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By Ann Schockett, NFRW President

You know that internet censorship is a real problem when the President of the United States has his social media account cancelled while a Middle Eastern dictator can post whatever he likes. Or when an emerging social media company is de-platformed by its web hosting service. Or when a Big Tech executive must be hauled before a panel of United States senators and lambasted for not allowing a major publication to post an article on its social media account because its critical of a particular presidential candidate.

Countless conservatives have had their social media accounts suspended or canceled by the predominately left-wing employees who make up Americas high tech elite.

How is it that America, where the right to free speech is the first item enshrined in the Bill of Rights, has gotten to the point where internet oligarchs have the power to silence someone for their political beliefs, under the guise of hate speech? It seems as though conservatives are facing a David vs. Goliath battle with Big Tech.

Well, NFRWarrior Sisters, we all know who won that battle.

With your voice and your wallet, you can let the titans of Big Tech know that censorship is unacceptable in a free society. We live in a nation that has allowed people such as themselves to become enormously successful, but it should not be at the expense of our rights. We can make a difference. Heres how.

1. Use Social Media to Call Out Tech Executives When They Censor a Conservative These companies - and all businesses - monitor their social media accounts regularly for customer feedback and are often quick to respond to complaints.

2. Utilize Alternative Social Media Platforms Competition is good for business, and Big Tech companies need to know that their customers can go elsewhere if they find their business practices unacceptable.

3. Own Stock in a Big Tech Company? Participate in their Annual Shareholder Meeting Even just owning one share of company stock grants you a seat at their annual shareholder meetings where investors can submit questions to their executives about their policies and practices.

4. Engage Rather Than Boycott Its better to engage the company as a continuing customer. If youre not a customer, then youre not on their radar, and the company therefore has no incentive to change their policies.

5. Support Small Businesses and Shop Locally Big Tech retailers have made record earnings during the COVID-19 pandemic while small businesses are struggling to survive. Please consider that when shopping online.

6. Always Keep Your Comments Polite and to the Point Youre more likely to get a response if you maintain a calm and professional attitude.

Technology is an important part of all our lives. Like any consumer, we want value for our money. Lets send a reminder to Big Tech that the right to speak ones mind is the cornerstone of freedom and as such, we as a free people are willing to take our business elsewhere.

Link:
Send a Big Message to Big Tech: Stop the Censorship - National Federation of Republican Women

Scrolling through images of the white nationalists who overran the US Capitol last month, I was horrified, if not entirely surprised, to see so much flagrant Nazi paraphenelia. One man wore a sweatshirt reading Camp Auschwitz; another wore a T-shirt printed with the slogan 6MWE, which stands for 6 million wasnt enough, referring to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Theres no denying Trumps presidency stoked a profound resurgence of antisemitism in this country. Even with a new administration in Washington, antisemitism remains a real and growing threat in America, and the world.

A broad coalition of progressive organizations, activists, and faith communities are working to dismantle antisemitism along with all other forms of racism and oppression. I was incredibly moved by the Muslim communities that lovingly guarded synagogues in a circle of protection and raised money to repair vandalized Jewish cemeteries. Im heartened by those who do the work of rejecting racist politicians who rely on division and fear for their political power. Over and over, its been made clear: we are not alone in this struggle.

But not everyone claiming to work against antisemitism has Jewish safety at heart.

The Israeli government and its rightwing allies are using this moment to double down on their campaign to equate all forms of anti-Zionism the moral, political or religiously based opposition to an ethnic Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine with antisemitism. This is not a sincere attempt to end anti-Jewish bigotry and violence. It is a breathtakingly cynical gambit to limit our ability to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing human rights abuses against Palestinians. And Facebook might take the bait.

In response to pressure from the Israeli government and its supporters, Facebook is currently reaching out to stakeholders to ask if criticizing Zionists falls within the rubric of hate speech per Facebooks community standards. In particular, Facebook is weighing whether Zionist should be considered a proxy for Jew or Israeli.

Facebooks hate speech policy prohibits attacks based on protected characteristics including race, nationality and sexual orientation. Political ideologies, like capitalism, socialism or Zionism are not protected. But if Facebook names Zionist a proxy for Jew or Israeli, Zionism would become a de facto protected category, which would have far-reaching and dangerous ramifications for Palestinians and Jews.

