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For countless Indians, Twitter has been a way to track down medical supplies for friends and family sick with COVID-19, as a second wave overwhelmed hospitals.

But when one man appealed for oxygen for his sick grandfather in April, he was arrested and charged with spreading misinformation. Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, where the man lived, claimed there was no shortage, dismissing "rumors and propaganda on social media."

One head of an NGO in New Delhi, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisal, told Insider he was called by police and told to shut down a Telegram channel he was running to procure medical supplies for those in need.

Authorities have been going after the platforms themselves too. Earlier this week, police went to Twitter's offices in Delhi after the company labelled tweets by ministers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party as "manipulated media."

They are also clamping down on more trivial matters. Last week, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to remove references to the "Indian variant" of coronavirus despite the fact the government itself was happy to call another variant "South African."

Indian authorities' attempts to censor criticism have become more pronounced in recent months.

A flashpoint came during anti-government farmers' protests in January, when Twitter refused a government request to permanently ban accounts on free speech grounds.

At that time, COVID-19 cases were low and ministers encouraged people to resume normal life. But a more severe second wave struck. Earlier in May, the country set a global record for cases recorded in one day 414,188 and its seven-day average of daily cases is still more than 200,000, more than double the peak of the first wave in September.

Ministers have been condemned for not only failing to prepare for second wave, but allowing and even staging mass gatherings. In late April, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook were asked to censor dozens of tweets and posts that criticized such failures.

This week, the standoff is coming to a head. A new law came into force Wednesday that threatens tech companies and their employees with prosecution and potentially imprisonment if they don't comply with takedown orders within 36 hours.

Twitter issued a statement Thursday condemning "intimidation tactics" against their employees and the new rules' "potential threat to freedom of expression."

The statement vowed to continue a "constructive dialogue with the Indian Government" but added: "We plan to advocate for changes to elements of these regulations that inhibit free, open public conversation."

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been refuges for dissent in India. A US State Department report noted in March that Indian government officials were "involved in silencing or intimidating critical media outlets" through physical attacks, pressuring owners, as well as targeting sponsors and "encouraging frivolous lawsuits."

Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia Policy Director at Access Now, a non-profit promoting digital civil rights, said the government's actions were creating a "chilling impact on free speech."

He added the repressive action tended to happen "when they think they are under pressure or come under more online criticism."

Pratik Sinha, who founded one of India's leading fact-checking platforms, AltNews, said the government had been content to leave social media alone before the farmers' protests, when it was enjoying praise and India appeared to have avoided a COVID-19 disaster.

But Sinha said: "As soon as the narrative changed, people started using the very medium that has benefitted the ruling party for such a long time to voice their discontent ... they don't want these critical voices to come out."

"These are clearly diversion tactics that the government is adopting in the middle of a pandemic."

Samir Jain, policy director at digital rights think-tank the Center for Democracy and Technology, said threats of imprisonment were akin to "hostage provisions."

He added the new rules would "only empower the government to escalate its attempts to stifle legitimate speech and further imperil the future of online free expression in India."

Facebook and Google have both issued carefully-worded statements in response to the new rules, in contrast to Twitter's strongly-worded response.

Google said it would "ensure that we're combating illegal content in an effective and fair way, and in order to comply with local laws in the jurisdictions that we operate in."

A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the company would "comply with the provisions of the IT rules and continue to discuss a few of the issues which need more engagement with the government."

WhatsApp, which belongs to Facebook, is suing the government, saying the rules would allow authorities to trace the source of messages, a violation of the app's end-to-end encryption.

Senior BJP member of parliament and former party vice-president Dr. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, whose tweet was among those labelled "manipulated media" by Twitter, told Insider in a statement: "The refusal and reluctance of social media platforms to abide by the rules and regulations made applicable by the government is inexplicable."

"Law of the land is supreme and nobody can disregard India's constitution," he added.

"Besides, the opaqueness of their algorithms and lack of transparency in their decision making makes their case of taking a unilateral decision of flagging some Tweets totally undemocratic.

