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Washington, D.C. Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL), Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Chairman Chris Smith, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Rep. Keith Self (R-TX), Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) sent an oversight letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding censorship perpetrated or facilitated by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). Last year, after the States Departments Inspector General issued a detailed report chronicling inappropriate actions by the GEC, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee determined it was appropriate to delay reauthorizing the GEC until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved.

Since that time, however, additional news has come to light that suggests the GEC continues to stray from its founding mission through its subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions particularly by established conservative media and individuals. The committee intends to exercise its full legislative and oversight jurisdiction over the GECs lack of transparency.

The GECs founding mission, effectively, was to provide a ready resource for the truth about America and our fight against global terror, particularly ISIS, the members wrote. [But now we] are forced to wonder about the authority by which the GEC justifies its mission creep, and the direction of its current evolutionary trajectory. Congress originally authorized the GEC to support the development and dissemination of fact-based narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at the United States and United States allies and partner nations. While the GEC performs some unquestionably important work, it has also provided social media companies with access to tech applications that detect and either knock down or flag malign-foreign-influence activity, but, according to the FBI, also might accidentally pick up U.S. people[s] information.

The full text of the letter can be found here and below.

Last year, after the States Departments Inspector General issued a detailed report1 chronicling inappropriate actions by the Global Engagement Center (GEC), members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee determined it was appropriate to delay reauthorizing the GEC until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved.

Since that time, however, additional news has come to light that suggests the GEC continues to stray from its founding mission through its subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions particularly by established conservative media and individuals through grants, partnerships, and awards to entities including the Global Disinformation Index, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensics Research Lab, and Moonshot CVE. The GEC also appears to take the official position that populism whether at home or abroad is an affront to democracy and the First Amendment rights of all Americans. For example:

In 2021, the GEC spent $275,000 producing a counter-disinformation video game that programmed audiences to associate citizen critiques of government waste, fraud, and abuse with a social media disinformation campaign.

In 2020, the GEC produced a similar counter-disinformation video game explicitly targeting political misinformation, apparently modeled off the U.S. 2020 presidential election cycle.

In the above counter-disinformation video games, the GEC selected and supported the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, whose recent disinformation research includes:

Targeting U.S. conservatives

Targeting climate change deniers

Targeting vaccine skeptics

Targeting election deniers

The GECs founding mission, effectively, was to provide a ready resource for the truth about America and our fight against global terror, particularly ISIS. We therefore are forced to wonder about the authority by which the GEC justifies its mission creep, and the direction of its current evolutionary trajectory.

Congress originally authorized the GEC to support the development and dissemination of fact- based narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at the United States and United States allies and partner nations. While the GEC performs some unquestionably important work, it has also provided social media companies with access to tech applications that detect and either knock down or flag malign-foreign-influence activity, but, according to the FBI, also might accidentally pick up U.S. people[s] information.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government officials from censoring disfavored speakers and viewpoints. Merely labeling speech misinformation or disinformation does not strip away First Amendment protections, and government officials may not circumvent the First Amendment by inducing, threatening, and/or colluding with private entities to suppress protected speech.

In 2019, Richard Stengel, the very first head of the GEC after its 2016 founding, published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for an effective end to the First Amendment. This fact calls into question not only the founder, but the founding vision of the GEC itself. Stengel went on to say in a televised interview: [T]he basis of the First Amendment, the marketplace of ideas model, is actually not working. Marketplace of ideas is this notion that good ideas will drive out bad ideas. Well, it was kind of a mystical notion coming from Milton and John Stewart Mill and that doesnt really happen anymore Im actually very sympathetic now to the U.S. adopting some versions of hate speech laws in Europe.

Due to the lack of transparency regarding the GEC, and its potential violations of the Constitution, I write to request that you provide the committee the following documents and information no later than May 11, 2023:

All documents and communications between the GEC and any entity with a domestic presence in the United States, including media outlets, mentioning disinformation, disinfo, misinformation, misinfo or malinformation.

