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The big idea

From Lady Chatterleys Lover to novels about trans children, attempts to suppress works of literature tend to have the opposite effect

The 17th century rector of St Albans College in Valladolid, Spain, must have rolled his eyes at the size of the book he had to review for the library. The Jesuit seminary, known as the English College because it produced missionaries committed to the reconversion of England to Catholicism, had received a 900-page volume of Shakespeares plays.

William Sankey prepared his quill and began the long work of censoring ungodly, anti-Catholic and otherwise unsuitable material. Holy-day fools a jibe in the Tempest that seemed to impugn the Christian calendar struck out. Heavier soon by the weight of a man, as Margaret tells Hero on the eve of her wedding in Much Ado About Nothing filth blotted into unreadability with heavy ink. A play about a pretend friar and a novice nun: actually, at Measure for Measure Sankey admitted defeat, put down his pen and took a sharp blade to cut out the pages of the entire play.

Whats striking about this, however, is not the censorship. It is that these cheerfully secular, prominently anti-Catholic, ribald dramas were even considered for inclusion in this religious institution in the first place. Sankeys redactions were less about censorship and more about doctoring the text to enable it to circulate. He made it more possible, not less, for seminarians to read Shakespeare (except Measure for Measure).

That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but its a pattern we see again and again. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisands attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a smutmobile filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist?

The best sales pitch is the threat of censorship. It draws attention to books that might otherwise have gone under the radar. The academic Indologist Wendy Doniger observed that the lawsuit against her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had had the effect of making it an unexpected bestseller. The publishers, Penguin, originally defended her against charges of being defamatory about the Indian national movement and the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, but then agreed to cease publication and pulp copies. There were none to be found, because theyd sold out. Probably relatively few readers in 1961 were agog for a cheap copy of Lady Chatterleys Lover, but the trial created an eager market. Had the prosecutors wanted to restrict access to DH Lawrences explicit novel, they might have done better simply to keep quiet about it.

We tend to believe that when books are censored, they are obliterated or withdrawn from view. But much more often they are edited to increase sales. Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, a dystopic novel about book burning, was shocked to find that his US publishers had been censoring it to make it more acceptable in the American classroom. Seventy-five instances of damn and hell were stripped out to establish the book in the lucrative education market; Bradbury grudgingly acceded.

Censorship to allow material to circulate with younger readers is commonplace. Outrage about the updating of Roald Dahls fiction earlier this year suggested this was a regrettable modern phenomenon, but the template was set long before. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salingers coming-of-age novel that is often credited with inaugurating the contested genre of young adult fiction (books that young people enjoy and parents worry about), was subject to constant demands for censorship. The language was a perennial complaint, as one reader, galvanised by the National Organization for Decent Literature, enumerated bathetically: 237 goddams, 58 bastards, 31 Chrissakes, and 1 fart. Slightly redacted versions of the novel were produced to minimise classroom anxieties. These censored versions had more, not less, circulation than their uncensored predecessors.

Contemporary censorship is also fixated on the classroom and on young adult fiction, but now outraged readers are not going to the trouble of counting blasphemies (sometimes not even reading the texts they find so offensive). Previous censorship regimes attempted a compromise between the book and its more sensitive readers; these have now been overruled. Todays censorship is about the withdrawing, wholesale, of volumes deemed problematic.

Alex Ginos novel about a trans girl, Melissa, previously published as George, topped the American Library Associations list of most banned books for several years, but again, the act of suppressing the book drew more attention to it. When the American Family Association encouraged a letter-writing campaign to the publishers to have the book withdrawn, Gino organised a crowdfunding campaign to provide copies to school districts in Kansas. It reached its fundraising target within the hour. The free availability of digital versions of banned books, supported by major libraries including the New York Public Library, has also worked to stymy attempts to restrict their circulation. Again, it seems that censorships perverse outcome is increased awareness of, and access to, challenging books or at least lets hope so.

Emma Smith is the author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers (Penguin, 10.99), now available in paperback. To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden (John Murray, 20)

Melissa by Alex Gino (Scholastic, 6.99)

Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age by Paul S Boyer (University of Wisconsin, 20.50)

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The big idea: what if censoring books only makes them more popular? - The Guardian

I have come to realize that if I cant bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help, Eszter Encsy, the narrator of Magda Szabs 1959 novel, The Fawn, says. Eszter is an actress; she needs a script to speak. She has spent years fashioning a life out of silence. The novel is her belated, wandering attempt at finally unburdening herself. But silence isnt an easy habit to break. For most of what follows, the identity of the you to whom Eszter addresses the novel is withheld from the reader, as are the reasons for her reticence.

The Fawn is a chronicle of silence and all that roils beneath it. It depicts the tumultuous reunion of the bitter and brilliant Eszter with her former playmate, the cherubic Angla, after a decade apart. The narrative shuttles frenetically across this gap, from their provincial childhoods during the Second World War to their adult lives in Budapest in the early nineteen-fifties.

