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Its easy to forget what a recent phenomenon freedom of expression is, even in this country. Until 1959, British publishers could be sent to jail for producing books deemed to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Back then, the things that couldnt be said were largely sexual. James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses, was banned indeed burned on the grounds of obscenity. A single line in Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (And that night they were not divided) convinced a magistrate that all copies must be destroyed, because it could induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism.

The bravery of successive generations of publishers, their mischievous insistence on thumbing their nose at the censors, helped bring about the sexual revolution, enabling us all to live and love and read more freely. The obscenity trial, 60 years ago, of Lady Chatterleys Lover (or more accurately, of its publisher, Penguin Books), is widely recognised as the moment when the gates of artistic and sexual freedom were finally blown open.

Now, though, there are those who wish to drag them shut again. This time it isnt the grey elderly ones, as Lawrence described his censors, having apoplexies over the written word. Today, the blue pencil hovers in the hand of young progressives some of them, astonishingly, publishers themselves.

Staff at Penguin Random House tried this week to block the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose contempt for identity politics has earned him a huge following on the Right. At a town hall meeting at Penguins Canada office, employees argued that the publisher should not give a platform to an icon of hate speech. According to one of those present, people were crying in the meeting about how Mr Peterson has affected their lives, with one employee fretting that the publication of the book would negatively affect their non-binary friend.

To Penguins great credit, it is pressing ahead with publication. But as the social justice generation moves up the media hierarchy, this bizarre sight publishers protesting against their own publishing house for publishing a book will only become more common.

Earlier this year, the US firm Hachette dropped its plans to publish Woody Allens memoirs after staff staged a walkout. The American journalist Abigail Shrier has described how her latest book, an investigation into the rise in transgender identification among adolescent girls, was dropped by her first publishers following protests by staff. When another publisher picked it up, newspapers refused to review it. When the podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, staff at Spotify, the podcast platform, threatened to walk out. Censorship is once more in the ascendant.

They are so easily rattled, these new inspectors of literary hygiene. No sensible critic of Peterson would claim that his books constitute hate speech. (Unlike Mein Kampf, which Penguin, quite rightly, continues to publish on the grounds of public interest.) The argument against Peterson seems to be that, even if he isnt a neo-Nazi, some of his fans are. But since when did we judge a book by its readers?

If reading has any moral purpose, it is that it broadens our understanding of the world by exposing us to different ideas. This is what makes publishing an exalted profession: its whole purpose is to find ideas and set them free. A publisher should be a liberator, not a jailer.

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The attempt to censor Jordan Peterson shows the intolerance of the social justice generation - Telegraph.co.uk

We lift the lid on an odious policy by a major PR provider. It is imperative that all FX and CFD firms read this carefully.

The first step was to remove liberties and livelihoods, and the second step is censorship.

This is the method by which illiberal powers that be erode free enterprise and control the minds of the entrepreneurial.

Back in March, a number of members of society (myself excluded Ed) actually believed in the initiative by world governments that locking the world down was somehow in the best interests of the unsuspecting and uninitiated global population.

Here we are, eight months later, almost the time in which it takes for a human being to come into the world, and the attempts to curtail business, personal activity, social activity, and well normal behavior are still in full swing.

Naturally, as an inquisitive and intelligent species, hundreds of millions of people are now beginning to understand that control to this extent is unpalatable at best, and has questionable motives at worst, so in order to maintain it, governments are now stepping up their propaganda efforts.

However, it is not just governments that are doing so, but privately owned media and PR entities, which are resorting to censorship on a very extensive scale in order to ensure that they toe the party line.

The FX and CFD industry has done well during the past few months, and our collective commitment to innovation, hard working diligence and ingenuity has led the electronic trading sector to prosperity, especially given the efficiency of modern trading platforms and their respective brokerages, in providing easy and good quality access to global currency, stock and equities markets during the times at which many people are working from home, or have to search for another form of income at a time during which many have lost their jobs and new jobs arent plentiful.

