Mediaboss Marketing

Rock musician and conservative political activist Ted Nugents wife, Shemane Nugent, posted a screenshot of an Instagram censorship notification she received and reacted to Instagrams attitude towards free speech.

As you may remember, Shemane had actively supported Trump during the presidential election and often ridiculed the severity of COVID-19. Her videos from the live streams in which she was asking her followers who theyre going to vote for and why were banned before the elections.

Similarly, this time Shemane posted visual content considering COVID-19 which was banned from Instagram. After she received the notification that her post was removed as it contained false info, Shemane posted the info-warning on her Instagram and ridiculed their policy.

The message also said that to stay up to date on the latest facts, visit the World Health Organizations website which seems to have been received as a joke by Shemane who often questions the role of the government in newcasting.

Her response to Instagrams ban was to thank them ironically for informing her and sharing her happiness that Instagram is always there to censor peoples thoughts and beliefs. More than 100 people responded to her post and thanked her for trying to raise awareness even though she is being censored.

This is what the Instagram warning said:

A post you shared contained false info: We removed the post because it included harmful false information about COVID-19. To stay up to date on the latest facts, visit the World Health Organizations website.

Heres what Shemane wrote in the caption of her Instagram post:

Thanks, Instagram. I had no idea. Glad youre here to censor us.

You can check out the photo that Shemane Nugent posted below.

Read the rest here:
Ted Nugents Wife Shemane Targets Instagram For The Recent Censor But She Puts It Again On Instagram To Find A Solution For Free Speech - Metalhead...

Zoom videoconferences are a staple of the coronavirus pandemic. Above, members of the Vermont House of Representatives met on Zoom in April. Wilson Ring/AP hide caption

Zoom videoconferences are a staple of the coronavirus pandemic. Above, members of the Vermont House of Representatives met on Zoom in April.

Now that the coronavirus pandemic has transformed Zoom from a corporate videoconferencing app into a ubiquitous tool for governments, schools, karaoke parties and even "Zoomsgiving" celebrations, the company is having to do the dicey work of deciding what is permitted on its platform.

And not everybody is allowed on it.

Zoom's rules say users cannot break the law, promote violence, be obscene, display nudity or support terrorism. The terms of service largely mirror those of larger tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube.

And just as social media companies draw critics' ire when they flag a post or ban a user, Zoom is now being accused of censorship after refusing to host a speech by a controversial Palestinian activist. The episode is raising questions among technology experts about whether and how Zoom sessions should be regulated.

Terrorist link versus academic freedom

In September, Zoom blocked a speaking event featuring Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist group. Khaled, now 76 years old and living in Jordan, is notorious for hijacking a plane in 1969 and attempting to do it again a year later.

Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University's College of Ethnic Studies, planned an "open classroom" event in which Khaled was to participate.

But the night before the event, Abdulhadi received a message from the university's provost: Zoom was canceling the livestream over legal concerns.

Abdulhadi says she was told, "We might be implicated in criminal activities of material support for terrorism and that might include imprisonment and a fine."

Leila Khaled, an activist and prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, speaks during an event in February 2018. Burhan Ozbilici/AP hide caption

Leila Khaled, an activist and prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, speaks during an event in February 2018.

Abdulhadi didn't fear those consequences. She says her own lawyers had assured her that inviting Khaled to speak publicly is not tantamount to providing material support to terrorists, as broadly defined in a federal statute that prosecutors have used to arrest individuals for everything from fighting alongside terrorist groups to exchanging Twitter messages with them.

To Abdulhadi, Khaled is a feminist icon and radical nationalist whose planned talk on resistance movements had captured wide attention. Some 1,500 people had RSVP'd to tune in to the event on Zoom.

"They do not have the right to use their being a platform to veto the content of our classroom and thus actually impinge on our academic freedom," Abdulhadi said of Zoom.

Legally, Zoom cannot tell Abdulhadi what to teach. But it can decide who is and is not allowed to speak on its platform.

The Lawfare Project, a pro-Israel think tank and litigation fund, pressured Zoom to block the event, arguing that hosting Khaled was a legal liability. It organized a protest in front of Zoom's headquarters in September.

"If your interest is in having an academic discussion about controversial issues, go ahead. But that doesn't mean that you have the right to assist a designated terrorist group in carrying out their mission," Brooke Goldstein, the think tank's executive director, said.

The Lawfare Project claimed victory after Zoom shut down the event.

In a statement, a Zoom spokesperson said the San Francisco State University roundtable violated the company's terms of service because Khaled is a member of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

"Zoom let SFSU know that they could not use Zoom for this particular event," the spokesperson said.

The company said there were 10 subsequent events planned related to Khaled. Khaled was set to speak at three of them. Those three events were also banned from the platform.

"The other seven events did not publicize any appearance from Ms. Khaled and were therefore able to be hosted on Zoom," according to the company's statement.

