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Bruce Lawson from Birmingham, England, has sent approximately 100 texts to strangers in Russia about the true extent of the war in Ukraine during the past week, he told Insider.

The software engineer said he has been copying chunks of prewritten Russian-language text provided by the Polish hacktivist group Squad303 and sending SMS messages to randomly selected numbers between business meetings.

"It's so easy to do," Lawson said. "I just get a new number, hit send, enter, get a new number, hit send, enter."

Lawson has been using 1920.in, an online tool designed to cut through Russian President Vladimir Putin's censorship, which The Wall Street Journal notes use a bank of nearly 140 million Russian email addresses and 20 million cell phone numbers.

Users can send texts, WhatsApp messages, or emails from anywhere in the world to inform Russians that soldiers and civilians are being killed in the deadly invasion of Ukraine that the Kremlin is trying to characterize as a "special military operation."

According to Squad303, who are connected to the Anonymous hacking collective, some 30 million messages have been sent to random Russians since the website was launched on March 6, Insider's Kieran Press-Reynolds reported.

Lawson started using the online tool last week, hoping that he might "change somebody's mind" and encourage a stranger to see beyond the lies that the Russian propaganda machine is pumping out.

So far, he's received a mixed response. "I've had a fair few, 'Fuck off, motherfucker,' messages," Lawson said. "But I've also had quite a few nice conversations with people who are saying, 'We don't want this either, and we're scared.'"

That's more than can be said for Nan, who asked to only be referred to by his first name due to the fear of being trolled. So far, the marketing executive from San Antonio, Texas, hasn't received a single response to any of his WhatsApp messages.

"Nobody wrote me back," he told Insider. "I'd say that about from the 14 people that I sent messages to, about 10 of them showed the double checkmark with the blue, which means they read it."

Nonetheless, Nan said he plans on continuing to send messages because he wants Russians to "really reconsider what they're hearing" about Ukraine from state media outlets.

A combination of censorship and propaganda is so effective the Ukrainians are struggling to persuade their relatives in Russia that their country is under attack, Insider's Mia Jankowicz reported.

Alexander Nielsen, a military analyst from Copenhagen, Denmark, was initially frustrated by the lack of responses to the deluge of texts he and his girlfriend had been sending. At first, he told Insider, he felt like he was sending messages "out into the void."

That was until he received a call from a number he had texted. Unable to speak Russian, Nielsen couldn't hold a conversation with the stranger, but, he said, it felt "empowering" to get a reply.

It made it clear that he spoke to "real people," he said. "It felt good to actually do something and be on the digital frontline," Nielsen added.

Energized by that call, Nielsen recruited his friend Kathrine Richter to join the international army of online volunteers sending messages via 1920.in.

Richter, who is Denmark's country-lead for the European political movement Volt Europa, told Insider that she has sent a handful of messages via the online tool and intends to continue doing so.

"Putin's Russia is being dislocated from the rest of the world, divorced from democracy, so we need more than ever to penetrate that and make some connections at a personal level with direct contact," Richter explained.

She said that sending these formulated texts to strangers might feel inconsequential but, Richter added, it still serves to make a difference.

"I think when we look at what's happening in Ukraine, we can't be complacent anymore," Richter continued. "We have to do everything we can, even if it's just a small thing."

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Meet the army of volunteers who are beating Putin's censorship by sending texts about the Ukraine war to Russian strangers - Business Insider Africa

Video-hosting platform Rumble is offering famed podcaster Joe Rogan a $100 million deal to leave Spotify and appear exclusively on the upstart YouTube competitor. The offer arrives amid Rogan facing calls from the cancel culture mob to remove him from Spotify over alleged misinformation regarding the Chinese coronavirus, and more recently, his past usage of the N-word during podcast episodes.

We stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. So wed like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place, Rumble said in a statement on Monday.

How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for 100 million bucks over four years? the video-sharing platform added in its statement. This is our chance to save the world. And yes, this is totally legit.

Spotify already has a$100 million exclusive deal with theJoe Rogan Experience podcast. The deal, however, includes thecensorshipof certain episodes of Rogans podcast.

Daniel Ek, CEO of Swedish music streaming service Spotify, gestures as he makes a speech at a press conference in Tokyo on September 29, 2016. Spotify kicked off its services in Japan on September 29. / AFP / TORU YAMANAKA (Photo credit should read TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images)

Neil Young performs at Farm Aid 30 at FirstMerit Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island on Saturday, Sept. 19, 2015, in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

Rogan has been under attack ever since hostingtwo guests Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone on his podcast, who have an opinion thats different from the mainstream narrative regarding coronavirus-related issues, he said.

