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We had previously written about Algonquin Township paying its attorney to try and censor a video obtained from Township cameras (here), which at the time did not work very well for them. According to their attorneys invoices, several communications were had between him and YouTube and are still the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which the township will end up losing.

A National Press Freedom Organization even highlighted Algonquin Townships censorship efforts in their article (here).

Our original article with the video in it is (here).

Apparently someone, we believe either the Township Clerk, her family member, or the township attorney kept complaining to YouTube.

In March of 2020, YouTube sent us a message stating they had taken the video down because of a privacy complaint.

What YouTube apparently was not aware of, was this video was eventually obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, albeit after we posted it online, and is no longer subject to any privacy concerns with it being a public record of the township.

In the interest of full disclosure, we provide the video as it was received under the Illinois FOI Act from the McHenry County States Attorney Office.

To the Algonquin Township Clerk Karen Lukasik, or whomever finally succeeded in censoring and taking down a public video from YouTube, you should be ashamed for promoting censorship.

Try taking this one down. The other censored video of the Clerk and her family in the basement file storage room will be in an upcoming article.

From the previous article:

Why would Jennifer Curtiss, a Village of Fox River Grove Trustee, be going through files and a persons desk in the Algonquin Township Supervisors Office? Not only is this trustee from another community going through Algonquin Township records, she is left alone in an office she has no business being in.

At the 12:17mark of the video, Curtiss asks the Clerk: Karen, do you have the authority to be going through this stuff? Lukasik responds with:I can do whatever I want. Then, as if the Clerks authority is all encompassingto her, she admittedly starts going through Township employee Ryans stuff. She even tells Clerk LuKasikat the 13:16 mark of the video that she is going through Ryans stuff, which generated a response of;I dont give a shit.go through it all. By asking if the Clerk had authority to go through stuff you would think she would understand that the same authority question would apply to her.

This video provides clear indicators that the Clerk was not honest with her responses to our FOIA requests and is not a trusted keeper of the records. Additionally, as statutory custodian of the records, her response of I dont give a shitgo through it all, is sufficient to call for her immediate resignation in our opinion.

Any Clerk that brings in another person from another community and allows them to have free access to records to include leaving them in that office alone with those records is not protecting the records of the Township.

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To the Algonquin Township Clerk: Censorship never works. Enjoy this video - Edgar County Watchdogs

May 01, 2020 Skye Arundhati Thomas on censorship and resistance in locked-down India

NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS, identity papers, and crumpled, bloodstained notes lie next to pair of folded trousers. The photograph was taken by Kashmiri photographer Masrat Zahra, the items carefully arranged on a lavender cloth, embroidered with red and blue flowers, by Arifa Jan, the widow of Abdul Qadir Sheikh. Sheikh was shot by the Indian Army in 2000; we are looking at what was in his pockets on the day he died. Sheikhs death was the result of an encounter killingconfrontations staged between suspected militants and state forces that most often result in unarmed civilian deaths. There is little accountability after such killings, and many of the murders go unrecorded. Zahra visits the homes of those that have were gunned down and collects their stories. Her quietly moving photographs of objects animate the ways in which they are remembered. There were eighteen bullet holes and I still remember how deep they were, the widow Jan told Zahra, who posted the image on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on April 18. She tagged it #KashmirBleeds.

Shortly after the photograph went online, the cybercrime police station of the Kashmir Zone booked Zahra under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), for uploading anti-national posts with criminal intention to induce the youth and to promote offenses against public tranquility. Zahra could be incarcerated for up to seven years and arrested at a moments notice. Despite being in the middle of a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19during which people are being beaten and fined for violating curfew restrictionsZahra was forced to appear at a police station in Srinagar on April 21.

In the document detailing the allegations, Zahra is referred to as a Facebook Usernot a journalist or artist. Her photographs and captions have been classified as having criminal intention. Special attention must be paid to the language here: The UAPA is an intentionally ambiguous piece of legislature that allows the state to label an individual as a terrorist simply if it believes so. On April 22, New Delhi police booked university students Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar under the UAPA. Both students are from Jamia Millia Islamia Universityone of the central sites of the recent demonstrations against the Islamophobic and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC). Haider and Zargar were charged with conspiracy and inciting violence during the protests and are currently being held in judicial custody. Zargar, who is pregnant, spent the first day of Ramadan in a high-security prison in New Delhi.

