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CNN anchorAnderson Cooperset aside the final moments of Tuesday nights Anderson Cooper 360 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese soldiers brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protestors in Beijings city center. But that segment didnt air in China, as censors immediately cut CNNs live feed. In a dramatic moment, Cooper acknowledged the censorship on-air, even displaying the color bars that viewers inside China were seeing.

It comes as no surprise that seconds after we teased this story at the end of the last segment, Chinese censors took our signal off the air, Cooper said of the real-time censorship that occurred during the commercial break. The host then proceeded with his scripted introduction acknowledging the anniversary of whats known within China as the June 4th Incident. The picture-in-picture color bars first appeared at the 23-second mark and remained in place until the conclusion of the three-minute segment.

Cooper was later joined by CNNs senior international correspondent Will Ripley, who offered additional context about what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and how difficult the story was to report for international outlets. CNN had to hide its videotapes in the U.S. embassy before tourists smuggled them in a suitcase and flew them to Hong Kong, Ripley explained, noting that escape plan wouldnt be possible now that the territory is controlled by China. Its a very different situation today.

Cooper once again called attention to the color bars in the corner of the screen, saying: Were showing you the color bars that is happening in China right now. Were being censored these color bars went up and the signal is now being blocked.

Ripley noted that the censorship is part of Chinas approach to removing all mention of Tiananmen Square from the public record within its borders.As you see from the color bars, China has essentially tried to erase this momentthis date June 4, 1989from its history.

I have friends who grew up in China, who are highly educated people but they didnt even know about the Tiananmen Square massacre until they moved out of the country and learned about it on the free internet, Ripley continued. Chinas internet is heavily censored.

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Anderson Cooper Calls Out China's Censorship of Tiananmen Square Anniversary Coverage - Adweek

This commentary was published in commemoration of International Fact-Checking Day 2024, held April 2 each year to recognize the work of fact-checkers worldwide. Angie Drobnic Holan is director of the International Fact-Checking Network. From 2013 to 2023 she was editor-in-chief of the U.S.-based fact-checking website PolitiFact.

A recent Supreme Court case put a spotlight on how social media companies like Meta moderate content on their platforms. It also put a spotlight on critics who say that content moderation and the fact-checking that goes with it is a form of censorship.

The Supreme Court case is primarily about the governments actions in dealing with tech platforms: Did the Biden administration go too far in asking for takedowns of vaccine-related misinformation? For years, similar attacks have been aimed at fact-checkers. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network, Ive watched this movement label fact-checkers as part of a censorship industrial complex, claiming that fact-checkers are trying to suppress debatable information.

Ironically, this deeply misleading argument itself is aimed at suppressing critique and debate.

The misinformers have long known that the old saying knowledge equals power can be perverted by following a simple rule of might makes right. In other words, by shouting loudly enough and often enough in the public square, motivated messengers can sway public opinion even when the message is factually inaccurate.

One of the top examples that critics of fact-checking mention is the COVID-19 lab leak theory a compelling example, because the ultimate origin of COVID is still unknown and uncertain. But its a very poor example of actual censorship.

Fact-checkers looked at the lab leak theory when internet memes claimed that COVID was man-made that it came from biological laboratories where scientists study and sometimes manipulate disease-causing viruses. The theory had dramatic variations: Some said COVID was the creation of irresponsible scientists playing with virus variants, while others said that COVID was a bioweapon created by the Chinese government and released upon the world purposefully. Less dramatically, people wondered if it was a naturally occurring virus that escaped a laboratory due to carelessness.

Each of those ideas had wildly different ramifications. Fact-checkers were initially skeptical of all the theories, but they revised their work to express more uncertainty when confronted with new evidence. Because they were fact-checkers, they credited the new evidence, rather than trying to push it away for ideological or political reasons. The theory has remained widely debated and much discussed.

