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Netflix is aiming for a 20-fold increase in subscribers in India, but its journey in the nation has been bumpy. And now its getting a lot bumpier.

The Covid-19 crisis has forced film and TV production in Mumbaithe home of Bollywoodto shut down. According to Variety, Netflixs local productions are not only shut down in Mumbai, but also in Delhi and Lucknow. The company revealed on an earnings call this month that its back up and running safely in every country in the world except India and Brazil (pdf).

The shutdowns, of unknown duration, will thwart the momentum Netflix had been starting to build in India with its homegrown productions. Covid-19 wont last forever, and Bollywood will return to production eventually. Netflixs opportunity in India is immense, and the company is still committed to seeing it through. It just might take a lot longer than it planned.

Netflix is so interested in India because the movie-loving country (it produces 2,000 films per yearmore than the US) represents perhaps its biggest single-market opportunity since it started producing original content in 2015.

India is the worlds fastest growing streaming market, according to a 2020 report by PwC. Half of the countrys 1.4 billion peopleare under the age of 25, and by 2022, India is expected to have more than 800 million smartphone users. Netflixs expansion in India is part of a broader push throughout Asia, which has served as the source of much of the services subscription growth in the last few years.

The streaming service launched in the country in 2016, catering mostly to affluent, English-speaking consumers. It initially struggled to compete with cheaper entertainment options from the likes of Amazon, a brand thats long been popular with consumers in India, and Hotstar, which is now owned by Disney and was integrated into Disneys own streaming service, Disney+, last year.

In 2018, Netflix adjusted its India strategy to meet its bold vision. It invested more in local productions, offered a cheaper mobile-only plan (which the company said had better retention than it anticipated), and partnered with existing distributors like Reliance Jio to bring the service to new demographics. It also added Hindi to its interface and committed to more local-language productions, like the crime series Sacred Games, which debuted in 2018 and remains Netflixs most popular Indian show to date.

As of December, Netflix had about 5 million subscribers in Indiawell short of its 100 million goal. Executives have admitted they will continue to experiment with the strategy. India, were still figuring things out, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings said on the companys most recent earnings call. And so that investment takes some guts and forward-looking belief. This year, Netflix plans more than 40 original Indian movies and TV showssignificantly more than its output in most places outside North America.

But Netflix cant really afford to turn off thespigot of content it opened in India in 2018. Because the Netflix brand is not as well-known to many Indian consumers as some of its competitors, the company has tried to stay fresh in viewers minds with lots of new contentat least a few of which, the company hopes, will be hits, like Sacred Games. Throughout the pandemic, its done a very good job engaging its users in India.

The indefinite pause in production, however, will likely reduce the amount of new content Netflix subscribers in India see, and thus lessen the chances of a breakout cultural phenomenon. In the US, Netflixs subscription growth has slowed, which the company attributes directly to production pauses causing a lighter than usual slate of content.

Netflix has already nearly saturated the US market, so three months with weak content in the country wont be devastating. But, in India, a similar light slate could set the company back a long time in its quest to reach 100 million, especially when its competitors have such widespread recognition. Hotstar, for instance, is operated by the media conglomerate Star India, whose networks are in 90% of pay-TV homes in India.

Whenever Netflix does return to production in India, it will face much greater government scrutiny than when it first entered the country in 2016.

After shows like Sacred Games were accused of being vulgar by politicians aligned with prime minister Narendra Modi, Netflix and other streaming services began self-censoring some content, with the hopes of avoiding controversy and staving off regulation. Modis government has since changed the regulatory agency under which streaming companies operate, largely seen as an attempt to start clamping down on content on services like Netflix.

Such regulations could have a chilling effect on the thriving creative community in Bollywood. A number of filmmakers and actors in India told CNN last month that they are now walking on egg shells, worried not only that many of the countrys most provocative projects wont get off the ground now, but also that they could face jail time for just doing their jobs. Netflix in particular could struggle to replicate the success of Sacred Games in this stifling environment.

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Netflix's big plans in India may be slowed by Covid and censorship - Quartz

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In March, international clothing brands such as H&M, UNIQLO and Adidas caught the ire of Chinese social media. The initial outcry against foreign brands was spurred by H&Ms recent decision to stop relying on cotton sourced from Xinjiang due to concerns of forced labor and human rights abuses, and has since evolved into a broader online movement to support Xinjiang cotton.

Chinese celebrities are severing ties with foreign brands, TV platforms are blurring logos of the offending companies, and domestic clothing brands are doubling-down on their support for cotton produced in Xinjiang. Foreign journalists accused of inciting the companies to distance themselves from the mass detention and forced labor in Xinjiang are the subject of vitriolic online attack. Cotton sourced from Xinjiang supplies 85 percent of Chinas cotton and 20 percent of the worldwide cotton supply, but nationalist Chinese netizens are increasingly intolerant of any action they believe constitutes bullying China.

