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The Chinese government under president Xi Jinping is continuing to make life on the internet difficult for its potential detractors. Yesterday (Aug. 25), the countrys highest internet regulator released new rules (link in Chinese) that govern who can post what online. The upshot: anonymity on the Chinese internet is just about dead.

The new rules are the most recent instance of the Cyberspace Administration of Chinas (CAC) efforts to enforce real-name registration, which aims to severely limit internet activity for users who do not provide identifying information. There are already rules in place that require using your real name to register for WeChat, mobile phone numbers, Weibo, and other services for a few years. But the latest rules target the relatively unruly world of online communities and discussion forums.

For users who have not given identifying information, platforms for and providers of online communities may not allow posting of any kind, the announcement declares. It adds that, on these platforms, no content may appear that is prohibited by national regulations. (Those are my translations; I tried to keep intact the confusing language often used in these Chinese government announcements.) The CAC announcement also requires these platforms to investigate thoroughly any users they think may be using fake names and retain all user data for government inspection.

With the major online platforms like WeChat and Weibo already censored and operating under real-name registration rules, forums provide some of the few remaining places where it is possible to be anonymous on the Chinese internet. Tiebathe largest of such forums and often the origin of nationalist political activismwas given the real-name treatment by its parent company, Baidu, just a few months ago. The new rules will extend those controls to smaller forums.

Under Chinas previous leader, Hu Jintao, expression on the internet flourished in spite of censorship. Now, under Xi Jinping, the censors appear to be winning. These latest regulations follow a crackdown on VPNslong the easiest way to browse the web uncensoredand the announcement that the countrys three largest internet companies were under investigation for not adequately controlling what users say on their platforms.

So what exactly constitutes forbidden topics on the Chinese internet? An unnamed CAC official told a journalist the following when asked about the new rules (first translated by The Diplomat):

Good luck avoiding all of those.

Go here to see the original:
In China you now have to provide your real identity if you want to comment online - Quartz

YouTube continues to censor more and more content.

At least as far back as 2014, YouTube began engaging in active censorship of content. This does not mean censorship of obviously profane material, such as pornography and hate speech. The censorship applied a narrow band of content, such as ISIS recruitment videos, that were deemed dangerous.

You Tube has begun a broad censorship campaign, silencing many content creators.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - It is one thing to ban pornography or ISIS recruitment videos. It's understandable that videos produced by terrorists could contain secret messages and inspire domestic terrorism. However, the censorship did not stop with ISIS and porn. Today, major content producers are being silenced because YouTube doesn't like their message.

This censorship is hurting the revenue streams of many content providers including now, news and media outlets.

You Tube now keeps the lion's share of revenue from your content, and will delete or suppress it if it even mentions terrorism, Islam, or violence. Suppression also applies to daily Bible readings.

That's right, You Tube finds daily Bible readings offensive.

Recently, Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer was labeled "offensive" and censored. Spencer shares news and information about militant Islam on his You Tube network and website. Or at least he did.

The militant left is on the march. They know most people now get their news from social media. But social media is where the censorship is the strongest. This is resulting in an uninformed public whose perception of reality is incomplete.

The consequences of this should be obvious to any thinking person.

On the Jihad Watch website Spencer shared this message and screencap from a reader:

This is not the Jihad Watch YouTube channel, which still remains (so far); nor was it an account I had any association with. This was simply a collection of some of videos featuring me that this man had made for his own reference.

YouTube user "NoNo Boddy" sent me this screenshot, and explained:

As far as I recall it was just your stuff. Nothing crazy

I don't actively use the channel at all really just was using it to bookmark stuff.

I'd actually forgotten I made it. I didn't actually know if it was public or not. To be honest I didn't know they come in public and private.

As I said when PayPal reinstated Jihad Watch's account, the Left's war on the freedom of speech is by no means over. They are determined to cut foes of jihad terror off from all means of communication.

---

Pope Francis Prayer Intentions for AUGUST 2017Artists. That artists of our time, through their ingenuity, may help everyone discover the beauty of creation.

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YouTube censors Jihad Watch, Daily Bible readings, and more - Catholic Online

Beijing (AFP) - Just days after the world's oldest publisher briefly caved in to Chinese censorship demands, international publishing houses are courting importers at a Beijing book fair, with some admitting they keep sensitive topics off their pages.

