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The ABC has been accused of censorship by a Q+A panellist, on an episode dedicated to whether Australians can trust the media.

Indigenous musician Ziggy Ramo took the national broadcaster to task on the program, saying his preferred choice of song for the episode's closing segment was rejected.

The song, April 25th, includes these lines:

"You didn't give your life

"You weren't an Anzac

"If you're gonna love your soldiers

"You've gotta love the blacks

"But you fly your flag

"Water off your back

"If this don't make sense and you lost your way

"Just remember how much you hate it when I say

"F*** those Anzacs, screaming, f*** those Anzacs. Now, how f***ed up is that?"

Ramo questioned whether his inclusion on the Monday night panel was "performative" diversity on the part of the ABC, after talking about the lack of representation of people from minority backgrounds at media outlets.

"For example, on this show today the song that I'm going to perform is called Stand For Something," Ramo said.

"The song I initially was going to perform was called April 25th, and this was a song that I was not allowed to perform.

"I was basically censored, in the fact that the ABC said that it was not appropriate.

"Me sitting on this panel ticks off a box for the ABC that is cultural diversity, but if I'm not able to express my perspective, is it performative or is it actual cultural diversity?"

He then referenced an earlier comment from Nationals MP and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, about the importance of freedom of expression.

But Mr Joyce indicated he felt there were limits, and sided with the ABC's decision on the song.

"I imagine when we say April 25th, we are looking at Anzac Day or something like that," Mr Joyce said.

"You have to be careful what you say.

"You go to a point where you insult people. I could talk to Indigenous people where I grew up and there are so many Indigenous people who are part of the RSL movement, and what are you saying to them?

"What do you say to all the members? What are you saying to them? You don't respect them?" Mr Joyce added.

Host Hamish Macdonald then offered to let Ramo explain his position.

"I want to celebrate the Anzacs, and I do celebrate the Anzacs," the rapper said.

"I myself, have gone to [World War I battlefields in] Belgium when I was 17. I had the privilege to go there and celebrate and understand the sacrifice that people have laid down for this country.

"The whole point of a song about April 25th is saying that I've seen this country recognise the sacrifices that have been made so that we could all sit here today.

"We can't just pick parts of our history that we want to recognise, and bury the others.

"If in World War II, we fought against genocide, yet we don't recognise the genocide in our own country, that's a double standard.

"So the whole reason why the song says, 'I hate the Anzacs,' is to demonstrate, that how outrageous is that?

"If we can recognise how outrageous that is, why can't [we] recognise that on [Australia Day] January 26?

"Why can't we recognise that when we ask to raise the age from 10 because 600 kids last year were locked up, we're 2 per cent of the population, we make up 65 per cent of those kids incarcerated.

"Do we not understand the hypocrisy?"

An ABC spokesperson confirmed Ramo had been asked to "perform an alternative song to close the show".

"[The ABC] instead invited him to present his points of view on all topics, including the sentiment and lyrics of the song April 25th and the reasons he wrote it, during the discussion," the spokesperson said.

"He took up the opportunity to explain those sentiments in detail."

Ramo later closed out the show with an emotional performance of Stand For Something.

Watch the full episode again on iview or via the Q+A Facebook page.

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Musician Ziggy Ramo accuses ABC of censorship over Anzac song on Q+A - ABC News

TheBelarusian media on Monday wenton strike over election result and censorship, saying that would not return to work unless the government implemented five demands, including new elections and the removal of television censorship.

Approximately 300 employees of Belarus One,the national channel supporting the government, have resigned as many at the channel feel they can no longer work for the propaganda machine. It has a total strength of 2000employees.

Also read:Belarus President Lukashenko gives nod to fresh elections

According toKseniya Lutskina, a documentary maker among oneof those who signed,People feel that if we cant do honest journalism, then we wont work.

The problem for a lot of people is that the theres no other television to work at in the country its all state-controlled,'' she added.

Some employees walked out even before the recent elections, feeling suffocated by the atmosphere as Lukashenko jailed his political opponents and looked set to rig the election.

Also see:We come in peace: Belarusian women dressed in white protest against corrupt leadership

Alexander Luchonok, who worked for 18 months as a special correspondent on the twice-weekly current affairs programme Under the Presidents Control, handed in his resignation a week before the election.

Talking about Lukashenko's supporters he said,Even if they dont believe everything in the reports, they think its important to keep Lukashenko in office.

Even as the country was plunged into chaos last week, there were attempts to portray business as usual.

Workers at a state-run factory confronted Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko with chants of "Leave!" on Monday as pressure built on the strongman to step down over a disputed election.