And to be clear, many of the social media posts about COVID that were taken down during the pandemic were not because they were fact-checked, but because they ran afoul of other social media policies on community standards and public harm. Social media companies do not typically remove false information because of factual correction alone. Takedowns typically happen for illegal content; content that could cause public harm; or content that runs afoul of rules on hate speech or other community standards.

Critics of fact-checkers have tried to muddy this distinction, and as a fact-checker, I worry they are succeeding. But the truth is that no fact-checker has been given authority by any tech platform to take down content. The fact-checkers I work with would rather see inaccurate content contextualized and labeled, so it can remain part of the public record and the public debate.

Fact-checkers strong desire to keep information available and accessible is yet another irony of the fact-checkers-as-censors argument. The reality is that fact-checking is an activity deeply embedded in the ideals of free speech and free expression. Fact-checkers require the right and ability to freely investigate ideas, find sources, read widely and interview experts who can speak candidly, all as part of their methodology and process. This intellectual freedom is the bedrock on which all fact-checking is built. Countries with strong traditions of free expression and freedom of the press tend to have a lot of fact-checkers, while countries with press restrictions tend to have few. The roster of fact-checkers who participate in the International Fact-Checking Network shows this trend clearly.

When fact-checkers arent dealing with accusations of censorship, we face another crisis of confidence among those who might otherwise support us. Theres a trend among both the right and the left to say that fact-checking doesnt work, or that its been proven ineffective. Nothing could be further from the truth though it does depend a lot on what people mean by fact-checking working or being effective.

Often, by working, skeptics of fact-checking mean that it doesnt change peoples political views or sway their outlooks. Thats true; fact-checking doesnt do that. But its not supposed to. Politics experts have long known that peoples political views tend to be changed by discussions and persuasion from their friends and family, not by reading fact checks.

Another complaint is that fact-checking is not a solution to the problem of misinformation on the internet. But misinformation isnt a problem that can be solved with a single approach. Saying fact-checking doesnt work is a bit like saying we should get rid of firefighters because buildings are still catching fire.

Fact-checkings actual aim is to continuously improve the quality of information that people use to make decisions about their own lives. Research has shown that fact checks are highly effective in correcting misperceptions around false claims, and this is vitally important in an online world where everyday photos are taken out of context; where manipulated audio is passed off as real; and where video game footage is presented as video from actual military conflict.

In these contexts, fact-checking journalism is a crucial safety mechanism that helps weed out factually false information. Fact-checkers have debunked demonstrably false claims about the efficacy of vaccines; about the location and dates of elections; about the falsity of war propaganda, and about beloved celebrities who are still alive. During elections, they provide critical context to public policy issues from health care to economics to foreign policy, and they correct the excesses of political messaging that distorts and deceives average voters trying to make common-sense decisions.

Are fact-checkers perfect? We are not. We are human beings subject to human error. But thats why fact-checkers have corrections policies. The value of fact-checking is that it seeks conclusions based on evidence and logical processes, and fact-checkers correct their reports when confronted with new evidence. Rather than having a predetermined political agenda, fact-checkers try to compile the best of what is known for the benefit of all stakeholders.

In recent years, critics of fact-checking have been emboldened to make false claims about fact-checking itself, in order to promote a survival-of-the-fittest, anything-goes atmosphere on the internet and in the world when it comes to public debate. They want the loudest voices to win the fight, regardless of logic, evidence or coherence.

Fact-checking stands as a check on that noise, ever reminding us that evidence can be complicated and uncertain, that volume isnt the same thing as verity, and that the truth is something that must be worked out continuously, again and again, but never once and for all.

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Lets say it plainly: Fact-checking is not censorship - Poynter

I recently read Gender Queer, Maia Kobabes best-selling memoir about coming of age as a nonbinary person. Its an honest and forthright portrayal of the challenges facing sexual minorities in our society. Im outraged that so many schools and libraries have banned or restricted it.

