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A "free speech champion" could be appointed to fight "unacceptable silencing and censoring" at universities under plans put forward by the education secretary.

The person would investigate potential infringements, such as no-platforming speakers or dismissal of academics.

Gavin Williamson's other proposed measures to protect free speech on university campuses include:

Mr Williamson said: "Free speech underpins our democratic society and our universities have a long and proud history of being places where students and academics can express themselves freely, challenge views and cultivate an open mind.

"But I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of unacceptable silencing and censoring.

"That is why we must strengthen free speech in higher education, by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring strong, robust action is taken if these are breached."

The responses from those in the education sector were mixed.

University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said: "It is extraordinary that in the midst of a global pandemic the government appears more interested in fighting phantom threats to free speech than taking action to contain the real and present danger which the virus poses to staff and students.

"In reality the biggest threats to academic freedom and free speech come not from staff and students, or from so-called 'cancel culture', but from ministers' own attempts to police what can and cannot be said on campus, and a failure to get to grips with the endemic job insecurity and managerialist approaches which mean academics are less able to speak truth to power."

Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, vice president for higher education at the National Union of Students, said: "There is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus, and students' unions are constantly taking positive steps to help facilitate the thousands of events that take place each year."

She added: "We recognise this announcement as an opportunity for us to prove once and for all that there is not an extensive problem with freedom of expression across higher education."

The so-called culture war has been bubbling for some time.

As far back as 2018, an official report showed that unpopular and controversial ideas were being opposed or discouraged on campuses across the UK.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights study found numerous attempts at many different locations to shut down such debates rather than confront them.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was at the centre of a fracas in Bristol in February 2018 as he tried to address University of West England politics and international relations students.

Masked protesters hurled abuse at him and tried to disrupt the event before being removed by security.

At the end of last year, Cambridge University also entered the fray after proposals requiring staff and students to be "respectful" of differing views under a freedom of speech policy were overwhelmingly rejected.

The governing body said it would instead emphasise "tolerance" of differing views. Cambridge alumni including Stephen Fry had been among those who had opposed elements of the new policy, which the actor and writer had described as "muddled".

A Universities UK spokeswoman said: "There are already significant legal duties placed on universities to uphold freedom of speech and universities are required to have a code of practice on free speech and to update this regularly."

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, said: "Free speech and academic freedom are essential to teaching and research. Universities and colleges have legal duties to protect both free speech and academic freedom, and their compliance with these responsibilities forms an important part of their conditions of registration with the OfS.

"We will ensure that the changes that result from today's proposals reinforce these responsibilities and embed the widest definition of free speech within the law."

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'Free speech champion' among proposals to fight 'silencing and censoring' in universities - Sky News

Much has been made by the government that web companies should comply with any order they recieve. In fact, under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, ensuring the protection of human rights requires firms to ensure that their operations do not result in knowing and preventable infringement of rights.

The UN's Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression have also emphasised that web platforms should review the government orders they receive and ensure that measures are lawful, including being necessary and proportionate, before censoring online speech.

And as any news sector business in India would tell you, there are directives received from a range of government agencies that require narrowing and push-back all the time some of which end up as court cases. So why should the situation be so different for online content?

At the minimum, if any of this goes into litigation as a bye-product of the Union governments dispute with Twitter, then there is good ground that the courts should reconsider the initial hope they placed in the governments restraint, in their earlier Shreya Singhal ruling.

But perhaps at a larger level, we need to ask our elected lawmakers and public officials why web censorship orders should be regarded as acceptable in the Indian republic.

If we do believe that these troubling powers might be needed in truly exceptional circumstances, then we need to ensure they are wielded not by bureaucrats beholden to the government, but by judges and in a manner that is transparent and accountable to Parliament. And indeed, their use should be absolutely exceptional not a regular occasion several times in the year.

(Raman Jit Singh Chima is Policy Director at Access Now, an international digital rights advocacy and policy group, and a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the authors own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Why Indias Web Censorship Regime is Rotten & Needs Urgent Reform - The Quint

The lovable bear was heavily censored in one version of Kingdom Hearts 3, leaving some fans with lingering questions.

