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Although the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting brought all OTT platforms and digital news websites under its ambit in November 2020, the content streamed on these platforms remained out of its regulatory purview. This would now change with the news of the ministry working on a specific legislation, which reportedly would follow a three-tier mechanism the first two being self-regulation on the part of the platform and the third rumoured to be an inter-departmental committee established by the ministry for hearing grievances.

Most content generators, expectedly, believe that the backlash that followed the political drama series Tandav where Amazon Prime Video made voluntary cuts and apologised for unintentionally hurting anybodys sentiments had already blurred the line between self-regulation and censorship. In the absence of any regulation governing the OTT industry, this move by the makers of Tandav joins the thwarting-freedom-of-expression-and-creative-liberty list.

While there is a good reason for producers and artists to complain, but just how much does creative brilliance to depict reality, or latent rage amongst the masses, genuinely depend on, for want of a better term, shock value? To show real characters also means showing how they exist in reality. However, at times, this need transforms into something else as filmmakers argue that unless characters abuse or do something shocking, the narrative wont seem organic.

Many years ago, Dr Rahi Masoom Reza was criticised for repeatedly resorting to cuss words in his seminal Aadha Gaon (Half a Village), set around Indias Partition. It is believed that Reza lost out on popular awards because of the abusive text, but the author felt that people swore on the streets, and he drew his characters from real life.

Some of the greatest Hindi films that depicted societal rage in some form or the other such as Satyakam (1969), Namak Haram (1973), Garam Hava (1973), and Zanjeer (1973), rarely showed the protagonist abusing. Its ironic that Salim-Javeds Angry Young Man (AYM) character that set a new benchmark when showing onscreen rage never let go completely. Zanjeer is considered a precursor to not only the AYM seen in 1980s films like Arjun, remade in Tamil as Sathyaa (1988) or Meri Jung (1985), which was also remade in both Telugu and Tamil, but also art-house films like Ardh Satya (1983).

Unlike today, some of the greatest romantic or erotic moments on the silver screen rarely showed skin Nargis and Raj Kapoor in Awaara (1951) or Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985). Forget the past, the success of Scam 1992 on the OTT platform has spun the entire argument surrounding the two significant tenets of the freedom of expression debate on OTT shown that abusive language or showing skin on its head.

Gautam Chintamanigautam@chintamani.orgFilm historian and bestselling author

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Of creative liberty and censorship - The New Indian Express

By Calvin Freiburger(Life Site News)

While Democrats dominate the federal government, state governments are taking the lead to combat anti-conservative censorship online, with several attorneys general detailing their efforts so far Wednesday.

The idea of censorship by Big Tech is one thats reached national proportion, Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell said at the online press conference. In at least 18 states, there is now activity taking place in one degree or another.

Organized by MRC, which hastaken a lead rolein the grassroots campaign against Big Tech, the conference featured Attorneys General Ken Paxton of Texas, Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas, and Lynn Fitch of Mississippi, each of whom detailed their concerns about Big Tech and the actions theyve taken in response.

Unless we address this soon, we may lose our ability to address it, warned Paxton, who isleading a lawsuitagainst Google for abusing its monopoly status to eliminate competition and control ad pricing. He also discussed thecivil investigative demandshis office issued to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, and Apple regarding their comment moderation practices particularly as it pertains to those companiesclaims that inadequate comment moderation was their justification for deplatforming alternative social network Parler.

In response to concerns about fines potentially being an insufficient deterrent to censorship, Paxton argued that a $10,000 fine per violation can add up, even to a company like Google.

Bozell then interjected to note that such enforcement actions are valuable not just for whatever direct deterrent effect they have, but also as evidence to bring before Congress to show that these arent objective platforms, but subjective publishers, and as such should lose their federal liability immunity and face antitrust action.

In addition to investigation, Rutledge explained that she has taken proactive action byintroducing legislationthat would hold the likes of Facebook and Twitter in violation of the states Deceptive Trade Practices Act and potentially be liable for damages if they take action against a user that is selectively enforced, in violation of their terms of service, or otherwise not made in good faith.

