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In March 2022, Russia took censorship to new extremes, blocking access to Facebook and enacting a law that threatened to punish coverage of its war on Ukraine with forced labor and imprisonment. To what extent does censorship actually reduce activity on banned media among different societal groups in the context of international conflict?

A new study published inThe Journal of Politicsexamines this question by exploring the effect of a 2017 Ukrainian ban on online activity among Russian social media users with close affiliations to Ukraine and Russia.

Authoritarian and nonauthoritarian states alike use censorship to police cyberspace, notes author Yevgeniy Golovchenko in Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media. In recent years, an increasing number of European states and tech firms have used it to combat digital disinformation and foreign interference.

Even before the Russian attacks in 2022, Ukraine offered some of the most extreme examples of censorship used to respond to information war and online propaganda from abroad. In 2017, the Ukrainian government issued an executive order that forced internet service providers to block access to major Russian websites, including VKontakte, the second most visited social media platform in Ukraine. The Kremlins control over Russian social media was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian government viewed the VKontakte ban as a national security measure against Russian propaganda and surveillance.

Censorship may successfully limit overall access to information, or it can backfire and draw attention to the forbidden or political outrage. Even if a government succeeds in partially reducing the overall online activity on forbidden media, the ban may backfire if the supporters of the regime become less active on the censored platform than the opposition, Golovchenko writes. The government would risk making the opposition more prevalent on the platform than the supporters of the regime.

Golovchenko uses publicly available data from VKontakte and a natural experiment research design to estimate the causal effect of the ban on online activity among different user groups. The findings indicate that a vast majority of Ukrainians on VKontakte could circumvent censorship by logging on through tools like VPN. However, the Ukrainian government still succeeded in reducing the overall online activity among Ukrainians on the Russian platform. Government attempts at curbing Russian influence reduced the wall posting activity on VKontakte among users with pro-Russian attitudes at least as much as among pro-Ukrainian users, notes Golovchenko, who found the same pattern when comparing citizens in Ukraine with few social ties to citizens within Russia versus those embedded in the Russian social network.

Even without legal repercussions for circumventing the ban, the increased access time and effort is enough to disrupt online activity among pro-Russian (and pro-Ukrainian) users, who would instead shift to cheaper and more accessible alternatives. In other words, the accessibility of the media appears to play a much more important role in the decision to use censored social media than do politics or social ties with citizens in the hostile state, Golovchenko writes.

The results are favorable from the perspective of the censor, who wishes to combat foreign propaganda and disinformation by using one of the most drastic countermeasures available, he writes. He went on to speculate, If Russia were to use its newly upgraded censorship infrastructure to ban Facebook to prevent foreign influence, one would expect the ban to be successful from the point of view of the government if Russians were to respond in a similar manner as Ukrainians have. Now that such a ban has come to pass, the effects of its harsher censorship remain to be seen.

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Fighting Propaganda With Censorship: A Study Of Ukrainian Ban On Russian Social Media - Eurasia Review

Censorship on the cheap

When governments block access to information, people often find a workaround for example, the use of VPNs, online services that provide encrypted connections to foreign websites. But that doesnt mean the censorship has no effect; using VPNs can be cumbersome enough to make a difference. In 2017, the Ukrainian government ordered Internet service providers to block VKontakte, a popular social-media website based in Russia. According to a new study, the vast majority of Ukrainian users were still able to log on to the website after the blockade, as evidenced by publicly visible time stamps. Even so, public postings dropped by about half, including those by users with many contacts in Russia. As the author of the study notes: A pro-Ukrainian resident in Kyiv explained to me in an interview why he no longer uses VKontakte on a daily basis: the VPN on his PC required more clicks and slowed down the connection by a few seconds. Interestingly, the same person could enter VKontakte automatically on his smartphone without extra clicks, likely due to a preinstalled VPN. Despite this, he still decided to stop using VKontakte as his main platform because he felt it was too troublesome to manage his account only from a smartphone.

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Golovchenko, Y., Fighting Propaganda With Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media, Journal of Politics (forthcoming).

Revolving door

Using a mathematical model, political scientists show that hiring industry insiders into government can, counterintuitively, reduce the industrys ideological influence over policy. This is because former industry insiders can boost the governments policymaking expertise, making it less dependent on industry in formulating and implementing quality policy, which in turn reduces the need for making ideological concessions to industry.

Hbert, R. et al., Going Into Government: How Hiring From Special Interests Reduces Their Influence, American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).

