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A discussion between Noam Chomsky, a political activist and celebrated linguist, and Vijay Prashad, writer and Frontline columnist, organised by the Tata Literature Festival, was abruptly cancelled a few hours before the event. Chomsky and Prashad were scheduled to speak on November 20 on an online platform about Chomskys latest book Internationalism or Extinction. The organisers said they cancelled the event to protect the integrity of the festival.

Both Chomsky and Prashad accused the organisers of censorship and said they will find another platform to have the discussion, which they said was important and relevant.

Over 50 well-known activists had urged Chomsky and Prashad to bow out of the event, organised by the Tatas, who, they alleged, were involved in widespread human rights violations. It is believed that Chomsky and Prashad were planning to read out a statement during the discussion against corporations such as the Tatas, and the Tatas in particular. The organisers reportedly learned of the plan to open the discussion with the statement and cancelled the event.

In a statement published on Peoples Dispatch (an international media organisation highlighting voices from peoples movements) and released to the media,Vijay Prashad says: Both of us agreed to hold this dialogue because we believe that the themes in the bookthe dangers of nuclear war, climate catastrophe, erosion of democracyrequire the widest circulation and debate. We were pleased to join even though we had reservations about the sponsor of the event.

Vijay Prashads statement says: Noams book is based on a lecture that he delivered in Boston in 2016, in which he warns that human beings must act to end various calamities. Of nuclearism, Noam writes specifically, Either we will bring it to an end, or its likely to bring us to an end. The urgency of these matters cannot be dismissed. In conversation with the actor Wallace Shawn, which followed the lecture, Noam speaks about the perils of public discourse. Objectivity has a meaning, he notes. It means reporting accurately and fairly whats going on inside the Beltway, White House, and Congress. In other words, what is being said by the elites is notable and must be given judicious care by the media owned by large corporations, but what is said outside those circles must be ignored or disparaged. Since we do not know why Tata and Mr. Dharker decided to cancel our session, we can only speculate and ask simply: was this a question of censorship?

Regarding India, the issue of the erosion of democracy is a serious matter, with the passage of bills such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the vast sums of money that have now suffocated the voices of the hundreds of millions of impoverished Indian voters as examples of the problem; the issue of warfare is significant, with the Indian government participating in the highly destabilising Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, Japan, and the United States. We wanted to talk about how governments such as those led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and corporations such as the Tatas are hastening humanity towards a deeper and deeper crisis.

Anil Dharkar, Tata Mumbai Literature Festival director, issued a statement saying: The festival which I founded and run with a dedicated team, owes its success to a free expression of ideas, not a free expression of someones specific agenda. The expression of such an agendawhether against a specific organisation, a corporation or an individualis therefore misplaced in the discussions at our festival.

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Tata Lit Fest cancels a discussion between Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, raising concerns of censorship - Frontline

Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content.

Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose harms, intimidates or excites disaffection toward the government or in other ways hurt the integrity, security, and defence of Pakistan.

Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the tech firms said that they were alarmed by the scope of Pakistans new law targeting internet firms. In addition to Facebook, Google and Twitter, AIC represents Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Expedia Group, Yahoo, Airbnb, Grab, Rakuten, Booking.com, Line and Cloudflare.

If the message sounds familiar, its because this is not the first time these tech giants have publicly expressed their concerns over the new law, which was proposed by Khans ministry in February this year.

After the Pakistani government made the proposal earlier this year, the group had threatened to leave, a move that made the nation retreat and promise an extensive and broad-based consultation process with civil society and tech companies.

That consultation never happened, AIC said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating that its members will be unable to operate in the country with this law in place.

The draconian data localization requirements will damage the ability of people to access a free and open internet and shut Pakistans digital economy off from the rest of the world. Its chilling to see the PTAs powers expanded, allowing them to force social media companies to violate established human rights norms on privacy and freedom of expression, the group said in a statement.

The Rules would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses. If Pakistan wants to be an attractive destination for technology investment and realise its goal of digital transformation, we urge the Government to work with industry on practical, clear rules that protect the benefits of the internet and keep people safe from harm.