WhenKingdom Hearts 3 launched in January of 2019, it finally gave fans the chance to continue the story of Sora and the assortment of Disney characters by his side. The game introduced a number of Disney and Pixar properties that hadn't been touched on in previous installments, including Big Hero 6,Toy Story, andFrozen. The series as a whole is largely family friendly, combining the talents of Square Enix and Disney into one franchise, but there was one aspect ofKingdom Hearts 3that didn't sit well with the government of one particular country.

In the Chinese release ofKingdom Hearts 3, Winnie the Pooh was completely censored. In every on-screen appearance that the honey-loving bear made, he was covered by a massive white blot that blocked everything but the bear's feet. After the trailer for the Hundred Acre Wood section of the game was revealed, screenshots of this censorship were made public through social media. Instead of just removing the character from the game, which likely would have delayed theKingdom Hearts 3 more than it already was, it looked as if he was just painted over like a stain on a wall. This confused a lot of people in the west when the change was discovered,but Chinese censorship isn't new.

RELATED: Kingdom Hearts' Sheltering Zones Teach the Importance of Magic in the Series

Winnie the Pooh's censorship in China was a decision made by the government to prevent what it viewed as potential instability within the country.Kingdom Hearts 3 was not the first time the lovable bear had been banned from Chinese media, as the character has been a source of contention for quite some time now. The issues around the character began when Chinese citizens began likening Winnie the Pooh to Chinese president Xi Jinping. The comparisons began as a meme all the way back in 2013, when the Chinese president was pictured in a meeting with then-U.S. president Barack Obama.

While some people saw these comparisons as a point of mild amusement, many people in China that object to the rule of president Xi Jinping took the meme and expanded it immensely. Soon there were all kinds of images online comparing Winnie the Pooh with the Chinese president, some of them even photoshopping the president's face directly on to the character. It became one of many forms of protest for some citizens, but it didn't go ignored for long. The Chinese governmenttook exception to these memes and outright banned any depictions of Winnie the Pooh in Chinese media.

Chinese law sees this type of censorship across all mediums, including film and television. The 2018 filmChristopher Robin that starred Ewan McGregor and Hayley Atwell was completely banned in the country because of the stuffed-animal depiction of Winnie the Pooh, andany posts on social media that contain the character have been swiftly removed since this form of opposition began.

RELATED: Kingdom Hearts' Invisible Heartless Are an Odd Omission from Future Games

The video game industry has been subject to China's various bans on different forms of entertainment for years. It wasn't until the last console generation that the country allowed foreign video game consoles to be sold in stores, and even when it became legal, it was with some major caveats. Many aspects of the consoles sold in China are different from the ones sold in other parts of the world. The consoles are usually region-locked, meaning that only games approved by the Chinese government can be bought through online stores and played on Chinese servers.

Because of the amount of time that it takes to place these censors on consoles, this also means that China gets access to new hardware much later than most of the world does. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that a heavily censored version of the Switch released in the country, and Sony just recently announced that the PS5 would be coming to China sometime this year.

Games other thanKingdom Hearts 3have also been subject to heavy censorship in the country so that they can access the Chinese market. Back in 2018,Rainbow Six Siege attempted to introduce changes to some of the game's visuals so that it could sell in China. Instead of creating a version of the game specifically for China, however, the developer decided to changethe visuals in the game for everyone, and the controversy surrounding the decision was staggering. The censorship was changed soon after, and no additional forms of censorship for the game have been announced ever since.

Industry titanFortnite has also been subject to China's rules on censorship, in some cases changing how the game is even played. Instead of games always having one definitive winner, as long as a player survives for twenty minutes, they are crowned victorious along with anyone else that has survived for that long. The Chinese version ofFortnite also has changes for many of the game's skins, especially those that depict skeletons in one way or another as they go against China's censors. These are likely a small price to pay for the game's developer, however, as some mild changes to the game means that one of the largest video game markets in the world gets to access it.