Officials at Zoom say the company does not monitor the content of video chats and took action on the planned Khaled events only after being notified about them.

"What does it mean for the future of communication?"

Zoom felt similar heat this summer after it shut down meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre at the request of the Chinese government. But while social media companies have long been in the middle of debates over content rules, this is a relatively new predicament for Zoom.

"Welcome to the party, Zoom," said Daphne Keller, a former Google lawyer who is now with Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.

There is a case to be made, Keller said, that Zoom's rules of engagement should be distinct from those of Facebook or Twitter because the services function differently.

"Do we want Zoom to be the content police or the speech police? Because we're all so dependent on them," Keller said. "They are functioning in a way that for previous generations the postal service or the phone company functioned."

Zoom may act like a phone company to millions, but it is not a utility. It can face criminal prosecution if it is not careful with the content it permits. But like other online platforms, Zoom is protected by law from civil lawsuits over what people say and do on its platform.

Faiza Patel with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice says there have to be rules, since the notion of good speech being able to counter bad speech falls apart when there is just so much content. And outlandish and conspiratorial material can often overpower everything else.

"I think we're all kind of struggling to figure out how to maneuver in this space, which is quite different than what we've had before," Patel said.

Patel said tech companies' terms of service usually espouse support for robust free speech and debate. Stopping someone from communicating to others can appear to contradict those values.

"That obviously creates a question about, 'Well, are you really allowing the full extent of the conversation?' " Patel said.

Back at San Francisco State University, Abdulhadi is looking for an open-source alternative to Zoom that does not, as she sees it, silence political speakers.

"It's a very serious problem to be vulnerable to the only means of communications in today's pandemic times," Abdulhadi said. "Because what does this really mean for the future of education? What does it mean for the future of communication?"

Editor's note: Zoom is among NPR's sponsors.

Continue reading here:
'Welcome To The Party, Zoom': Video App's Rules Lead To Accusations Of Censorship - NPR

A group of researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have published a global database of instances of internet censorship that shows an extremely aggressive growth of online interference on a world scale over a recent 20-month period.

The team used an automated global censorship tracking platform called Censored Planet, which was developed in 2018 by UM assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science Roya Ensafi. Between August 2018 and April 2020, the team collected 21.8 billion measurements of online censorship from 221 countries.

Among the key findings of the researchpresented at the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer and Communications Security on November 10was that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries that were studied, including Norway, Japan, Italy, Israel and Poland.

A press release issued by the UM on November 17 described the findings contained in the teams research paper as The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled, which shows that even citizens of the worlds freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. It also showed that among the countries where censorship is expanding are those rated as some of the freest in the world by advocacy group Freedom House.

The research reveals that, for the most part, the increasing internet censorship is driven by organizations or internet service providers filtering content and not nationwide censorship policies such as those in China, where online content is highly restricted by direct state intervention.

The UM press release says Assistant Professor Ensafi noted that, while the uptick in blocking activity in the US was small, the groundwork for such blocking has been put in place in the United States.

Ensafi explained further: When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for internet service providers to interfere with or block internet traffic. She added, The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

The five-member US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 on December 14, 2017 in favor of ending net neutrality, and the new policy took effect on June 11, 2018, approximately two months before the Censored Planet data collection began. Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs)the companies that own the hardware infrastructure connecting consumers to the internet in the form of wired and wireless services, routers, switches and serversmust treat all content on their systems equally.

While the proponents of abolishing net neutrality argued that the change was necessary to modernize FCC policies and remove anti-competitive government intrusion into the corporate internet marketplace, the UM research shows that the logic of capitalist private property and nation-state-based interests in the global information infrastructure leads inexorably to undemocratic and repressive restrictions on public access to online content in a range of forms.

As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, the tech monopolies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, have been engaged in censorship both within the US and internationally by targeting left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites and publishers with various types of internet content blocking, throttling and manipulation.

The WSWS itself and its affiliated organizations have been the target of this increasing censorship in the form of s uppression of search results by Google, banning and de-whitelisting by Reddit, account suspension by Twitter and event blocking by Facebook.

Another of the UM researchers, Ram Sundara Raman, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering, said, What we see from our study is that no country is completely free. Today, many countries start with legislation that compels internet service providers to block something thats obviously bad like child sex abuse material. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its usually a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

In Norway, for example, laws were passed in early 2018 that require internet service providers to block some gambling and pornographic content. The Censored Planet data shows evidence of network inconsistencies across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like match.com in Norway.

The Censored Planet automated monitoring platform is a novel approach to tracking online censorship. It uses public internet servers around the globe as data gathering nodes that monitor and report when access to websites is being blocked. It also uses artificial intelligence algorithms to filter the data, remove noise and recognize trends.