All documents and communications regarding the U.S. Department of States contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, or other agreements for assistance covered in section 200.40 Federal financial assistance of the OMB Uniform Grant Guidance to any of the following entities:

Material preservation is essential for Congress to conduct a comprehensive fact-finding investigation into actions by the GEC and grantees in stifling, censoring, and silencing conservative speech through the guise of labeling it as misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.

More specifically, this request should also be construed as an instruction to preserve all documents, communications, and other information, including electronic information and metadata, that is or may be potentially responsive to this congressional inquiry. This includes electronic messages about the determined topic that are sent using official and personal accounts or drives, including records created using text messages, phone-based messaging applications, or encryption software. For purposes of this request, preserve includes taking reasonable steps to prevent the partial or full destruction, alteration, deletion, shredding, wiping, relocation, migration, theft, mutilation, reckless, or negligent handling of responsive documents, communications, and information that could render the information incomplete or inaccessible.

Please notify all relevant current and former employees, colleagues, officials, contractors, subcontractors, and consultants who may have worked on documents, communications, or information that is or would be potentially responsive to this congressional inquiry. Thank you for your cooperation in this critical oversight matter.

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Originally posted here:
McCaul, HFAC Members Demand Answers on GEC's Role in ... - House Foreign Affairs Committee

The Supreme Court responded by charging him with contempt, but he refused to apologize, saying in an affidavit: The suggestion that my tweets could shake the foundation of the most powerful court in the world is an overestimation of my abilities.

As a comedian, Kamras work is at risk from the new rules. Other comics have been targeted because of their work. In February 2021, Munawar Faruquiwas arrested in Madhya Pradesh for a joke hed told more than a year before, after a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party accused him of harming religious sentiments.

Kamra points out that the rules could easily be used against satire on the internet. In March, he tweeted a picture of Prime Minister Modi delivering a speech in parliament with several lawmakers listening. The face of billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani had been photoshopped onto all of the lawmakers. Adani has been accused of benefiting from his proximity to Modi.

Comedy is about satire and a bit of exaggeration, Kamra says. But with the new IT rules, I stand the risk of being deplatformed retrospectively by finding three things I said satirically, claiming them to be fake.

But he adds that his legal challenge isnt about him. This is bigger than any one profession. It will affect everyone, he says.

He points to wide discrepancies between the official account of Covids impact on the country and the assessment of international agencies. The WHO has said that Covid deaths in India were about 10 times more than the official count. Anybody even referring to that could be labeled a fake news peddler, and it would have to be taken down.

In April 2021, Indias most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was ravaged by a second wave of Covid-19 and a severe shortage of oxygen in hospitals. The state government denied there was a problem. Amidst this unfolding crisis, one man tweeted an SOS call for oxygen to save his dying grandfather. The authorities in the state charged him with rumor-mongering and causing panic.

Experts believe the amendments to Indias IT rules would enable more of this kind of repression, under a government that has already extended its powers over the internet, forcing social media platforms to remove critical voices and using emergency powers tocensor a BBC documentary critical of Modi.

Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital liberties organization, says the social media team of Modis Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hasitself freely spread misinformation about political opponents and critics, while reporters going to the ground and bringing out the inconvenient truth have faced consequences.

Waghre says the lack of clarity on what constitutes fake news makes matters even worse. Looking at the same data set, it is possible that two people can arrive at different conclusions, he adds. Just because your interpretation of that data set is different to that of the governments doesnt make it fake news. If the government is putting itself in a position to fact-check information about itself, the first likely misuse of it would be against information that is inconvenient to the government.

Go here to see the original:
The Comedian Taking on India's New Censorship Law - WIRED

When governments come knocking, Twitter is glad to censor. Under Elon Musk, the bird company is honoring most government demands to take down tweets or hand over users data, according to data from Lumen and a new report from our friends at Rest of World.