Indias 2020 began with the revolutionary energy of the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests, but also the police brutality that came with it, including a four-day-long pogrom in the working-class Muslim neighborhoods of New Delhi which happened to coincide with Donald Trumps state visit (dubbed Namaste Trump). Muslims were lynched by Hindutva mobs and their homes burned down. Many were relocated to refugee camps, some set up in graveyards. One of the strongholds of dissent was Shaheen Bagh, where a monthslong, women-led sit-in had become a generative site for community, public art, music, and book-sharing. On March 24, Modi declared that India was on lockdown. One of the first moves the police made was to bulldoze through the protest site, pull down posters and whitewash the murals and slogans that emblazoned its walls.

Across India, the pandemic and lockdown have provided an occasion for the free play of authoritarian impulses, writes Siddharth Varadarajan, a journalist, editor, and cofounder of the online newspaper The Wire. On April 11, a group of policemen delivered court summons to Varadarajan, the case against him relating to The Wires coverage of a large Hindu religious gathering in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which was allowed to occur despite the lockdown. The charges claim that Varadarajan was promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes simply for printing the news. The Wire is one of Indias only newspapers that neither censors its opinions nor panders to the Hindu-centric, jingoistic demands of the central government. The lockdown is giving the central government leverage that could not have arrived at a worse time: Protest is impossible, millions are starving or stranded because of the lockdown, and all political opposition has neared a complete standstill as state-level governments focus on combating the virus.

We are being organized and disciplined along the borders of identity: primarily of class and caste (there is no doubt that it is the poor and the already marginalized that are bearing the brunt of this crisis), but also the borders of culture, and whether it aligns with the intentions of the ruling government. The recent slew of arrests began with that of educator and activist Anand Teltumbde, who is, incidentally, married to the granddaughter of Dalit leader and scholar Dr. B. R Ambedkar. After months of scrutiny and psychological harassmentincluding the ransacking of his faculty houseTeltumbde was taken into judicial custody on April 14, on the one hundred and twenty-ninth anniversary of Dr. Ambedkars birth. Suspecting an imminent arrest, he published a letter with The Wire a day prior. In it, he details his case and unfair treatment, and signs off with this: [I] do not know when I shall be able to talk to you again. However, I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes.

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Mumbai. She is a contributing editor at The White Review.

Read more from the original source:
Skye Arundhati Thomas on censorship and resistance in locked-down India - Artforum

YouTube has been removing videos of a press briefing in which two doctors criticize the sweeping shelter-at-home edicts that governments have imposed throughout the world in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. One of the videos had over 5 million views before it was taken down.

The original videos were posted by an ABC news affiliate in Bakersfield, California. When the affiliate reached out to YouTube about the removal, a company spokesperson issued a statement that offered the following justification:

We quickly remove flagged content that violate [sic] our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. (...) From the very beginning of the pandemic, weve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.

The claims of the physicians (Dr. Daniel W. Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield) have been the subject of furious debate. Many health experts and organizations have denounced their remarks as unscientific and reckless. Even fellow critics of shelter-in-place who agree with much of the rest of their analysis have questioned some of their statistical inferences.

Whatever the veracity of the doctors claims, YouTubes censorship of unorthodox ideas in the name of protecting the public from misinformation is misguided and counter-productive. Sheltering the public from ideas, even bad ones, only makes society more susceptible to dangerous error.

One of the censored doctors critiques of shelter-at-home provides an apt metaphor for the folly of censorship. Dr. Erickson said:

Id like to go over some basic things about how the immune system functions so people have a good understanding. The immune system is built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria. When youre a little child crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is built. You dont take a small child, put them in bubble wrap in a room, and say, go have a healthy immune system.

This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of what weve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, go into your house, clean all your countersLysol them down youre gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; dont go outside, what does it do to our immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria. Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses.

Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteriawhat do you think is going to happen? Disease is going to spike. And then youve got diseases spikeamongst a hospital system with furloughed doctors and nurses. This is not the combination we want to set up for a healthy society. It doesnt make any sense.

Just as local health authorities are ostensibly trying to protect the public from COVID-19 through shelter-at-home policies, YouTube is seeking to shelter the public from misinformation. The following characterizes the perspective of YouTube and the health authorities that YouTube is serving in a metaphorical nutshell:

This is in keeping with the policy that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced days ago, that YouTube would remove any content that contradicts the World Health Organization on COVID-19.