But Im also outraged that some libraries and bookstores have banned Abigail Shriers book, Irreversible Damage, which attributes the rise of gender surgeries among young women to social contagion that is, to the messages these women are receiving rather than to their inherent identities.

Thats how I differ from some of my fellow liberals, who scream bloody murder about restrictions on books they love but seem perfectly happy to remove ones that they loathe. I understand and, in many ways, share their distaste for Irreversible Damage. But you cant fight censorship with one hand if youre furthering it with the other.

Consider the kerfuffle earlier this year in Blue Hill, Maine, an affluent, left-leaning community with a well-endowed public library. When the library accepted a donation of Irreversible Damage and placed it on display, residents posted angry messages on Facebook and accosted the librarys staff at the local post office and grocery store.

They would say, I cant believe the library is allowing this, the library board president recounted. My feeling was, I cant believe the library would not allow it, based on its position on free access to information.

I cant believe it, either, but its happening. When it comes to free expression, even liberals have become illiberal.

That includes the American Booksellers Association, which proudly touts its anti-censorship bona fides. A sponsor of Banned Books Week, an annual event that proclaims the value of free and open access to information, the association issued an abject apology after it sent Irreversible Damage to 750 bookstores in 2021.

An anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members, the American Booksellers Association declared, noting the pain and harm it had caused to the trans community. This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABAs policies, values, and everything we believe and support. It is inexcusable.

Heres whats inexcusable: An organization ostensibly devoted to the freedom to read closed the book on it. According to illiberal liberals, you should be free to read what they like. Everything else is off the table.

So in the wake of the George Floyd police murder in 2020, the resolutely leftist school district in Burbank, Calif., barred teachers from assigning To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the grounds that these books (which both use the N-word) cause harm and trauma to Black students.

Never mind that many leading Black authors from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison have praised Huck Finn, which indicted American slavery and racism. These books threaten young readers, the argument goes. We cant allow that.

And never mind that conservatives have invoked the same argument to ban Gender Queer and other LGBTQ-themed books. In Cumberland, Maine just a few hours down the coast from Blue Hill a parent read several passages from Gender Queer to his school board and demanded that it be removed from the school library. Thats what our kids are seeing, and youre OK with that? he asked, calling the passages pornographic.

Thankfully, the Cumberland school board retained Gender Queer for its high school library. And Im also grateful to report that the town library in Blue Hill stuck to its guns and held on to Irreversible Damage.

But it got no help from the American Library Association, another sponsor of Banned Books Week. When the librarys director reached out to the ALA for a letter of support, he said, it ghosted him.

To her credit, the director of the ALAs Office for Intellectual Freedom privately apologized to him. She also told reporters that she opposed using the tools of the censors against Irreversible Damage. But there would be no official statement of support from the ALA, where the book had sparked considerable internal debate.

Either you believe in intellectual freedom, or you dont. If you do, youll defend books that you find harmful or offensive.

That speaks volumes, in its own right. Whats to debate, really? Either you believe in intellectual freedom, or you dont. If you do, youll defend books you find harmful or offensive. And if you dont, youll try to eliminate them.

Next Monday is Right to Read Day, when the ALA asks citizens to stand up to censorship from organized pressure groups that want to ban books. And lets be clear: The vast majority of the attacks on books have come from the political right, not from the left.

But if my fellow liberals dont stand up for freedom for everyone we wont have a leg to stand on as conservatives try to tear it down. When we adopt the tools of the censor, everybody loses.

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The danger of liberal censorship | Opinion - The Philadelphia Inquirer

After accusing Al Jazeera of being a Hamas mouthpiece and repeatedly describing Al Jazeeras journalists as terror operatives, Israel now has the legislative means to carry out its threats to close the Qatari broadcasters bureau. This could happen very soon as Likud the party leading the ruling coalition has already said the Prime Minister would act immediately to close Al Jazeera.

