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Modern authoritarian regimes dont attempt total, absolute control. Their censorship is more selective and calibrated and thus more resilient.

By: Cherian George and Sonny Liew

The political cartoon is the art form of our deeply troubled world; a chimera of journalism, art, and satire that is elemental to political speech. Cartoons dont tell secrets or move markets, yet as Cherian George and Sonny Liew show in Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship, cartoonists have been harassed, sued, fired, jailed, attacked, and assassinated for their work.

As drawn commentary on current events, the existence and proliferation of political cartoons provides a useful indicator of a societys state of democratic freedom: It shows that the system requires powerful individuals and institutions to tolerate dissent from the weak; and that the public is used to freewheeling, provocative debate. But that is not the norm. In most countries, political cartoonists the guerrillas of the media are vulnerable to multiple and varied threats. In the excerpt that follows, George and Liew examine China and Turkey to illustrate that while totalitarianism may be out of style, what remains is no less insidious.

Censorship is the power to make 2 + 2 equal 5. Or 3. Or whatever people in power say it is.

You still think there are four. You must try Harder! So said George Orwell in his classic, 1984, which he wrote in the 1940s. Horrified by Stalins Soviet Union and Hitlers Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies. Zero tolerance for dissent. Erasure of inconvenient data. Even the wrong thoughts are against law Thoughtcrime.

But this may not be how we should think about 21st-century despots. At least, not the clever ones. As Antonio Gramsci understood, rules achieve hegemonic domination when they are able to cloak their coercion with the consent of the ruled.

Hannah Arendt, a close observer of totalitarian regimes, realized that power needs legitimacy, which is destroyed when violence is overused.

In the 1980s, Mikls Haraszti in communist Hungary observed that arts censorship in a mature one-party state was quite different from the terror of Stalinism. Stalinism was paranoid, hard, and military-like. It required complete consensus, and loud loyalty Neutrality is treason; ambiguity is betrayal. Art was forced into a propaganda role.

Post-Stalinist regimes were more confident, and therefore softer. They expanded the boundaries of the permissible. Make no mistake modern authoritarians havent undergone a philosophical conversion to liberal values. They still use brutal methods. But paradoxically, if we overestimate their use of fear and force, we underestimate their power and resilience.

China the worlds longest-running communist state has swung between hard and soft censorship. Mao Zedongs cultural revolution (19661976) was a period of extreme, uncompromising mind control. The partys insistence on ideological purity impoverished China, even as other low-income countries were courting investors and improving living standards. After Maos death in 1976, his successors changed course dramatically.

The party blamed the excesses of the cultural revolution on a small faction, led by the so-called Gang of Four (including Maos widow Jiang Qing). Suddenly, caricatures of the Gang of Four, which had to be sketched in secret under Mao, were being celebrated in exhibitions and the press.

In 1979, Peoples Daily, the partys official daily newspaper, even launched a twice-monthly supplement, Satire and Humor, to provide an outlet for artists pent-up desire to lampoon the Gang of Four.

But how deep were these reforms?

In his first public work in 20 years, artist Liao Bingxiong portrayed himself frozen with caution when suddenly freed of the strictures of the cultural revolution. It expressed how traumatized many Chinese felt. He was probably right to be skeptical. The party was still exploiting art for propaganda purposes. It still set political limits on artistic expression.

Nevertheless, the 1980s did see the opportunities for cartoonists expand dramatically. Under Dent Xiaoping, communist ideology took a back seat to modernization and the market. The pendulum swung back after 2012, when Xi Jinping took over the party. He brought in a renewed emphasis on ideological purity, hints of a personality cult, and more repression of dissent.

The comparison to Mao is inevitable.

In his painting, Garden of Plenty, Shanghai-based artist Liu Dahong depicts Xi Jinping as a prodigal son in Maos embrace. Xi couldnt revert fully to cultural mode even if he wanted today. Todays Chinese are already too well-educated, exposed, and materially well-off to allow it.

The country is too vast and populous. The media are too plentiful, and authority is too decentralized to allow Mao-style total control.