Previous censorship tracking methods have relied upon human activists to gather data manually. As the UM press release explains, Manual monitoring can be dangerous for volunteers, who may face reprisals from governments. The limited scope of these approaches also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar.

The #KeepItOn campaign of the digital rights organization AccessNow, for example, tracks incidents of internet shutdowns annually in countries around the world. It uses some technical measurement tools and also relies upon news reports and personal accounts through a coalition of 210 organizations from 75 countries. The organization published its last report in 2019, which noted, The constraints of our methodology mean that there may be cases of internet shutdowns that have gone unnoticed or unreported, and numbers are likely to change if and when new information becomes available.

In describing their longitudinal censorship observatory, the UM researchers explain that they used four remote measurement techniques (Augur, Satellite/Iris, Quack, and Hyperquack) on six internet protocols to detect 15 prominent censorship events, two-thirds of which have not been reported previously. The reference to longitudinal measurement means that data points are gathered multiple times over an extended period of time.

Among the censorship methods that Censored Planet detects are internet shutdowns, Domain Name Server (DNS) manipulation, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) blocking and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) layer interference. Among the countries that were studied for specific censorship events by Censored Planet (in addition to the countries mentioned above) were Egypt, Iran, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, India, Sudan and Cameroon.

The instance of censorship in Sri Lanka, following a series of bombings on April 21, 2019 that killed more than 250 people, highlights the power of Censored Planet platform. To previous reports of social media censorship, the study says, We observed 22 domains (compared to 7 reported previously) being blocked, including domains like twitter.com that were not reported. Five out of these 22 domains were only from the Alexa test list, showing that variety in test lists is important. After the initial peak, HTTPS censorship remained unusually high through April, and then spiked again in the week of May 12, 2019. This contrasts with most reports claiming that the social media ban was lifted by May 1st.

It is significant that amid the near-continuous reporting in the corporate media of the false allegations from right-wing organizations and individuals that conservatives are being singled out for online censorship, including US President Trumps complaints regarding the imposition of fact-checking labels on his Twitter account, not one of the major news organizations has reported on the Censored Planet study.

Along with publishing their methodology and disclosing the tools they are using for data collection, the UM researchers are making their data set available for further analysis by others. As Ensafi explained, We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference. While Censored Planet does not attribute censorship to a particular entity, we hope that the massive data weve collected can help political and legal scholars determine intent.

More:
Censored Planet: University of Michigan research finds worldwide increase in internet censorship - WSWS

To quote the internet site, yourdictionary.com, censorship is the practice of limiting access to information, ideas or books in order to prevent knowledge or freedom of thought.

This has become the business practice of Facebook, Twitter, Google and with the so-called mainstream media. Unelected bureaucrats have the authority to stop these business practices. Thus far no action has been taken by any government agency with that authorization to stop these business practices.

It's up to all Americans to put a stop to this censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Google and the mainstream media. We can do this by discontinuing our use of Facebook, Twitter, Google products and by finding alternative information sources to the mainstream media.

Shopping, learning, and communicating with family and friends was possible before Facebook, Twitter, Google and mainstream media censorship. We can do this again by using cellphones, land lines, email, regular mail and a collection of more balanced information sources.

Wake up, America. We dont need Facebook, Twitter, Google and the mainstream media. Their censorship business practices will turn America into a banana republic instead of the thriving democratic republic it has become. Stopping this censorship is up to us.

John Hatch

League City

Go here to see the original:
It's time Americans wake up and stop the censorship - Galveston County Daily News

'Kennedy' host and panel break down hearing on Big Tech election interference and censorship

Twitter claims it has reversed its censorship of a link to the lawsuit filed by attorney Sidney Powell that seeks to change the outcome of Georgias 2020 election results.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday evening, alleges multiple constitutional violations, citing experts, fact witnesses and statistical improbabilities within the results. The plaintiffs seek to decertify the 2020 election results in the state and have Trump declared the winner.

The URL referenced was mistakenly marked under our unsafe links policy this action has now been reversed, a Twitter spokesperson told FOX Business. The warning still appeared when FOX Business clicked on the link.

Twitter says it sometimes takes action to block links to content outside Twitter. Links are blocked if they are deemed to be malicious and used to steal personal information, spamthat mislead people or disrupt their experience or violate Twitters rules.

Twitter, and other technology companies including Facebook and Google, have in recent months come under fire from Republican lawmakers who argue the companies unfairly target posts from conservatives.

CEO Jack Dorsey testified earlier this month that between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 Twitter labeled or removed 300,000 false or misleading tweets about the election. More than 50 tweets from President Trump have been labeled since Election Day.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

Twitters censorship of conservative voices has been a boon for competing social media platform Parler, which in the days after the election shot up to No. 1 in Apples AppStore for the first time.

Read more from the original source:
Twitter claims it has reversed ban of link to Sidney Powell's Georgia election lawsuit - Fox Business