ForKingdom Hearts 3, Winnie the Pooh's censorship was likely a small sacrifice to make so that the game could reach a wider audience. The immensity of the Chinese market cannot be overstated, and when there's money to be made, some companies are willing to make the necessary adjustments. With speculation on aKingdom Hearts 4 ramping up, it'll be interesting to see how the franchise juggles this moving forward.

Kingdom Hearts 3is available now for PS4 and Xbox One, and will be available on PC starting March 30th.

MORE: 5 Old Video Games That Have Aged Incredibly Well

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury: Can Yoshi Be Unlocked?

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Kingdom Hearts 3: The Censorship of Winnie the Pooh Explained - GameRant

Journalism is facing unprecedented assaults from attempts at censorship and the proliferation of fake news around the world. To push back against these threats, blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications are being developed to help authenticate media content, preserve records and maintain journalism integrity.

From Rappler CEO Maria Ressas persecution and conviction in the Philippines for cyber libel, to the arrests of reporters and media tycoons in Hong Kong, to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange potentially being extradited to the U.S. where he could face over 100 years in prison, media watchers say the outlook for press freedom is bleak.

Journalistic institutions working independently without interference from state actors or foreign actors is in peril in some countries, more so than in others, Bernat Ivancsics, a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told Forkast.News.

What we see in extreme cases, like in the Philippines, in Hong Kong, mainland China, currently in Belarus and Eastern Europe, Brazil, etc. that type of phenomenon is creeping into Western and developed nations, Ivancsics said.

The Trump administrations decision to prosecute Assange in 2019 for allegedly violating the Espionage Act also set the tone for the deteriorating state of freedom of the press around the world. The charge comes as a result of Wikileaks publication of classified U.S. military documents known as collateral murder showing two Reuters journalists and Iraqis killed by gunfire from an American helicopter in 2007. The U.S. Justice Department has pledged to appeal a British judges recent rejection of their request for Assanges extradition to the U.S.

Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations, said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLUs) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project in a statement. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the publics interest.

BREAKING: For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment. https://t.co/RJxjFPfkHe

Ivancsics agreed that Assanges prosecution would very likely set a dangerous precedent in journalism. There is a silence, especially in British and American press, on what the Assange decision would entail is kind of worrisome, he said. I certainly do not see the amount of discourse or just anxiety that it should invoke in current journalists.

With attacks on the press from a variety of directions from both state actors and the private sector what role can blockchain play to ensure a better playing field for journalism? Forkast.News explores ways in which blockchain has been experimented with by media companies and how the technology could be used by journalists and readers in the future.

A number of journalism organizations are now experimenting with blockchain.

The New York Times News Provenance Project was one, which created a proof-of-concept of how images could be authenticated and recorded as authentic on blockchain to prevent the spread of doctored images.

The project simulated a social media platform where users would be able to quickly check if a photo on the site was modified by providing a transparent record of any changes and usages of images on the site.

See related article: Journalist Maria Ressas ordeal shines light on social medias dark side

According to Ivancsics, who worked on the New York Times project, the real threat in journalism is the prevalence of images and memes that are cheaply made and easily shared on social media that distort the truth of events in the news.

Its just a sheer obfuscation of whats going on and what is true, what is not true, what the mainstream media is hiding, he said. Those sorts of questions are going to be the ones that are really going to just mess with peoples minds and perceptions around political and cultural issues.

The Times concluded that the prototype did help make informed judgements about the authenticity of photos on social media, but more work is needed to make it easily accessible to users.

In order for a blockchain solution to become a reality, news organizations with varying financial and technical resources need to be able to participate, said the Times report on the project. Finding ways to lower the barriers to entry is an essential component of any future explorations.

1/5 Today, the News Provenance Project is sharing insights from the UX research it has done to find out if surfacing metadata on news photos would help people to better discern credible images from misinformation. An overview of what we learned https://t.co/08SFMyoiSe

Another project was Civil, which was an attempt to change financing in journalism through the use of cryptocurrency tokens, but which shut down operations in 2020 due to similar issues with accessibility.