By necessity and design, Chinas censorship efforts are porous, regularly bypassed without punishment, says political scientist Margaret Roberts. Modern Chinese censorship uses a blend of fear, friction, and flooding, she writes.

Fear of punishment works on most bosses of news media outlets and internet platforms. If they slip up and allow the wrong content to reach the public, they may not be sent off to do hard labor in a detention camp, but they could be demoted and their day docked a big setback in a highly competitive and unequal society where most people are desperate to get ahead.

Opinion leaders like journalists and artists are also subject to fear-inducing threats. The first tool is not terror, but tea. It is less publicly visible than an arrest. Wang Liming (known as Rebel Pepper) got an invitation to tea after he drew a cartoon supporting independent candidates for local peoples congresses, challenging the partys tight supervision of these elections. A private conversation over tea can intimidate without backfiring the way public punishment does. But it didnt work on Wang.

The next meeting was at a police station. (Tea was also served.) It still didnt work. When face-to-face intimidation fails to silence, the state ratchets up the pressure on critics, with character assassination and online harassment.

Wang received this treatment in 2014, when he visited Japan on a business trip and bogged about his positive impressions. He questioned the Chinese governments vilification of its neighbors. The authorities seized the opening to play the nationalism card.

People.cn, a widely read news portal owned by the party organ, Peoples Daily, ran an article calling him a Japanese-worshipping traitor. He knew he could not return to China. He now lives in the United States, working as a cartoonist for Voice of America.

Friction is about making it harder and less convenient to access unapproved material. The Chinese internet is a walled garden. Out: Foreign social media platforms, search engines, news media, human rights sites.

An army of human censors as well as automated programs trawl the internet for material that crosses the red lines, following directives from the party. Chinas gateway to the global internet is maintained by nine state-run operators. Chinese netizens can use circumvention tools like virtual private networks (VPNs) to access banned sites, but this is getting harder.

In 2009, censors played a long cat-and-mouse game with the grass mud horse, a meme created by Chinese netizens to protest internet controls. Its name in Chinese sounds like fuck your mother. Another pun that censors didnt appreciate was river crab, which sounds like harmony a government euphemism for control.

Although the Chinese internet is walled off, it cant be totally controlled.

Flooding is about filling the internet and other media with stuff that dilutes and distracts from the prohibited content.

Flooding plays to the governments strengths. The communist party of China cant always match the wit of a clever cartoonist. But it can overwhelm him with sheer numbers. The Chinese authorities are able to create and post around 1.2 million social media comments a day, thanks to an army of human trolls amplified by human-impersonating robots or bots.

This could include government propaganda or even faked, low-quality dissent as well as totally irrelevant posts to simply change the subject, all of which makes it harder to keep track of the debate and find authentic material. The strategy works because peoples attention is in shorter supply than information.

The shifting red lines of Chinese censorship are reflected in the career of Kuang Biao, one of Chinas most famous political cartoonists. Kuang is a native of Guangdong Province, whose coastal cities were among the first to benefit from Dengs economic reforms.

The Guangdong model was associated with more freedom for civil society, trade unions, and media. Kuangs career as a newspaper cartoonist began at the commercially-oriented New Express, which he joined in 1999. In 2007, he was recruited by another commercial paper, Southern Metropolis Daily.

Though party-owned, Southern Metropolis Daily and Southern Weekend were not obliged to parrot the party line. Although of lower official rank than the party organ, their profitability and popularity gave them prestige and clout. They were among the most independent newspapers in China. They were able to publish groundbreaking investigative reports and critical commentaries.

And they gave Kuang the chance to publish cartoons that would not have appeared in a party newspaper. He also took advantage of social media, opening a Weibo account in 2009. This allowed him to publish cartoons that his newspaper would not.

Online, he was free of his editors restraints. But, ironically, being free to post his work publicly also exposed him to more personal risk. Thus, in 2010, his employer fined and demoted him after he posted a cartoon protesting the blacklisting of Chang Ping, one of Chinas most outspoken journalists.