Known unknowns

In a series of experiments, researchers found that providing basic information about an anonymous stranger not only makes people think they know the stranger better but it also makes them think the stranger knows them a little better too. In turn, this intuition leads people to think that it would be easier for the stranger to catch them lying or cheating. The researchers tested this in a real-world experiment with the New York City Police Department and New York City Housing Authority, in which similar housing developments were randomly assigned to receive some personalizing information about a neighborhood police officer. In a survey two months later, the residents who received the information were more likely to believe the officer would find out whether they committed a crime. The researchers believe this experiment may even have reduced crime in those developments.

Shah, A. & LaForest, M., Knowledge About Others Reduces Ones Own Sense of Anonymity, Nature (forthcoming).

The essence of legalese

A study from MIT spells out just how bad the language in legal contracts is. The worst offender is the center-embedded clause. For example: In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the Total Payments) would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. A more comprehensible version might be: In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the Total Payments. This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof. Indeed, people had more difficulty understanding and recalling contract language written in traditional legalese, particularly when it included center-embedded clauses, compared with simplified language. The researchers say their findings undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts. In other words, what sets lawyers apart from laypeople is not necessarily their greater familiarity with legal concepts. Its that theyve been trained in how to handle such esoteric language.

Martnez, E. et al., Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language, Cognition (forthcoming).

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Social Studies: Mapping distrust; the cost of avoiding censorship; getting to know the cops - The Boston Globe

By DENA EAKLES | rural Ontario

The N-O-W School Board meetings are quite interesting these days. It seems there is a never-ending barrage of challenge to public in public schools. And while I support parental control, that right granted to parents in their own home does not and should not extend to other peoples children. My father was a great one for saying, Do as I say, not as I do, but he was also heavily invested in my being able to think critically and to be self-determining.

The March school board meeting brought a whole new attack on public, with accusations of pornography and a plea for teachers to be reeled in and books to be OKd by parents. Good luck with that. We live in the time of the internet. Everything is available to everyone.

But more importantly, as with the misused understanding of Critical Race Theory, the new term being used to strike fear and forced repression is pornography. It is important to understand, words like pornography and obscenity are legal terms. Books for teens are reviewed and judged not by a single moral code, but by the recognition that students have the right to receive information as noted in The First Amendment Right of Minors (more can be found in http://www.ala.org) For more, go to https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/accusations-of-providing-pornography/.

It is really good to see so many people caring for their children, and from what I can tell, that includes the teachers of N-O-W as well. But I am not a fan of censorship. By all means, teach your children good ethics and morals, and may the first among them be Judge not lest you be judged (Matthew 7:1).

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Letter to the editor: The challenge of censorship - Thecountyline

The arrest of a reporter who held up a poster during a Russian news broadcast criticising the war in Ukraine reminds us how dictatorships operate. One of Vladimir Putins first acts on the home front, after sending his tanks over the Ukrainian border, was to pass a law specifying jail terms of up to 15 years for anyone who dares to disseminate fake news i.e. anything which contradicts his governments lies about the Russian war effort.

Britain is a very long way from that kind of suppression of speech. If a publication wishes to condemn Boris Johnson for his handling of the Ukraine war, Covid or for anything else, its writers and editors will not be disappeared. But the stories themselves might be. A speech by David Davis questioning government plans for vaccine passports was taken down from YouTube but online censorship is usually more subtle. Dissenting voices can be made harder to find online, or advertising removed from the videos.

The Spectator now encounters these censorship bots on a regular basis. If we publish academics who question the rigour of the science behind the governments mask policy, Facebook can stick a false information label on it with no obligation to identify a single false fact. Lionel Shriver incurred the wrath of YouTube censors by reading a version of her column online. The Socialist Workers Party had its Facebook page removed entirely. Arguments that go against the grain are identified and then gently buried or wrongly labelled as fake news. This ought to appall the government. Instead, it wants to put itself in charge of the process.

At first, Silicon Valleys pioneers put themselves forward as proud defenders of free speech: Twitter even described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party. But now Twitter and other platforms have complicated censorship algorithms that either remove or downgrade (i.e., make it harder to find) stories that offend whatever orthodoxy is programmed into the system. When Twitter took down Donald Trumps account (while allowing spokesmen for the Taliban to stay on the platform) it was a huge demonstration of raw power: a social media company could delete a sitting president from what has, in effect, become the public sphere.

The motives of Big Tech are not ideological but financial. They want to make money from adverts and avoid regulation and will do whatever governments want to minimise the risk of that regulation. Their ability to tweak the news feeds of tens of millions of people gives them more power than Murdoch, Hearst or Beaverbrook ever wielded but unlike the press barons, the tech giants do not care about free speech. They happily cut informal censorship deals with governments as long as they keep their power and ability to make money.