Even assuming all the doctors ideas are indeed bad, such a policy doesnt work, and only makes things worse.

Just as human immune systems are built up through exposure to viruses and other pathogens (as Dr. Erickson explained above), our intellectual defenses against error are strengthened through exposure to bad ideas.

When you encounter a bad idea, what can conceivably happen? You can:

In the case of #1, there is no problem. Next, lets consider #4, since that is the outcome that censors are most trying to avoid.

What happens when you adopt and implement a bad idea in your life? In the worst-case scenario, it could destroy you. But that is far less common in life than scaremongers would have us believe. More often, we suffer but do not die. And that is a very memorable way to learn that the idea implemented was indeed bad. We learn from experience, from failure, from the school of hard knocks. That is one of the reasons why what does not kill you makes you stronger, as the saying goes.

But not everybody needs to suffer to benefit from the lessons of suffering. That brings us to #2: we can investigate the idea. Through investigation, we can discover the accounts (whether first- or second-hand) of experiments with the bad idea and their bad results. Ideally, these would be rigorously scientific experiments whenever possible.

Finally, we have #3, which is adopting the bad idea without implementing it. What would be the point of doing that? Well, it could mean adopting it just enough to advocate it. And arguing for an idea is one of the most efficient ways to investigate it (making #3 really a subset of #2). That is because argument elicits counter-argument. And true, effective counter-arguments are, by definition, antithetical to bad ideas. Even if the apologist of the bad idea holds fast to his belief, the counter-arguments that emerge can arm debate spectators against error.

In all of the above cases, exposure to bad ideas strengthens our defenses against bad ideas. We come away equipped with truthsfacts, information, and counter-argumentsdrawn ultimately from experience, whether our own or that of others. These good counter-ideas are like antibodies that we develop through exposure to bad ideas. Bad ideas are not just pathogens, but antigens. We thus develop immunity, not only to those specific bad ideas, but to similar ones, because we learn to recognize the basic logical fallacies that they share.

The mind, like our immune system and our muscles, is antifragile to use the term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It grows stronger through exposure to adversity.

The flipside of that is also true. Just as sheltering from antigens can lead to immunodeficiency, sheltering from bad ideas ultimately makes us more susceptible to them.

When paternalistic censors seal us up in a sterile bubble of ideas for our own protection, they deprive us of the chance to develop through experience our own ability to identify and grapple with bad ideas. As soon as a bad idea penetrates our bubble, we have no defences against it. Our lack of experience with the responsibilities of intellectual independence has left us naive, credulous, and gullible.

The more that self-appointed gatekeepers like YouTube and its allied health authorities protect us from ideas they disapprove of, the more susceptible we will be to falsehood and error (including falsehoods foisted on us by our protectors themselves). This vulnerability will in turn be used to justify still more such protection. Such is the vicious cycle of sheltering.

Ironically, many secular leftists who support public-health influence sheltering probably fully understand the dangers of that practice in another instance.

The classic critique of a sheltered upbringing is that it deprives the child of experience grappling with potentially bad influences and so ultimately leaves her more vulnerable to them. The stereotypical example of this is a child raised in an exclusively religious and traditional environment, without exposure to non-traditionalist peers, popular movies and music, and tempting situations. Once this naif inevitably leaves home, perhaps to go off to college or the big city, she has no defenses against the wave of bad influences that she must then face all at once with little support, and so the wave engulfs her.

The same principle applies generally: sheltering backfires, whether the bad influences are cultural or medical.

This is one reason why open discourse is so important and censorship is so debilitating and disrespectful. We need to be allowed the responsibility and practice of identifying and guarding against falsehood to be any good at it.

Now, all of the above takes for granted, for the sake of argument, that the purported bad ideas are in fact bad, and that the censors are in possession of good ideas. However, that is often not the case. Heresies often turn out to be right, and orthodoxies often turn out to be wrong: and this includes scientific paradigms that wound up in the ash heap of history. Our protectors may be sheltering us from the truth and forcing falsehood upon us. Wrong orthodoxies are far more dangerous than wrong heresies, simply as a matter of the scale of the errors impact.

That is yet another reason why open discourse is so vital. For the sake of human welfare, orthodox falsehoods need to be overthrown, and heretical truths need to spread.

The remarks of the Bakersfield doctors are probably a mix of good ideas and bad, truths and falsehoods. Taking down the video does us a disservice regarding both sides of the coin.

