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MOSCOW Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Kremlin-controlled RT television network, recently called on the government to block access to Western social media.

She wrote: Foreign platforms in Russia must be shut down.

Her choice of social network for sending that message: Twitter.

While the Kremlin fears an open internet shaped by American companies, it just cant quit it.

Russias winter of discontent, waves of nationwide protests set off by the return of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, has been enabled by the countrys free and open internet. The state controls the television airwaves, but online Mr. Navalnys dramatic arrest upon arrival in Moscow, his investigation into President Vladimir V. Putins purported secret palace and his supporters calls for protest were all broadcast to an audience of many millions.

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to clamp down on freedom of speech online, leading to frequent predictions that the country could be heading toward internet censorship akin to Chinas great firewall.

But even as Mr. Putin faced the biggest protests in years last month, his government appeared unwilling and, to some degree, unable to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.

The hesitation has underscored the challenge Mr. Putin faces as he tries to blunt the political implications of cheap high-speed internet access reaching into the remote corners of the vast country while avoiding angering a populace that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

Theyre afraid, Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, said of why the Kremlin hasnt clamped down harder. Theyve got all these weapons, but they dont know how to use them.

More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet lays bare a dilemma for Mr. Putins Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public backlash or continue trying to manage public discontent by maintaining some semblance of an open society.

In China, government control went hand in hand with the internets early development. But in Russia, home to a Soviet legacy of an enormous pool of engineering talent, digital entrepreneurship bloomed freely for two decades, until Mr. Putin started trying to restrain online speech after the antigovernment protests of 2011 and 2012.

At that point, the open internet was so entrenched in business and society and its architecture so decentralized that it was too late to radically change course. But efforts to censor the web, as well as requirements that internet providers install equipment for government surveillance and control, gained pace in bill after bill passed by Parliament. At the same time, internet access continues to expand, thanks in part to government support.

Russian officials now say that they have the technology in place to allow for a sovereign RuNet a network that would continue to give Russians access to Russian websites even if the country were cut off from the World Wide Web. The official line is that this expensive infrastructure offers protection in case nefarious Western forces try to cut Russias communications links. But activists say it is actually meant to give the Kremlin the option to cut some or all of Russia off from the world.

In principle, it will be possible to restore or enable the autonomous functioning of the Russian segment of the web, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putins Security Council and a former prime minister, told reporters recently. Technologically, everything is ready for this.

Amid this years domestic unrest, Russias saber-rattling directed at Silicon Valley has reached a new intensity. Mr. Navalny has made expert use of Googles YouTube, Facebooks Instagram and Twitter to reach tens of millions of Russians with his meme-ready depictions of official corruption, down to the $850 toilet brush he claimed to have identified at a property used by Mr. Putin.

At the same time, Russia has appeared powerless trying to stop those companies from blocking pro-Kremlin accounts or forcing them to take down pro-Navalny content. (Mr. Navalnys voice is resonating on social media even with him behind bars: On Saturday, a court upheld his prison sentence of more than two years.)

Russias telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has taken to publicly berating American internet companies, sometimes multiple times a day. On Wednesday, the regulator said that the voice-chat social network Clubhouse had violated the rights of citizens to access information and to distribute it freely by suspending the account of a prominent state television host, Vladimir Solovyov. On Jan. 29, it claimed that Google was blocking YouTube videos containing the Russian national anthem, calling it flagrant and unacceptable rudeness directed at all citizens of our country.

Clubhouse apparently blocked Mr. Solovyovs account because of user complaints, while Google said some videos containing the Russian anthem had been blocked in error because of a content rights issue. Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition, as calls for nationwide protest proliferated after Mr. Navalnys arrest last month, Roskomnadzor said that social networks were encouraging minors to take part in illegal activity.

The Russian social network VKontakte and the Chinese-owned app TikTok partly complied with Roskomnadzors order to block access to protest-related content. But Facebook refused, stating, This content doesnt violate our community standards.

For all its criticism of American social media companies, the Kremlin has used them extensively to spread its message around the world. It was Facebook that served as a primary tool in Russias effort to sway the 2016 United States presidential election. On YouTube, the state-controlled network RT has a combined 14 million subscribers for its English, Spanish and Arabic-language channels.

