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Our early morning report revealed the good news that the Trump Administration is privately assuring U.S. Companies including Apple that WeChat won't be banned in China. However, in general, we can understand why the U.S. Government is against the WeChat App which is a powerful tool for the Chinese Communist Government. Don't take my word for it, take the word of those under China's rule.

Abacus, who works out of Hong Kong, is now under the thumb of Mainland China. They've posted a report, while they still can against the government titled "Chinas WeChat censored thousands of keywords tied to the coronavirus pandemic, Citizen Lab study says."

Many in Hong Kong know the extent of censorship due to researchers from the University of Toronto who cataloged censored keywords from January to May and passed on their findings.

The report by Abacus writer Karen Chiu states that "When the novel coronavirus first struck China, government efforts to control online discussions were mostly focused on domestic politics. But as the pandemic spread across the globe, US-related topics have borne the brunt of WeChats censorship, a new study found.

Between January and May, researchers at the University of Torontos Citizen Lab found that the Chinese app blocked more than 2,000 keywords related to Covid-19.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, early warnings about the virus were censored, as were domestic criticisms of Chinas handling of the outbreak, said the report.

One incident concerned the real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who went missing after he wrote an article slamming the government.

Using the keyword "Ren Zhiqiang" by itself did not trigger any censorship, however when grouped together as "cover up the facts, Ren Zhiqiang" or "Ren, missing," the entire message was blocked.

Months later The story resurfaced in late July with the Chinese Government preparing to prosecute Zhiqiang.

For more on this story read the full Abacus report. Abacus is now owned by the reputable South China Morning News.

WeChat is simply caught up into this political situation because of the Communist Government forcing the issue on them. Not complying would be a death sentence for the company.

On the other hand, U.S. Social Media sites like Twitter use censorship by choice to shut out the U.S President in the hope that he'll lose the election. They can't use the excuse that the government made them censor voices different from their own. In terms of free speech, I wonder what form of censorship is more evil Government or Corporate censorship?

View original post here:
China's WeChat is forced to adopt Censorship to Appease the Chinese Communist Government - Patently Apple

After banning almost 5,000 books in the last seven years, Kuwaits government has relaxed its book censorship laws in a move that has been welcomed by writers and free speech activists.

Kuwaiti state media reported that the countrys parliament had voted 40 to nine in favour of lifting the Ministry of Informations control over books imported into the country. Previously, the ministry had blacklisted more than 4,000 books since 2014, with titles including Victor Hugos The Hunchback of Notre Dame and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garca Mrquez falling foul of its censorship committee. All books published in the country had to receive prior approval from a 12-member committee that met twice a month before they could be released, with offences ranging from insulting Islam to inciting unrest and committing immoral acts.

The new rules mean importers and publishers will only have to provide the Ministry of Information with book titles and author names, with the importer alone bearing responsibility for the books contents. According to the National, only an official complaint from the public will spark legal action against a book, with a ban only to be implemented by the courts, rather than the Ministry of Information.

The International Publishers Association said the ruling put an end to the mandate of the Kuwaiti book censorship committee.

Congratulations to those in Kuwait who have successfully encouraged this change in favour of the freedom to publish, said the chair of the IPAs freedom to publish committee, Kristenn Einarsson. This is an important step forward and I hope that more positive changes will follow.

Kuwaiti-American author Layla AlAmmar told the Guardian that the change was a major and positive step in the right direction.

Abolishing the committee is a major accomplishment that is worthy of celebration, and the credit for it rightly goes to writers and activists like Bothayna al-Essa and Abdullah al-Khonaini, who lobbied tirelessly for this cause, she said.

AlAmmar said that, in the nearly 15 years that the committee was in place, almost 5,000 books were banned in a largely arbitrary fashion and that the law had throttled an already fledgling publishing industry and market where piracy is rampant.

Campaigners have both welcomed the news and shared reservations. The Ministry of Information is no longer the judge when it comes to books and I believe this is a most important achievement, Essa told Gulf News. We will continue to work towards achieving greater freedoms.

But Khonaini said: The freedom of expression is already restricted in Kuwait on multiple levels. This law doesnt fix it. The amendment shifts the power of censorship away from the executive branch to the judicial branch. We still need to work on the prohibition section in the law, which needs a stronger political lobby and mature political and societal awareness.

