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The Pentagon updated its rules for working with filmmakers after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language into the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill. Cruz has pushed back on Beijings censorship of films.

What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists? he said in a floor speech at the time.

According to a new Defense Department document obtained by POLITICO, filmmakers who want the U.S. military to help with their projects must now pledge that they wont let Beijing alter those films.

The DOD will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the Peoples Republic of China to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the Peoples Republic of China, the document reads.

Hollywood and the Defense Department have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for decades. The Pentagon has allowed filmmakers to shoot their projects on military bases, Navy ships, or other locations, and weighs in on filmmaking processes. The military benefits from positive portrayals of service members, and moviemakers benefit from authentic settings and technical expertise.

But as Chinas ruling Communist Party has developed increasingly advanced censorship and surveillance tools, countless American companies including Hollywood studios have sought to comply with Beijings demands while attempting to dodge stateside pushback.

Chinese government censors can be unpredictable and demanding. They pushed the producers of Spider-man: No Way Home to remove the Statue of Liberty, according to Puck. And they wanted the filmmakers of Lightyear to cut a short same-sex kiss, according to CNN. Neither of the studios complied, and neither film was released in mainland China.

In its new rule, the department will also weigh any verifiable information from people who arent connected to the production who indicate that the film could comply with a censorship demand.

Once DOD greenlights cooperation on a project, the agency assigns an officer to work with the filmmakers. From now on, the production company must notify that person in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.

Cruz said he was pleased with the new rule.

The Chinese Communist Party spends billions on propaganda and censorship, he said. For years Hollywood helped them by censoring movies so they could be screened in China, while still working with the U.S. government to get those very same movies developed.

This new guidance implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act will force studios to choose one or the other, and Im cautiously optimistic that theyll make the right choice and reject Chinas blackmailing.

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Pentagon to filmmakers: We won't help you if you kowtow To China - POLITICO

Last year, Twitter sued India over orders to block content within the country, saying the government had applied its 2021 IT laws "arbitrarily and disproportionately." Now, India's Karnataka High Court has dismissed the plea, with a judge saying Twitter had failed to explain why it delayed complying with the new laws in the first place, TechCrunch has reported. The court also imposed a 5 million rupee ($61,000 fine) on the Elon Musk-owned firm.

"Your client (Twitter) was given notices and your client did not comply. Punishment for non-compliance is seven years imprisonment and unlimited fine. That also did not deter your client," the judge told Twitter's legal representation. "So you have not given any reason why you delayed compliance, more than a year of delay then all of sudden you comply and approach the Court. You are not a farmer but a billon dollar company."

Twitters relationship with India was fraught for much of 2021. In February, the government threatened to jail Twitter employees unless the company removed content related to protests by farmers held that year. Shortly after that, India ordered Twitter to pull tweets criticizing the countrys response to the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, the government ordered Twitter to block tweets from Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that claimed India was an example of a country where freedom of the press is on the decline.

Those incidents put Twitter in a compromising situation. It either had to comply with government orders to block content (and face censorship criticism inside and outside the country), or ignore them and risk losing its legal immunity. In August, it complied with the orders and took down content as ordered.

The court order follows recent comments from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, saying that India threatened to raid employees homes if it didn't comply with orders to remove posts and accounts. In a tweet, India's deputy minister for information technique called that "an outright lie" saying Twitter was "in non-compliance with the law."

Twitter filed the suit around the same time that Elon Musk started trying to wiggle out of buying Twitter. Since then, Twitter has often complied with government takedown requests most recently in Turkey, where it limited access to some tweets ahead of a tightly contested election won by incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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Twitter's lawsuit over censorship in India has been dismissed - Engadget

The Barbie movie was meant to be for everyone. If you love Barbie, this movie is for you, the trailer for Warner Bros. summer blockbuster declares. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.

But with just weeks before the star-studded film about the titular doll was set to hit theaters, some in Southeast Asia have decided that its not for them.

It was announced in Vietnam on Monday that the cinematic distribution of Barbie would be banned over the display of a map that includes the nine-dash line, a disputed maritime border that China has controversially used to lay claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, even though it was rejected in 2016 by an international tribunal.

Authorities in the Philippines, also troubled by the promotion of the nine-dash line, are currently deliberating whether or not to permit the release of the film. The movie is fiction, and so is the nine-dash line. At the minimum, our cinemas should include an explicit disclaimer that the nine-dash line is a figment of Chinas imagination, Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros said Tuesday.

Photograph by Carlota Guerrero for TIME

Read More: How Barbie Came to Life

The context of the alleged depiction of the nine-dash line in the new Barbie movie is unclear. But its not the first time this kind of censorship has occurred over similar concerns.

Last year, the Philippines and Vietnam both banned screenings of Sonys action-adventure flick Uncharted because of a brief scene depicting the contentious nine-dash line. And in 2019, both the Philippines and Malaysiaanother country that contests Chinas territorial claims to the waterwaystopped the domestic distribution of the DreamWorks animated movie Abominable after producers declined a request to remove a scene showing the nine-dash line. (In Vietnam, Abominable had already been out in cinemas for more than a week before censors pulled it and fined the films distributor.) In 2018, a second-long clip, which featured a designer handbag with a map that showed the South China Seas islands under Chinas control, was cut from Crazy Rich Asians screenings in Vietnam.