The Israeli government already approved a regulation last November allowing the closure of foreign media, including Al Jazeera. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad voiced support for this decision at the time, considering that Al Jazeera endangers the activities of the Israel Defence Forces.

Al Jazeera journalists killed, injured by Israel strikes

Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, at least 103 journalists have been killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes, including at least 22 in the course of their work. Three of them worked for Al Jazeera. The journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh the son of Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeeras bureau chief in Gaza and his colleague Moustafa Thuraya, were killed by an Israeli strike at the start of January.

They are taking revenge on us [the Gazan journalists] by killing our children, but that will not stop us, Wael al-Dahdouh said at the time. A month later, this leading journalist was himself injured by an Israeli strike that killed Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. In South Lebanon, Al Jazeera correspondent Carmen Joukhadar was one of the six journalists injured in an Israeli strike on 13 October that killed Reuters reporter Issam Abdallah.

Israel already inflicted terrible losses on Al Jazeera before 7 October. Its internationally renowned West Bank correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while reporting in Jenin on 11 May 2022. A year before that, in May 2021, RSF filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court after Israel air strikes destroyed around 20 media outlets in the Gaza Strip, including the Al Jazeera bureau.

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Al Jazeera to be banned soon in Israel in unprecedented censorship after months of persecution - Reporters sans frontires

In the city of Haifa, in northwest Israel, the sounds of Arabic, Hebrew and Russian chatter fill the streets.In the Arab-Christian neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas lies Beit Hagefen, an Arab-Jewish cultural centre set in gleaming white stone. For 60 years, its aim has been to promote tolerance between Jews and Arabs until last month, when one of their events was postponed and then cancelled following a recommendation from the citys legal advisor, Yamit Klein.

The event in question was a book launch for the Hebrew translation of Apeirogon, a novel by Irish author Colum McCann that tells the story of two grieving fathers, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, who are united by the death of their daughters. The event was supported by the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a joint Palestinian-Israeli group of families who have lost relatives in the conflict.

But the launch would never take place. The official reasons for its cancellation were concerns about its commercial aspects on municipal premises and the potential distress it could cause to those affected by past violence with references made to objections from families of terror attack victims. However, the move has also been interpreted as an attack on democratic principles and freedom of speech. In the eyes of many liberal Israelis, it is part of a broader, two-decade-long campaign led by Benjamin Netanyahu to suppress collaborative efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Such tactics arent confined to Netanyahu, however. The Israeli government has a long history of censorship: in 1970, for instance, the national unity government threatened to withdraw funding from the Cameri Theatre over Hanoch Levins play The Queen of the Bathtub. Often regarded as the most contentious theatrical work in Israel, Levin employed musical satire to critique what he saw as the nations militaristic tendencies, self-righteousness and racial prejudices following the triumph in the 1967 conflict. The play was stopped in 1970 after merely 19 shows, following a bomb threat at the Cameri Theatre, actors being pelted with stones in Jerusalem, and accusations branding Levin as a traitor to Israel.

But since then, Netanyahu has turned cultural censorship into an art form, encouraging journalists, politicians and charity workers to actively attack, censor and suppress any Left-wing efforts to cultivate a shared Jewish-Palestinian culture. This includes any initiatives that criticise or acknowledge the oppression or unequal treatment of Palestinians, or which hint at contentious events surrounding the nations birth.

Netanyahu has turned cultural censorship into an art form.

His efforts have paid off. This strategic reshaping of Israels cultural landscape has weakened the Israeli Left by silencing any talk of the occupation, Palestinian self-determination or Israels Zionist ethos. And it hasnt been difficult: in Israel, much of the cultural sector including theatre, music, and art is funded by taxes and therefore subject to oversight by the Knesset and the government. In 2023, for instance, Netanyahus culture minister, Miki Zohar, took issue with H2: Control Laboratory, a documentary about Israeli settlers occupation of Hebron. He ordered a retrospective examination of the films budget, arguing that works that harm the state will not be funded. That same year, Zohar also threatened to withdraw the budget from the film Two Kids a Day, about the arrest of Palestinian minors, while a performance by a 13-year-old was cancelled for fear of offending the ultra-Orthodox.