Under this policy, valid attempts to hold the state of Israel accountable through constitutionally protected political speech could be labeled as hate speech and removed from the platform. Palestinians would be prevented from using Facebook like everyone else to talk about their daily experiences, histories and lives because their realities are shaped by Zionist apartheid policy. This policy would censor Palestinian speech, discriminate against Palestinians as a class, and silence nuanced conversation about Zionism.

The discriminatory implications for Palestinians are more than reason enough to reject this policy. But theres another important reason to denounce it. To conflate Zionism with all Jews many of whom are anti-Zionists struggling alongside Palestinians for their freedom and equality is itself a harmful assumption. It is premised on the antisemitic notion that Jews are uniform in our beliefs and political commitments. Even worse, it suggests that all Jews, in America and elsewhere around the world, are fundamentally loyal to a foreign government, and that the real home for all Jews is Israel playing into the vile notion that we are unable to fully become part of the societies we inhabit, that we do not truly belong in our home countries and communities.

This troubling move by Facebook is part of a much larger trend. The tech giants definition of antisemitism takes cues from the working definition formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which conflates antisemitism with all forms of anti-Zionism, including boycott and divestment campaigns in support of Palestinian freedom and human rights. While Facebook claims that its current policy is narrower in scope than IHRA, its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is on record with Adam Milstein a leading proponent of IHRA and rightwing donor who is so extreme, even Aipac distanced itself from him saying that IHRA has guided Facebooks approach, and that their policy indeed goes even further than the IHRA definition.

Any definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism would threaten scholarly inquiry, constitutionally protected political speech, and the ability of non-profits to support projects in and for Palestine, as many human rights defenders, free speech advocates, and academics have publicly stated. This danger isnt theoretical the IHRA definition has already been wielded in attempts to shut down educational events and cancel university classes. Legislators have attempted to codify it into law; a few have attempted to attach criminal penalties to the simple act of speaking out against Israeli apartheid. This definition is becoming a favorite among Christian Zionists, including the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who believe that Israels occupation of Palestinian land will hasten the second coming of Christ, at which point Jews must convert to Christianity or die. Theres hardly a more antisemitic idea than that, and its shared by at least 10 million Christian Zionists in the US.

Its imperative that we dismantle antisemitism in all its manifestations, but conflating Zionism with the Jewish people only entrenches it. Facebook should not allow governments to blur the lines between hate speech and political speech, and it must prioritize revisiting existing policies that disproportionately censor Palestinians and other marginalized voices posting about their experiences of racism and state violence. We must all be able to talk about our lives and the issues that are most important to us, while never losing sight of the fact that Palestinians and Jews deserve safety wherever we are.

Read this article:
Facebook might censor criticism of Zionists. Thats dangerous - The Guardian

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images

Censorship online by Big Tech is a bad idea, in large part because its a distraction from the problem of how social media companies promote, spread and amplify harmful information, according to author Peter Pomerantsev.

Its ridiculous to think that you can regulate the billions of things people say every day, or that we should, or that its even feasible. So I dont think thats the way forward, Pomerantsev said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. Therell be a way to get out of the whole tricky thing of taking one comment down or leaving it up.

The way out, he said, is through forcing the tech companies to be transparent about how they are manipulating the spread of information, and holding them accountable to prevent public harms.

Pomerantsev is a Russian-born journalist now based in London whose parents were hounded by the KGB secret police in Soviet Russia. His book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality argues that phrases like freedom of expression have been hacked by authoritarian leaders and governments like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

Authoritarians use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth. This constitutes a sort of censorship through noise, Pomerantsev and two others wrote in a recent article for the London School of Economics Institute of Global Affairs, where he is a visiting senior fellow.

But countering autocrats doesnt have to mean removing the posts of ordinary people or taking them off their preferred social media platforms, he said, which has become a growing concern among many Republicans.

We thought that for a long time, the federal government is infuriating, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News Wednesday. The bigger threat to your family turned out to be huge publicly held corporations, particularly the tech monopolies.

Story continues

In fact, focus on censorship and cancel culture actually distracts from solving the problem of disinformation and all the chaos and confusion and real-world harm it brings with it in a way that preserves free speech, Pomerantsev said.

A lot of the virality is amplified artificially. Thats kind of how a lot of these platforms were designed, he said. That kind of artificial amplification I think really has to end.