Additionally, the extra volatility caused by this years extremely unusual circumstances has stirred tremendous interest among retail traders, so existing client bases of brokerages have traded at high volumes, and in some cases record volumes.

Of course, this is all great news for the FX industry, however whilst activity is up, and many FX firms have spoken to FinanceFeeds over the past few months stating that they have never been busier. My colleagues here in Canary Wharf are working flat out from early morning until late at night to cope with the extra business that is being processed.

Yes, it is boom time for the FX industry, but very much a disaster for pretty much every other industry sector worldwide, with no end in sight.

What, it is feasible to ask, does a firm do in order to capitalize on the demand for FX trading and gain more customers?

The usual method is to channel some of the profit into marketing in order to bring on board new clients whilst there is good revenue. This way, the marketing spend can be increased, and new types of client demographic onboarded without making any dent in expected income.

Similarly, it is also prudent to approach new channels, and develop new asset classes or products for new audiences in order to appeal to a different sector of society, thus making your brokerage more sustainable in future.

These are sensible, normal methods of expanding a business during a time of good revenue generation.

The question is, how? Traditionally, being an online business sector, FX and CFD companies, along with their relative technology vendors, liquidity providers and platform integration firms would meet at conferences, an extremely popular point in the annual calendar of all FX firms pioneered almost ten years ago by Finance Magnates (known at that time as Forex Magnates) and followed by many other entities since.

These industry conferences have been viewed by the entire industry globally from Tier 1 banks to global exchanges like CME Group, all the way through all brokerages and payment firms, platform companies as absolutely essential, and have brought every component of the entire industry together so that they all now know each other personally, whereas formerly they were separate online entities.

However, these events are no longer allowed which is a travesty.

Thus, electronic trading firms, which need to get their presence known, need to step up their digital remit once again, because it is an online world only now.

How? I hear you ask. Well, the traditional PR method has now fallen into the hands of the censors.

Not only are all social media and business news sites censored in case any content doesnt toe the new pro-lockdown, pro-Covid line, but PR sites that brokerages actually pay a lot of money for are now censoring content.

PRNewsWire, owned by Cision, which is a well known and widely read PR aggregation site used by all industry sectors and is hugely popular with companies across all aspects of the FX industry, has issued a notice on its site detailing its policy if it can be called that.

Under the ominous title of How to Ensure Your COVID-19 Press Release Gets Published,it says Crafting an engaging press release that stands out is challenging in the best of times, not to mention during a time of great uncertainty with a news cycle that changes by the minute. Releases need to be extra-sensitive and thoughtful in the time of COVID-19, and we at Cision wanted to lend some guidance to help ensure that any COVID-19 related press release meets the PR Newswire guidelines.

There is a document available for download which details all of this in full, however here are the important points:

If this is to be taken seriously, it gives a clear impression that any PRs submitted to the internet and indexed in search engines via the PRNewsWire site will not be published if they have titles such as Our brokerage experiences great increases in revenue during Covid for example, as that comes under their absurd rule of newsjacking which really means not following the narrative of the totalitarians in government.

Another example would be perhaps Multi-asset brokerage offers access to derivatives for extra income during Covid/pandemic/situation (or whatever anyone wants to call it these days) as this would be attempting to attempting to make an unfair profit from this situation even they are using the marketing spin we have all heard from governments in calling it a situation. I would call it the waste product which emanates from the alimentary canal of the male of the bovine species.

For brokers or media entities wishing to promote their online webinars to clients, or business-to-business online seminars, thats out too. Join our Zoom in which panels will discuss how to move your brokerage forward in the times of Coronavirus which is a very popular panel discussion on every single Zoom conference I have attended lately and I have attended a lot is out of the question according to PRNewsWires criteria.

You cannot talk about volatility due to big pharma stock rises, you cannot promote services aimed to help people wishing to trade during these times and you cannot publish quarterly results which attribute any rises in revenue or volatility to the current situation if we really must call it that.