Civil had the potential to revolutionize how journalism is funded, created, and distributed in a secure, verifiable, quality manner, said Jonathan Askin, a professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School, said in an interview with Forkast.News.

However, Civils use of blockchain technology was not smooth enough, widely adopted, or well enough understood to enable journalists and readers to use the platform to its full potential. One guide from the Nieman Journalism Lab outlined the 44-step process needed to buy Civil tokens, highlighting the complexities of becoming a participant.

We will learn from these early experiments and create more viable blockchain-based content funding, creation, and distribution platforms, largely free from the oversight of the media moguls, Askin said.

More work remains to be done to achieve those goals, particularly for the use of blockchains features as a decentralized, immutable store of information as a tool against censorship.

Blockchain usage for information security in terms of information dissemination and decentralized information dissemination hasnt really been explored, Ivancsics said. At least in the U.S. and certain Western European countries, I dont really see the incentive right now to explore this type of blockchain usage.

While the economic or political incentives may not be in place to explore the usage of blockchain or DLT chiefly as a way to deter censorship, the technologys application in journalism is still valid according to experts.

The immutability, and decentralized, redundant verifiability of blockchain-enabled networks and processes makes it well suited to prevent censorship, Askin said. No central, biased arbiters are positioned to mutate content without verification by the network.

The fact that we can now trace the provenance and flow of data, content, and information from creation to mutation through perpetual distribution makes it much easier for viewers to access and verify the authenticity and likely truth of the content, added Askin, who is also the founder and director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, which focuses on tech-related media and policy issues.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is an example of a company using a combination of distributed ledgers, blockchain and cryptocurrency to store data and content such as articles securely in a decentralized fashion.

IPFS project lead Molly Mackinlay told Forkast.News that the company assists media with content addressing, meaning that users are able to view exact copies of articles independently of where they are hosted or published. This allows users to canonically reference and self-host a specific snapshot of an article, even if its later modified or deleted by the original provider.

Being able to fetch content by what it is means that anyone can host the data youre looking for decreasing the dependence on single, central news sources which might be censored if a group is trying to restrict access to information, Mackinlay said.

IPFS has been used to help document data that might be politically at-risk for later analysis and accountability. For example, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative used IPFS to document climate change data during the 2016 U.S. election to ensure it was preserved despite USAID funding cuts.

This helps decouple data creation from data preservation, even if one party wants the data to be removed or destroyed, other organizations who find it valuable can preserve it, link to it, and keep using it, Mackinlay said.

However, neither IPFS nor its decentralized storage network affiliate Filecoin incentivize spreading information to parties that arent trying to find it, and users pay to maintain content on their networks.

Matters.news is one Chinese-language media company that is cryptocurrency driven and hosts content on IPFS nodes, and platforms such as STEEM, LikeCoin, DTube and Hive also fit in similar categories related to cryptocurrency and decentralized content creation.

The use of blockchain and distributed ledgers to maintain a transparent and public record of media may be the most immediate use of the technology, particularly as rumors and actual fake news proliferate on social media, and the impact of Covid-19 continues to shape global geopolitics and economics.

How do you prove or disprove if something is the authentic material or know it is not being censored? Jim Nasr, CEO of blockchain application developer Acoer, told Forkast.News.

Blockchain technology applied in ways similar to the News Provenance Project or Adobes Content Authenticity Initiative may provide the answer. We can timestamp [content], we can have non-intrusive ways to show the authentic content and its attribution to whoever created it, versus any of the alternatives, Nasr said.

Forkast.News is collaborating with Acoer to leverage NewsHashs authenticity tracking service. Readers can scan the QR code below to verify on Hedera Hashgraphs DLT whether this article or video is authentic.

Acoer has developed a pilot system for journalism that aims to do just that a news tracker that logs and stamps article hashes into the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger DLT to combat fake news. Users curious to check if an article is authentic could scan a QR code on the Newshash.io site to ensure the article and its contents are valid.