This debacle reveals underlying trends not only in how foreign companies must navigate their business environment amidst the Xinjiang genocide but also in Chinas information management of politically sensitive issues. The progression of state discourse on Xinjiang follows different trends than more familiar approaches to censorship of politically sensitive issues, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong. Specifically, Chinas evolving approach to managing information on Xinjiang has evolved from one of exclusive denial to crafting a parallel narrative that links supporting Xinjiang cotton with supporting China, and rejecting foreign bullies.

The Familiar Contours of Information Control

Politically sensitive topics are systematically monitored and censored through an information control regime Margaret Roberts describes as porous censorship. In this model, netizens are disincentivized from accessing information through three mechanisms: fear (threats and punishment for spreading and accessing sensitive information), friction (increasing the costs of accessing information), and flooding (coordinated information that competes with sensitive information through distraction). These mechanisms are porous because while they aim to block the access and spread of certain sensitive topics, the Great Firewall is often permeable by those with the means to evade it. Yet, the strategy is ultimately successful in its ability to create barriers for most, not all, citizens to access and spread sensitive information, creating an online barrier between the masses and the elite who choose to circumnavigate it.

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Often, the mechanisms behind the Great Firewall are all designed to prevent and distract attention from sensitive issues. The archetypal examples of Chinese government censorship for example, historical information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, or the expulsion and repression of the Falon Gong are defined by their lack of information. Banned keywords, scrubbed archives, and blocked foreign news outlets are familiar realities of the Chinese digital ecosystem. Those who do criticize the government online are regularly punished. Most recently, an online application called Clubhouse allowed a brief window through the firewall for citizens to discuss recognized sensitive issues: Taiwan, the Hong Kong protests, and the ongoing Xinjiang genocide amongst others. The platform was blocked within days, re-affirming the familiar environment of silence on sensitive issues.

What makes Chinas shifting state strategy on Xinjiang information management unique is that in addition to traditional approach to censorship which prevents access to information and instills fear of discussion or doubting state narratives there seems to be a shift to fill the censored silence with noise. This is similar to Roberts flooding mechanism, wherein authorities produce and disseminate information through traditional media outlets and social media to compete with sensitive information for user attention. The states strategy on controlling information on Xinjiang expands beyond flooding by not only overwhelming social media with generic pro-government posts, but also actively constructing a government-endorsed narrative that non-government netizens discuss, support, and organically amplify. This narrative functions in a symbiosis with actual, grassroots nationalists who amplify, supplement, and even provide new information for state-produced and endorsed narratives.

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The Xinjiang Cotton Strategy

To be sure, accurate information on the ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang is near impossible to access on the Chinese internet. Foreign reporting, much of which is based on advanced satellite imagery analysis, has been crucial for the discovery and documentation of forced labor camps. But, by denouncing H&M on Weibo for declaring that the clothing chain would not use forced labor in its supply chain, the Communist Youth League invited discussion on the topic. Of course, that discussion is limited to the complete denial of human rights abuses in the region. But nonetheless, this is a strategy equally of information construction as of information erasure.

This constructed narrative on Xinjiang has developed three main themes: conflating criticism of Xinjiang with bullying China, linking support for Xinjiang-produced cotton with support for the PRC, and identifying the West (and especially the United States) as hypocritical for its historical human rights abuses. The I support Xinjiang Cotton hashtag (#) garnered over four billion Weibo views by the end of March. Countless videos and posts are circulating of citizens burning their Nike shoes in response to Western foreign bullies. There are calls for boycotting foreign brands, and foreign critics are regularly lambasted. H&M was removed from Baidu Maps and e-commerce platforms. State media platforms produced and recycled illustrations of slavery in the United States to criticize its history of slavery and cotton production, and amplified indignant memes about foreign companies such as H&M.

The relationship between the Party propaganda apparatus and grassroots nationalists are mutually reinforcing, wherein the state dictates the parameters of accepted speech, and user-generated content, in return, gives the state a wide variety of real material, from which it can choose what to amplify. Celebrities and other public figures are likely under significant government pressure to denounce H&M and foreign brands. They are also just as likely subject to the bottom-up pressure of an increasingly nationalist fan base that explicitly aligns commercial brand identity with a pro-Chinese government position. If traditional strategies of censorship are designed to prevent groups from coalescing on overlapping interests, this new strategy is one that seeks to align the masses with the elite: grassroots nationalists and the highly visible public figures who represent elite opinion. This type of manufactured collective action serves the twin purposes of suppressing sensitive information and providing a parallel interpretation of that information which reaffirms the Chinese governments position. Chinese netizens are not cloistered individuals duped into believing a falsity: they are patriotic and nationalistic internet users emboldened by an environment that permits discourse on a sensitive topic.