Under the new law, tech companies that fail to remove or block the unlawful content from their platforms within 24 hours of notice from Pakistan authorities also face a fine of up to $3.14 million. And like its neighboring nation, India which has also proposed a similar regulation with little to no backlash Pakistan now also requires these companies to have local offices in the country.

The new rules comes as Pakistan has cracked down on what it deems to be inappropriate content on the internet in recent months. Earlier this year, it banned popular mobile game PUBG Mobile and last month it temporarily blocked TikTok.

Countries like Pakistan and India contribute little to the bottom line for tech companies. But India, which has proposed several protectionist laws in recent years, has largely escaped any major protest from global tech companies because of its size. Pakistan has about 75 million internet users.

By contrast, India is the biggest market for Google and Facebook by users. Silicon Valley companies love to come to India because its an MAU (monthly active users) farm, Kunal Shah, a veteran entrepreneur, said in a conference in 2018.

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Google, Facebook and Twitter threaten to leave Pakistan over censorship law - TechCrunch

It was, at that time of its release, the greatest success in German literary history: Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was published on January 29, 1929 and was quickly translated into 26 languages. In Germany alone, nearly half a million copies were sold within months.

Yetthe roaring success of a novel detailing the horrors of the First World War did not go over well with the National Socialists, who were then preparing to assume power. They spread rumors that Remarque had assumed a false surname and was actually called "Kramer." And they claimed that he was a French Jew, and also that he did not fight as a soldier in the First World War.

The film version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" did not appeal to the Nazis

A year later, an American production company adapted the novel into a film directed by Lewis Milestone. Initially, the film was approved for German viewers by the Supreme Censorship Board in Berlin on November 21, 1930. It premiered in early December at the Mozartsaal, a large Art Nouveau-style theater and concert hall in Berlin, and attracted intellectuals, celebrities and other prominent people. The liberal paper Vossische Zeitung wrote that never before had a film "had such a profound effect on the audience," who left the hall "quietly and deeply stirred" at the end of the screening.

However, at another film screening for the general public at Berlin's Nollendorfplatz, astonishment and horror followed when a Nazi mob who had infiltrated the audience demanded that the film be stopped and forced the projectors to shut down. In addition, Reichstag members of the NSDAP, exploiting their parliamentary immunity, released mice and tossed stink bombs into the theater, driving the audience out.

This was at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, then NSDAP district leader of Berlin (and who wouldlater gain notoriety as Nazi Propaganda Minister). He felt that the film's unfavorable view of war ran contrary to Nazi ideology. He further railed against the film in an impassioned speech at Berlin's Wittenbergplatz. As such, subsequent film screenings could only take place under heavy police presence. In December 1930, "for security reasons," the Supreme Censorship Board withdrew the film's screening license. Consequently, the Jewish manager of the Mozartsaal, Hanns Brodnitz, came under the scrutiny of the National Socialists, and was eventually killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz in September 1944. In January 1933, All Quiet on the Western Front was completely banned by the Hitler regime.

Yetnone of this diminished the film's popularity among the general public and critics. It quickly gained popularity due to its no-holds-barred portrayal of the happenings on the front.

It tells the story of young high school student Paul Bumer before his deployment to the front. At that time, the mood was still buoyant in Germany. This was also the case in school, where Paul's patriotic teacher inspires his students to "die for the fatherland."

Fighting over a slice of bread in "All Quiet on the Western Front"

Thus encouraged, Bumer and his classmates enlist in the army; however, they quickly become disillusioned by the reality on the front. Bumer wounds a French soldier in an attack. He tries to save his life and asks for his forgiveness. Eventually, Bumer himself is also injured, and ends up in a Catholic hospital. Back home on leave, he visits his old school and his teacher again, who praises him for his "German heroism." Bumer, however, speaks of his drastic war experiences and disillusionment and describes it as a mistake to have gone to war. As a consequence, the teachers and students brand him a coward.

Disappointed by this reaction, Bumer returns to the front where many of his comrades have already fallen. The final scene takes place in the fall of 1918, shortly before the end of the war. In the trenches, Bumer reaches for a butterfly and is shot by a French soldier. The film ends with Bumer uttering:"Nothing about dying is sweet." Film critic Siegfried Kracauer stated that the film underscored the fact that war was "not palatable." The harrowing scenes had never before been seen in the then early history of film. The journey of sacrifice of a "lost generation" is realistically and unrelentingly portrayed onscreen.