Fake amplification everything from gaming algorithms and search engine optimization through to amplification through coordinated inauthentic activity I think that probably has to end if the internet is going to be a just reflection of society and not this kind of weird funhouse mirror that distorts everything, Pomerantsev said.

One of the first steps toward reducing disinformation is algorithm transparency: revealing how the social media and Big Tech companies engineer which information rises to the top and is seen by large numbers of people. Google, Facebook and TikTok have all taken some recent steps in this direction, Axios reported this week, but it was voluntary and most experts think this issue needs to be overseen by government regulators.

When Trumps people would say, Google pushes conservative views right down, liberal news up, we dont know because Google has not shown anyone its formulas that shape search results, Pomerantsev said. Thats ridiculous.

Carlson addressed the same root cause on his show. Twitter refuses to release data on who it bans, he said.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent letters to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in late January urging the companies to address the fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users. The letters were co-signed by 38 other House Democrats.

The lawmakers drew a straight line between the focus of social media companies on maximizing user engagement and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former presidents lies about the 2020 election.

The rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier this month were radicalized in part in digital echo chambers that these platforms designed, built, and maintained, and that the platforms are partially responsible for undermining our shared sense of objective reality, for intensifying fringe political beliefs, for facilitating connections between extremists, leading some of them to commit real-world, physical violence, Malinowski and Eshoo wrote.

The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation from last May that revealed Facebook knew in 2018 that its algorithms sometimes radicalized its users, but did not take action to reduce this because it would reduce profits. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness, a presentation created internally said, noting that the company was serving more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Malinowski and Eshoo have proposed a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act a law targeted for reform by conservatives as well that would hold tech companies accountable for content they proactively promote for business reasons, if doing so leads to specific offline harms.

Malinowski said in a hearing this week that this is a solution that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. We can believe that the biggest problem is on the right, on the far right or on the far left it doesnt matter. We can debate that. Whichever of those things you believe you should be for this, because the mechanism works the same way. It pushes people on the left further left. It pushes people on the right further right, until they reach an extreme.

Pomerantsev pointed to the United Kingdoms approach, which says in his words that companies have to think about the harms they cause, and those harms could be around public health or some forms of personal abuse.

And the question is what are the companies doing almost like in a health and safety kind of regime to mitigate that? So are their algorithms making it too easy for people to bully others or to harass them? Pomerantsev said. Are the way their systems are designed making it too easy to spread this information thats dangerous to peoples health?

The British have said there needs to be a regulator thats making a judgment about whether theyre doing enough around those issues, and are working to set up a system in which Ofcom, its communications regulator, could issue fines if the companies are found at fault.

The tech companies have lobbied the British government against giving Ofcom punitive regulatory powers.

But as Pomerantsev wrote in his book and expounded on in his interview with Yahoo News, the Big Tech companies have acquired so much information about their users which is most people that there is a real question about whether they are infringing upon freedom of thought.

To some degree our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves, he wrote in This Is Not Propaganda.

Are they actually invading your freedom of thought? Are they actually crossing the line of you, and then using it against you? he said. What is that line of our unconscious that deserves to be protected?

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Read more from Yahoo News:

Originally posted here:
To avoid online censorship, government must force Big Tech to be more transparent, expert says - Yahoo News

The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being depoliticized.

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed. He said that Facebook was continuing to fine-tune how this works and we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating community standards in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities would include groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they dont violate our policies.

Zuckerbergs remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear, and for using algorithms that undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebooks decision before the 2020 elections to stop recommending that users join political and social issue groups and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users newsfeeds.

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to divisive conversation, turning down the temperature, fringe political beliefs and extremist users, make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally. He added, Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street J ournal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued Groups, Now Plans Overhaul.

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the Capitol riot was the product of hyper-partisanship, the article goes on to say that the proliferation of extremist groups on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities using platform tools to build large audiences. Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but Suburban Housewives Against Trump appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.

Facebooks reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize, Karr said. This isnt rocket science.

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accountsincluding the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the USby Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policiesespecially the response to the COVID-19 pandemicand against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist systemthe source of the fascist menaceand for socialism on a world scale.

More here:
Facebook's depoliticization aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations - WSWS

One of the most popular arguments to despise horror films and related genres in their most violent and explicit incarnations is that they can inspire atrocities in real life. It's a thought as old as the films with Lon Chaney and remains in force to this day: just remember all the controversy generated by Joker and the Death Wish remake before their premieres.