These social media platforms are the new town squares, and so we must protect freedom of speech and encourage the sharing of ideas, Rutledge said. We want to make sure that Arkansans thoughts and opinions are not edited out.

They choose to silence us just because they can, Fitch said of Big Tech. This affects everyone.

Fitch relayed her own recent experience of seeing ananti-human trafficking videoshe posted flagged by Twitter as potentially sensitive content. The minute-and-a-half-long video was taken down just 37 seconds after publishing, meaning a human could not have watched it in its entirety to fully assess its content.

Fitch, who has also joined legal action against Google, shared that her office is collect[ing] human stories that put a human face on censorship via[emailprotected].

The problem of online censorship and discrimination has steadily grown over the past four years, largely in response to the belief that former President Donald Trumps 2016 victory was due in part to his effective use of Twitter. Over the past year it has sharply accelerated, citing the twin pretexts of medical misinformation over COVID-19 and inflammatory political rhetoric. It is expected to intensify further still over the next four years, based onreportsthat the Biden administration wants to partner with Big Tech to clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information.

Even so, Bozell expressed optimism for the future. This thing is growing, he said. It is going to be a forest fire against Big Tech in no time at all. I think you are going to see all fifty states emerging, because this is going too far.

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Conservative AGs lead the charge against Big Tech censorship: 'This thing is growing' - The Jewish Voice

More and more countries are blocking undesired websiteson their networks or specifically searching internet traffic for critical and oppositionvoices.

When the internet becomes a state-controlled intranet, users run into problems: They can then no longer access the website of Deutsche Welle or other free media, for example. Social media platforms on which opposition activists had arranged to protest just a short time before are suddenly offline.

Read more:Tor, Psiphon, Signal and Co.: How to move unrecognized on the internet

Whenever a regime censors the internet in a crisis, many users in their helplessness resort to the simplest solutions. These are often virtual private networks (VPNs).

VPNs were developed to allow companies in different locations to connect their internal networks (intranets) via encrypted channels through the internet. But VPNs can also be used to connect a private computer from within a non-free government-controlled network to a server on the free internet, using exactly the same principle.

Read more:OONI: An app for detecting Internet censorship

The website of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is not the only one that Chinese authorities have blocked.

VPNs are now readily available to everyone. Corresponding programs are available free of charge. VPN apps even top some charts. But users usually don't think about the risks in this situation.

VPN apps are plentiful, and the providers' promises are great. If you install their software on your cell phone, you can go online particularly securely, they say. And they promise that your personal data can no longer be accessed by potentially malevolent forces. What is clear: If the VPN works, you can use streaming services from other countries, bypass government censorship and access blocked websites.

A VPN establishes an encrypted tunnel from your smartphone or computerto a remote VPN server. From this endpoint, you enter the public internet. When you surf the web, it looks to the operators of the websites you're visitingas if your computer was the VPN server.

If, for example, you are using a computer or smartphone in Germany but your VPN server is located in Japan, then the operators of websites you visit will thinkyou're in Japan. This game of hide-and-seek is based on the fact that you do not appear with your own IP address, but with that of the VPN server.

Basically, regimes that control internet traffic are able to detect when someone is using a VPN. However, they cannot detect what someone is doing with it, i.e. what data is flowing back and forth in the VPN tunnel.

Some dictatorships have banned VPN use for this reason. Such regimes then block access to VPN servers abroad or, in rare cases, even persecute the users individually. But governments usually cannot take blanket action against every VPN, because many foreign companies also rely on VPNs for their internal company communications.

So as long as governments do not list the IP addresses of foreign VPN servers in their firewalls, and thus block them, it is possible to use them to circumvent censorship.

Here lies the second weak point: All your data makea detour via the VPN provider. But do you really know the company and what it's about? Essentially, you will have to trust your provider to maintain data privacy.