It wasnt like this before. Publicly available records suggest that the company is fully complying with 80% of government requests, in contrast to the pre-Musk era, when that number hovered around 50%. This was thanks in part to policy staffers who worked hard to figure out when government demands were really legitimate and when they were overblown. But Musk fired most of the people doing this work shortly after taking the helm. And now people around the world are feeling the consequences.

More on this below.

With the fake news bill looming, Brazil blocked Telegram over neo-Nazi channels.

Brazils Congress is poised to vote on a controversial, Bolsonaro-era anti-fake news bill that would require big tech platforms to proactively remove illegal content, curb mass messaging by politicians and make other changes that would give the government more leverage when dealing with foreign tech powers. Silicon Valley wants none of it Google even used its quasi-monopolistic online presence to push its agenda in Brazil and some free expression advocates are concerned too.

As if to offer a case in point, major internet providers in Brazil blocked Telegram on April 26, over the Dubai-based companys refusal to hand over information about neo-Nazi activity on the platform. Police had requested data about two groups they suspect used Telegram to encourage a series of violent attacks at schools in Brazil in recent months. Telegram says the data cant be recovered. The block on Telegram was lifted on May 2, but the company is still racking up fines to the order of $200,000 per day. For Telegrams part, the company says it has never complied with a single data request from a government or anyone else. If the fake news bill passes, this may have to change, or Telegram may need to say, bye bye, Brazil.

African content moderators are uniting. A coalition of workers who clean up troublesome content for some of the worlds largest internet platforms Meta, ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and OpenAI voted to form the African Content Moderators Union this week. This is the latest development coming out of legal battles in Kenyan courts over the rights of content moderation workers who are typically hired by third-party companies Sama and Majorel are two of the biggest players in Nairobi that offer low pay and next to no benefits. Happy May Day, folks.

So now we know: Twitter is taking governments at their word and removing most of the tweets they say are illegal and maybe some that just rub government officials the wrong way. Meanwhile, emerging evidence shows that the company is less interested than ever in proactively removing content that violates its own policies, not to mention content that violates local laws. Im thinking here about all the violent, hateful and otherwise nasty stuff that third-party content moderators have to deal with. At least the ones in Kenya might have union representation soon.

I asked Turkish internet law scholar Yaman Akdeniz about it this week Turkey has made more censorship demands of Twitter than almost any other country on earth. Akdeniz noted that in the past, it was clear that the company ignored most requests from Turkey. I am not sure if this will be the case with the Musk administration, he said. The data from Lumen certainly suggests that it wont.

He described how Turkish authorities restricted access to Twitter following the earthquake earlier this year. The response from Twitter was swift. There was an immediate meeting, he said, and the ban was lifted within hours.

I can only speculate what was promised in that meeting, he said. More tweets will be withheld and more accounts will be suspended, that is for sure. And none of this bodes well for national elections, which are coming up on May 14. Twitter can easily become the long arm of the law enforcement agencies in Turkey if AKP wins, Akdeniz warned.

India was also at the top of the list of governments asking the company to take down tweets. In March, we wrote about Twitters willingness to censor tweets about the police search for a Sikh secessionist preacher in Punjab. The episode made it look as if the company was glad to do whatever the Indian state or federal authorities asked, including suspending the account of a member of the state assembly.

If government officials can simply lean on Twitter to silence not only their critics in the public sphere but also their political opponents, the consequences for public discourse and democracy will be pretty severe.

Censor when governments ask, but let the rest flow as it will. What could go wrong?

Visit link:
From Turkey to India, Twitter offers censorship on demand - Coda Story

Freedom of expression in Americaespecially the use of language to imprint thoughts and ideas upon a pagehas always been under assault. The removal from classrooms and school libraries of material deemed injurious to young minds is nothing new, but its recent resurgence as promulgated by many of the school and library boards of today reminds us that the freedom to share ideas via the tools of language has never been inviolate. The censorship of booksthis most venerable manifestation of thought preservation in Americacan undergo periodic, politically-engineered recrudescence just when you least expect it.