To the extent that they are wrong, their errors should be aired out and refuted. Any mistake the doctors made will probably be made again, since the human mind tends to fall prey to the same basic fallacies. By developing and disseminating counter-arguments (mental antibodies) to them, we develop our immunity to these and similar errors.

By taking down the videos, YouTube has limited the extent to which that social learning can happen and insulated the error from debunking. If anything, YouTubes censorship has lent additional credence to whatever mistakes they made by feeding into the narrative that the powers-that-be fear its truth. The debunking is being drowned out by outrage over the censorship. And the Streisand Effect (how censorship can boost somethings publicity) is causing it to spread even more.

Moreover, even if the physicians are wrong in some ways (like in their statistical claims), they may be right in other important ways.

Whether or not sheltering bodies is a wise policy for the spread of COVID-19, sheltering minds is surely a bad policy for the spread of ideas.

The rest is here:
YouTube's Censorship of Dissenting Doctors Will Backfire - Foundation for Economic Education

Every May 3, we are reminded of the importance of press freedom for the enjoyment of human rights. Press freedom constitutes one of the cornerstones of a democratic society as it can ensure the governments transparency and accountability.

World Press Freedom Day is also a reminder to governments around the world on the need to fulfill their commitment to the principles of press freedom. Unfortunately, the battle for press freedom is still the reality of our daily life in Southeast Asia.

In the past three years, the region showed an increasing number of journalists killed, attacks on the media and growing concerns over disinformation. As journalists work to uncover abuse of power, shed light on corruption and question opinions, they often face the specific risk of intimidation and violence.

As Indonesias representative to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission o...

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Insight: Press freedom more pressing than ever amid virus controls, censorship - Jakarta Post

In the context of World Press Freedom Day, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Article 19 are sending an open letter to President Miguel Diaz-Canel urging him to take immediate measures to guarantee press freedom and protect independent journalists in Cuba.

The organizations also sent this letter in light of recent worrying reports regarding independent journalists in the country who have reportedly been fined or intimidated by state security agents because of their work.

In the COVID-19 era its even more vital to guarantee freedom of the press and access to truthful and timely information. Its shameful how the censorship of independent journalists in Cuba, which we have documented for decades, seems to be worsening in recent weeks, with complaints from independent journalists fined for reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the country. No journalist should have to decide between silence or jail. We demand that the Daz-Canel administration take immediate action to guarantee freedom of the press, said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.

In the open letter, the organizations demand that the Cuban authorities immediately and unconditionally release Roberto Quiones Haces, a 63-year-old Cuban prisoner of conscience who has been held since September 2019 for practicing independent journalism and who is now at risk from COVID-19.

Its shameful how the censorship of independent journalists in Cuba, which we have documented for decades, seems to be worsening in recent weeks, with complaints from independent journalists fined for reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the country

The threat of imprisonment and the imposition of fines have functioned as dissuasive and inhibiting tools for the body of independent journalists on the island. In this sense, the imprisonment of journalist Roberto Quiones since September 2019 has become a clear warning to all critical journalists and media workers, even though there have been widespread calls for his release. Without doubt, these demands are more valid than ever today, as there is real risk of contagion with coronavirus, particularly for the elderly and even more so for those held in jails like the Guantnamo Provincial Prison, where, according to the journalists own testimony, the conditions are inhumane, said Ana Cristina Ruelas, regional director of the Article 19 office for Mexico and Central America.

Cuban authorities must release imprisoned journalist Roberto de Jess Quiones Haces and ensure that journalists on the island do not face harassment, threats, intimidation, or jail time simply for reporting facts. As long as they remain behind bars, Roberto Quiones and other imprisoned journalists face an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19, as they cannot isolate, maintain social distance or follow other health guidelines. Journalism must not carry a death sentence, now or ever, saidCPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick.

The imprisonment of journalist Roberto Quiones since September 2019 has become a clear warning to all critical journalists and media workers, even though there have been widespread calls for his release

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression recently reiterated their concern about the state of freedom of expression in the Americas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cuba remains the only country in the Americas to which Amnesty International and other human rights monitoring mechanisms do not have access.

For more information or to arrange an interview, contact Duncan Tucker: duncan.tucker@amnesty.org

Excerpt from:
Cuba must guarantee press freedom in the COVID-19 era - Amnesty International