AlAmmar pointed to the case of International prize for Arabic fiction winner Saud al-Sanousi, who went to court to get a ban on his book annulled. It remains unclear what the fate of the banned books is: does the ban automatically lift? Must they pass through some other authorising committee or bureaucratic procedure before their sale is allowed? None of this has been addressed, she said.

Read more here:
Kuwait relaxes book censorship laws after banning thousands of titles - The Guardian

When the novel coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country responded aggressively, placing tens of millions of people into strict lockdown. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was just as forceful in controlling how the health crisis was portrayed and discussed among its own people.

Politically sensitive material, like references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, have long been forbidden on Chinas highly censored internet, but researchers at the University of Torontos Citizen Lab say these efforts reached a new level during the pandemic. The blunt range of censored content goes beyond what we expected, including general health information such as the fact [that] the virus spreads from human contact, says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the associate director of Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on technology and human rights.

Citizen Lab's latest report, published earlier this week, finds that between January and May this year, more than 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users in the country. Many of the censored terms referenced events and organizations in the United States.

Unlike in the US, internet platforms in China are responsible for carrying out the governments censorship orders and can be held liable for what their users post. Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not comment in time for publication. WeChat blocks content via a remote server, meaning its not possible for research groups like Citizen Lab to study censorship on the app by looking at its code. We can send messages through the server and see if they are received or not, but we can't see inside of it, so the exact censorship rules are a bit of a mystery, Crete-Nishihata says.

For its latest report, Citizen Lab sent text copied from Chinese-language news articles to a group chat it created on WeChat with three dummy accounts, one registered to a mainland Chinese phone number and two registered to Canadian phone numbers. They used articles from a range of outlets, including some based in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Chinese state-controlled publications. If a message was blocked, the researchers performed further tests to identify which words triggered the censorship. Some of the blocked messages had originally been published by Chinese state media. In other words, while a person or topic may be freely discussed in the government-controlled press, its still banned on WeChat.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.

The Citizen Lab report demonstrates the extent to which the Chinese government tried to control the narrative from the beginning. As residents in Wuhan remained in lockdown, WeChat blocked phrases about Li Wenliang, a local doctor who warned colleagues about a new infectious disease before it was disclosed by the government, and who became a popular hero for free speech after he died of Covid-19 in February. WeChat also blocked its users from discussing an announcement by Chinese officials that they had informed the US government about the pandemic for the first time on January 3, almost three weeks before they said anything to their own citizens. And it censored mentions of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the organization was coupled with the word coronavirus.

By March, Covid-19 had become a global pandemic, and WeChat began blocking some mentions of international groups like the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. It also censored references to outbreaks in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Citizen Lab found that the majority of blocked words related to international relations were about the United States, the subject of the third portion of the report.

More here:
How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic - WIRED

Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series which celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on TV. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.

Next up, we're speaking to Amber Benson about her game-changing role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.

That's true for more reasons than I could ever list here, but when Buffy said this to Dawn, younger me also found these words strangely comforting. Being a teenager is never easy, no matter who you are, or where you come from, but it's safe to say that all the loneliness everyone feels is amplified even more when you're queer. And hearing someone else acknowledge that on screen shifted something inside of me.

Buffy didn't choose to be a Slayer, just like I didn't choose to be gay, but there's a strength to be drawn from being different and embracing what makes you special. Of course, that's easier said than done. For the longest time, I fought to deny this part of myself with even more strength than Buffy battling another apocalypse.

But then something magical happened. A new character called Tara Maclay appeared on the show and for perhaps the first time ever, I saw my own shy, queer insecurities reflected directly back at me on screen.

Looking back at her first day, Amber Benson recalls walking onto the 'Hush' set in season four and coming across the Gentlemen on wheeled platforms:

"Someone was pulling them, and they just couldn't get it to work right. So for two hours, it was everyone trying to get the Gentlemen to float properly [laughs]. I was like, 'What have I walked into?'"

It's fitting that in an episode where people lost the power to speak, Tara's debut ended up giving a voice to countless queer viewers watching at home. As her role gradually became more prominent, this shy young character shifted the show and TV as a whole towards something more inclusive, and that was thanks in large part to her relationship with Willow.

Sure, there had been other LGBTQ+ romances on TV before, but it's safe to say seeing Tara and Willow fall in love saved more lives than even Buffy herself ever could. Almost twenty years on, Benson tells me that both she and co-star Alyson Hannigan "feel honoured" still by how fans react to their story:

"I'm so lucky," says Amber. "It's the thing I'm most proud of as an actor. I look back at Buffy, and I'm like: we did something that wasn't just television. I think that was a beautiful thing. I think it changed the landscape a bit."