Ms. Simonyan, the editor of RT, says she will continue to use American social media platforms as long as they are not banned.

To quit using these platforms while everyone else is using them is to capitulate to the adversary, she said in a statement to The New York Times. To ban them for everyone is to vanquish said adversary.

A law signed by Mr. Putin in December gives his government new powers to block or restrict access to social networks, but it has yet to use them. When regulators tried to block access to the messaging app Telegram starting in 2018, the two-year effort ended in failure after Telegram found ways around the restrictions.

Instead, officials are trying to lure Russians onto social networks like VKontakte that are closely tied to the government. Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the state-owned natural gas giant, has promised to turn its long-moribund video platform RuTube into a competitor to YouTube. And in December it said it had bought an app modeled on TikTok called Ya Molodets Russian for Im great for sharing short smartphone videos.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has co-written a book on the Kremlins efforts to control the internet, says the strategy of persuading people to use Russian platforms is a way to keep dissent from going viral at moments of crisis. As of April 1, all smartphones sold in Russia will be required to come pre-loaded with 16 Russian-made apps, including three social networks and an answer to Apples Siri voice assistant that is called Marusya.

The goal is for the typical Russian user to live in a bubble of Russian apps, Mr. Soldatov said. Potentially, it could be rather effective.

Even more effective, some activists say, is the acceleration of Mr. Putins machine of selective repression. A new law makes online libel punishable by up to five years in prison, and the editor of a popular news website served 15 days in jail for retweeting a joke that included a reference to a January pro-Navalny protest.

In a widely circulated video this month, a SWAT team in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok can be seen interrogating Gennady Shulga, a local video blogger who covered the protests. An officer in a helmet, goggles and combat fatigues presses Mr. Shulga shirtless to a tile floor next to two pet-food bowls.

The Kremlin is very much losing the information race, said Sarkis Darbinyan, an internet freedom activist. Self-censorship and fear thats what were heading toward.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

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China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesnt Russia? - The New York Times

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. But if they are made poorly, both are bad for you.

An Iowa House member has introduced a bill that would penalize school districts if they teach history using any information from something called the 1619 Project. That curriculum was developed to re-examine slavery in the United States, and it contains some harsh realities not otherwise taught.

For example, were you taught that, The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province shall serve durante vita, hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment. By 1729, Maryland law authorized punishments of enslaved people including to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county.?

This is true, but if a teacher uses this information from the project, House File 222 would cut their schools funding. The bill also applies to any similarly developed curriculum. In other words, Even if I havent seen it, its bad.

Beyond the obvious Constitutional problems with the bill, it is unenforceable. Who decides if particular information came from the 1619 Project; who decides if a curriculum is similar? This is nothing but censorship of thought.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said, Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought, and Alan Dershowitz who represented President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial has said freedom of speech means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.

If you disagree with speech, you dont ban it; you present opposing views. The Iowa Constitution says plainly that, No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech ...

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More than 40 groups have officially objected to the bill, and during a subcommittee hearing on Feb. 9 there were many thoughtful statements in opposition. The representative brushed those comments aside, spent 10 of the hearings 60 minutes reading a statement with his thoughts on the politics of the 1619 Project, and never engaged in a meaningful discussion of the pros and cons of the bill.

What was most telling was the fact he never mentioned one constituent, one Iowan who had raised concerns about the project.

Instead, he relied on national opponents of the project who had their views published in places such as the World Socialist website.

Its a good bet that if you were in the Sioux Center Fareway the night before a big blizzard, you could throw a stone and not hit anyone who had ever even heard of the 1619 Project before it became this legislators pet project.

He also has a bill that would make Black market sales of handguns legal. Now, if a drug dealer sells a handgun to another drug dealer who doesnt have a gun permit, thats a felony for both of them. His bill eliminates that crime.

And then theres his attempt to pass a law about how many toilets a bar has to have. Theres more, but thats enough.

Someone needs to take this representative aside and say Look, you dont have to present a bill just because you can. You dont have to be a bully just because you have a bully pulpit.

Small minds make bad laws ... and bad laws get in the way of good ones.

The legislature has only two more months to finish its work.