The censorship controversy that hit Cambridge University Press (CUP) sent a chill along the stands staffed by publishers from nearly 90 countries at the Beijing International Book Fair, which opened on Wednesday.

But some acknowledged their companies have already resorted to self-censorship to ensure that their books do not offend and are published in China.

CUP had given similar arguments when it initially complied with a Chinese import agency's demand to block articles from its China Quarterly journal, before reversing course on Monday after coming under fire from the academic community.

Terry Phillips, business development director of British-based Innova Press, was candid about it as he prepared to meet a Chinese counterpart at the fair's section for overseas publishers.

"We frequently exercise self-censorship to adapt to different markets. Every country has different sets of requirements about what they consider appropriate for education materials," Phillips told AFP.

"But as authors, I think we also have a responsibility to find ways to teach good citizenship and human rights," he said.

John Lowe, managing director of Mosaic8, an Asian educational publishing specialist based in Tokyo, said the authorities govern the distribution of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) that companies need for their books to be sold in China.

"So it is in publishers' interest to not publish something that would anger authorities," Lowe said.

"You don't mention the three 'Ts': Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan. But it's usually fine to discuss human rights issues generally," Lowe said.

- CUP quiet -

The 300 articles that were temporarily removed from China Quarterly's website in China included texts on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the status of Tibet, the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese democracy movement.

CUP had said last Friday that it wanted "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market".

In an about-face, the publisher announced on Monday that it was restoring access to the articles after international academics criticised CUP for succumbing to Chinese pressure and launched a petition demanding that it reverse course.

But the US-based Association for Asian Studies revealed this week that CUP had received a request from China's General Administration of Press and Publications to remove 100 articles from another publication, the Journal of Asian Studies.

Cambridge University officials said they would discuss the censorship issue with the importer at the book fair, which runs until Sunday, after expressing concern about "the recent increase in requests of this nature".

Rita Yan, a CUP coordinator at the publisher's booth, told AFP that the censorship issue "wasn't affecting our activities at the book fair."

Yan declined to comment further and said CUP's managing director of academic publishing was unable to speak with the press because she was occupied with meetings.

- Censorship: 'A selling point' -

Other publishers participating in the fair said the uproar has created an atmosphere of anxiety about censorship.

"Currently, we don't have any problems, but in the future, we don't know," said Ding Yueting, a marketer for Wiley, an educational publisher and research service based in New Jersey.

A representative of a large American publishing house, who requested anonymity because she was not authorised to speak to the press, said: "We're nervous about whether there will be increased censorship requests from Chinese agencies in the future."

But a representative of another major American publisher, who also requested anonymity, said that a factor influencing self-censorship decisions is that there would be "no point" in producing books that will likely get banned.

"It would be embarrassing to go through the trouble of translating a book from English to Chinese, and then being unable to publish in China," he said.

"On the other hand, books that are censored in China often sell better abroad," he said.

"It's usually a major selling point."

Originally posted here:
At Beijing book fair, publishers admit self-censorship - Yahoo News

The university press, which describes itself as the oldest publishing house in the world, had admitted to blocking online access in China to academic works on Tiananmen Square, the Cultural Revolution and Tibet.

The University of Cambridge said in a statement on Monday that its academic leadership and the publisher had agreed to reinstate the blocked content "with immediate effect" to "uphold the principle of academic freedom."

The censored academic articles appeared in the highly regarded journal China Quarterly. Its editor, Tim Pringle, said the reversal followed a "justifiably intense reaction from the global academic community and beyond."

"Access to published materials of the highest quality is a core component of scholarly research," he said in a statement on Monday. "It is not the role of respected global publishing houses ... to hinder such access."

The decision to censor the articles drew condemnation from academics around the world.

It represented "a craven, shameful and destructive concession" to the Chinese government's "growing censorship regime," Georgetown University professor James Millward wrote in an open letter published over the weekend.

By Monday, an online petition threatening a boycott of the publisher and its journals had gathered hundreds of signatures.

Related: Facebook finds a way into China

The not-for-profit publisher had defended its action as necessary to ensure that China doesn't block "entire collections of content." It said it would never proactively censor its own content.

But many prominent academics blasted the move.

"Chinese students and scholars reading a censored version of The China Quarterly will encounter only historical facts and scholarly analyses approved by political authorities," Greg Distelhorst of MIT and Jessica Chen Weiss of Cornell wrote in a letter to Cambridge University Press.