Chang had been a senior editor at Southern Weekend but was progressively sidelined. The Propaganda Department later ordered media to stop carrying the writers articles. Kuang insisted on testing the limits, making him a regular target for censorship. Many of his online cartoons were short-lived. Social media platforms would remove each one as soon as they realized that they crossed a line.

After Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, things began to change at the Southern Media Group and in Chinese journalism generally. Xi wasnt the only factor that spelled the end of what, in hindsight at least, appears like a golden age for political cartooning and independent journalism.

Commercially-oriented media started suffering financially, as advertising rapidly moved online. Faced with stagnating salaries, many of the best journalists moved to other occupations. Commercial newspapers disappearing profits meant that the balance of power in media groups shifted back to the party outlets.

Party bosses were no longer tolerant of their commercial newspapers feisty journalism. By 2013, Kuang Biaos editors were routinely refusing to publish his cartoons. After 14 years with the partys commercial newspapers, he quit.

He refused to do commissioned work. In communist China, creating art for clients, whether state or corporate, can only compromise his independence, he says. Have the security officials met him for tea?

In two hours, not once does he mention the name Xi Jinping. Similarly, the political cartoons he posts online nowadays are subtle and abstract. The dragon must hide his tail.

Unlike China, Turkey is not a one-party state; it has plenty of privately owned media, and a rich, uninterrupted history of satirical cartooning. But, like China, its a showcase for modern authoritarian censorship.

Recep Tayyip Erdoans AKP government came to power in 2002. In its first term, it introduced some liberalizing reforms, but after 2007 it backslid dramatically.

There was a big increase in internet censorship, with tens of thousands of sites blocked. After a military faction attempted a coup in 2016 the government launched a massive crackdown on perceived opponents. In the following months, more than 150 media outlets were closed. Since the failed coup, Turkey has been among the worlds top jailers of journalists.

Jailed journalists include Musa Kart, cartoonist and board member of Turkeys oldest independent newspaper, Cumhuriyet. Musa Kart and his colleagues were imprisoned for allegedly using Cumhuriyet to support terrorist organizations, including the Glenist Movement (FET) behind the 2016 coup. One piece of evidence the state produced against him was that he had called a travel agency suspected of having FET links.

The charges were filed in the run-up to the April 2017 referendum to turn the country from a parliamentary to a presidential republic, which would greatly enhance Erdoans powers. The timing was no coincidence, Kart told interviewers.

In 2014, Kart had drawn fire for a cartoon about a major corruption scandal. It shows a hologram of Erdoan looking the other way while a robber says, No rush, our watchman is a hologram. The cartoon was inspired by Erdoans use of this technology to make a virtual appearance at a campaign rally a few days earlier.

The government tried to imprison Kart for this cartoon, but the court dismissed the charges. The 2016 coup attempt gave Erdoan carte blanche to jail critics like Kart.

The spectacle of overt repression serves as a warning to others. Equally powerful, though, are economic carrots and sticks that have been used to discipline the media.

Turkey is a textbook case of what has been called Media Capture. Although the country has never enjoyed high levels of press freedom, there were always newspapers highly critical of the government of the day. The AKP has been more successful than previous Turkish governments in taming the press.

Paradoxically, it has been helped by its privatization program. Big projects in infrastructure, energy, and other sectors were opened up for tender. Publishers joined the feeding frenzy, becoming diversified conglomerates. Just like in China, such pro-market reforms strengthened the media at first; but eventually the profit orientation became a liability for journalistic independence.

Media owners interests in sectors such as mining, energy, construction, and tourism made them reliant on government licensing, contracts, and subsidies, thus exposing them to political blackmail.

Take, for example, the influential newspapers Milliyet and Hrriyet, which were owned by the Dogan Group. Instead of attacking them head-on, the government targeted another Dogan company, the fuel retailer Petrol Ofisi. Petrol Ofisi was slapped with a $2.5 billion fine for alleged tax offenses. Dogan gave up, selling first Milliyet (in 2009) and then Hrriyet and other media assets (in 2011) to Demiroren Holdings, a pro-AKP conglomerate.