Russian-American director Lewis Milestone had a budget of $1.2 million(now, 1.01million euros) at his disposal for the film, a substantial sum for that time. (Milestone, hailing from a Jewish family, was born "Leib Milstein" in 1895 in what was then the Bessarabia Governate of the Russian Empire. He arrived in the US in late 1913, just months before the start of the First World War.) Milestone worked with tracking shots, crosscuts and perspectives that drew the viewer directly into the action. Never before was there such a realistic reckoning with war and its killing machines, and which was perceived as senseless. In 1930, Milestone was awarded with two Oscars for Best Film and Best Director.

Erich Maria Remarque at his house on Lago Maggiore

The film's international success even trumped the crude cultural policy of the National Socialists. In 1931, a heavily abridged and censored version returned to German cinemas, but it was only shown "for certain groups of people and at closed events." After Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the film was completely banned again.

Even after the end of the Second World War, the film was only shown in edited and abridged versions: When All Quiet on the Western Front returned to German cinemas in 1952, key scenes from the film were deliberately left out. It was not until 1983/84 that the German public finally got to view the newly dubbed, unabridged, and original American version on television.

Milestone's film was consistently banned, and not just in Germany. Abridged versions were also screened in Austria and France, and even in the US. All these attempts at denigration and censorship, however, did not detract from the film's success. All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, is still considered one of the best 100 films in American film history.

This article was adapted from German.

Read more:
How 'All Quiet on the Western Front' ran afoul of Nazi film censors - DW (English)

The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of what are considered the worlds freest countries arent safe from internet censorship.

The University of Michigan team used its own Censored Planet tool, an automated censorship tracking system launched in 2018, to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They recently presented a paper on the findings at the 2020 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference, said Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool.

Ensafis team found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the worlds freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan.

While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic, she said. The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

Its already happening abroad, the researchers found.

What we see from our study is that no country is completely free, said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. Were seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something thats obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content.

But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

Norway, for exampletied with Finland and Sweden as the worlds freest country, according to Freedom Housepassed laws requiring ISPs to block some gambling and pornography content beginning in early 2018. Censored Planet, however, uncovered that ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls extremely aggressive blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com.

Similar tactics show up in other countries, often in the wake of large political events, social unrest or new laws. News sites like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, for example, were aggressively blocked in Japan when Osaka hosted the G20 international economic summit in June 2019. News, human rights and government sites saw a censorship spike in Poland after protests in July 2019, and same-sex dating sites were aggressively blocked in India after the country repealed laws against gay sex in September 2018.

Roya Ensafi. Image credit: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering

The study also makes public technical details about the workings of Censored Planet that Raman says will make it easier for other researchers to draw insights from the projects data, and help activists make more informed decisions about where to focus.

Its very important for people who work on circumvention to know exactly whats being censored on which network and what method is being used, Ensafi said. Thats data that Censored Planet can provide, and tech experts can use it to devise circumventions.

Censored Planets constant, automated monitoring is a departure from traditional approaches that rely on volunteers to collect data manually from inside countries.

Manual monitoring can be dangerous, as volunteers may face reprisals from governments. Its limited scope also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar. While censorship efforts generally start small, Raman says they could have big implications in a world that is increasingly dependent on the internet for essential communication needs.

We imagine the internet as a global medium where anyone can access any resource, and its supposed to make communication easier, especially across international borders, he said. We find that if this continues, that wont be true anymore. We fear this could lead to a future where every country has a completely different view of the internet.

The study is titled Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. The research team also included former U-M computer science and engineering student Prerana Shenoy and Katharina Kohls, an assistant professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award CNS-1755841.

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'Extremely aggressive' internet censorship spreads in the world's democracies - University of Michigan News

View this letter as a PDF here.