"This censored history of China will literally bear the seal of Cambridge University," they said.

The Cambridge press, which has been operating since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, has run into a challenge faced by other global publishers: obey China's censors or be locked out of its giant market.

Related: Apple's Tim Cook hopes China will ease VPN restrictions

Foreign authors who wish to publish books in China must allow their works to be altered by censors. Top news organizations like The New York Times have had their websites blocked in China for years after publishing articles that upset the ruling Communist Party.

"Western institutions have the freedom to choose," said an English-language opinion article published Sunday by Global Times, a provocative but state-sanctioned Chinese tabloid. "If they don't like the Chinese way, they can stop engaging with us. If they think China's internet market is so important that they can't miss out, they need to respect Chinese law and adapt to the Chinese way."

China's General Administration of Press and Publication, a regulatory body, didn't respond to requests for comment Monday.

Related: Banned! 11 things you won't find in China

Submitting to Beijing's demands was "a misguided, if understandable, economic decision that does harm to the Press' reputation and integrity," said Jonathan Sullivan, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.

"This is not the first time Beijing has leveraged the economic power of the Chinese market for political gains," he wrote in a blog post. "The fear is that it won't be the last time that Western academia is the target."

-- Serena Dong contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (London) First published August 21, 2017: 1:12 PM ET

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World's oldest publisher reverses 'shameful' China censorship - CNNMoney

YouTube has suspended his account allegedly because he violated their terms of use; but really, he suspects, for the crime of being a Trump supporter who speaks unpalatable truths about leftist evils.

If youre unfamiliar with Thomas Wictor, youre missing a treat. Hes a Venezuelan-born recluse with a rich and varied past who, besides being the worlds greatest (and only) expert on World War I flamethrowers, also happens to produce some of the most fascinating Twitter threads and social media video commentary you will ever see on subjects ranging from Antifa to Pallywood to whats really going on in Syria and Iraq.

Some of his output is so kooky and recondite that, quite possibly, it strays into the realm of conspiracy theory.

But with Wictor you can never be quite sure because his exposition is so thorough and well-documented.

One of his specialties is forensic video analysis. This is how I first came across him, a few years back, when I wrote my first Breitbart News story based on his research. It concerned the four Palestinian boys supposedly blown up on a beach by Israeli artillery during the last Gaza conflict but really, or so Wictor claimed, murdered by Hamas who then exploited the dead children for propaganda purposes.

More recently he has attracted a big following on Twitter thanks to his epic threads which examine the truth behind various news stories, especially ones relating either to the Middle East or Antifas domestic terrorism.

This, he believes, is what got him into trouble with the lefts political correctness sentinels.

He told me:

I was able to prove at least three attempted murders by Antifa at Berkeley on April 15, 2017. In the video above [now deleted by YouTube], the Antifa member used a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

The Fairbairn-Sykes is a double-edged stabbing weapon. It produces deep wounds that bleed heavily, making it hard to save the victim. It was only incompetence on the part of Antifa and sheer luck that the free-speech supporter didnt die. The Antifa member stabbed four times. Thats attempted murder in the first degree.

The reason I came to the attention of Google was that Donald Trump Jr retweeted me. After that, my YouTube account came under almost daily assault until it was terminated.

On Twitter, I support Jews, Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians, blacks, whites I see no religion or color. My blog posts were all technical.

The last detail is important because, according to Googles explanations as to why his YouTube account was first closed temporarily then permanently, his videos had inappropriate content.

Eventually, Wictors account was killed with death-by-faceless-bureaucracy. (Ive included the full private thread of Wictors communication with me because its soclassically Thomas Wictor)

This is the internets loss and reflects ill on both YouTube and Google.

Happily, his Twitter threads are still operative and todays is another classic. It concerns a story aboutState Rep. Beth Fukumoto (D-Hawaii) and her claim reported in Huffington Post that she receivedracistcorrespondence from a Trump supporter.

Wictor has strong suspicions that it is a hoax because, using photos of the letter and envelope from the internet, he has subjected the correspondence to forensic analysis.

Read the full thread to find out why he thinks it is fake. Its classic Wictor.

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Delingpole: Thomas Wictor Is the Latest Victim of Google Censorship - Breitbart News