Another major paper thats been pulled into AKPs orbit is Sabah. Its former cartoonist, Salih Memecan, describes the change:

In the past, even when we disagreed sith our editors, they valued us as cartoonists and columnists. They knew people bought the newspaper for our voices. But, with the emergence of digital media, newspapers started losing sales revenues. So they aimed at getting government contracts, rather than readers. I felt I didnt fit, so I quit.

Through such market censorship as well as repression, AKP has built a bloc of loyalist media.

On the margins, there are still some independent media, including the satirical cartoon magazine, Leman. Turkey has a long tradition of cartoon-heavy magazines. The appetite for satire dates back at least to Ottoman times, when shadow puppet theater (Karagoz) satirized current events, targeting officials and sometimes even the Sultan.

Not even Erdoan has been able to crush this culture totally. In 2004, Musa Kart made fun of Erdoans difficulties enacting a new law, by drawing him as a cat caught in a ball of wool. The prime minister tried (unsuccessfully) to sue the cartoonist.

Observing Erdoans wrap at being drawn with a cats body, the cartoon magazine Penguen turned him into other animals. Leman decided to go with vegetables. After a 15-year run, the loss-making Penguen closed in 2017. Leman survives.

Tuncay Akgn, a former Girgir cartoonist, established Leman as an independent magazine in 1991. It was a reincarnation of Limon, which died when its parent newspaper went bankrupt.

Leman continues to test the red lines every week. But its getting harder. Facing the threat of lawsuits and imprisonment is nothing new to Akgun. But things were more predictable in the past, even under military rule (198082).

The big new factor is the mob. Erdogan has a large base of followers who can be counted on to go after anyone whos named as an enemy. Real supporters are augmented by paid troll armies and bots, which swarm critics and intimidate them.

Following the attempted coup, Lemans cover depicted the coups nervous soldiers as well as the mobs who defended the regime as pawns in a larger game.

As soon as a preview of the cover went out on social media, pro-government writers launched a smear campaign accusing Leman of being pro-coup. A mob showed up outside the magazines offices.

The government got a court order to ban the issue. Police went to the press to halt the printing and copies were retrieved from newsstands. Its the kind of orchestrated, intolerant populism that modern authoritarians have mastered and that at last one novelist predicted many years ago.

Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.

It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

George Orwell, 1984

Cherian George is Professor of Media Studies at Hong Kong Baptist Universitys School of Communication. A former journalist, he is the author of Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy.

Sonny Liew is a celebrated cartoonist and illustrator and the author of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a New York Times bestseller, which received three Eisner Awards and the Singapore Literature Prize.

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An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship - The MIT Press Reader

Before Twitter banned thenPresident Donald Trump in response to the January 6 Capitol riot, the platform tried to police his false claims about election fraud by attaching warning labels or blocking engagement with them. A new study suggests those efforts were ineffective at preventing the spread of Trump's claims and may even have backfired by drawing additional attention to messages that Twitter deemed problematic.

Those findings highlight the limits of content moderation policies aimed at controlling misinformation and, more generally, the futility of responding to lies by trying to suppress them. But the researchers think their results demonstrate the need to control online speech "at an ecosystem level," with an assist from the federal government.

The study, published today in Harvard'sMisinformation Review, looked at Trump tweets posted from November 1, 2020, through January 8, 2021, that Twitter flagged for violating its policy against election-related misinformation. Zeve Sanderson and four other New York University social media researchers found that tweets with warning labels "spread further and longer than unlabeled tweets." And while blocking engagement with messages was effective at limiting their spread on Twitter, those messages "were posted more often and received more visibility on other popular platforms than messages that were labeled by Twitter or that received no intervention at all."

Sanderson et al. caution that these correlations do not necessarily mean that Twitter's interventions boosted exposure to Trump's claims, since the explanation could be that "Twitter intervened on posts that were more likely to spread." But the results are at least consistent with the possibility that flagging tweets or blocking engagement with them added to their allure. Either way, those measures demonstrably did not stop Trump from promoting his fantasy of a stolen election.