"India is a robust and institutionalized democracy and the Government cannot allow any company to take us for granted."

AltNews's Sinha said the government could not continue to suppress its failures over the pandemic.

"People are grieving. There's anger," he added. "You can't just suppress anger, it's bound to come out."

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The Indian government is escalating its fight to censor social media - Business Insider

Are sex workers being unfairly targeted by tech companies? Heres how social media censorship affects adult industry influencers.

According to a Centro University study, social media censorship is costing sex workers hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A survey sent out to adult industry influencers back in February revealed startling results, with nearly half of respondents reporting that one of their social media accounts (on Twitter or Instagram) had been banned in the past year. Nearly 1 in 10 reported that both of their accounts had been banned.

Some adult industry influencers also reported that their accounts had been shadowbanned, meaning their traffic and engagement fundamentally came to a halt.

Though most of these influencers play by the Terms of Service, avoiding explicit content, monitoring what sorts of things they link and advertise, and keeping an eye on their followers and hashtags, they find themselves with banned accounts nonetheless. They often dont know just where and how they violated the Terms, and they often have no chance to appeal.

This comes at a detriment to their very livelihoods.

FanCentro VP Kat Revenga says, Social media censorship isnt some theoretical issue for adult influencers, it robs them of huge amounts of income. The majority of adult influencers are small business owners who use the income to pay rent and put food on the table, and the arbitrary closure of an account can be devastating, depriving them of tens of thousands of dollars.

CentroU wanted to see exactly how much an adult industry influencer could be affected by unfair social media bans, and created a profile of a typical adult influencer. They reported that someone earning $4,000 per month in January could easily drop to under $1,000 per month in July. By the end of the first year, they reported, an influencer suffers over $30,000 in lost income.

Revenga went on to say, Social media has enabled a new generation of independent adult influencers to thrive, and to own what they produce, but the true power rests with the social media companies. Their arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is costing an already marginalized population hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

CentroU is a free school for adult influencers and sex workers.

Photo at topby Seyi Ariyo on Unsplash

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Social Media Censorship Is Costing Sex Workers and Adult Influencers Big Money - Hornet

Herman Mashaba's party, Action SA, has released a billboard with names and faces of various political party leaders with labels such as criminal, crook and fraud next to their names. He said that the refusal by media houses to flight the billboard amounted to censorship.

A screenshot of Action SA's election billboard.

JOHANNESBURG - The election season has not reached fever pitch yet, but the new kid on the block, Action SA, is already crying foul.

Herman Mashabas political project accused media houses on Tuesday of refusing to flight an election campaignbillboard in which leaders of various parties were labelled as anarchists, criminal and divisive among others.

Mashaba said through a statement that the refusal to flight their campaign amounted to censorship.

The aim of the billboard was not to target the individuals featured on our billboard, but rather to expose a political system that results in the selection of compromised candidates by political parties to serve in some of the highest public offices in the land.

"This system serves political parties instead of serving the people of South Africa. Despite the right to the freedom of speech entrenched in our Constitution, no less than six media owners refused to flight the billboard for fear of political reprisal, vandalism or defamation, Mashaba said in a statement.

The controversial billboard features Democratic Alliance (DA) chairperson Helen Zille and Solly Msimanga, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema, and from the African National Congress (ANC), Mashabas party targeted suspended ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, Zandile Gumede, Geoff Makhubo and Bathabile Dlamini.

Meanwhile, political parties representing the named leaders in the Action SA billboard were contacted for comment. Eyewitness News received only one, saying that "commenting would give it traction."

Download the Eyewitness News app to your iOS or Android device.