Its not just the big screen thats under scrutiny. In 2021, officials in the Philippines ordered Netflix to take down select episodes of Australian spy drama Pine Gap due to scenes containing the nine-dash line, while Vietnam demanded the entire series be removed from the streamer.

The repeated instances of the same issue raise questions about Hollywoods relationship with China, which commands a 1.4 billion-person market. China has been critical to the global box office success of many contemporary films, and studios have been known to try to appease Beijings own stringent censors in an effort to not be shut out.

Recently, however, Hollywood studios, facing pushback for their acquiescence, have started to stand up to China. The trailer from Tom Cruises 2022 movie Top Gun: Maverick initially removed Taiwanese and Japanese flags to placate China, but following a public backlash, the flags reappeared in the film.

A U.S. Defense Department memo obtained by POLITICO last week said that filmmakers wont receive support from the Pentagonwhich typically assists on movies and shows that portray the military or require filming on basesif they alter their productions to comply with Chinese censorship demands.

The growing resistance from Southeast Asian states to even blink-and-youll-miss-it flashes of subtle political propaganda in popular culture demonstrates a heightened vigilance against Chinese influence, says Richard Heydarian, a political analyst and senior lecturer in Asian affairs at the University of the Philippines. Outright bans come at a price: viewers excited to see much anticipated Hollywood blockbusters miss out, and it thrusts the censoring countries into the spotlight for what Heydarian says could be perceived as petty oversensitivity.

But getting attention is the point. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Heydarian says. Vietnam is reminding the world that Chinese state propaganda should have no place in supposedly innocuous productions like Barbie movies. It just doesnt make sense.

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Vietnam Bans Barbie: What to Know About Hollywoods Nine-Dash ... - TIME

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX and so many other projects, is very concerned about censorship. He said as much in a conversation with Bill Maher, kinder than usual to his guest, on Real Time (on HBO Max). Musk claims to be a centrist, but leans Republican, and Maher is openly a Democrat, yet both agree in warning of left-wing activism known as woke, a derogatory term against those who hand out sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or neo-colonial labels to those they consider to be the enemies of their causes.

Musk claims to be a fundamentalist of free speech. Thats why he dismantled Twitters moderation teams, which contained (without great success) hate messages, lies or incitements to violence. Trolls of all kinds - conspiracyists, supremacists, lynchers, misogynists - returned to the jungle of the little blue bird. However, Musk failed to mention that the woke protest, however annoying it may be to him, is also protected by freedom of speech.

One can share the fear that in the name of just causes there is an attempt to constrain the public debate, especially in universities, the supposed temples of free thought. This is what they call cancel culture. But nothing really represses the extreme rhetoric, which can be heard everywhere. While the most conservative right wing, in the U.S. states it controls, with Florida at the head, does impose gags. Especially in education: they prohibit any content on sexuality or gender; they prevent explaining the racist past of the country; they have banned books in libraries.

A high school principal in Florida was forced to resign for showing 11 and 12 year-old students Michelangelos David. Some parents found it too obscene: perhaps there were more open minds in the Renaissance. The Republicans anti-woke laws, with that explicit name they present them with, go much further in their censorious rage than the demonized woke crowd ever went.

The person who cancels like nobody else, even Disney, is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, one of the few Republican alternatives to Donald Trump for the nomination in 2024. The new reactionaries claim to fight woke censorship but wherever they rule, they impose their old repression. As would their emulators on this side of the Atlantic.

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The censorship that alarms Elon Musk does not include the repression practiced by Ron DeSantis - EL PAS USA

Index on Censorship is deeply alarmed by the reports that the Hong Kong Police Force have issued arrest warrants for eight pro-democracy activists living in exile in the UK, USA and Australia. According to the police force, all those targeted are alleged to have continued to commit offences under the Hong Kong National Security Law that seriously endanger national security, including incitement to secession, subversion, incitement to subversion and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. Index has long condemned the National Security Law as it has fundamentally criminalised dissent and paralysed pro-independence and pro-democracy advocates in the city.

Index further condemns the reward offered by the Hong Kong authorities of HK$1 million (100,581) for information leading to their capture. By offering financial incentives to members of the public to report on these pro-democracy activists, the authorities are trying to turn society against itself to isolate those who have spoken out against Chinas attack on human rights. This is especially damaging for those living in exile. Through the Banned By Beijing project, Index has documented how Chinese authorities both in Hong Kong and mainland China have threatened those who have fled to Europe, targeting their ability to work, express themselves, seek education, or continue advocating for human rights back home in China.

The extraterritorial reach of the National Security Law explicitly targets those who have fled due to their work defending democracy. The US Government highlighted this specific issue in their statement responding to the warrants, stating that the extraterritorial application of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law is a dangerous precedent that threatens the human rights and fundamental freedoms of people all over the world. All states must ensure they can respond robustly to all threats of transnational repression. This was highlighted in an exhibition launched by Index last week in London to mark the third anniversary of the enactment of Hong Kongs National Security Law, which featured Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian artist and human rights defender; Lumli Lumlong, a husband and wife painting duo; and leading Uyghur campaigner, Rahima Mahmut.

All countries must stand firm to their commitment to ensure that all those targeted by these warrants and the National Security Law are protected from transnational threats wherever they are.

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The international community must resist Hong Kongs attempts to ... - Index on Censorship