The problem, as Sanderson and his colleagues see it, is insufficient cooperation across platforms. They suggest the government should do more to overcome that problem.

"Taken together, these findings introduce compelling new evidence for the limited impact of one platform's interventions on the cross-platform diffusion of misinformation, emphasizing the need to consider content moderation at an ecosystem level," the researchers write. "For state actors, legislative or regulatory actions focused on a narrow band of platforms may fail to curb the broader spread of misinformation. Alarmingly, YouTube has been largely absent from recent Congressional hearingsas well as from academic and journalistic workeven though the platform is broadly popular and served as a vector of election misinformation."

Just to be clear: Sanderson and his colleagues don't think it is "alarming" when the federal government pressures social media companies to suppress speech it considers dangerous. The alarming thing, as far as they are concerned, is that the pressure, including "legislative or regulatory actions" as well as congressional hearings, is not applied more broadly.

"Political actors seeking to advance a narrative online are not limited to working within a single platform," study coauthor Joshua Tucker complainsin an interview with USA Today. "People who are trying to control information environments and who are trying to push political information environments are in a multiplatform world. Right now, the only way we have to deal with content is on a platform-by-platform basis."

Megan Brown, another coauthor, suggests that the problem could be remedied if social media platforms reached an agreement about which kinds of speech are acceptable. "Misinformation halted on one platform does not halt it on another," she observes. "In the future, especially with respect to the ongoing pandemic and the 2022 midterms coming up, it will be really important for the platforms to coordinate in some way, if they can, to halt the spread of misinformation."

And what if they can'tor, more to the point, won't? Given the emergence of multiple social media platforms whose main attraction is their laissez-faire approach to content moderation, this scenario seems pretty unlikely. It would require coercion by a central authority, which would be plainly inconsistent with the First Amendment. And even government-mandated censorship would not "halt the spread of misinformation." As dictators across the world and throughout history have discovered, misinformation (or speech they place in that category) wants to be free, and it will find a way.

This crusade to "halt the spread of misinformation" should trouble anyone who values free speech and open debate. The problem of deciding what counts as misinformation is not an inconvenience that can be overcome by collaboration. Trump's claim that Joe Biden stole the presidential election may seem like an easy call. Likewise anti-vaccine warnings about microchips, infertility, and deadly side effects. But even statements that are not demonstrably false may be deemed dangerously misleading, or not, depending on the censor's perspective.

The Biden administration's definition of intolerable COVID-19 misinformation, for example, clearly extends beyond statements that are verifiably wrong. "Claims can be highly misleading and harmful even if the science on an issue isn't yet settled," says Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who urges a "whole-of-society" effort, possibly encouraged by "legal and regulatory measures," to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation." Given the many ways that the federal government can make life difficult for social media companies, they have a strong incentive to cast a net wide enough to cover whatever speech the administration considers "misleading," "harmful," or unhelpful.

Meanwhile, the companies that refuse to play ball will continue to offer alternatives for people banished from mainstream platforms, as the NYU study demonstrates. Leaving aside the question of whether interventions like Twitter's perversely promote the speech they target, they certainly reinforce the conviction that the government and its collaborators are trying to hide inconvenient truths. They also drive people with mistaken beliefs further into echo chambers where their statements are less likely to be challenged. The alternativerebutting false claims by citing countervailing evidencemay rarely be successful. But at least it offers a chance of persuading people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society.

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Since Platform-by-Platform Censorship Doesn't Work, These Researchers Think, the Government Should Help 'Halt the Spread of Misinformation' - Reason

At a glance.

The UK hopes to walk a tightrope of easing GDPR requirements that stifle innovation and offend common sense without falling afoul of the existing EU-UK data transfer agreement, the Wall Street Journal reports. If successful, the changes are expected to benefit British business, science, and technology. If the European Commission decides the revisions stray too far from EU standards, however, London will need to muddle through developing another data agreement, and organizations may face more complex compliance burdens. The UK is simultaneously hammering out data-transfer arrangements with Washington, Canberra, and eight other nations.