November 17, 2020

Senator Lindsey GrahamChairmanCommittee on the JudiciaryU.S. SenateWashington, DC 20510

Senator Dianne FeinsteinRanking MemberCommittee on the JudiciaryU. S. SenateWashington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Feinstein,

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (The Leadership Conference), a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 220 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States, we thank you for the opportunity to submit our views regarding the need for major tech companies to address threats to civil rights created or facilitated by their platforms and improve civil rights infrastructure, and ask that this statement be entered into the record of the committee hearing entitled Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election, on November 17, 2020.

The internet has created immense positive value by connecting people, facilitating civil rights advocacy and adding new voices to our culture and public debate. However, it can also enable discriminatory conduct, exacerbate existing disparities, and give new tools to those who want to threaten, harass, intimidate, defame, or violently attack people different from themselves. While The Leadership Conference welcomes scrutiny of the role of social media companies in our democracy, we urge caution regarding potential changes to Section 230 to ensure any proposed changes will not do more harm than good. We encourage the committee to focus on the most important opportunities to ensure these platforms serve all people, which we discuss in more detail below.

Technological progress should promote equity and justice as it enhances safety, economic opportunity and convenience for everyone. On October 21, The Leadership Conference joined dozens of leading civil rights and technology advocacy organizations in releasing updated Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data, in response to the current risks to civil rights including COVID-19, a surge in hate-based violence, private sector and government surveillance, and disinformation on social media platforms designed to manipulate or suppress voter participation and with an eye toward how technology can meet its promise and affirmatively promote justice and equity. These principles provide important guidelines to aid this committee in ensuring that new technologiesincluding algorithmic decision making, artificial intelligence and machine learning protect civil rights, prevent unlawful discrimination, and advance equal opportunity.

Congress should use this opportunity to ask platforms what actions they are taking or plan to take to reduce online activities that harm communities of color, religious minorities, and other marginalized communities. For years, we have urged major tech platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their products and business processes protect civil and human rights and do not result in harm or bias against historically marginalized groups, but they have failed to take sufficient action. And despite years of advocacy urging the companies to rectify the problems, misinformation regarding time, place, manner, and qualifications to vote and content intended to suppress or deter people from voting continue to proliferate. The failure of tech platforms to address these activities harms people of color and members of other marginalized communities. Moreover, despite new policies that ostensibly forbid white supremacy, white supremacists continue to use platforms to incite racist violence on multiple platforms against Asian Americans, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Platforms have the tools and the ability to respond effectively to these concerns if they only had the will. Congress should press tech companies on the actions they are taking to improve and enforce their own policies and stop the weaponization of their platforms to suppress the vote, spread hate, and undermine our democracy.

Congress should not be distracted by baseless claims of anti-conservative bias and should instead focus on platforms efforts to respond to online voter suppression and other threats to our democracy. A commitment to civil and human rights is not a right or left issue it is about right versus wrong. Baseless allegations of so-called anti-conservative bias should not distract tech companies. Research shows that anti-conservative bias is a phantom problem; a number of studies, articles, and reports show that the voices of marginalized communities are more likely to be regarded as toxic by content moderators and content moderation artificial intelligence.

Congress should instead focus on some of the more significant challenges facing social media platforms such as safeguarding our elections and the census from manipulation and disinformation, as well as fighting hate and harassment online. We have made a series of recommendations to obviate false, misleading, and harmful content on the companies platforms that could lead to voter suppression and the spread of hate speech. While Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have made some recent policy changes, their lack of consistent enforcement makes these policies insufficient to prevent the spread of voter suppression. Platforms must also better utilize disinformation tools for voter suppression content as they have done for other issues like COVID-19, and platforms must prevent disinformation in political ads.

The lack of consistent enforcement was evident in the period leading up to and on Election Day this month and in the current post-election period. Twitter labeled and limited sharing and interaction on some posts by President Trump and others that contained disinformation about mail-in ballots, the process of counting the vote, and falsely declaring victory while the vote count was occurring. However, the application of these steps was not consistent, and limiting of interaction has diminished significantly since the election, even as the president and others are still questioning and spreading falsehoods about the election process. Facebook and YouTube have also labeled similar posts and videos that have appeared on their platforms. The labels stated that the vote counting process is continuing and, once the election was called, that President-elect Biden is the projected winner of the election. But these labels do almost nothing to limit the interaction and sharing of the posts, allowing the disinformation to continue to spread widely.