Implications of a New Censorship Approach

Most Chinese citizens including the educated and wealthy elite who regularly circumnavigate the Great Firewall still choose to distance themselves from Xinjiang rather than explicitly join the growing hypernationalist chorus. Most are largely unaware of the ongoing atrocities and prefer not to venture into the maelstrom to investigate further. But a strategy that invites discussion on any sensitive topic is inherently risky, as it increases the amount of discourse the censors must then monitor. In February, the government pursued a similar media campaign of four Chinese soldiers who died in a skirmish on the Sino-Indian border. A similar pattern of producing and encouraging a specific pro-government narrative emerged, but when a few popular bloggers criticized that narrative, they were promptly arrested and denounced by scores of their followers.

Shifting from a strategy of complete denial and erasure to one of narrative construction and alternative facts may inevitably create more holes in Chinas porous censorship model. If this model is replicated across issue areas which it seems to be, given the similar coverage patterns of the China-India border dispute, the Hong Kong protests, and now the shifting discourse on Xinjiang it may indicate an underlying shift in Chinas information management and censorship strategy, rather than a tactic specific to the ongoing Xinjiang genocide.

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Xinjiang Cotton and the Shift in China's Censorship Approach - The Diplomat

Notoriously reclusive "Simpsons" writer John Swartzwelder revealed how the show got around the censors in its early days in an extremely rare interview.

Despite his secretive nature, Swartzwelder is a very popular figure among diehard "Simpsons" fans as he is credited with writing fifty-nine episodes of the comedy, more than any other single writer in the shows history.

After getting his start in advertising before pivoting to the world of TV on "Saturday Night Live," Swartzwelder became one of "The Simpsons" most beloved writers and promptly shied away from the public spotlight.

However, he granted an interview with noted comedian interviewer Mike Sacks for The New Yorker in which he opened up about his career and the bafflingly unregulated early days of Americas favorite animated comedy.

"Thanks to the deal [executive producer] Jim Brooks had, Fox executives couldnt meddle in The Simpsons in any way, though we did get censor notes," Swartzwelder explained. "The executives werent sent advance copies of the scripts and they couldnt attend read-throughs, even though they very much wanted to. All we had to do was please ourselves."

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'The Simpsons' writer John Swartzwelder opened up about the early days of the hit animated comedy. (FOX)

He added: "This is a very dangerous way to run a television show, leaving the artists in charge of the art, but it worked out all right in the end. It rained money on the Fox lot for thirty years. Theres a lesson in there somewhere."

Despite the unprecedented freedom the creatives like him had on the show, he and the early writers still prided themselves on vaulting their only hurdle network censors. Swartzwelder explained that they managed to get some of the most violent and gory things on air by way of Springfields own cartoon-within-a-cartoon, "Itchy & Scratchy."

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"The obvious example of this would be The Itchy & Scratchy Show [the violent cat-and-mouse childrens cartoon within The Simpsons]. We could show horrendous things to the children at home, as long as we portrayed them being shown to the Simpsons children first," he explained. "Somehow this extra step baffled our critics and foiled the mobs with torches. We agreed with them that this was wrong to show to children. Didnt we just show it being wrong? And, look, heres more wrong stuff!"

'The Simpsons' writer John Swartzwelder gave a rare interview about his writing on the show. (Fox)

Swartzwelder, whose episode writing credits include beloved episodes such as "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," "Bart the Murderer," "Dog of Death," "Homer at the Bat," "Homie the Clown," "Bart Gets an Elephant," "Homers Enemy," and "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment," left the show roughly eighteen years ago.

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Still, his presence looms large over the show as the revered mind behind "Swartzweldian" lines like "To alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of lifes problems." When asked to reflect on the impact his writing had on "The Simpsons," he noted that hes pleased to see writers getting their due.

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"I am pleased by the attention," he concluded. "The Simpsons did something I didnt think possible: it got viewers to look at writers credits on TV shows. When I was growing up, we looked at the actors names, and maybe the director, but thats it.

"Now a whole generation of viewers not only knows about writers, theyre wondering what were really like in real life. And they want to know what were thinking. And look through our windows. Thats progress, of a sort, and we have The Simpsons to thank for it."

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Reclusive 'Simpsons' writer reveals how the show got around network censors with 'Itchy & Scratchy' - Fox News

A new West Virginia billproposes regulations against censorship of information by social media companies during an election, with some criminal and civil penalties" depending on the nature of the violation.