The Guardian spotlights users impatience with hallmark GDPR irritating cookie popups. England will present a test case, the piece says, for how much wiggle room the framework allows, and what diverse shapes data protection can take. Now that we have left the EU Im determined to seize the opportunity by developing a world-leading data policy, commented Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden.

The Record details the effects of Havanas new cybersecurity laws. In addition to establishing an Institute of Information and Social Communication, the legislation requires network providers to deploy gear that can monitor traffic, stop and report cybersecurity incidents, and block the transmission of false information. Cybersecurity incidents are defined to include criticisms of the regime. The laws also bind independent networks and ban unauthorized network equipment. The Record sees more Internet shutdowns along with a national firewall in Cubas future.

The New York Times traces the contours of Beijings trend towards Moscow-style hacking operations. As weve seen, the CCPs pivot to Ministry of State Security (MSS) sponsored cyber operations has correlated with increases in both sophistication and brashness. MSS recruits from universities, the private sector, and cyber tournaments, and looks the other way when the talent mingles crime and espionage. The current setup can be sloppy, with readily traceable online tracks, but onlookers fear Chinas cyber game will only improve in coming years.

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Post-Brexit privacy moves away from GDPR. Havana tightens online censorship. Beijing's cyber contractors and their APT side-hustles. - The CyberWire

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know wed be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. Its easy to get confused about what ought to be done. Its difficult to find any recommendation that isnt confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they dont want censored.

A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence. This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that leads to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian Peace Keepers to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada plus, if he or she were in the mood, Ive probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if its just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the defense of Canada. (And it shouldnt matter that Im not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)

Well, whats the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him fake which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises cant have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We cant do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.

This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as obscenity is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and youre mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.

The tech-giant censors concern is in part also with stupidity, but its not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned whether they know it or not with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.

Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out theyre mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else theyre right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.

The promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the action-filled (violence-filled) childrens entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?

The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news poof! there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.

Censoring news, and labeling news as factual, seems to me a cheap fix that doesnt fix. Its a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that youll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. Its a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the fact-checker sections of corporate media outlets. Theyre as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; theyre just labeled differently.

The solutions that will work are not easy, and Im no expert on them, but theyre not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.

We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they wont be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; Id be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if theyre going to bomb children in the name of democracy, well, then, thats my vote for the use of my dollars).

At the same time, we need through schools and outside of them radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think its entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.

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Which Is Worse, the Tech Giant Censors or the Stuff You Want Censored? - PRESSENZA International News Agency

Nostalgia is not a new phenomenon in the horror world, and it's not going away anytime soon. Whether we're talking about the genre's ongoing love affair with '80s throwbacks or the increasing number offilms influenced by the '90s, it's easy to see why the appeal of going retro with scary stories has such a grip on us, and I'm not just talking about using the past to erase the plot inconvenience of cell phones. For the right audience, that little warm ache that comes with nostalgia calls to mind a time in our lives when we were perhaps more innocent, more vulnerable, even easier to scare. Put us in that frame of mind, then hit us with the horror, and you've got a recipe for midnight movies that are both spooky and warm and fuzzy.

But there's more to nostalgia in horror than just using the right needle drops and wardrobe choices to pull us back into another time and place. When it's properly wielded, it's not just a charming piece of the background or a way to riff on a classic plot. In the right hands, nostalgia becomes a powerful tool for examination, picking apart not just the horror storytelling of the era in which the story is set, but our own preconceptions about that era. A good nostalgic horror film reminds us of what came before and makes us question it, while also questioning where we are now, as horror fans and as moviegoers.

We're living in a golden age of good nostalgia horror at the moment, whether we're talking about the genre mash-ups of the Fear Street trilogy or the meta deep dive of The Final Girls, but if you're looking for films that scratch that nostalgia itch while also sending a particularly icy chill down your spine, I've got a new double feature for you. It begins in the 1980s with Censor, then leaps into the 1990s with The Last Matinee, both films arriving in front of American audiences this year, and both films that pack serious style, stakes, and narrative smarts into their respective brands of retro horror.