In reaction to Rogan hosting guests with different opinions on coronavirus topics,left-wing rocker Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum, demanding that thestreaming giant remove his music from the platform if it refuses to blacklist Rogans podcast.

When Spotify reacted by announcing it wouldpull Youngs music from the platform, the rocker called on other musicians to join him in removing their music as well, in an apparent attempt to further pressure Spotify to cave to his demands.

From there, Young was able to get a smallcohort of aging rockers to join him in his anti-Spotify crusade, with musicians David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash,Nils Lofgren, and Joni Mitchell making similar announcements shortly after.

But when that didnt appear to be picking up any further steam, singerIndia Arie who is perhaps best known for coming out against Rogan shared a video compilation of Rogan using the N-word, sans context.

Now, the focus of the cancel culture mob has shifted to attacking Rogan for his previous usage of the racial slur publicly on his podcast over the years.

On Friday, Rogan responded to the controversy, explaining, Its a video thats made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast, and its all smushed together, and it looks fucking horrible, even to me.

I know that to most people, theres no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly, on a podcast, and I agree with that now, he added.

Rogan went on to explain:

I havent said it in years, but for a long time, when I would bring that word up like if it were to come up in a conversation instead of saying the N-word, I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.

Its not my word to use. Im well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner. I never used it to be racist, because Im not racist but whenever youre in a situation where you have to say, Im not racist, you fucked up. And I clearly have fucked up.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, however, said he will not remove Rogan from his platform, despite the resurfaced videos of him using the N-word.

Ek explainedthat while he strongly condemns Rogans incredibly hurtful language, he does not want to take a ride down the slippery slope of canceling voices.

At the time of publication, Rogan has not yet responded to Rumbles offer of $100 million for four years of his podcast on its platform with a commitment to zero censorship.

Rumble competitor Odysee did reply to the offer, making its own mocking offer to Rogan of 100 gazillion bucks.

You can follow AlanaMastrangelo onFacebookand Twitter at@ARmastrangelo, and onInstagram.

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Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million Four-Year Deal with ...

In March 2022, Russia took censorship to new extremes, blocking access to Facebook and enacting a law that threatened to punish coverage of its war on Ukraine with forced labor and imprisonment. To what extent does censorship actually reduce activity on banned media among different societal groups in the context of international conflict?

A new study published inThe Journal of Politicsexamines this question by exploring the effect of a 2017 Ukrainian ban on online activity among Russian social media users with close affiliations to Ukraine and Russia.

Authoritarian and nonauthoritarian states alike use censorship to police cyberspace, notes author Yevgeniy Golovchenko in Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media. In recent years, an increasing number of European states and tech firms have used it to combat digital disinformation and foreign interference.

Even before the Russian attacks in 2022, Ukraine offered some of the most extreme examples of censorship used to respond to information war and online propaganda from abroad. In 2017, the Ukrainian government issued an executive order that forced internet service providers to block access to major Russian websites, including VKontakte, the second most visited social media platform in Ukraine. The Kremlins control over Russian social media was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian government viewed the VKontakte ban as a national security measure against Russian propaganda and surveillance.

Censorship may successfully limit overall access to information, or it can backfire and draw attention to the forbidden or political outrage. Even if a government succeeds in partially reducing the overall online activity on forbidden media, the ban may backfire if the supporters of the regime become less active on the censored platform than the opposition, Golovchenko writes. The government would risk making the opposition more prevalent on the platform than the supporters of the regime.

Golovchenko uses publicly available data from VKontakte and a natural experiment research design to estimate the causal effect of the ban on online activity among different user groups. The findings indicate that a vast majority of Ukrainians on VKontakte could circumvent censorship by logging on through tools like VPN. However, the Ukrainian government still succeeded in reducing the overall online activity among Ukrainians on the Russian platform. Government attempts at curbing Russian influence reduced the wall posting activity on VKontakte among users with pro-Russian attitudes at least as much as among pro-Ukrainian users, notes Golovchenko, who found the same pattern when comparing citizens in Ukraine with few social ties to citizens within Russia versus those embedded in the Russian social network.

Even without legal repercussions for circumventing the ban, the increased access time and effort is enough to disrupt online activity among pro-Russian (and pro-Ukrainian) users, who would instead shift to cheaper and more accessible alternatives. In other words, the accessibility of the media appears to play a much more important role in the decision to use censored social media than do politics or social ties with citizens in the hostile state, Golovchenko writes.