Employees at several factories also walked off the job after a historic protest on Sunday brought tens of thousands to the streets.

Pressure has been building on the ex-Soviet nation's longtime leader since the August 9 election, which he claims to have won with 80 percent of the vote.

More than 100,000 people took part in a "March for Freedom" in the capital Minsk on Sunday following calls from main opposition figure Svetlana Tikhanovskaya for continued demonstrations.

A brutal police crackdown has drawn widespread condemnation and appears to have turned even Lukashenko's support base at state-owned industries against him.

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Wont work, if we cant do honest journalism: Belarus media goes on strike over election result and censorship - WION

"So if we've done that, we can't just pick parts of our history that we want to recognise and bury the others. If in World War II we fought against genocide, yet we don't recognise the genocide in our own country, that's a double standard.

"I was basically censored in the fact that the ABC said [performing April 25th] was not appropriate."

Q+A host Hamish Macdonald pointed to the program's decision to have Ramo on the show as evidence of its commitment to an open debate, which an ABC spokeswoman echoed on Tuesday.

"The ABC asked Ziggy Ramo to perform an alternative song to close Q+A on Monday night and instead invited him to present his points of view on all topics, including the sentiment and lyrics of the song April 25th and the reasons he wrote it, during the discussion," the spokeswoman said.

Fellow panellist, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who said he was shocked to be defending the ABC, agreed with the broadcaster's decision not to allow Ramo to perform the song.

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Mr Joyce said the song was insulting to Indigenous Anzacs.

"You have to be careful what you say," he said.

Mr Joyce, long an unpredictable politician, also found himself in agreement with unexpected allies on the question of media diversity on a day when Media Diversity Australia, a pressure group, released a report showing non-Anglo-Celtic journalists were under-represented on Australian TV.

Antoinette Lattouf, the organisation's director, said a more diverse workforce would help the media represent a broader range of political views, pointing to electorates in Western Sydney, home to ethnic communities that recorded high "no" votes on the same-sex marriage postal survey. Mr Joyce and Lattouf also agreed on the problems of ill-informed and aggressive social media posts.

"I've been a reporter on the road for several years, never have I copped so much abuse from randoms just for being in the media," Lattouf said.

She said she had heard calls of "fake news" and "defund the media" when she was not even reporting.

Mr Joyce said: "We have to try and give kids a course that Twitter is the ambit scratchings on the back of a lavatory wall."

In the end Ramo closed the show with a performance of his song Stand for Something, which also deals with racial inequality. His emotional rendition passed without incident, aside from the panel's applause.

Nick Bonyhady is industrial relations reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based between Sydney and Parliament House in Canberra.

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Indigenous rapper accuses the ABC of censorship - Sydney Morning Herald

A much hyped-up propaganda has been launched with the intention of portraying Facebook as pro-BJP. While the allegations appear hilarious on the face of it, liberals appear to have lost all sense of reality and proportion and embarked upon an Uninstall Facebook drive. The latest spell of delusion began after propagandists at the Wall Street Journal published a report alleging, without any real evidence, that Facebook was unfairly favouring the BJP.

The allegations are particularly ridiculous because Facebook, like almost all other social media platforms, is known to silence right-wing or conservative voices on social media. The Community Standards section on Hate Speech offers sufficient indication of the Left-wing bias built into the platform.

Facebook clubs gender identity, a term engraved deeply in left-wing political ideology, with very real concepts such as race, ethnicity, religious identity and other such identities. Thus, if a user is vocal against the concept that a man can be a woman if he merely claims to be one, then the user can be accused of having trafficked in Hate Speech and his account could be suspended. We are expected to believe that such an organisation has suddenly discovered fondness for a Hindutvavadi party.

There is also other very real evidence that the Facebook is not favourably disposed towards the BJP. It is known that prior to the General Elections in 2019, the tech giant engaged in a campaign against popular pages supportive of the BJP and suspended them from Facebook without any clear reason at all.

For instance, in April 2019, Facebook had announced that it had taken down 687 pages linked to the Indian National Congress for suspicious activity. When we remove one of these networks, the reason we remove them is because of their coordinated inauthentic behaviour, that they are using network of fake accounts to conceal their identity.to mislead whos behind them. Thats the basic reason for removal, Head of its Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher told the media.

What escaped notice was the fact that numerous pages supportive of the BJP were also taken down, without any good reason, and the popularity of almost every single one of these pages far exceeded that of the cumulative reach of the Congress pages put together. One of the pages that suffered the axe was The Chaupal page which currently has close to 10.8 million likes on Facebook.