"I look back at Buffy, and Im like: we did something that wasnt just television."

Before Willow fell under Tara's spell, TV was pretty much a full-on Hellmouth when it came to any kind of positive queer representation. Sure, some important strides were made in the '90s, but they often came at a cost.

Shows like Friends often reinforced cringeworthy stereotypes, and even when Ellen DeGeneres came out in her sitcom, the subsequent backlash led to its eventual cancellation. Readers who grew up during this time will recall that queer characters were even rarer in genre TV. Looking back, Xena and Gabrielle must have slipped a disc carrying the whole queer fantasy fandom on their shoulders.

And then Tara arrived. Just by proudly loving Willow on TV, Amber's character told fans that; "If you find somebody to love, it doesn't matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. If you find somebody, you're lucky. That's a beautiful, wonderful thing, and everyone should have that opportunity."

Back in the early noughties, it was still rare to see two women share this kind of affection on screen; "You just didn't see that." So while Tara and Willow's relationship was groundbreaking for a number of reasons, Benson admits the network was still "very, very wary" about showing the physicality of their love.

"Standards and practices were like, 'Hmmm. No. We don't want them touching. We don't want them kissing', which I always thought was kind of absurd, because you have a show where people are having sex on gravestones. Really? You can't have two women just holding hands? [laughs] I don't understand. It seems a little hypocritical there, guys?"

Benson and her co-star Alyson Hannigan were naturally both "very upset" about this. "We felt it was disrespectful to the relationship, how they were censoring things on the show." However, it's important to remember that Tara's relationship with Willow still made an impact regardless, just by virtue of existing:

"One of the guys in the art department came over to us, and he was gay. He was like, 'Look, in the grand scheme of things, yes, it would be awesome if you could show the physical aspects of the relationship. But what's important is that you guys are going into people's houses every week, and introducing them to a wonderful, loving relationship two people that just both happen to identify as female, who are together, and love each other. You're changing people's perceptions.'"

At a time when queer people were almost non-existent on screen, even a censored version of this relationship still mattered. Just ask 14-year-old me. And that made it even more special when the network did finally relent and start to show the physical aspects of Tara's love for Willow.

"To be in bed together, and to kiss, and to hold each other, and to hold hands. I think all of that was really important and really necessary."

"You have a show where people have sex on gravestones. You can't have two women just holding hands?"

As the relationship evolved, Tara grew too. Benson recalls how her character started out "very shy, very insecure," at first. "We really worked on portraying that in a physical way. She's almost holding herself. She was so hunched, and almost protecting herself. And by the end, she was standing straight, and her stammer had mostly gone away. She was very integrated into the Scooby Gang."

When Giles left in season six, Tara became "the moral centre of the group," and Benson thinks "that could only have happened because Tara took that journey from a shy, insecure person, to a loved human. The relationship changed her."

That's what real love does. It changes you for the better. But when you're a young queer kid living in a small town somewhere, it's easy to start thinking you'll never find love like that. Most queer storylines back then punished LGBTQ+ characters for daring to be themselves, or just neutered them completely.

And it's also worth noting that when Buffy first aired, stigmas surrounding AIDS were still prevalent, which led many queer teens to wonder if they would even survive long enough to experience the love they deserve. But by showing Tara and Willow physically enjoy their relationship on screen, it taught young people like myself that we too were worthy of love.

The best example of this can be found in 'Once More With Feeling', otherwise known as 'That wacky Broadway nightmare' or 'The Best Buffy Episode Of All Time'. As a now integral part of the Scooby Gang, Amber's character was given her own song called 'Under Your Spell' where she sang of how Willow's love helped set her free.

"I heard that song, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I got the best song on the whole album!'" Benson laughs. And for what it's worth, she's not wrong either. "I love everybody's songs, but my song is a magical, little song. People listen to that song at their wedding. They play that song when they walk down the aisle."

But what these couples might not realise is 'Under Your Spell' is also a rather "naughty song". Even over Zoom, it's clear how much Benson loves that aspect of the song, and she even sings a couple of these double entendres to me, like "Spread beneath my willow tree" and "You make me come plete".

Younger me would have lost his mind hearing Amber sing what was basically the soundtrack to my youth, and honestly, even now, I had trouble containing my excitement.