In the month its been in session, it has passed only a handful of bills and resolutions, including to give Coast Guard members the same rights given other military members, modify the disorderly conduct statute dealing with loud and raucous noise, allow more consumer accounts to be billed for service charges, deal with remote education, and propose a constitutional amendment dealing with firearms.

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Meanwhile, the Legislative Services Agency had to draft HF 222, opponents of the bill had to respond to the bill, and there was a one-hour hearing all wasted on an unconstitutional, unenforceable bill because someone thinks they are better qualified to decide what to teach than trained educators and the Department of Education.

We dont watch sausage being made because we trust the sausage-maker to do their job right and to give us a good and safe product. We should be able to expect the same from the Iowa Legislature.

Bob Teig was a career federal prosecutor in Cedar Rapids for 32 years before he retired in 2011.

Original post:
Iowa's proposed '1619 Project' ban is a censorship of thought - The Gazette

Under new draft laws, the eSafety Commissioner could order your nude selfies, sex education or slash fiction to be taken down from the internet with just 24 hours notice.

Officially, the Morrison governments new bill aims to improve online safety.

But in doing so, it gives broad, discretionary powers to the commissioner, with serious ramifications for anyone who engages with sexual content online.

After initial consultation in 2019, the federal government released the draft online safety bill last December. Public submissions closed on the weekend.

The bill contains several new initiatives, from cyberbullying protections for children to new ways to remove non-consensual intimate imagery.

Crucially, it gives the eSafety Commissioner a federal government appointee a range of new powers.

It contains rapid website-blocking provisions to prevent the circulation of abhorrent violent material (such as live-streaming terror attacks). It reduces the timeframe for takedown notices (where a hosting provider is directed to remove content) from 48 to 24 hours. It can also require search engines to delete links and app stores to prevent downloads, with civil penalties of up to $111,000 for non-compliance.

But one concerning element of the bill that has not received wide public attention is its takedown notices for so-called harmful online content.

Due to the impracticality of classifying the entire internet, regulators are now moving towards systems that require access restrictions for certain content and make use of user complaints to identify harmful material.

In this vein, the proposed bill will require online service providers to use technologies to prevent children gaining access to sexual material.

Read more: Coalition plans to improve online safety don't address the root cause of harms: the big tech business model

Controversially, the bill gives the commissioner power to impose their own specific restricted access system.

This means the commissioner could decide that, to access sexual content, users must upload their identity documents, scan their fingerprints, undergo facial recognition technology or have their age estimated by artificial intelligence based on behavioural signals.

But there are serious issues with online verification systems. This has already been considered and abandoned by similar countries. The United Kingdom dropped its plans in 2019, following implementation difficulties and privacy concerns.

The worst-case scenario here is governments collect databases of peoples sexual preferences and browsing histories that can be leaked, hacked, sold or misused.

The bill also creates an online content scheme, which identifies content that users can complain about.

The bill permits any Australian internet user to make complaints about class 1 and class 2 content that is not subject to a restricted access system. These categories are extremely broad, ranging from actual, to simulated, to implied sexual activity, as well as explicit nudity.

In practice, people can potentially complain about any material depicting sex that they find on the internet, even on specific adult sites, if there is no mechanism to verify the users age.

The draft laws then allow the commissioner to conduct investigations and order removal notices as they think fit. There are no criteria for what warrants removal, no requirement to give reasons, and no process for users to be notified or have opportunity to respond to complaints.

Without the requirement to publish transparent enforcement data, the commissioner can simply remove content that is neither harmful nor unlawful and is specifically exempt from liability for damages or civil proceedings.

This means users will have little clarity on how to actually comply with the scheme.

The potential ramifications of the bill are broad. They are likely to affect sex workers, sex educators, LGBTIQ health organisations, kink communities, online daters, artists and anyone who shares or accesses sexual content online.

While previous legislation was primarily concerned with films, print publications, computer games and broadcast media, this bill applies to social media, instant messaging, online games, websites, apps and a range of electronic and internet service providers.

It means links to sex education and harm reduction material for young people could be deleted by search engines. Hook up apps such as Grindr or Tinder could be made unavailable for download. Escort advertising platforms could be removed. Online kink communities like Fetlife could be taken down.