So, what makes them effective? For one thing, both films have their own very specific perspective on the horror viewing experience. Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, Censor takes place in the United Kingdom amid the video nasty panic (when censors were cutting apart and banning gory horror films left and right) of the 1980s, and follows a particular effective film censor (played with icy fire by Niamh Algar) as she begins to unravel after an unsettling recent viewing experience rekindles past traumas. The Last Matinee, directed by Maxi Contenti, moves its action from censor screening rooms and dingy video stores to a fading movie palace in Uruguay in the early 1990s, and follows a small group of characters as they watch (or talk through, as the case may be) a horror film even as they're living out one of their own, thanks to a hooded killer in their midst.

It might seem a small thing, but the attention to detail pulsing through both Bailey-Bond and Contenti's films means that by setting their respective stories in settings directly tied to the act of watching a horror movie, they've invited us to interrogate our own past horror experiences. For me, Censor called to mind not just what it was like to comb my local video store as a teenager, searching for the most gruesome slasher film on the shelves, but what it was like to take that movie home and slide it past disapproving parents. The Last Matinee took me not just to the cool darkness of movie theaters, but to very specific theatrical experiences in rundown auditoriums where the audience was either glued to the screen or completely disinterested in the film itself. If you've ever watched a movie in a theater with only a half dozen other people and felt like you could sense the conflicting energies of every single one of them, then you know the kind of atmosphere this film evokes.

But of course, these are just the setups, the laying of the table for the meal to come, and in both Censor and The Last Matinee, the meal comes with style to spare. Like its title character, Censor spends much of its runtime in reserved, patient contemplation, slowly sliding pieces into place with the practiced, deft hands of a horror scholar building out a thesis not just on the rise of splatter films in '80s horror, but on the prudish response to it. It's a restraint so delicate that you know it can only hold on for so long before it unleashes, and when Censor finally lets it all go, it's devastating. The Last Matinee, on the other hand, goes full-tilt operatic almost right away. There's a reason you can see Dario Argento posters in background shots. This is an homage not just to the most stylish slashers of the 1980s, but to the most brutal giallo films of the 1970s. There are gore shots in this film, which I wouldn't dare spoil here, beautiful enough to make Argento himself weep.

There's a third key ingredient to each of these films, though, that pushes them out beyond stories that simply evoke an effective rush of nostalgia, and that's a thematic resonance that makes the retro appeal linger beyond the style and setting.

Censor is about the ways in which one woman begins to come undone after her job gets under her skin, yes, but it's also about our relationship to screen violence, both individually and in a broader, cultural sense. It's an exploration not just of the video nasty panic's skewed sense of morality and reason, but of our own existential fears about what effective art might do to us, that voice lurking in the back of our minds going "What if our parents were right and this really will mess us up?"

The Last Matinee's own thematic concerns are perhaps a bit more ambiguous, though that feels more like a product of deliberate filmmaking than a missed opportunity. It's hard to dig too deep into what that means without spoiling the whole film for you, but by its very nature making a horror movie about someone who murders people while they watch a horror movie opens up some very interesting doors in terms of our relationship to scary stories and the voyeuristic aspect of violence on a screen.

Censor and The Last Matinee are, in many ways, very different films, beholden to different kinds of nostalgic aesthetics and concerns, but in the end, they both had the same effect on me because they are both, in some form, about the transgressive nature of the horror genre. Each reminded me what it felt like to be a young horror fan, searching for the limits of my local video store, whispering to my friends about how far these films might take me into realms that the adults in my life might not want me to go. With a couple of decades of scary movies under my belt now, that's a hard feeling to recapture, but the part of me that still relishes the idea of existing in an outsider fandom still chases it, and these films gave it back to me, each in their own way.

Censor is now available on VOD. The Last Matinee arrives on VOD on Aug. 24.

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'The Last Matinee,' 'Censor,' and the power of retro horror done right - SYFY WIRE