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Actor/director Ben Affleck spent Tuesday morning visiting ESPNs studios in New York City to appear on Get Up! and First Take. And yes, the self-professed Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots fan definitely had a biased view of Tom Brady, Deflategate and MLBs sign-stealing scandals. But it was the language Affleck used to share his opinions which is making headlines.

So what had Affleck so fired up? Brady, but not because the six-time Super Bowl champion will be a free agent next month. Rather, it was Bradys role in Deflategate which got under Afflecks skin.

Affleck also thinks too much is being made of baseballs sign-stealing scandals. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred already punished the Astros for their illegal use of electronic equipment in the 2017 season, which ended with Houston winning its first World Series title in franchise history.

Manfreds report on the 2018 Red Sox, accused of illegally stealing signs under the direction of former manager Alex Cora on their way to the franchises fourth World Series title in 15 years, should be done by the end of next week.

Afflecks opinions on the sign-stealing investigations did not resonate with viewers.

Affleck, whos waged a public battle with alcoholism, also took hits for his demeanor during his TV appearances on Tuesday.

Afflecks new movie The Way Back opens March 6. In the film, Affleck stars as a former high school basketball standout whos offered a coaching job at his alma mater while struggling with alcoholism.

Mike Rosenstein may be reached at mrosenstein@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @rosenstein73. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Continued here:
ESPN censors MIA when Ben Affleck went on Get Up! and First Take to talk Patriots Tom Brady, Astros sig - NJ.com

"The circle" camera technique used in That '70s Show was a way for the series to abide by Fox's censorship rules without crossing the line. The teenage characters at the focus regularly smoked marijuana on the show set in the 1970s, but the network forbade the depiction of teenage characters using drugs. Luckily,the show's creative team came up witha clever way to showcase when they did so: the group would sit in a circle as the camera swiveled person to person, imitating passing the joint.

Since it was the '70s, it wasn't uncommon for Eric, Donna, Hyde, Kelso, Jackie, and Fez to participate in smoking marijuana. To illustrate this behavior, the circle became a prominent element throughout That '70s Show's eight seasons. The location of the circle was primarily in Eric's basement, although the group was caught by his parents on a few occasions. In fact, the adults participated a few times on their own unbeknownst to the teens. The same couldn't be said about Tommy Chong's Leo, who often participated with the teens. The circle was also used for events other than smoking pot like eating, drinking, and arguing about a particular topic. The circle was also used as the setting for the credits in the show's eighth and final season.

Related:That '70s Show: Every Episode Title Based On A Song

During the circle scenes in That '70s Show, drug paraphernalia is never directly shown. The characters rarely referred to the drug as "marijuana" and "weed" and instead called it their "stash." Even though every young That '70s Showcharacter took part in the circle, the series only featured the whole gang present just four times. The use of the circle was a pretty obvious method to depict what they were doing, but it actually served as the show's only optionfor including drug use.

Fox wouldn't allow That '70s Show to directly show the use of marijuana on their network. The circle was the best way to bypass the censorship and still accurately depict bored teens living in the '70s. Since the details surrounding the circle were implied, the producers never broke any kind of rules when it came to censoring content. The immense smoke and change in character behavior were clear, but Fox had no reason to force the circle out of the show.

To pull off the effect of the circle, the team behind That '70s Show pumped in constant special effects smoke from a machine. The smoke used was strawberry-scented so that it wouldn't bother the cast and crew considering the amount used.A few of the cast members of the show also smoked cigarettes at the time so they assisted in the circle. They would hold their lit cigarettes low under the table to provide more smoke while filming the specific scenes. The filming technique was very successful, which was why it remained a common sequence in the series whether Fox liked it or not.

Next:That '70s Show Timeline Is Very Confusing

Rick And Morty's "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub" Is A Google Easter Egg

Kara Hedash is a features writer for Screen Rant. From time to time, she dives into the world's most popular franchises but Kara primarily focuses on evergreen topics. The fact that she gets to write about The Office regularly is like a dream come true. Before joining Screen Rant, Kara served as a contributor for Movie Pilot and had work published on The Mary Sue and Reel Honey. After graduating college, writing began as a part-time hobby for Kara but it quickly turned into a career. She loves binging a new series and watching movies ranging from Hollywood blockbusters to hidden indie gems. She also has a soft spot for horror ever since she started watching it at too young of an age. Her favorite Avenger is Thor and her favorite Disney princess is Leia Organa. When Kara's not busy writing, you can find her doing yoga or hanging out with Gritty. Kara can be found on Twitter @thekaraverse.

Originally posted here:
That '70s Show: The Circle Was Used To Battle Network Censorship - Screen Rant

At the end of December 2019, when the coronavirus outbreak was still in its early stages, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital used WeChat to alert colleagues to the true scale of the threat. Shortly afterwards, Li Wenliang was summoned by local police and reprimanded for making false comments on the Internet. He returned to work, caught the virus from an infected patient, and died in early February. The authorities summoned, rebuked, and silenced other rumourmongers to avoid stoking public fear.