"You can't work with a group of people for three years, and not feel like they're your family."

However, it's also important to recognise how these little moments actually celebrated queer sex pre-watershed at a time when most TV shows failed to even acknowledge its existence.

Amber says filming the musical was her biggest highlight on the show, even if it was "probably the most intense thing" to shoot. And that's saying a lot given how Benson's time on Buffy came to an end.

Countless words have been written about Tara's death and perhaps even more tears have been shed since 'Seeing Red' first aired in 2002. Looking back on that episode, Benson remembers "everyone was very emotional" on set:

"We had a cake. It said 'RIP Tara'. There was a little gravestone. I cried. Sarah [Michelle Gellar] cried. My last stuff was with Sarah. It was very, very emotional. You can't work with a group of people for three years, and not feel like they're your family."

For many watching back home, Tara was their "family" too, which is why fans were so devastated by how her story came to an end. As traumatised viewers might recall, Tara was killed by a stray bullet just after she and Willow had finally got back together, cutting their reconciliation short.

Outrage ensued amidst a wave of frustration and sadness. Not only did fans love the character dearly, but many felt that Tara's death was actually some form of punishment because of the queer love scene that preceded it.

Executive producer Marti Noxon has since expressed regret over Tara's demise, but to this day, her death is still referred to as a quintessential example of the 'Bury Your Gays' trope.

Speaking about the moment she found out Tara's fate, Benson remembers Joss Whedon taking her aside while filming season five's finale:

"He was like, 'Hey! Guess what? It's so exciting! We're going to kill your character!'"

"I was like, 'Oh oh, yes. That sounds awesome yeah.'" [laughs]

However, as time went on, it became clear that Whedon's excitement for this might have faded somewhat. Amber tells us that Joss "kept putting it off," and in fact, Tara's death was actually supposed to happen at the beginning of season six.

"I truly believe that if he'd understood the impact of Tara's death, Joss would never have done it."

"He just kept pushing it further back. It kept getting pushed further and further down the line [laughs]. I think there was a part of him that didnt really want to do it."

But what does Amber think about it all now? No-one was affected by this decision more than Benson herself, but she doesn't bear any ill will towards Joss and the writing team. In fact, Amber even defends their choices, although she believes hindsight would have helped them "find a different way to deal with Tara's death".

"I feel like Joss did such a beautiful job with her," says Benson. "I truly believe that if he had understood the impact of Tara's death, Joss would never have done it that way. He's not vindictive or hurtful."

According to Amber, Joss was looking at this decision "from a story point of view", planning Tara's fate to support Willow's addiction storyline:

"How do we get Willow to become dark Willow? Well, she has to lose the most important thing in her life. It's her lover, her person... What Joss was trying to do was really impactful and beautiful. I just think how it happened was a little intense, and there could have been a better way had we all had a conversation about it."

Despite there being a general "lack of thoughtfulness" on TV back then, Amber maintains that the intention was never to "screw" with people. "If we were doing this now, I guarantee you, Joss would be super-aware of the conversation around 'Bury Your Gays'."

Since leaving Buffy, Benson has become a prolific writer with multiple books to her name. One story in particular, The Witches of Echo Park, may even follow in Buffy's footsteps and make the move to TV. A pilot has already been written, and Amber plans to work behind the scenes as showrunner alongside her friend Mo Perkins.

Given her success as an author, I was keen to know if Amber would have handled Tara's story differently if she'd been involved in the writers' room all those years ago.

"I understood why it needed to happen," Benson reflects. "And looking back, there was probably a better way to do it. A way to maybe not kill her. Maybe sending her to another universe. Who knows? There's all kinds of ways to get rid of somebody for a while."

"We could talk all we want about Tara's death, but the fact she existed transcends all that."

Amber jokes that "Buffy's died like five times," so it would have been easy to 'kill' Tara without really killing her. While there was some talk of bringing her character back in the final season, Benson says the dates conflicted with another job, and in hindsight, she feels that this was for the best.

Joss planned for The First to take Tara's form, torturing the friends she left behind on Earth, but Amber didn't want her character to return as a villain. "I think that would have been hard for people... If the show had gone on, we could have gone a different way to bring her back. Kind of like what they did in the comics. I thought that was really lovely."