Because the provider operates the tunnel, the company can also seewhich websites you access, when and how often. The provider may also be able to see the non-encrypted content of your communications, such as simple e-mails.

This data can be stored, and especially the data about surfing behavior can also be sold for marketing purposes. For VPN providers, this can be a successful business model. They take money from the customer for VPN use in a subscription model. At the same time, they sell data about web usage to the advertising industry.

In the worst case, however, they also sell or supply data to government authorities. Even if the provider promises not to sell the data, it is already a risk that the data is stored at all. Not a day goes by without a new data leak being reported, whether due to poor security or criminal hacker attacks.

It's better if no data is collected in the first place. If a VPN provider promises it won't do that, I have to trust him. Buta system that does not collect any data in the first place is even more secure.

This is what Tor can do.Tor builds a triple tunnel directly through the Tor Browser. With Tor, you actually don't talk about tunnels, but onion layers, hence the name: Tor = The Onion Routing.

The good thing is that none of these onion layers know your identity and destination at the same time. Which web pages you access, when and how often, cannot be stored anywhere because this information is not available at all. The whole thing is therefore called "Privacy by Design".

Tor is a non-profit project run and financed by many volunteers. It is free of charge for users. But there is one small drawback: The internet connection can sometimes be jerky. Unfortunately, this much privacy comes at a price in terms of speed and convenience.

If you want to be able to surf the internet quickly with your browser, with a foreign IP address, and do not need the utmost protection of privacy, you should use a VPN provider that you can trust as much as possible. It is, therefore, better not to rely on VPN comparison portals that rate any provider well.

These are often not independent, butcontain sponsored links of the VPN providers. Instead, it is better to ask trustworthy digital security experts or read current VPN reviews from reputable trade journals.

Read more:DW websites accessible via Tor Protocol

Under this link you can access DW news via Tor

When computers communicate with each other on the internet, IP addresses are always exchanged. No IP address no World Wide Web. However, the possibilities of identifying individuals based on their IP addressare often overestimated, because IP addresses are rarely firmly tied to individuals.

The situation is similar with cookies. The user can turn these off and cookies have long since ceased to be of great importance to internet giants such as Facebook and Google. This is also reflected in Google's recent announcement that they no longer want to collect 3rd party cookies in their Chrome browser.

Moreover, internet users can now be identified much more precisely via so-called fingerprinting processes. That meansbrowsers collect relevant information such as the time zone, the keyboard layout, installed plug-ins and properties about the creation of graphic elements.

Users can usually be recognized with an accuracy of more than 99% through those fingerprints. The method is very popular with large internet companies. Linked to a login, for example,at Amazon or Google, a fingerprint is also directly linked to a true identity.

Incidentally, these fingerprints are not only collected directly on the sites of these internet giants, but also on third-party websites.

For example, if you visit the website http://www.xyz.com and there are elements such as images or JavaScript from a third server on it, then you are just as visible to this server as you are to http://www.xyz.com.

Shortly after winning a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival with "A Man of Integrity," the Hamburg-based director returned to Iran in September 2017. Iranian authorities then confiscated Rasoulof's passport and banned him from directing new films. In July 2019, he was sentenced to a year in prison. He nevertheless managed to shoot "There Is No Evil" (photo), which won the Golden Bear in 2020.

Abdolreza Kahani migrated to France in 2015 after three of his films were banned in the Islamic Republic and he was prevented from submitting them to international festivals. "We are born into censorship. Censorship affects not just literature, music and film. Censorship begins inside the home," he told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) in a recent interview.

Getting a screening permit for films that premiered at world festivals can take years: Kianoush Ayari's "The Paternal House," from 2012, was only released in Iran last year after the director agreed to make some edits. But a week later, in November 2019, the film was banned, prompting 200 film personalities to sign an open letter condemning state censorship and calling for freedom of expression.

He is one of the few directors to have won the Oscar for best foreign film twice: "A Separation" (2012) and in 2016, "The Salesman" (photo). Farhadi boycotted the second ceremony, which took place shortly after Trump's "Muslim travel ban." Even though Iranian officials were behind Farhadi's Oscar entries, the filmmaker was among the signatories of the 2019 open call condemning state censorship.

Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi directed the world's first Kurdish-language feature film, the 2000 "A Time for Drunken Horses" (photo). Following his semi-documentary about the underground indie music scene in Tehran, "No One Knows About Persian Cats" (2009), Ghobadi fled Iran, as intelligence agents repeatedly threatened him and urged him to leave. Those two films won awards at Cannes.

Having permanently left Iran as a young adult, Marjane Satrapi didn't have to deal with Iranian authorities as an author and filmmaker. Her best-known comic book, "Persepolis" (photo) adapted into a film that won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2007, offers a personal depiction of how a teenager can get into trouble with the police by disregarding modesty codes and buying music banned by the regime.

Released shortly before the 9/11 attacks, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 2001 film, "Kandahar," became a must-see work about the fate of Afghan women. Many of the award-winning director's films are banned in Iran, and he left the country to live in France after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election. His most recent feature film, "The President" (photo) opened the Venice Film Festival in 2014.

The daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of the most influential directors of the Iranian New Wave. Her first feature film, "The Apple," which she directed at the age of 17, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998. Two years later, she won the Cannes Jury Prize with "Blackboards. (photo). She then became the youngest person to sit on the jury of festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin.

Winning a Cannes award with his 1995 feature debut, "The White Balloon," Panahi kept receiving international acclaim despite increasing restrictions in Iran. Since 2010, he has been banned from making films and leaving the country, but still managed to secretly direct more works, including the Golden Bear-winning "Taxi" (2015) and "3 Faces" (photo), which won Cannes' best screenplay prize in 2018.

A decade after winning the International Award at the Venice Biennale, the visual artist's feature debut, "Women Without Men" (photo) was also honored at the Venice film festival in 2009. A critic of political injustice, Neshat lives in self-imposed exile in New York. "While I am critical of the West, women artists in Iran still face censorship, torture and, at times, execution," she said.

Author: Elizabeth Grenier

View original post here:
Bypassing censorship with VPNs is that really safe? | DW | 11.03.2021 - DW (English)

Jonathan Zimmerman, Opinion contributor Published 1:09 p.m. ET March 11, 2021 | Updated 1:38 p.m. ET March 11, 2021

Dr. Seuss can open the discussion of racism with your children.

In 1951, childrens author Jerrold Beim published a short book called "The Swimming Hole." It described two groups of boys one white, one Black who frolic together in the water. Refusing to swim with the Black boys, a white kid receives a nasty sunburn and eventually a stern rebuke from his peers. Suppose we would refuse to play with you now because your face is red? they ask him.

"The Swimming Hole" sparked outrage across the segregated South, where it was frequently banned from schools. So was "The Rabbits Wedding" which described the nuptials of a Black hare and a white one and even a new edition of "The Three Little Pigs." The revised edition portrayed a Black pig as better than a white one, which offended the delicate sensibilities of white people below the Mason-Dixon line.

Ive been thinking about this history during the recent debate over Dr. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel. Recently, the company that oversees his estate announced that it would end publication and licensing of six books by Dr. Seuss that portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.

But its hurtful to remove them from the public square, which is the goal of censors everywhere.They think we can't recognize the "problematic" aspects of Dr. Seuss, so we must be shielded from him. And they're wrong about that.

Books by Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, including "On Beyond Zebra!" and "And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street," on March 2, 2021, in Chicago.(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Yes, his booksinclude blatantly racist caricatures and stereotypes: an Asian person holding chopsticks, barefooted Africans wearing grass skirts, and so on. Before he died in 1991, Seussactually altered some of the drawings to make them less objectionable. In the Asian illustration, for example, he removed the figures pigtail, changed its yellow skin tone, and altered the accompanying text to read Chinese instead of Chinaman.