The more you read into the rules set out by this censorship, the less you can write about your companys innovations, new products and adaptability to the new method of doing business that we have all been forced into by anti-business, pro-lockdown, censorship-happy authorities in Western nations.

PRNewsWire charges an absolute fortune for even the smallest of PR. It is not in my personal remit to advise anyone to part with money to place PR on any media site, I believe in freedom and free enterprise. The more the merrier.

However, if this is how the good customers of a site which is supposed to provide a service to help them promote their products are treated, it may be time to look elsewhere. until they are censored too.

FinanceFeeds maintains an absolute commitment to freedom of information, to uncovering important matters of public and commercial interest within the electronic trading industry, to assisting all areas of the FX industry to provide detailed editorial to reach their potential commercial or retail clients and absolutely promise that we will never implement censorship of any kind.

That way, transparency is upheld, business can be conducted without barriers, and the most important news and developments within our industry are documented for the greater good of all its participants.

Open dialog and open publication is vital to online industries such as ours.

Read more:
In this age of censorship lunacy, your online presence and PR will never be the same again - FinanceFeeds

PlayStation is reportedly censoring PS5 users on Twitter. Over the course of the PS4 generation, Sony came under fire from some PlayStation gamers for censoring sexual content in a few different games. Continuing this streak of censorship, it's now censoring PS5 users on Twitter, or at least that's what new reports claim. More specifically, users are reporting that the PS5's share functionality comes equipped with a built-in profanity filter that prohibits users from using certain words when tweeting from their PS5 by blocking the publication of the tweet until the word is removed. Adding to this, apparently, the filter is broken, with one user providing a concrete example of a tweet being flagged for containing problematic language, except it doesn't contain any profanity whatsoever.

Reports of the filter can be found from Twitter to Reddit, but the best example comes way of Patrick Beja. Taking to the former social media platform, Beja revealed that when trying to share a post about Astro's Playroom, full of PG praise for the game and Sony, the PS5 blocked its publication, citing issues with the text.

As you can see below, the tweet has zero profanity, though it's possible "torrent" is triggering the filter, though, for now, this is just a theory.

Oddly enough, there's no mention of this feature within the parental controls, which suggests it can not be removed.

At the moment of publishing, Sony has not commented on this feature or the backlash and speculation it has created. If this changes -- or if more information on the filter itself is provided -- we will be sure to update the story. Until then, for more coverage on the PS5 -- including all of the latest news, rumors, leaks, guides, and deals -- click here or check out the links below:

H/T, The Gamer.

Read more from the original source:
PlayStation Reportedly Censoring PS5 Users on Twitter - ComicBook.com

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Greenwald was the journalist Snowden contacted in 2013 when he decided to go public with documents revealing global mass surveillance carried out by US and British spy agencies.

In the video interview published on Wednesday, Greenwald and Snowden, who is living in exile, spoke about a range of issues, including the state of the internet today and how it compares to its early days.

Greenwald wanted Snowden to recall what the internet was like in its infancy, for the benefit of those who are too young to remember it and only know it the way it is today marked by centralization, and corporate Big Tech control and censorship.

Snowden spoke about the values that made the web exciting in the early days, when it was creative and cooperative, but also decentralized by virtue of most websites being built by individuals. These were small and not particularly sophisticated but original and human a value that was lost as the internet became more and more centralized with the influx of big corporate and commercial players.

Another difference Snowden spoke about was the ability of people to protect their identities, choosing their own names and staying outside the system of personal data collection and tracking made possible by real identity rules imposed by Facebook and others.

And it wasnt a commercial space, Snowden continued but then it started turning into that, with companies, governments and institutions moving in, competing with each other and making it less for the individual and more for them.

Today, he said, even those whose email is on their own server, private and secure, who then send a copy to somebody with a Gmail account Google has that copy.

This is emblematic of the way a small group of companies is now able to learn more and more about everybodys lives through access to content people share, even in private accounts and direct messages that are nevertheless increasingly visible to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

So they know everything about us, at the same time they work in very secretive ways and they have very little due process, Snowden said.