Such a deal is about to take place through the Online Safety Bill currently going through parliament. It is based on an acceptance that Silicon Valley now censors the news published digitally in Britain, but government wants the power to set the terms under which it does so. As is always the case with state censorship, this is justified by citing the worst filth imaginable: child abuse, revenge porn,glamorisation of suicide, promotion of terrorism. But it never takes long before the legislative scope widens to include things that ministers just dont like. Nadine Dorries, who is overseeing the bill, has said that the more indelicate jokes of comedians like Jimmy Carr may fall on the wrong side of her line.

So the bill has presented social media companies with a choice: interpret the word harmful liberally and risk being fined or err on the side of caution and remove any content that might conceivably land them in trouble. We have already seen where this leads. During the pandemic, social media firms tried to guess what would and would not be seen as helpful by the government. At one stage, Facebook banned articles suggesting that Covid-19 might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory. It has since lifted this rule, but the episode shows the dynamic at play: what is removed is not so much what government bans, but what social media firms regard as risky.

Some will ask: why should we care about Facebook? And why should it not be trusted to moderate what is said on its platform? After all, no newspaper is compelled to publish content with which its editors dis-agree. But the problem is the sheer power and growth of digital media. A handful of private companies now control the way people find out information. More Britons get their news from Facebook than from any newspaper but the daily news feed is curated by the platforms algorithm. Whoever controls these algorithms controls the news.

Social media sites claim not to be publishers, merely platforms a distinction which has, until now, allowed them to escape legal action for the libellous or other illegal content that they host. Such is their global reach that their ability to censor their users, and to do so silently, puts them in an incredibly powerful position. Nick Clegg, who now oversees policy at Facebook, has been promoted to a position of influence greater than any newspaper proprietor. The Online Safety Bill empowers Silicon Valley giants rather than calling them to heel. But politicians, who have worked on this Bill for years, do not understand the nature of censorship bots - or the effect of algorithms in deciding what news people do and don't read.

It's ironic thatBoris Johnson, a former journalist and an erstwhile campaigner for free speech, is presiding over this legislation. Aides say that he is out of date and barely understands how anyone can get news from Facebook, let alone how that news is selected and censored.After office, he will soon find out how the censorship bots he's about to empower will judge his ownarguments. And how the power of Silicon Valley is already casting a shadow over the print press: all the more so when its bots are expected by the government to sure all articles are "safe".

Ms Dorries says he bill will give special exemption to journalists.But why should freedom of speech and opinion not be available to all? Are we really to pass a law where thestate decides who and who does not have the ability to say what they. please without fear of censure?

The BBC can often be guilty of a left-wing bias, but its power to influence national and international debate is tiny compared with the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. Why hasnt the government realised that this bill will unshackle rather than restrain these companies? It needs to re-examine the proposed legislation and stop seeing online harm purely from the point of view of protecting children from damaging internet content. Ministers cannot sit by and allow Silicon Valleys bots to stifle public debate.

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The soft censorship of the Online Safety Bill - The Spectator

The Taliban arrested three journalists from TOLO TV Thursday night, according to the Afghan television station.

The three employees were detained after airing a story about the Talibans censorship of a foreign drama series in Afghanistan.

TOLOnews head Khpalwak Sapai and colleague Nafay Khaleeq, the legal adviser to TOLO TV, were released hours after their arrest. Station presenter Bahram Aman remains in custody as of Friday.

Aman told the TOLOnews team on a phone call Friday that the Taliban have promised to release him after two meetings.

Officials from the Talibans General Directorate of Intelligence took the three employees into custody after nightfall on orders from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which was recently extended for another year, condemned the Talibans suppression of journalism.

UNAMA expresses its deep concern about the detentions of journalists and the ever increasing restrictions being placed on media in Afghanistan, the mission wrote. Time for the Taliban to stop gagging & banning. Time for a constructive dialogue with the Afghan media community.

The Washington, D.C.-based Committee to Protect Journalists released a similar statement, calling on the Taliban to immediately release TOLOnews journalist Bahram Aman, and stop its intelligence agency from arbitrarily arresting and intimidating media personnel.

It continued: Afghanistans once thriving independent media community cannot operate effectively under constant Taliban threats and harassment.

The Taliban took over the Afghan government shortly after U.S. troops began exiting the country last year, a move that raised concerns globally about human rights in Afghanistan.

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Taliban reportedly arrests journalists over story on censoring: report | TheHill - The Hill