But the illustration still offends, which raises an obvious question: why didnt the publishers alter it again or simply remove it? We dont know, but we can guess the answer: to satiate Dr. Seuss critics. Censors dont aim to strike a word here, and a picture there; they want to obliterate a work of literature altogether, so nobody sees it.

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And that never works in America, where authors often become more popular when someone tries to shut them down. A few days after the announcement that six Dr. Seuss books would no longer be published, four of themshot into Amazons list oftop 20 best-sellers.All told, 13 of the 20 books were by you guessed it Dr. Seuss.

The moral of the story?Americans dont want to be told what they can and cant read. And, most of all, they want to make up their own minds instead of letting someone else do it for them.

Thats the deepest fear of the censor, in all times and places: that readers will get the wrong idea. In the segregated South, whites worried that kids who encountered The Swimming Hole would decide that racism was wrong. And now theres a fear that children who read Dr. Seuss will become racists themselves.

But children and their parents are wiser than that. Writing last year, African-American blogger Danielle Slaughter argued that Dr. Seuss her young son's favorite authorwould help her teach him about racism. Dr. Seuss wrote books that indicted discrimination (most famously, "The Sneetches")but he also engaged in his own forms of it, Slaughter noted. It was complicated. And so is America, especially when it comes to race.

Choosing to throw away his books doesnt make you any less racist, Slaughter wrote, explaining why she continued to read Dr. Seuss with her family. It does, however, make you the type of person who insists on talking about racism in hushed tones.

The real question is whether we trust each other enough to have that talk out loud. Last week, the childrens author Deborah Hautzig acknowledged the racismin Dr. Seuss books but insisted that theyshould remain available to everyone. Hautzig recalled that her first novel, "Hey, Dollface," was banned in schools and libraries across the South when it appeared in 1978 because of its frank exploration of teenage female sexuality.

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Children are smart, Hautzig wrote. They have every right to see, examine, challenge, and reject racism for themselves, and to have it pointed out and vehemently rejected by the adults who read to them.

No matter its source or its goal, censorship always betrays a lack of faith in human beings. We don't have to tuck Dr. Seuss away in a corner. We can talk about him, the good and the bad: his light spirit of whimsy, and the dark racism that marred it. We are better than the censors think we are.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-author (with Signe Wilkinson) of Free Speech, and Why You Should Give a Damn, which will be published next month by City of Light Press.

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Why we shouldnt censor Dr. Seuss: Parents and their children are wise - USA TODAY

Film distributors in Russia have attempted to censor the gay romanceSupernova by removing scenes of two men having sex, and scrubbing the film of references to the two leads being a gay couple.

The Moscow Times reports that DTFa series of Russian blogsdocumented that at least one scene where the characters try to have sex after a dramatic dialogue has disappeared from the story. The paper further reports that DTF commentators said the gay relationship is still obvious, even with the edits.

Related:WATCH: Supernova star Stanley Tucci weighs in on straight actors playing gay (and he should know)

Apparently, the distributor for the film in Russia, World Pictures, imposed the edits without the input of the filmmakers. They feared that Russias harsh anti-gay propaganda laws could open up the company to government oppression. Further reports state that World Pictures had also instructed critics not to make any reference to the leadsplayed by Colin Firth and Stanley Tuccias couple, or to use the word gay in reviews.

In a delightful twist, however, attempts to censor the film have also backfired. Critics commented that removing overt references to the couples sexuality actually makes the film even more touching.

Now the Russian version of Supernova even more clearly shows the huge social gap between us and the conventional West, critic Yefim Gugnin wrote in his review. The distributors, unwittingly, made this love story even more poignant, even thinner, removed it into a subtext, which, as you know, is stronger than any open text.

In recent years, Russia has launched a harshand at times, violentcampaign against what the nation deems homosexual propaganda. LGBTQ activists in the country and surrounding nations are subject to intimidation, torture and death. As such, a number of western films dealing with homosexuality have also undergone heavy censorship, includingRocketman, Onward and Avengers: Endgame.

Read more from the original source:
Russian censors tried to cut the gay out of Supernova. It didnt work. - Queerty