Chicago-based social enterprise Hala Systems is another example of a company using Hedera Hashgraph to provide journalists and civilians with an immutable digital record of events occurring in war-torn Syria, where disinformation campaigns have distorted public perceptions. Information gathered on the platform can be used to verify the authenticity of events that transpire as well as provide an early warning system to prevent civilian casualties from incoming air strikes.

A combination of decentralized content hosting and blockchain-enabled authentication could be a solution to the issue of fake news and censorship.

Certainly the infrastructure of a blockchain can help with that, particularly if you have not just a proof of it, but the content itself decentralized and distributed over many nodes, Nasr said.

Another potential application may involve using natural language processing algorithms to gauge the veracity of the content in articles and to stamp and store that information through DLT or blockchain in a way that readers can easily check the accuracy of statements.

A combination of these technologies could provide a reliability score for readers to help readers judge whether articles are trustworthy. This proposed system would require a consortium of vetted journalists working together over time to use the rating system, over time creating a large record of content and authors as well as their confidence scores through a network effect.

From a consumer perspective, if Jim is reading [a journalists] article with a 79% trust or confidence score, that intimates the algorithm basically looking at different sources, this triangulation in real time and saying theres a high degree of confidence that this is legit, Nasr said.

The same system could also be applied to find out if an article was censored, or to what degree one article is omitting information relevant to the reader compared to other articles.

While blockchain as applied to journalism is still in its experimental phase, experts agree that it does have the potential to assist the flow of information and to mitigate the spread of disinformation.

I like to think that blockchain will become a great democratizing tool to allow worthy ideas to reach broader audiences and advance global public discourse on ideas that affect all of society and the planet, Askin said.

When the technology and user interfaces become more user-friendly and idiot proof, well see broader adoption of blockchain-based journalism.

Forkast.News is collaborating with Acoer to leverage NewsHashs authenticity tracking service. Readers can scan a QR code to verify on Hedera Hashgraphs DLT whether this article or video is authentic. Read here to find out more.

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Can blockchain prevent fake news and protect against censorship? - Forkast News

Meduzas editorial office received a notice from Russias federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, ordering the removal of an article about the flashlight protest Alexey Navalnys supporters are planning to conduct on Sunday, February 14.

The notice says specifically that the article contained information with calls for citizens to participate in mass (public) events on February 14, 2021, in Moscow and other Russian cities, conducted in support of A.A. Navalny in violation of the established procedures.

Roskomnadzor added that there wasnt any information confirming that the protests in question had been approved by the competent authorities in the manner prescribed by law.

Meduza deleted the article at the departments request.

The article that drew Roskomnadzors attention was titled Many made fun of flashlights as a new form of protest. But not the Russian government. It saw it as a NATO scheme and is even scaring [people] with terrorist attacks. The text didnt mention the exact time that the demonstration is scheduled to begin.

The article reported that Russias Investigative Committee, police officials, andAttorney Generals Office had issued warnings about the inadmissibility of violating the law in connection with the calls for mass demonstrations. It also cited reports from the state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, which said that according to anonymous sources, terrorist attacks were being planned during the protests in different Russian cities.

The text also cited the opinions of Russian lawmakers and the Foreign Ministrys spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova. In addition, it cited segments from state television channels, which have covered the upcoming demonstration in great detail one channel even aired a segment that included the tweet announcing the demonstrations posted by Navalnys chief of staff, Leonid Volkov.

In late 2020, the Russian State Duma adopted amendments to article 7 of the federal law On assemblies, demonstrations, rallies, marches, and picketing. These changes allow the courts to recognize nearly any gathering as a public event that can be deemed illegal unless it was sanctioned by the relevant authorities in advance.

No court decisions recognizing the demonstration planned for February 14 as a public event have been reported as of yet.

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Russias censorship agency orders Meduza to delete article about the official reaction to planned pro-Navalny demonstration - Meduza