And thats not all. In 2015, the Ministry of Education disqualified a book for school study because it describes a romance between a Jewish woman and an Arab; in 2017, the Acre Fringe Theater Festival barred a play about Palestinian prisoners, leading to a boycott by eight theatre groups; in 2022, a police officer went on stage during a performance by Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar and ordered him to stop singing songs against the police that incite against Israel.

This is the core of the Netanyahu doctrine: any work of art that reflects on the shared grief of Israelis and Palestinians, or that challenges the official government narrative in any way, cannot be allowed to stand. The greatest champion of this effort is Miri Regev, who, as the Minister of Culture and Sport from 2015 to 2020, was notorious for her aggressive approach towards what she deemed as the cultural elite of Israel, referring to them as a cultural junta. (She once boasted: I am proud of having never read Chekhov.) And while her stated aim was to correct a historic cultural imbalance that has marginalised Mizrahi and other non-European Jewish traditions in favour of Ashkenazi norms, in reality, her tenure was marked by a number of campaigns against Leftists, Palestinians and secularists. In 2019, for instance, she allocated 8 million shekels (1.7 million) for films promoting settler life.

Arguably, Regev has done more than anyone else to stifle free speech in the Israeli arts. In 2018, she championed the Loyalty in Culture law, which allows the Ministry of Culture to reduce or refuse funding to cultural institutions that are perceived to deny the Jewish and democratic nature of the State of Israel; incite racism, violence, or terrorism; commemorate Israels Independence Day as a day of mourning; or desecrate the states flag or national symbols. With this law, Right-wing politicians can strangle pretty much any cultural movement they deem ideologically treacherous.

And for those they dont tackle, there are plenty of other Israeli groups lining up to enforce Bibis doctrine. One of these is Im Tirtzu, founded by Right-wing activist Erez Tadmor, who has a criminal record for stealing military equipment. In 2016, Im Tirtzu launched its Shtulim (moles) campaign, which implicated well-known human rights advocates, artists and writers in terrorist activities, effectively branding them as traitors to Israel. Tadmor went on to serve as an advisor for the Likud Party under Netanyahu in 2019. Another organisation is Betzalmo, founded by ultranationalist Shamai Glick. Despite presenting himself as a human rights advocate, Glick uses legal intimidation and political pressure to cancel or disrupt Left-wing events run by the enemy.

Unsurprisingly, since October 7, many of these organisations have increased their crackdowns on artists and writers demonstrating against the war, especially those from the Arab community. Elsewhere, liberal academics have been suspended and social media influencers persecuted. There is a growing sense among Israels cultural figures that any anti-war expression will be punished.

Israel thus risks facing a fate worse than state censorship and thats a culture of self-censorship, which will render a shared Israeli-Palestinian narrative not just improbable, but unattainable. Terrified of losing out on public funding, or provoking a public backlash, Left-wing cultural figures are already tiptoeing around certain political subjects. Yet pandering to the government can create other problems, as Left-wing groups such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) will boycott any cultural institution associated with Netanyahu. As a result, even artists who critique his policies, but rely on government support, may be vulnerable to boycotts themselves.

Faced with this hostile climate, the path of least resistance is usually to stay silent. Already in 2019, a study by Professor Dana Arieli revealed that self-censorship among Israeli artists and curators had significantly increased: in 2005, fewer than 10% reported experiencing censorship, but by 2019, their number had risen to more than 50%. Even before October 7, then, an ominous hush was descending upon Israels theatres. Over the past six months, it has only grown more pronounced: a deafening silence of acquiescence, as poets and thespians lay down their scripts and pens in despair.

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Netanyahu's regime is built on censorship Israeli culture is being smothered by silence - UnHerd