Going forward, it is clear that platforms have to be more vigilant about stopping the spread of disinformation about voting and elections. The current lack of enforcement and application of the platforms voter interference policies is not sustainable. Systematic and consistent solutions that slow or stop the spread of disinformation that leads to voter suppression must be implemented rather than the inconsistent piecemeal approaches that the platforms currently take.Section 230 must be considered carefully and in context. President Trumps actions to use Section 230 to pressure social media companies is a threat to our civil liberties. The Presidents Executive Order and the FCCs recent announcement defy both statutory and constitutional principles in the name of protecting the presidents own speech online regardless of the consequences to everyone else. And many of the current legislative proposals around Section 230 would do more harm than good. One such example, the EARN IT Act, threatens to not only exacerbate the censorship that many LGBTQ persons face online, but also threatens the welfare and safety of the sex worker community. Instead of looking at simply changing Section 230 as a means of platform regulation, Congress should clearly define the problem and carefully consider whether Section 230 has a role in causing or exacerbating the problem before turning to making changes to Section 230 as part of the solution.

Congress should press tech companies to conduct independent civil rights audits as well as improve their civil rights infrastructure. Structural changes within the platforms will also help better protect civil rights by ensuring platforms can hold themselves accountable to their commitment to civil rights, diversity, and inclusion. Among the companies appearing at the committee hearing, only Facebook has undertaken a civil rights audit with outside auditors, though civil rights groups have urged all the major platforms to do so. Congress must press the other tech companies to conduct credible independent civil rights audits. But Facebooks example demonstrates that without institutional commitment and outside pressure, the impact of an audit will be limited and short-lived.

That is why, in addition to pushing for civil rights audits, Congress must also urge tech companies to adopt structural reforms that comply with federal civil rights law and demonstrate that the companies understand that civil rights are not a partisan issue, but instead are fundamental to protecting the constitutional rights of all people and thus should be part of the organic structure and operations of these companies. This means that tech companies must hire in senior leadership staff with civil rights expertise. The civil rights infrastructure within the companies must be well-resourced and empowered within the company and consulted on the companies major decisions. New and clarified policies should be subject to vetting and review by internal teams with real civil rights expertise and experience, prior to their implementation. Finally, tech companies should provide a process and format through which civil rights advocates and the public can engage with the companies and monitor their progress.

Congress must also press tech companies to do more to address meaningful diversity and inclusion at their workplaces and the lack of people of color in senior executive, engineering, and technical positions. People of color who are working at the companies often face discrimination and unequal pay, as well as a culture where they are devalued. Tech companies must ensure that this does not happen in their workplaces and must address the inequities that may have already occurred. They also must expand strategies to attract and retain talent in diverse communities to expand access to jobs and opportunities.

Prevention of harm, not damage and after-the-fact repair, must be the goal. This goal cannot be fully accomplished if those with civil rights expertise are not part of decision-making processes. Congress must continue to review and scrutinize tech companies to make sure that they are taking the necessary steps to accomplish this goal.Congress should consider other meaningful ways to protect civil and human rights. Congress should also focus on other means to protect civil and human rights. For example, invasive data collection and use practices can lead to civil rights violations. Congress should pass comprehensive federal consumer privacy legislation that protects consumers by requiring companies to minimize the data they collect, define permissible and impermissible purposes for collecting, sharing, and using personal data, prohibit discriminatory uses of personal data, and provide for algorithmic transparency and fairness in automated decisions. Congress should ensure federal agencies are focusing on identifying and ending data processing and algorithmic practices that discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics with respect to access to credit, housing, education, public accommodations and elsewhere.

Thank you for the consideration of our views. If you have any questions about the issues raised in this letter, please contact Leadership Conference Media/Telecommunications Task Force Co-Chairs Cheryl Leanza, United Church of Christ, Office of Communication, Inc., at [emailprotected] and Kate Ruane, American Civil Liberties Union, [emailprotected]; or Corrine Yu, Leadership Conference Senior Program Director, at [emailprotected]Sincerely,

Vanita Gupta

President and CEO

LaShawn Warren

Executive Vice President for Government Affairs

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Letter for the Record: Hearing on Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election. - Civilrights.org