banned entirely.

Movies spread throughout the U.S. during the turn of the century. While many audiences were enthralled by the new means of entertainment, some critics believed that the popularity of films, especially those featuring law-breaking, was responsible for the growing rates of crime. In particular, the governments of several major cities cast the blame for acts of illegality at the feet of film producers.

Chicago was the first city to take action against the film industry. In 1907, the city enacted a local government code requiring film distributors to submit their movies to a board for review. Many cities around the U.S., including New York City, followed suit over the next couple of years. Since each city had different ideas of what was immoral, many different cuts of the same film could be found in theaters around the country.

Chicagos own Film Censor Board, run by the Chicago Police Department, was one of the most notorious of the movie monitors. Throughout its tenure in the film oversight business, which began with its formation in 1907, the board made many strange and arbitrary choices and let itself be corrupted at almost every turn. And yet it laid the groundwork for the movie ratings we know today.

In 1913, Chicago P.D.s Second Deputy Superintendent Major Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser began serving as the citys chief censor. Funkhousers team, which included several ex-convicts (who had been hired in the hope that they could return to being productive members of society), combed through hundreds of films between 1913 and 1918, according to the Chicago Tribune. After viewing the films, they wrote reports to tell filmmakers which sections were inappropriate and needed to be removed. The filmmakers then made the required changes or risked having their film banned from Chicago theaters.

The board used many topics as evidence for banning a film, and Funkhouser quickly gained a reputation for being harsh when it came to content. He even chose to remove dancing from all films. He told the Exhibitors Herald in 1918 that showing dancing was dangerous because it encouraged teenagers to go to dance halls, which were the source of much crime and immorality.

While the dancing restriction seems strange today, some of the things the board flagged would still be censored or age-restricted in modern cinema, including sex, nudity, and large amounts of violence.

However, many of the boards reasons for banning material stand out today. Among their strangest decisions were the restriction of: Awake, America, Awake (protests and political criticism), Marked Cards (a man cheating at cards), Shackled (a woman who was not married), Chains of the Past (a theft), The Ordeal of Rosetta (women in a bar), Selfish Yates (the word hell), The House of Hate (fire), Baree, Son of Kazan (a boxing match), and Smashing Through (a bathroom). Films were also banned for depicting characters who were Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Indigenous, and for showing people of different races interacting.

In addition to implementing harsh restrictions, Funkhouser had also hosted parties at the censorship office, in which the scenes that had been banned from movies were strung together and shown as extended naughty features. This hypocritical practice caused many citizens to file complaints, which led to an investigation by the Chicago Civil Service Commission, according to the Chicago Tribune. After the investigation had concluded, the CCSC filed 41 civil charges against Funkhouser. Amongst the charges were failure of supervision, mismanagement of funds, and conduct unbecoming a police officer.

However, the charges against Funkhouser didnt just relate to his work as chief censor. They also covered the vast corruption within the censorship office. In their filing, the CCSC alleged that Funkhouser had knowingly allowed his employees to commit crimes, while also ordering his employees to stalk public figures such as the Chief of Police.

Funkhouser and the rest of the board denied the accusations, alleging that he had been framed. Funkhouser appeared in court on June 24, 1918. Ultimately, Funkhouser was convicted and dismissed from the office of Chief Censor. He died two years later.

After Funkhousers dismissal, the censorship boards role diminished. The position of chief censor was retired permanently, while the board lost its power to national film review organizations, including the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, established in 1922, which was followed by the Production Code Administration (PCA), established in 1934, which was followed by the introduction of the content warning banner For Mature Audiences Only, which was first used on the poster for Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Supreme Court decision Freedman v. Maryland in 1965 defanged movie censorship laws. In 1968, the PCA was formally retired, and the Code and Rating Administration was established. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. California that obscenitys definition in film was in part dependent on community standards. Thus, the court ruled that films could avoid sweeping censorship as long as they were appropriately categorized and adhered to the rules of a specific rating. These events led to the modern rating system, with the General (G), Parental Guidance Suggested (PG), Parental Guidance Strongly Suggested (PG-13), Restricted (R), and Adults Only (X) categories. The No One 17 and Under Admitted (NC-17) rating replaced the X rating in 1990. Despite the many social and legal changes, Chicagos film censorship board would not be dissolved until 1984.

None of these vast changes in film history might have happened if it werent for the Chicago Police Department and its infamous censorship board.

Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now

See the original post here:
Dirty Cops and Dirty Movies: Chicagos Notorious Film Censors - The Saturday Evening Post