Had Lis warning of a potential SARS-like virus been heeded instead of suppressed, the 2019-nCoV (coronavirus) might have been contained. Instead, Chinas culture of secrecy and paranoid state control enabled the virus to spread faster and further than was necessary. With retrospect the praise that WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lavished on the Peoples Republic for its innovative and aggressive response to the outbreak seems, at best, half-true in light of the governments role in hiding the truth when it mattered most.

Last week a resident of Wenzhou, a city about 500 miles from the epicentre of the 2019-nCoV outbreak told the Guardian: We are completely disappointed. [The authorities] are lying, we know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying, and yet they still lie Another citizen of Xuzhou, in the more distant province of Jiangsu, said: This is truly a manmade disaster.

In 1999 the Indian economist Amartya Sen noted that no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy be it economically rich or relatively poor Famines have tended to occur in colonial territories governed by rulers from elsewhere or in one-party states or in military dictatorships This, Sen reasoned, was because: famines are extremely easy to prevent if the government tries to prevent them, and a government in a multiparty democracy with elections and free media has strong political incentives to undertake famine prevention. The wider lesson, he concluded, was that political freedom in the form of democratic arrangements helps to safeguard economic freedom and the freedom to survive.

Sens insight applies equally well to epidemics. In 2003 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic originated in China, the authorities covered up the disease for months until another brave doctor, Jiang Yanyong, raised the alarm. SARS infected more than 8,000 people, and claimed 800 lives in 17 countries. The coronavirus has already surpassed that toll and is currently poised to have a much greater impact. But much if not all of this could have been prevented if there was greater respect for free speech in China.

After Lis death social media in China teemed with posts about his martyrdom. This soon led to demands for free speech. We want freedom of speech became a trending topic and millions of people watched and shared links to Do You Hear the People Sing?, a song from the musical Les Miserables, which has become a resistance anthem in the Hong Kong protests. These messages were censored too, but the Communist Partys internal watchdog was eventually forced to announce that it was sending investigators to Wuhan to look into questions raised by the masses. This belated concession was, of course, cold comfort to anyone who was affected, or lost a family member, in the period between official denial and acknowledgement of the truth.

If anything can be learned from such episodes, it should be that in crises like these, political freedom, the freedom to be a whistleblower, to defend the public interest without fear of being silenced, can literally become a matter of life and death.

Originally posted here:
Censorship and the Coronavirus - Stabroek News

The demand for more speech and content regulation on the internet by Facebook might seem like turkeys voting for Christmas, but its a cunning plot designed to protect and advance the power of Facebooks unaccountable monopoly.

Mark Zuckerbergs article, Big Tech needs more regulation, published in the FT, is an extraordinary public admission that Facebook now accepts censorship as core to its future. Of course, this is not what it appears to say, but the truth will out, as they say.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg argues that private companies should not arbitrate alone when it comes to fundamental democratic values like elections, harmful content, privacy and data portability. He asks, correctly, Who decides what counts as political advertising in a democracy? If a non-profit runs an ad about immigration during an election, is it political? He asks: Who should decide private companies, or governments?

These are good questions. His answers, however, are not.

The million-dollar or rather billion-dollar question Zuckerberg raises is how a Big Tech giant like Facebook can be held to account, given that it is a private company at liberty to regulate its platform and services as it likes. Its near monopoly, with almost 2.5 billion active users, not only dominates the social-media market in the US and Europe, it gives Facebook incredible power over an online republic with the freedom to regulate this new public sphere as they see fit.

Zuckerberg is concerned that this power is undermining peoples trust in Facebook because it doesnt need to answer to anyone. He wants more regulation to boost user trust. This is what has led him and Facebook to set up a new Independent Oversight Board so people can appeal Facebooks content decisions. This kind of regulation he says may hurt Facebooks business in the near term, but it will be better for everyone, including us, over the long term.

Zuckerberg is not stupid. But he thinks the public are. Closer scrutiny of the Oversight Board reveals how self-serving Facebooks road to Damascus regulatory conversion actually is.

First, the Oversight Board is being funded by Facebook as a separate company. So much for independence. It has selected its first director, Thomas Hughes, who will set up a separate company to recruit the 40-strong board, with Facebooks oversight. Hughes is a long-time advocate for freedom of information and expression, the former director of the equally unaccountable NGO Article 19.

Second, what criteria will be used to recruit 40 wise men and women who are impartial and worldly enough to represent 2.5 billion human beings from across every culture on the planet to decide what speech should be allowed in the worlds digital town square? Call me cynical, but unless the members of this virtual supreme court are to be angels summoned from above, everybody sitting on it will have earthly interests, prejudices and agendas of their own.