Or, perhaps, when you do expect it, given the full-stop cultural clashes now insulting the country.

Upon the publication by Dzanc Books of the twentieth-anniversary special edition of my novel Ella Minnow Pea this month, a friend of mine noted sadly, Its like America has become the island of Nollop.

The nation of Nollop, dolloped off the coast of South Carolina (which was founded by former American slaves and abolitionists in the nineteenth century), had always maintained a special, adulatory relationship with the English language. They revered it, elevated it, and then, with bewildering capriciousness, decided to destroy it, through misguided attendance by island leaders to a dead mans perceived postmortem wishes.

The dead man was, significantly, one Nevin Nollop, purported author of the familiar pangram The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. On the island of Nollop, the fox stopped jumping, and the lazy dog, lapsed right into canine coma.

Ella Minnow Pea was intended as a cautionary tale about the fragility of language and the risks attached to assuming that the use of language as a public tool and commodity is an inalienable human birthright. The pen, as it has been famously put, is mightier than the sword. Which means that its far more effective for oppressive forces to go after the pen.

The publication of my novel about Miss Minnow Pea and her fight against those who would eviscerate language through the progressive outlawing of letters of the alphabet put Ella and her fellow equally-beleaguered Nollopians on a two-decade-long journey. She found her way to the shelves of bookstores and libraries throughout the world, was discussed in book clubs and chat rooms and literary forums, was used as clues in both the New York Times and the New Yorker crossword puzzles, and even wound up in stage-musical adaptation as LMNOP (the muzical!).

For a book that never made the New York Times bestseller list, Ella slipped into the zeitgeistian cultural consciousness of America through the backdoor. Which put me as the books author in the interesting position of having to introduce Ella to those who had still never heard of it, while at the same time hearing it lauded by others as their favorite novel.

There were some who told me, Of course I know Ella Minnow Pea. I had to write a paper on it for one of my high school English classes. Those folks are now the parents of kids whose own English teachers have tucked the novel right into their own classroom curriculum. (There are now student study guides written for Ella, which have taught the books author a thing or two he didnt know about his own novel.)

Ella Minnow Pea isnt alone in addressing the struggle to oppose those who seek to outlaw or, at the very least, put ludicrous fetters on language. On the isle of Nollop, its citizens are forbidden, under heavy penalty, to use, first, the letter Z, then Q, then J, then, significantly, the letter D. And the illicitabetical laws keep piling up to a ridiculous extreme.

Is this any different from Vladimir Putins directive to throw people in jail for the crime of using the word war to describe his countrys invasion of Ukraine? In some parts of America, a man is allowed to read a story to children in a public space, but only if he doesnt dress as a woman; then the words that come out of his mouth become bizarrely suspect.

Coincident to Ella getting early attention after its original hardback publication in 2001, a community outside of Kansas City, Missouri, decided to publish its list of books that should be removed from local school libraries. (Note: should, not will. This is otherwise known as the good old days.)

Lest one believe that this particular community didnt recognize the contrasting existence of safe and non-controversial literature when they saw it, Ella was put on a second list of books of which they approvedthis novel of mine about censorship and book banning. In this town, located in suburban middle-America in the year 2001, irony took a powder.

In my novel, the Nollopian Library is eventually shut down and boarded up, since, with the passage of anti-alphabet laws, its shelves are now filled with books that contain the illegal letters. Could the shutting down of libraries actually happen in todays America? Ask members of the community in Texas who have recently expressed their desire to do just that.

I am sure there are those who wonder what its like to write a book that suddenly becomes topically relevant. But, of course, Id have to correct them: my novel hasnt stumbled inadvertently into political pertinence. Destroying the ability of members of our species to express themselves through language, through art, through the discourse that flows from untrammeled freedom of thought isnt without historic precedent. Its antecedents stretch back through the ages.

But today, the weapons are different, or at least differently configured, and, interestingly, freedom of thought and expressionespecially through the employment of the many linguistic riches to be found in the gleaming treasure chest that is the English languagedoesnt fall neatly and conveniently on one side of the political and ideological spectrum, as those who decry excessive attendance to political correctness will tell you.