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Action SA's Mashaba slams media houses over 'censorship' of election billboard - Eyewitness News

Redding Record Searchlight Published 7:00 a.m. PT May 16, 2021

Redding acts like the Sacramento River is akin to unsightlyrailroad yards. Let's pretend the river isn't there. Notice the civic auditorium is positioned at an angle away from the river, with a "water fountain" out front. I know the San Antonio RiverWalkhas been discussed, but Redding continues to ignore the river. I am from SoCal and am amazed how little the river is highlighted for shopping, especially with the high summertime temperatures. Stretch your imagination to beyond possibility. Imagine the Cobblestone Shopping Center on Hartnell, turned 180 degrees. With the stores facing the river and parking outback on Hartnell. Add a few boutique shops and some beautiful restaurants, again facing the river. Now imagine how much cooler the shopping and dining experience would be along the beautiful river. I know the Kutras/Redding property is on some agenda, but nothing happens.Redding. The Sacramento River is one of your biggest assets. Why do you continue to pretend it isn't there? Another small issue is water fountains. Look at the waterfall at the west end of Cypress. Why did it take the Rotary Club to createsuch a refreshing feature? Why doesn't the city havesomething like that downtown? It is cool to look at, and it would provide outdoor cooling to downtown. Compare the Rotary Club waterfall to Redding's small fountains. Redding desperatelyneeds a draw, and the Sacramento River should be a focus, not somethingto ignore, hoping that maybe people will not notice it is there.

Rick Putnam, Redding

Jonah Goldbergs recent column carefully and correctly defines censorship as a restriction of free expression by governments. By comparison, its placed directly next to the political cartoon, showing liberals disguised as Facebook manipulating Americans because it removes outright lies and extremist rhetoric from public distribution. Republicansotherwise known as government and purported champions of free enterpriseshow blatant hypocrisy when they use their public platform to actually accuse businesses like Facebook of censorship. No, theyre government advocating censoring by demanding a business must print inflammatory lies. With yet another destructive scam against democracy, theyre telling the world thats all they have left in their playbook.

Ronald Kardon, Redding

A recent column by Dan Walters was both unfair and unbalanced and leads one to wonder where has this formerly reasoned conservative critic has been watering. He writes to reduce the entire California judiciary to shills for the executive branch. As a lawyer for 38 years, with appellate experience in both the First and Third Districts, I can assure you that the Third is no pushover for the governor. Long-regarded as one of the most conservative appellate panels, it marches to its own beat. Walters implies- without a shred of supporting fact- that because the executive controls the purse strings then the judiciary is wretchedly beholden and no longer independent. If he has facts to back up his claim we in the bar would love to see them. I doubt they exist. This democracy, from which we all draw our freedoms, relies on trust in its institutions and the courts above all. Bald allegations of bias are corrosive to that trust and serve no one save authoritarians. Put up or shut up Mr. Walters.

Gregory W. Winters, Redding

Over the past few years, many businesses have been held hostage by crooks around the world when they took control of their computerized systems, which allowed them to operate and requested a ransom of bitcoin or some other digital currency. This will continue as it did recently withColonial Pipeline.It was reported the company paid $5 million so the crooks would release their computerized data programs. One sure way to stop these ransoms is to get rid of digital currency. Stop honoring it worldwide. World governments have been operating for centuries without this digital currency.

Don Farrell, Redding

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Letters to the editor: Sacramento River, ransomware and censorship - Record Searchlight

Following Red Dress Day on May 5, a day aimed to raise awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), Indigenous activists and supporters of the campaign found posts about MMIWG had disappeared from their Instagram accounts. In response, Instagram released a tweet saying that this was a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic, followed by an apology explaining that the platform experienced a technical bug, which impacted millions of peoples stories, highlights and archives around the world.

Creators, however, said that not all stories were affected.

And this is not the first time social media platforms have been under scrutiny because of their erroneous censoring of grassroots activists and racial minorities.

Many Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists were similarly frustrated when Facebook flagged their accounts, but didnt do enough to stop racism and hate speech against Black people on their platform.

So were these really about technical glitches? Or did they result from the platforms discriminatory and biased policies and practices? The answer lies somewhere in between.

Every time an activists post is wrongly removed, there are at least three possible scenarios.