Third, and most important, will the Oversight Board have power to force Facebook to act upon its arbitration? Facebook users will only be able to seek recourse to the Oversight Board once they have gone through Facebooks direct appeals process. Facebook still retains the ability to decide if Oversight Board decisions are operationally feasible or would cost too much. They can choose instead to take into account arbitration decisions as guidance for future policymaking.

In short, Facebook still controls the wide-reaching changes to policy which means the Oversight Board is a paper tiger. It has no real oversight at all. And nor does the public have any oversight of it. Zuckerbergs 58 percent voting control over the Facebook board means he, not Facebook users, remains king of the castle.

And this is the point. The Oversight Board will provide Facebook with a great advantage: it will shield Zuckerberg and Facebook from scrutiny and state regulation. It could remove total culpability for policy blunders around censorship or political bias from Facebooks executives. And it will most definitely be used as a counter to future regulatory investigations for potential antitrust violations and other malpractice, as the company could hide behind the Oversight Board arguing Facebook is no longer free to pursue profit over whats fair for society.

While this is self-serving for Facebook, the Oversight Board represents a major problem for the rest of us.

Facebook is not really a public square, nor is it a government. They are free to do what so many are clamoring for from woke identitarians to governments to set aside hard-won free speech protections in favor of more restrictive ones. Whatever reservations people may have, they are being drowned out by the support Facebook is getting for more censorship and online protections.

The fundamental danger of this new direction for Facebook is that it has escalated the drive for online censorship. Regulating what we can say, see, hear and read will always result in further curbs, not less. The idea that views, particularly strongly held ones, should constantly be put to the test in conflict with others, is now anathema, a bygone age of yesteryear.

The public will no longer determine whats true and good. No, now we have Facebooks 40 unelected moral overlords to determine what can and cant be said or published. The ennoblement of these 40 individuals has transformed the rest of us into infants devoid of moral agency.

This is not an exaggeration. It should be kept in mind, indeed, shouted from the rooftops, that Facebook has more power to restrict free speech than any government, Supreme Court justice, any king or president, in history. They might not be able to jail dissenters. But they can silence them which amounts to the same thing.

No one voted for Zuckerberg nor the new director of the Oversight Board, Thomas Hughes. Nor will we vote for the 40-strong moral guardians of the Silicon Valley universe. If Zuckerberg was really intent on establishing an accountable body to oversee Facebook, why not ask Facebook users to crowdsource the elections of the Oversight Board members? Why not hold the worlds first global online elections where candidates have to publicize their free speech credentials, which we can vote on? Moreover, why not rewrite Facebooks rules so that the Oversight Board has the power to remove executive board members, including Mr Zuckerberg, for failure to implement arbitrations?

This might be a pipe dream. But it highlights the gap between Facebooks pretensions and the reality of its self-serving turn to regulation.

Whatever happened to their defense that they were a platform not a publisher and thus not in need of regulation? Their regulatory conversion is not about protecting free speech or users online. They have become the judge and jury of the online world to protect themselves and their profits. It is a cunning plot to ensure their unelected and unaccountable shadow will shroud us for years to come.

It can be stopped, however. Just say no: close down your Facebook account and rob them of your data. Then well see how the worlds first virtual totalitarian state fares without its oxygen.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Facebooks Oversight Board will be Zuckerbergs patsy censors, giving him cover as he aims to control all global information - RT

Netflix has recently published its annual Environmental, Social and Governance Report, documenting all the occasions when it has censored content on its streaming platform due to government requests.

According to the document, the streaming giant has taken down content on a governments request just nine times, all of which have been made over the past five years. Singapore tops the list, removing a total of five items, including The Last Temptation of Christ a title completely banned in the country a Brazilian comedy calledThe Last Hangover, and three cannabis-related shows, as weed is illegal in the Asian country. New Zealand had NetflixremoveThe Bridge, which the government considers objectionable, while Vietnam pulledFull Metal Jacket and Germany bannedNight of the Living Dead. Finally, Saudi Arabia had Netflix remove an episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj after it criticized the Middle Eastern state, which made international headlines.

Despite having taken the aforementioned content down in its respective countries, Netflix reassures that it doesnt take these censorship demands lightly, saying that it will only do so if the company receives a written government request and cannot, in any circumstance, reach an agreement with local authorities. Where it deems necessary, the streaming service will also actively fight against those demands, as in the case of Brazil withThe First Temptation of Christ, which depicts Jesus as a gay man in a religious satire. Netflix had taken the issue to court, ultimately winning the case in the countrys Supreme Court last month.

In other entertainment news, check out the freshly-releasedThe Invisible Man trailer now.

Read more from the original source:
Netflix Reveals All Its Government Censorship Incidents Over the Last 5 Years - HYPEBEAST