If we talk about extreme measures against extreme films, what happened in the United Kingdom during the Margaret Tatcher years is fundamental. The explosion of the video market in the eighties changed the way of watching cinema forever. "Children can rewind and watch those scenes over and over again," says a character in Censor, a film set precisely in those years, when 72 movies on video, called video nasties, caused mass hysteria and harsh censorship.

Censor, the debut feature by British filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond, joins the long tradition of cinema about cinema, this time from a very particular point of view: that of the censors. Enid (Niamh Algar) is responsible for deciding which images should be cut from some slasher/cannibal movie or, depending on the case, if they should be banned. Not all of her colleagues are as strict, one of them, for example, quotes Un chien andalou to defend a scene where someone's eye is gouged out, which Enid wants to remove.

But let's not get confused, she always tries to do her job in the best way, with responsibility and objectivity. It's evident that she doesn't like this type of cinema, usually made by men and with women as the main victims. She ironically calls them "masterpieces."This doesn't mean that she wants to censor everything, her seriousness allows her to differentiate between over-the-top gore and more realistic violence.

Enid can't overcome a trauma from her past: when she was a child, her sister Nina disappeared while they were strolling in a forest. Enid suffered amnesia, preventing her from contributing to the recapitulation of the events. Confronting the reality that developments in the case had stagnated, her parents decided to stop waiting for a miraculous happy ending, accepting that they would never see Nina again. When they receive the newly-issued death certificate, the parents took the opportunity to move on, even though Enid was unwilling to accept the terrible ending. Guilt still overwhelms the protagonist.

Censor explores that moment when fiction affects reality... at least in appearance. Although Enid is not a filmmaker, she's pointed out as one of the responsible people when the hysteria grows because the press connects the characteristics of a real crime with one of the horror films within the film: Deranged, notorious for a sequence in which a murderer eats the face of his victim, a scene approved by Enid and another colleague.

Likewise, the protagonist's harsh past increasingly controls her head. Reality reminds her of the tragedy: the killer supposedly inspired by Deranged declares to have amnesia and, in the midst of the scandal, she falls prey to guilt again. Fiction evokes her sister: another film within the film, Don't Go in the Church, appears to be directly based on Nina's disappearance. Not to mention when, playing detective, she discovers Asunder, a forbidden video nasty that shares a director with Dont Go in the Church andfeatures an actress that looks like her sister.

Censor creates its own mythology. It mitxes real movies for example, sequences from Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer with fictional titles: Cannibal Carnage, a banned tape that video stores rent clandestinely (there's an extremely funny interaction between Enid and a clerk), derives from the Italian subgenre led by Cannibal Holocaust. These details make noticeablethe director's taste for genre cinema of that time. It's quite enjoyable.

Like other similar contemporary films Knife + Heart, to name one Censor draws on the genre cinema that it's referencing, specifically the giallo style. Dream sequences and saturated colors represent Enid's mind and her downward spiral on screen. Censor intersperses reality with the oneiric, bordering on the nightmarish, playing with the link between the real and the fictitious.

The film explores how her protagonist goes deeper and deeper into the world of video nasties (she meets a producer, "acts" in the sequel to Don't Go in the Church), as well as real-life violence and horror. Censor doesn't fall into nonsense; everything is linked to a personal trauma and her conviction that the creators of Dont Go in the Church are true criminals that leads to delirium.

Reality and fiction, even though they have an undeniable connection, are not the same. Censor remarks on it on several occasions, similar to the Canadian 1980 filmDeadline. We hear, for instance, that the amnesic killer didn't even know about the video nasty Deranged!

In its memorable and brutal climax, the separation is marked by the change in the aspect ratio of the images. At that point Enid no longer distinguishes. And when she finally seems to wake up from that "trance," she prefers fiction over the horrors of reality and imagines herself as a vengeful movie heroine.

She prefers the miraculously happy ending. She even believes that the demonization of video nasties worked, that they were all banned and consequently the evils of British society eradicated. Her last fantasy is a poignant and satirical comment that works for that time and today.

A version in Spanish of this review was also published at Cinema Inferno

Continue reading here:
Sundance 2021 Review: CENSOR, The Danger Of Confusing Fiction With Reality - ScreenAnarchy