The results are favorable from the perspective of the censor, who wishes to combat foreign propaganda and disinformation by using one of the most drastic countermeasures available, he writes. He went on to speculate, If Russia were to use its newly upgraded censorship infrastructure to ban Facebook to prevent foreign influence, one would expect the ban to be successful from the point of view of the government if Russians were to respond in a similar manner as Ukrainians have. Now that such a ban has come to pass, the effects of its harsher censorship remain to be seen.

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Fighting Propaganda With Censorship: A Study Of Ukrainian Ban On Russian Social Media - Eurasia Review

Censorship on the cheap

When governments block access to information, people often find a workaround for example, the use of VPNs, online services that provide encrypted connections to foreign websites. But that doesnt mean the censorship has no effect; using VPNs can be cumbersome enough to make a difference. In 2017, the Ukrainian government ordered Internet service providers to block VKontakte, a popular social-media website based in Russia. According to a new study, the vast majority of Ukrainian users were still able to log on to the website after the blockade, as evidenced by publicly visible time stamps. Even so, public postings dropped by about half, including those by users with many contacts in Russia. As the author of the study notes: A pro-Ukrainian resident in Kyiv explained to me in an interview why he no longer uses VKontakte on a daily basis: the VPN on his PC required more clicks and slowed down the connection by a few seconds. Interestingly, the same person could enter VKontakte automatically on his smartphone without extra clicks, likely due to a preinstalled VPN. Despite this, he still decided to stop using VKontakte as his main platform because he felt it was too troublesome to manage his account only from a smartphone.

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Golovchenko, Y., Fighting Propaganda With Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media, Journal of Politics (forthcoming).

Revolving door

Using a mathematical model, political scientists show that hiring industry insiders into government can, counterintuitively, reduce the industrys ideological influence over policy. This is because former industry insiders can boost the governments policymaking expertise, making it less dependent on industry in formulating and implementing quality policy, which in turn reduces the need for making ideological concessions to industry.

Hbert, R. et al., Going Into Government: How Hiring From Special Interests Reduces Their Influence, American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).

Known unknowns

In a series of experiments, researchers found that providing basic information about an anonymous stranger not only makes people think they know the stranger better but it also makes them think the stranger knows them a little better too. In turn, this intuition leads people to think that it would be easier for the stranger to catch them lying or cheating. The researchers tested this in a real-world experiment with the New York City Police Department and New York City Housing Authority, in which similar housing developments were randomly assigned to receive some personalizing information about a neighborhood police officer. In a survey two months later, the residents who received the information were more likely to believe the officer would find out whether they committed a crime. The researchers believe this experiment may even have reduced crime in those developments.

Shah, A. & LaForest, M., Knowledge About Others Reduces Ones Own Sense of Anonymity, Nature (forthcoming).

The essence of legalese

A study from MIT spells out just how bad the language in legal contracts is. The worst offender is the center-embedded clause. For example: In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the Total Payments) would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. A more comprehensible version might be: In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the Total Payments. This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof. Indeed, people had more difficulty understanding and recalling contract language written in traditional legalese, particularly when it included center-embedded clauses, compared with simplified language. The researchers say their findings undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts. In other words, what sets lawyers apart from laypeople is not necessarily their greater familiarity with legal concepts. Its that theyve been trained in how to handle such esoteric language.

Martnez, E. et al., Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language, Cognition (forthcoming).

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Social Studies: Mapping distrust; the cost of avoiding censorship; getting to know the cops - The Boston Globe

By DENA EAKLES | rural Ontario

The N-O-W School Board meetings are quite interesting these days. It seems there is a never-ending barrage of challenge to public in public schools. And while I support parental control, that right granted to parents in their own home does not and should not extend to other peoples children. My father was a great one for saying, Do as I say, not as I do, but he was also heavily invested in my being able to think critically and to be self-determining.

The March school board meeting brought a whole new attack on public, with accusations of pornography and a plea for teachers to be reeled in and books to be OKd by parents. Good luck with that. We live in the time of the internet. Everything is available to everyone.

But more importantly, as with the misused understanding of Critical Race Theory, the new term being used to strike fear and forced repression is pornography. It is important to understand, words like pornography and obscenity are legal terms. Books for teens are reviewed and judged not by a single moral code, but by the recognition that students have the right to receive information as noted in The First Amendment Right of Minors (more can be found in http://www.ala.org) For more, go to https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/accusations-of-providing-pornography/.

It is really good to see so many people caring for their children, and from what I can tell, that includes the teachers of N-O-W as well. But I am not a fan of censorship. By all means, teach your children good ethics and morals, and may the first among them be Judge not lest you be judged (Matthew 7:1).

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Letter to the editor: The challenge of censorship - Thecountyline