The notion of a time without speech, a gap severing past from present, was among the central preoccupations of Szabs career, which spanned seven decades before her death in 2007. The Fawn itself is the product of such a gap: Szab wrote it in secret, during a period of almost a decade when Hungarys postwar Stalinist regime prohibited her from publishing. My years of silence, Szab later called this time in her semi-autobiographical novel The Door. It was an experience that seeded her fascination with the cost of silence in all its formspolitically enforced, self-imposedas well as her other abiding fixations: the unspoken wounds of Hungarian history, the convulsions of reputation, the tension between a devotion to art and an attachment to other people.

Szab was a poet before she became a novelist. She moved to Budapest toward the end of the Second World War, in her late twenties, as the Russians were driving Hitlers forces out of Hungary. She fell in with a group of other young writers there, and, in 1947, published a collection of poetry, The Lamb, documenting the ravages of the war, followed by her second collection, Back to Man. In 1949, she received the Baumgarten Prize, Hungarys highest literary honor at the time. The prize was withdrawn the same day. The country had come under Soviet control, and the Stalinist regime of Mtys Rkosi, taking its cues from the Kremlin, began a brutal crackdown on all artists who wouldnt produce state propaganda. Szab was declared a class alien. She and her circle of fellow-writersthey called themselves the New Moon group (jhold)were banned from publishing.

The censors hounded her. They hoped to splinter the New Moon group, hungry for the cultural legitimacy the writers acquiescence might lend the regime. Szab claimed to have lost the will to write. She took a job teaching children. But, all the while, she was writing fiction, keeping it secret even from other New Moon writers. Her first novel, Fresco, is an obvious response to her predicamenta story of muzzling and defiance, about a painter who refuses to allow the Rkosi regime to dictate the subjects of her works. Rkosi was deposed after Stalins death, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 eventually ushered in the Hungarian Thaw, an era of somewhat greater tolerance. Fresco was published in 1958, to the astonishment of Szabs friends. The fact that they did not kill you might mean that we will also soon get the go-ahead, remarked the literary critic Balzs Lengyel.

Szab was a dissident, but never a straightforward one: under the classifications of the post-1956 censors, her novels were neither banned nor supported, but tolerated. But there remained a wound from her decade of censorship, and the memories of disgrace and return, bitterness and vindication, reappear throughout her writing. The Fawn, published in 1959, bears the marks of these years. Like Fresco, the book is about silence and censorship. But, instead of the familiar picture of the dissident artist defying the state, Szab wanted to show something differentthe way that silence could warp and disfigure a life. The novel is more politically didactic than Szabs later works, rendering pre-1956 Hungary as a bland, lobotomized bureaucracy, a public sphere blighted by euphemisms and smug hypocrisies: Blah, blah, blah. The true subject of the book, though, is not the silence of censorship, but those silences that fall between people, the failures of intimacy that cut friends and lovers adrift. Szab understood such silences as a sort of exile, and, in her fiction, she examined the effects of this exile, how estrangement from others could also make people strangers to themselves.

In The Fawn, this exile begins with a small moment of humiliation. Eszter first meets Angla when they are children. It is an ordinary day, before the war. Eszter is doing dishes in her familys dilapidated little kitchen. She is listening to her sickly father coughing and her mother teaching a piano lesson, and spills the dishwater, soaking her clothes. At that moment, Angla appears in the doorway for a music lesson, holding a ball in her left hand, a beautiful sky-blue ball with a gold ring around it, and in her right hand, in a snow-white glove, she held a lacquered music stand covered with red hide. She exudes innocence and gentility. Eszter hates her instantly. From that moment on, this hatred, emphatic and unrelenting beyond all proportion, becomes the novels undertow. I have loathed and hated Angla from the moment I first saw her, Eszter says. Even when I am dead, if there is any life after death, I shall hate her still.

But Eszter maintains a studied silence, never allowing this hatred to show, even after Angla takes up a one-sided friendship with her. She attached herself to me as sincerely as I hated her, Eszter says. Her hatred seems to spring from her resentment of the conspicuous wealth of Anglas parents. Eszters own family has undergone a long decline from their former social position. Eszters mother, born to aristocratic parents, has a triple-barrelled surname: Katalin Marton von Ercsik von Tp von Szentmarton. Her father, an eccentric lawyer who prefers to tend his garden of rare flowers rather than take on clients, turns the family into a public disgrace. A wealthy relation, seeing that Eszter goes barefoot, sends hand-me-down shoes for her; theyre too small and give her permanent calluses.

What Eszter hates most about Angla is her apparent goodness, the thoughtless benevolence and generosity her wealth allows her to shower on others. Eszter herself claims to have never believed as a child that goodness came naturally. I always suspected that beneath it lay some sort of payment for services past or still to come. When Angla receives the gift of a pet fawn, Eszter is seized by envy; witnessing the pleasure Angla takes in caring for it redoubles her resentment. One night, she breaks in and releases the fawn from its enclosure. She watches as it runs away and gets hit by a train.