First, sometimes the platform deliberately takes down activists posts and accounts, usually at request of and/or in co-ordination with the government. This happened when Facebook and Instagram removed posts and accounts of Iranians who expressed support for the Iranian general Qassem Soleiman.

In some countries and disputed territories, such as Kashmir, Crimea, Western Sahara and Palestinian territories, platforms censored activists and journalists to allegedly maintain their market access or to protect themselves from legal liabilities.

Second, a post can be removed through a user-reporting mechanism. To handle unlawful or prohibited communication, social media platforms have indeed primarily relied on users reporting.

Applying community standards developed by the platform, content moderators would then review reported content and determine whether a violation had occurred. If it had, the content would be removed, and, in the case of serious or repeat infringements, the user may be temporarily suspended or permanently banned.

This mechanism is problematic. Due to the sheer volume of reports received on a daily basis, there are simply not enough moderators to review each report adequately. Also, complexities and subtleties of language pose real challenges. Meanwhile, marginalized groups reclaiming abusive terms for public awareness, such as BLM and MMIWG, can be misinterpreted as being abusive.

Further, in flagging content, users tend to rely on partisanship and ideology. User reporting approach is driven by popular opinion of a platforms users while potentially repressing the right to unpopular speech.

Such approach also emboldens freedom to hate, where users exercise their right to voice their opinions while actively silencing others. A notable example is the removal by Facebook of Freedom for Palestine, a multi-artist collaboration posted by Coldplay, after a number of users reported the song as abusive.

Third, platforms are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to help identify and remove prohibited content. The idea is that complex algorithms that use natural language processing can flag racist or violent content faster and better than humans possibly can. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media companies are relying more on AI to cover for tens of thousands of human moderators who were sent home. Now, more than ever, algorithms decide what users can and cannot post online.

Theres an inherent belief that AI systems are less biased and can scale better than human beings. In practice, however, theyre easily disposed to error and can impose bias on a colossal systemic scale.

In two 2019 computational linguistic studies, researchers discovered that AI intended to identify hate speech may actually end up amplifying racial bias.

In one study, researchers found that tweets written in African American English commonly spoken by Black Americans are up to twice more likely to be flagged as offensive compared to others. Using a dataset of 155,800 tweets, another study found a similar widespread racial bias against Black speeches.

Whats considered offensive is bound to social context; terms that are slurs when used in some settings may not be in others. Algorithmic systems lack an ability to capture nuances and contextual particularities, which may not be understood by human moderators who test data used to train these algorithms either. This means natural language processing which is often perceived as an objective tool to identify offensive content can amplify the same biases that human beings have.

Algorithmic bias may jeopardize some people who are already at risk by wrongly categorizing them as offensive, criminals or even terrorists. In mid 2020, Facebook deleted at least 35 accounts of Syrian journalists and activists on the pretext of terrorism while in reality, they were campaigning against violence and terrorism.

MMIWG, BLM and the Syrian cases exemplify the dynamic of algorithms of opression where algorithms reinforce older oppressive social relations and re-install new modes of racism and discrimination.

While AI is celebrated as autonomous technology that can develop away from human intervention, it is inherently biased. The inequalities that underpin bias already exist in society and influence who gets the opportunity to build algorithms and their databases, and for what purpose. As such, algorithms do not intrinsically provide ways for marginalized people to escape discrimination, but they also reproduce new forms of inequality along social, racial and political lines.

Despite the apparent problems, algorithms are here to stay. There is no silver bullet, but one can take steps to minimize bias. First is to recognize that theres a problem. Then, making a strong commitment to root out algorithmic biases.

Bias can infiltrate the process anywhere in designing algorithms.

The inclusion of more people from diverse backgrounds within this process Indigenous, racial minorities, women and other historically marginalized groups is one of important steps to help mitigate the bias. In the meantime, it is important to push platforms to allow for as much transparency and public oversight as possible.

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Beyond a technical bug: Biased algorithms and moderation are censoring activists on social media - The Conversation CA