The legislation could embolden users - including anti-pornography advocates, disgruntled customers or ex-partners - to make vexatious complaints about sexual content, even where there is nothing harmful about it.

The complaints system is also likely to have a disproportionate impact on sex workers, especially those who turned to online work during the pandemic, and who already face a high level of malicious complaints.

Sex workers consistently report restrictive terms of service as well as shadowbanning and deplatforming, where their content is stealthily or selectively removed from social media.

Read more: How the 'National Cabinet of Whores' is leading Australia's coronavirus response for sex workers

The requirement for service providers to restrict childrens access to sexual content also provides a financial incentive to take an over-zealous approach. Providers may employ artificial intelligence at scale to screen and detect nudity (which can confuse sex education with pornography), apply inappropriate age verification mechanisms that compromise user privacy, or, where this is too onerous or expensive, take the simpler route of prohibiting sexual content altogether.

In this sense, the bill may operate in a similar way to United States FOSTA-SESTA anti-trafficking legislation, which prohibits websites from promoting or facilitating prostitution. This resulted in the pre-emptive closure of essential sites for sex worker safety, education and community building.

Platforms have been notoriously poor when it comes to dealing with sexual content. But governments have not been any better.

We need new ways to think about moderating sexual content.

Historically, obscenity legislation has treated all sexual content as if it was lacking in value unless it was redeemed by literary, artistic or scientific merit. Our current classification framework of offensiveness is also based on outdated notions of morality, decency and propriety.

Read more: The ChatterleyTrial 60 years on: a court case that secured free expression in 1960s Britain

Research into sex and social media suggests we should not simply conflate sex with risk.

Instead, some have proposed human rights approaches. These draw on a growing body of literature that sees sexual health, pleasure and satisfying sexual experiences as compatible with bodily autonomy, safety and freedom from violence.

Others have pointed to the need for improved sex education, consent skills and media literacy to equip users to navigate online space.

Whats obvious is we need a more nuanced approach to decision-making that imagines sex beyond harm, thinks more comprehensively about safer spaces, and recognises the cultural value in sexual content.

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A new online safety bill could allow censorship of anyone who engages with sexual content on the internet - The Conversation AU

Contact:Hadar Harris, Executive DirectorStudent Press Law Center(202) 549-6316 /hharris@splc.org

Student Journalists Celebrate 3rd Annual Student Press Freedom Day on Feb. 26

Washington, D.C. In anticipation of the 3rd annualStudent Press Freedom DayonFriday, Feb. 26th, the Student Press Law Center released a white paper today detailing a continuing pattern of censorship of student journalists by school officials across the country.Student Journalists in 2020: Journalism Against the Odds notes that, despite incredible challenges students faced, they produced top-quality reporting on the most important safety, health and political issues of our day.

Examples detailed in the white paper include:

Student journalists, like professional journalists, provide an essential, constitutionally-protected service to their communities and should be recognized and fully supported for the service they provide in gathering and delivering vital information on issues of concern to the public, said Hadar Harris, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.The troubling trends we observed over the past year reinforce the need to ensure legal protections for student journalists in all 50 states.

The theme for Student Press Freedom Day 2021 isJournalism Against the Odds,in acknowledgment of the important news coverage student journalists have produced, despite being faced with incredible challenges. In addition to outright censorship, student journalists worked against odds that included prior review, lack of access to critical data, suppression of or discipline for unflattering or controversial photos or other news coverage, assault and harassment during public gatherings, budget cuts, and an abrupt shift to an all-virtual newsroom and all-online business model. Furthermore, they faced the continuing scourge of a legal system that, following the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decisionHazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, has created an exemption for student free speech rights as it relates to student journalists, allowing overzealous school administrators to assert their power to censor broadly.

As the only reporters with a front row seat to the challenge of safe schooling in 2020, student journalists like me had a unique perspective on the experience of the nearly 73 million students who were forced to move suddenly to remote learning in spring 2020 and the impact this had on our families and communities, said Neha Madhira, sophomore at the University of Texas, Austin and reporter at theDaily Texan. Beyond our COVID-19 reporting, we have helped curate an important discussion about racial justice and systemic racism on our campuses and communities, and we took physical risks to cover protests in our communities, often being targeted by law enforcement because of our role as journalists. We student journalists must be allowed to do our jobs without undue interference.