Known as House Bill 3307, the legislation looks to create two things: 1) the Social Media Integrity and Anti-Corruption in Elections Act and 2) the Stop Social Media Censorship Act.

The first act would require social media companies to make election-related content on their platforms transparent and provide political parties and candidates with equal opportunities to share information online without being affected by policy- or partisan-based censorship.

The second act would implement criminal and civil penalties for companies that delete or censor a user's religious or political speech.

A lot of this work started in coordination with Secretary of State Mac Warner as a result of the 2020 election, Delegate Daniel Linville, the primary sponsor of the bill, said. There was particular concern about Facebook putting out incorrect information about registering to vote and primary dates.

According to Linville, Facebooks election center promoted inaccurate details, prompting Secretary Warner to exchange several emails with the company to rectify the issue.

This incident, he said, led to a larger conversation about who receives information posted by Facebook and whether or not the company targets users based on specific demographics such as age, geographic area, political party affiliation or gender.

The incident also raised questions about how social media companies play a role in censoring information shared online by political candidates during an election.

The purpose of this bill is to ensure that users arent treated differently because of targeting by social media companies or censored because of their political or religious beliefs, Linville said.

To enforce its stipulations, the bill would require companies to share information such as election dates or voting sign-up instructions with the secretary of states office before it is published to ensure the information is correct.

But is it too invasive for government to have a say in what social media companies publish? ACLU-WV Policy Director Eli Baumwell believes the answer is in the affirmative.

One of the concerns about this legislation is that the secretary of state would be deciding whats true and whats not true, Baumwell said. You dont want to put the government in charge of deciding those things.

The legislation might also disincentivize companies from addressing issues such as the spread of disinformation or calls to violence.

Bills like this are largely in response to President Trump being banned from social media sites along with other politicians that engage in a similar rhetoric, Baumwell said. I dont think the answer is censorship. There are other options such as flagging information or providing fact checks.

As for enforcing criminal penalties to regulate social media companies, Baumwell said "this more than likely won't happen."

Until another reasonable option is found, he said, theres a lot more innovation that needs to be done.

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West Virginia Bill Sets Sights on Social Media Censorship - Government Technology

Siding with Google, a federal appellate court refused toreinstate a lawsuit by commentator Bob Lewis, who claimed the company violated his rights by demonetizing some of the videos on his YouTube channel, Misandry Today, and restricting or taking downothers.

The decision, issued Thursday, upheld an order issued last year by U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim in the Northern District of California.

The dispute dates to2019, when Lewis sued Google for allegedly "censoring" his speech.

One of the demonetized clips argued that antifa is a terrorist group that targets children.

Another described former Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) as "the latest victim of left's campaign to discriminate against anyone based on their traditional American values."

That clip was postedafter King was removed from his committee assignments, which occurred soon after he commentedtoThe New York Times: White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization -- how did that language become offensive?

Among other claims, Lewis said Googleviolated his First Amendment rights, and violated the federal civil rights law by discriminating against him based on his national origin as a patriotic American citizen who supports Americantradition and culture.

Google argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed at an early stage for numerous reasons, including that the First Amendment doesn't prohibit private companieslike itself from restricting content. Google also said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes the company from lawsuits over its content moderation decisions.

Kim sided withGoogle and dismissed the lawsuit in May of 2020. Lewis then asked the 9th Circuit to reverse Kim's order and revive the case.

The Defendants censorship against Lewis constitutesnational origin discrimination against Lewis because hes a patriotic American citizen whose bedrock American values include embracing constitutionally protected free speech, his attorneywrote in papers filed with the appellate court last August.

On Thursday a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kim's order dismissing Lewis's lawsuit. The judges wrote in aneight-page order that YouTube isn't a place of public accommodation for purposes of the federal anti-discrimination law.

The judges also reiterated that the First Amendmentprohibits the government from censoring speech, but doesn't prevent private companies from exercising editorial discretion.

Only a person 'acting under color of state law' can commit aFirst Amendment violation, the appellate judges wrote. Here, Lewis sued private entities and asserted no actions that occurred under color of state law.

Lewis isn't theonly one to sue a tech company over its content policies. Numerous others, including Prager University and Freedom Watch have also claimed they were censored by tech platforms.

So far, judges have ruled that web companies have the right to decide how to treat content on their platforms. Last year, for example, the 9th Circuit Court of Appealsrefusedto reinstate a lawsuit by Prager University against Google forallegedly censoring conservative clips on YouTube.

Another appellate court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, likewise declined to revive claims by right-wing activists Laura Loomer andFreedom Watch that Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple conspired to suppress conservative views. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to hear the activists' appeal.

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Court Sides With YouTube In 'Censorship' Battle With 'Misandry Today' 04/19/2021 - MediaPost Communications