If your YouTube or Gmail account got banned, you can do nothing, he added because youre not Googles customer and the giant has no customer service for you, the regular user only for advertisers.

Greenwald asked if it was misguided to think that as long as Big Techs online censorship and corporate regulation targets those who are considered to be misfits and extremist people should be fine with it and only start objecting once it hits themselves or those they agree with.

Snowden thinks that the big picture that is rarely considered is that censorship often targets people for who they are and what their beliefs are, rather than what they are actually saying.

Are we talking about an intentional call to violence that creates imminent threat? Well thats already not protected under US law, he remarked.

What Snowden finds interesting is that those who want to silence others for using the internet to call for violence are not suing them but are turning to and putting pressure on tech companies to silence these people on their behalf.

The reason this is popular is because some of those targeted are terrible people, he said. But thats also indicative of the way restrictive laws are made and sold to the public, when worst possible examples are singled out to justify controversial action.

One example are the attempts to introduce legislation that would outlaw encryption when things like child pornography are always brought up as an argument in favor of the move, Snowden said.

Take this small group of worst people in the world and use them as a wedge if you dont give us X concession, then Y will happen, he explained the thinking behind it.

Even with terrorism, Snowden continued, the threat comes from a small group of people, but after each attack authorities want even more powers, even though theyve already had plenty to stop the threat before the act happened.

When it comes to censorship and free speech online, pressure groups imposing it dont want to go the hard way of using the legal system, instead wanting to be granted exceptional powers.

They go: lets pressure companies to do this on their own, beyond what the law affords, he said, likening it to how spy agencies work to forge relationships beyond the law.

This is effective because Big Tech companies, most of whom are really ad companies, worry about what advertisers think, Snowden explained, and thats why they accept to impose censorship thats beyond their legal obligations, and even if they internally dont think its right.

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Snowden: The modern internet became less for the individual and all about centralized control and censorship - Reclaim The Net

Celebrated linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, and journalist Vijay Prashad have expressed regret at the abrupt cancellation of their discussion at the online Tata Literature Live festival, asking if the move was a result of censorship.

The dialogue about the 91-year-old Chomskys new book Internationalism or Extinction was scheduled to be held at 9 p.m. on Friday. But at 1 p.m., Chomsky and Prashad received an email informing them that the virtual event will not be taking place.

Noam and I were to speak at the Tata Lit Festival about Noams latest Book. Our Panel was abruptly cancelled just hours before it was to go live, Prasad said in a tweet.

In a statement issued on Peoples Dispatch, Chomsky and Prashad said that they were informed of the events cancellation in the mail.

Then, out of nowhere, near 1 p.m. Indian Standard Time, we received an email which said, cryptically, I am sorry to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, we have to cancel your talk today, they said in the joint statement.

It is with regret that we could not hold our discussion at the Mumbai Lit Fest, now owned and operated by the Tata Corporation... Since we do not know why Tata and Mr. Dharker decided to cancel our session, we can only speculate and ask simply: was this a question of censorship? they asked.

The sponsors of the festival did not respond despite repeated attempts to reach out to them.

The panel was to talk about the broad issues that threaten the planet, but then also talk about the specific role of countries such as India and corporations such as the Tatas, the statement said

The issues about the Citizenship Amendment Act, Adivasi (tribal) killing, the industrialisation of indigenous lands and environmental degradation were also to be discussed during the session, it said.

We wanted to talk about how governments such as those led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and corporations such as the Tatas are hastening humanity towards a deeper and deeper crisis, the statement said.

We wanted to appear at this platform in the spirit of open discussion to hold our dialogue about extinction and internationalism, about the darkest part of our human story and the brightest sparks of hope that shine in our world, it said.

Chomskys book is based on a lecture that he delivered in Boston in 2016, in which he warns that human beings must act to end various calamities. The dominant themes in the book include the dangers of nuclear war, climate catastrophe, erosion of democracy.

Excerpt from:
Was this censorship?: Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad ask Tata Lit Live after it cancels their discussion - The Hindu