The monetisation of the page was suddenly rescinded on the 22nd of March, as per the admins of The Chaupal and they were told that it will be restored in 90 days. However, it was not restored even after 120 days had passed. Now, The Chaupal has a verified blue tick on Facebook. It was suspected even then by the page that they suspect they were targeted because of their right-wing political inclinations.

On the 1st of April, 2019, Facebook pages with a cumulative likes of around 150 million were removed. We page owners have no say after our pages are penalised. We are subjected to automated mails with no positive outcome, they complained. They also complained that they could not add new administrators and editors to their pages.

Speaking to OpIndia, Vikas Pandey, social media influencer and administrator of various popular Facebook pages said that although numerous Congress pages were deleted and their umber was greater in absolute numbers, the cumulative likes on them was far lesser than the BJP pages that were removed. We were told that the reason that was provided was that a Facebook administrator or editor on the page had a fake profile, he said.

Facebook claimed that some pages were removed because one of the IDs of the admins was fake. Many people use more than one accounts and it is very normal to protect ones identity. Such accounts were deleted arbitrarily. All this happened right before elections in April 2019. he said.

We were told that it is a very common practice for admins of pages to create alternative profiles for their Facebook pages. Sometimes, these profiles have names that are similar to the name of the page itself or have the same names as other administrator accounts. BJP-supporting Facebook pages were removed on the basis of such silly reason.

A popular Facebook page, The Frustrated Indian, suffered similar action after they shared from a syndicated news feed. Independent fact-checker Boom Live marked one of their articles as fake. Interestingly, it was a post that was from news agency IANS. When the administrator tried to reach out to Facebook to resolve the issue, he could not get through to him.

Similarly, another Facebook page Nation Wants NaMo was deleted abruptly just ahead of elections. The page admin, speaking to OpIndia said that there was no strike, a warning, before Facebook deleted their page. It was targeted to be deleted, the former page admin said.

Another such Facebook account which is regularly targeted is Political Kida. Ankur Singh, admin of Political Kida, while speaking to OpIndia said how Facebook policies are still unclear and used arbitrarily to silence their pages. They say that their memes and jokes are fact-checked and reported to be fake, videos that target the Congress party are removed before they go viral. The pages are selectively removed without any intimation and information and when an appeal is made, they are met with an automated response without any further response, he said.

Numerous such Facebook pages with great reach such as Doval Fan Club, I Support Ajit Doval, I Support Zee News with likes of 4.1 million, 1.8 million, 2.2 million respectively were censored by Facebook as well. There are a lot of other Facebook pages supportive of the BJP that suffered the same fate.

Under such circumstances, it is utterly preposterous to claim that the social media platform is somehow unfairly favouring the BJP. If anything, it is deliberately engaging in malpractice against the party and engaging in electoral malpractice. The current liberal rage against Facebook appears to be motivated by Facebook not bending to their will as absolutely as they so desire. Facebook, for its part, has rubbished such allegations.

Original post:
Social media activists share stories on how their pro-BJP content was censored by Facebook even as some accuse Facebook of being pro-BJP - OpIndia

By SCOTT STROUD Associated PressKolby Cooper, Vol. 2 (Combustion Music)Kolby Cooper could add a fresh voice to country radio if he could only get past the censors.The 21-year-old fire breather from the piney woods of East Texas offers relief from the parade of inauthentic junk laden with John Deere tractor references thats still way too pervasive these days.

Hes edgy, thats for sure.On Vol. 2, a new five-song EP, Cooper doesnt take long to start the beat-down. One of the songs, 2 Words, begins with a 15-second banjo intro and then drops hard into a breakup song as emphatic as any you will ever hear. And the two words its built around are enough to take commercial radio off the table.Thats probably OK with Cooper, who still lives in Bradford, Texas, not far from Palestine, a little farther from Dallas. He has the look of a guy who might pump your gas at one of those East Texas stations that still hasnt converted to pay-at-the-pump.

His music pulsates with the give-a-care vibe of someone still kicking dust off his jeans.Coopers first EP, 2018s Vol. 1, was followed by his only full-length album, Good Ones Never Last, which helped make him a word-of-mouth sensation. His previously best-known breakup song, It Aint Me, registered more than eight million Spotify streams.Yes, breakup songs are a specialty. But Cooper, who married early, says neither song is autobiographical.I showed the song to my wife, he says. And she was like, Oh sure, thats a good song. But are we OK?'The answer was yes. And Cooper shows his range and depth on new song Cannonball, a ballad about commitment thats original in its own way.Versatile and fearless, Cooper is the kind of voice that could redeem country music if only his songs can be cleared for airplay.

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Review: A new voice from Texas rips it but tests the censors - Fort Worth Business Press