Ella Minnow Pea, Im happy to report, has found a timeless place in the literary canon, and Im equally happy to have my name attached to it. But my quirky novel about letters of the alphabet which literally (and literally!) disappear from its pages does find itself invoked in timely moments, just like those were living through today. If Im lucky, its relevancewhether advertent or inadvertentwill keep it on the shelves far into the future.

Which, of course, is a good thing. But it is also an indication that fighting for the ability to use the tools of language without government intrusion is a cause that will never be put out to pasture.

As the son of two visual artists, Im excited that Dzanc Books has chosen in this special commemorative edition to include illustrations by the very talented Brittany Worsham. And Ella and her cousin Tassie are pleased to see their story illuminated upon crisp new pages. I would imagine that at this very moment, one cousin is writing to the other, using all the letters of the alphabet, not taking a single one of them for granted.

______________________________

Ella Minnow Pea: 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition by Mark Dunn is available via Dzanc.

See the article here:
On Shuttered Libraries, Censorship, the Threat of Book Bans - Literary Hub

Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow

Gaukur lfarsson's documentary Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow (part of Toronto's Hot Docs festival), raises questions about art, politics in censorship as it chronicles the creation of artist Ragnar Kjartansson retrospective in a Moscow museum.

Back in 2021, Kjartansson was given the opportunity to open a massive retrospective at the GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow, a renovated power plant owned by a Russian oligarch.

The retrospective included recreations of episodes of the U.S. soap opera Santa Barbara, which had been a massive hit in Russia.

We've known of each other for a long time and we have a group of friends that are the same group of friends, filmmaker lfarsson told Yahoo Canada about creating a documentary around Kjartansson's work. A very good friend of mine told me about what Ragnar was going to do in Moscow.

I didn't really understand the scope of what he was going to be doing and later, maybe a week later, I spoke to him on the phone. ... Then he started talking to me about [Santa Barbara], and what he was going to be doing in Russia. Even then, after a long conversation on the phone, I didn't really understand, he just told me that he was going to recreate 99 episodes of Santa Barbara.

While it ended up being the basis of his film, lfarsson had an interesting initial response to this retrospective.

My first reaction was, this is completely ridiculous, lfarsson said. But this is also completely brilliant.

I didn't understand the politics about it firsthand. He kind of gave me many of the layers and I asked him if we could come and do a documentary on this. He was very willing to let us do it.

Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow

Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow shows individuals, and Kjartansson himself, questioning the ethics around showing this work in a Russian museum. Even equating the move to people going to consume art in museums funded by the Sackler family.

Story continues

My parents were also socialists so I completely identify with being passionate about Russia, lfarsson said. As a young man reading a lot of Russian literature, I always wanted to go and going there, I was completely amazed by how amazing Moscow is, and the people there are also beautiful people.

He really wanted to go there. This was a part of him as an artist. The music and the literature from Russia is, I think there's no country that compares. So that's part of it I really understand.

But lfarsson identifies that the "heartbreaking" thing is how beautiful the city was, but had so much political turmoil.

When I started with this, I had a hunch that because of where he was going, things could happen, lfarsson said. After the invasion, obviously just completely took a U-turn, in a sense.

Kjartansson quickly had to face the reality that Putin's power will impact his art, including a visit from Putin himself. When Putin invaded Ukraine, that's when the reality sets in that Kjartansson art can't exist in what he calls a "full-blown fascist state."

For lfarsson, he hopes that Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow, provides an opportunity for people to think more about the threat of censorship.

I was reading in the Canadian newspapers yesterday about this Canadian poet, [Rupi Kaur who wrote 'Milk and Honey,'] lfarsson recalled. She's been banned [in the] United States. There are so many levels of censorship.

Continue reading here:
'Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow': Art, censorship and Russia's war on Ukraine - Yahoo News Canada