As part of Student Press Freedom Day, SPLC has curated21 examples of impactful, important student journalism, focused on reporting on the impact of COVID-19, reckoning with racial justice, overcoming censorship and more. The stories represent work by both high school and college journalists with diverse backgrounds and from geographically diverse schools. These stories represent some of the very best in student journalism.

A critical part of Student Press Freedom Day is students sharing their stories with mainstream media outlets, lawmakers, and their peers about the incredible odds they have faced in the past year to carry out their work. More than 100 student journalists took part this month in anop-ed writing boot camp with veteran CNN & New York Times Journalist Steven A. Holmesabout how to craft and place an op-ed, and nearly half of the participants are working with a professional coach to support their efforts.

In addition, with legislative sessions underway, students are advocating withNew Voices chaptersin their states and testifying before education and judiciary committees for proposedchanges to state law that will protect student press freedom. They are creating and sharing video testimonials on social media about the challenges they face as student journalists and spreading the word using the hashtag#StudentPressFreedom. They are participating in astudent-moderated town hall forumabout how to strengthen student press freedom moving forward. They are hostinggroup screenings and discussions ofRaise Your Voice, a documentary about how the student journalists at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL navigated their school mass shooting as both survivors and journalists.

Student Press Freedom Day is co-sponsored by more than 15 organizations, including the Journalism Education Association, the College Media Association, The Associated Collegiate Press, the National Scholastic Press Association, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and more.

In the past year, readership of student newspapers significantly increased in many places, underscoring the important role student media plays in the community in times of crisis and moments of historic significance, said Hadar Harris. As student press freedom faced unparalleled challenges in 2020, the movement to support it continues to grow.

About Student Press Freedom Day

The Student Press Law Center launched Student Press Freedom Day in 2019 to raise awareness of the vital work and impact of student journalists, highlight the censorship and prior review challenges student journalists face, and underscore the importance of journalism education. It is a national day of action which activates and empowers student journalists to assert their right to student press freedom.

About the Student Press Law Center

The Student Press Law Center (SPLC.org,@splc) is an independent, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit working at the intersection of law, journalism and education to support, promote and defend the rights of student journalists and their advisers at the high school and college levels. SPLC has the nations only free legal hotline for student journalists. Based in Washington, D.C., the Student Press Law Center provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to student journalists and the educators who work with them

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See original here:
Censorship of Student Journalists Persists Despite their Essential Role Reporting on COVID, Protests, Racial Justice and Elections, New White Paper...

One hundred years ago on Sunday, a decision by a lowly New York court had the effect of banning James Joyces Ulysses in the United States. In the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, set on Sandymount Strand, Leopold Bloom masturbates as Gerty MacDowell lets him glimpse her legs. Serialised in The Little Review, a literary magazine, this caught the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The magazines publishers were duly convicted of obscenity and fined $50; no other legitimate American publisher would risk taking on Ulysses for more than a decade.

In the meantime, mores were changing. In 1932, Random House imported a single copy of Ulysses and arranged for US Customs to seize it. The resulting court case ended in a famous victory when Judge John Munro Woolsey, who had spent months studying the novel, found that Ulysses was not obscene. Random House were free to import it; and, by implication, to print it.

It is easy to laugh, now, at the prudishness of Joyces moralising persecutors; it is less easy to apply a lesson from their eventual defeat. That lesson might seem to be that, as Judge Woolsey put it during the latter case, ideas ought to take their chances in the marketplace; but the idea of untrammelled freedom of expression has come under new strain in this age of social media, exemplified in the belated, clumsy attempts of the platforms to censor Donald Trump.

The Woolsey decision was less about the principle of freedom of expression than about a changing understanding of the balance to be struck between that freedom and the constraints that were acknowledged to be necessary upon it. Woolsey found that, although the effect of Ulysses on the reader could be emetic, or vomit-inducing, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac; had it done so, it would still have been obscene. A hundred years from now, perhaps people will look back and laugh at our fumbling attempts to censor online speech. We can only hope that we wont have to wait a further decade to find the right balance between constraint and freedom.

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The Irish Times view on the banning of Ulysses: lessons on censorship - The Irish Times