These comic book cameos were mostly flashbacks, but Amber has a perfect idea for how Tara's life could have continued if she'd survived:

"I picture her being a very cosy lady. I think she would be that mum that was very invested in Dawn. Like, 'Whats going on with Dawn? Dawn's moving to Los Angeles to go to UCLA? Guess what, Willow? We're moving to Los Angeles, so we can be near Dawn!'"

"She'd be that kind of mum. She'd totally be into macram, probably with a scrapbook."

Despite everything that's happened, it's comforting to imagine Tara living out the rest of her days in domestic bliss. After all, "We could talk all we want about Tara's death, and how awful it was, but the fact that she existed, that that relationship existed, transcends all of that."

And Amber's right. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it, but characters like Tara and Willow help make life a little bit easier to bear, especially for young queer people who might feel alone and unseen. Buffy was a hero we can all aspire to be, but so was Tara. In her own way, she saved the world too.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is currently available to stream or download on Amazon Prime Video. It's also currently available via All 4 in the UK.

Digital Spy has launched its first-ever digital magazine with exclusive features, interviews, and videos. Access this edition with a 1-month free trial, only on Apple News+.

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Buffy's Amber Benson on censorship, the musical, and Tara's death - digitalspy.com

In his opening remarks at the virtual Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday night, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk predictably assailed Big Tech for censoring conservativesan all-too-familiar point of view that has increasingly come to dominate much of the right's thinking about social media.

"The American way of life means you speak your mind without retribution, without being kicked off social media by a self-righteous censor in Silicon Valley," said Kirk. He also accused tech platforms of silencing doctors while regurgitating Chinese state propaganda.

Sean Parnell, a Republican running for a Pennsylvania House seat, echoed the same talking point, expressing the view that the Democratic Party was beholden to Big Tech.

"The party of Harry Truman became the party of hedge fund managers, Hollywood celebrities, tech moguls, and university professors, all bloated with contempt for middle America," said Parnell.

This is, by now, a familiar refrain. "Big Tech hates conservatives and will stop at nothing to silence them" has become the default conservative opinion, popularized by Republican ideological leaders like Sens. Josh Hawley (RMo.) and Ted Cruz (RTexas).

And yet if there was ever a televised event that demonstrated the lameness of the conservative anti-tech position, it was the first day of the RNC. No major tech platform censored any of the contenton the contrary, they granted easy and unrestricted access.

Multiple YouTube channels aired the RNC in full. It was possible to watch the event live on the GOP Convention's Facebook page, and to find it on Google (it's the top video result). Even Twitter, the platform most obviously hostile to conservatives, made it perfectly easy to watch. All of the platforms provided unlimited access to the remarks by Kirk, Parnell, and everyone else who spokeand importantly, this access came at no cost to viewers.

Contrary to the anti-social media perspective peddled by Kirk and others, it wastraditionalmedia outlets that restricted conservative speakers. CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News cut away from the convention repeatedly. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was petrified that unfiltered access to Republican speakers would cause her audience to succumb to disinformation, and thus she ceaselessly intervened to explain why certain GOP talking points were false. (Unsurprisingly, there was no live fact-check of the Democratic National Convention.)

Viewers with a cable subscription who preferred a selective, biased curation of the RNC could turn on their televisions. Viewers who just wanted to watch the event without interruption or interjection could do so for free on any of the major tech platforms.

This is an important point and one that the anti-tech crusaders in the Republican Party ought to consider more carefully as they mull regulations aimed at hampering social media companies. To the extent that there are genuine anti-conservative biases on social media, they pale in comparison to the biases of the traditional media. It's true that tech platforms occasionally make arbitrary or contradictory rulings about politically extreme speech; meanwhile, The New York Timesopinion page apologized for publishing a provocative but fairly mainstream opinion piece by a major Republican senator, fired the editor responsible, and essentially vowed never to make this mistake again. Conservative voices have flourished on Facebook, where articles from Breitbart and The Daily Wire praising President Donald Trump are routinely among the most shared content. At the same time, there's not a single reliably pro-Trump columnist at the Times orThe Washington Post.

If social media were to be regulated out of existenceand make no mistake, proposals to abolish Section 230 could accomplish precisely thisthen the Republican Party would return itself to the world where traditional media gatekeepers have significantly more power to restrict access to conservative speech. It should come as little surprise that Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden, who supports the revocation of Section 230, prefers this world. Why does Charlie Kirk?

Read the rest here:
Big Tech Is Not a Big Threat to Conservative Speech. The RNC Just Proved It. - Reason