When the war comes, Eszter exults in the grandeur of destruction: You thought the worst thing of all about the war was the bombing of the capital? For me that was the best. Whenever the radio announced another raid I became like a hunting dog. I shook with expectation. Angla, she happily imagines, will be very frightened. Even more satisfying is when Anglas Communist older brother, Emil, is arrested for some unnamed act of political agitation. Anglas family leaves town in shame; not long after, Emil is killed in a prisoners battalion.

Almost a decade later, when Eszter and Angla meet again, Eszter has become a successful actress in Budapest. But the upheavals of class and reputation under the new regime have made her an object of suspicion. Though she grew up penniless and once felt a wild happiness at the thought of a time when the poor would take everything from the rich, Eszters noble ancestry has become a political liability. She must constantly perform her loyalty for government censors, contorting the story of her aristocratic background to satisfy them. Angla, meanwhile, has become an ardent Communist, devoted to Party dogma. She runs an orphanage in memory of her brother, now lauded as a martyr. Eszter, her hatred still smoldering, calls her a charming, incompetent baby.

In Szabs 1963 novel, Izas Ballad, translated by George Szirtes, a judge named Vince Szcs finds himself blacklisted by Hungarys conservative prewar regime. Vinces daughter, Iza, is a talented, politically committed doctor, who joins the resistance against the Nazi occupation. She takes on the burden of her fathers humiliation as her own, standing beside him in dignified defiance of all the friends and neighbors who cut the family out of their lives. The tragedy of Izas Ballad is that her separation from the common life eventually becomes self-imposed, a habit of abnegation, and that by the time Iza realizes she must attempt to bridge the gap between herself and others, it is too lateher husband and lover have left her, her parents are both dead. The climax of the novel is an internal monologue by Izas ex-husband, as he reflects on the bloodlessness of her existence:

I loved you so much, in a way I never can and do not even want ever tolove again. But it was always I who was yours: you were never mine,you were distant from me even when you were in my arms. Sometimes atnight I wanted to wake you from your sleep and shout, say the word,the word that would allow you to be yourself, the word that would saveyou and tell me where to start looking for you so I might find you. .. . I have never met anyone as emotionally tight-fisted as you, sogrudging in your generosity, nor anyone more cowardly, not even whenyou carried grenades in your briefcase and said to the policeman whostopped you, Whats the matter, have you never seen a studentbefore?

The sentiment expressed in this final line recurs again and again in Szabs workwhat good is political courage if youre too much of a coward to speak freely of your love?

Szab particularly associated these failures of intimacy with artists, those who she thought perceived the world most clearly yet held themselves at a distance from it. Across her novels she symbolized this distance through various boundaries, gates, windowsor closed doors, as in The Door, where a locked door in an apartment is a literal manifestation of unspoken intimacy and distance between two women who care deeply for each other. How irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current, remarks the writer who narrates that novel.

In The Fawn, Szabs symbol for this distance is the mask of the actress. It is only onstage that Eszter feels truly comfortable and connected to the world. She suspects that there is something irredeemable about herself. Since she was a child, she has hidden behind her hatred: all along, she has loved Angla. But she cannot fully admit it. Love is danger, a promise of loss. Her love is mysteriouswhether this is a romantic love or not remains obscure, perhaps to Eszter most of all. All that is clear is that Eszter admires and envies Anglas innocence and sincerity; unspoken, these feelings express themselves through resentment and violence, the killing of the fawn. Eszter takes a lover, eventually revealed to be the one to whom the novel is addressed. Hes a married man, a scholar and translator of Shakespeare. They met in Budapest after the war. Eszter longs to tell him every secret of her life, believing him to be the only person who actually understands her. It is he who finally speaks the truth: I know you love Angla, he tells Eszter one night in bed. He sees behind the mask. He is Anglas husband.

Link:
Magda Szab and the Cost of Censorship - The New Yorker

When anti-establishment Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently sat for an interview with ABC News, only for the outlet to cut out his criticisms of the COVID-19 vaccine, it illustrated a little-discussed but overwhelming obstacle any challenger to President Joe Biden will face in 2024.

Those who wish to unseat the incumbent commander-in-chief already face a formidable opponent in the Democratic Party and its myriad partners, including a national security apparatus currently targeting Biden's chief opponent in this election, and that ran interference for Biden in the last one. To win in 2024, Republicans will have to compete under a lax voting system largely of the Democrats' own making, and which they manipulated and exploited to near perfection in 2020.

But Biden's challengers will also be facing a hostile and censorious information regime that transcends Biden and the Democratic Party, under which dissent from Ruling Class orthodoxy will likely be given no hearing, and dissenters given few platformson grounds of protecting "health" and "public safety." Biden's opponents left and right may raise compelling points on any number of critical and contentious issues, but will Americans be permitted to see or hear them?

RFK Jr.'s ABC News interview exemplifies a "soft" version of how this regime will operate.

Anchor Linsey Davis, who interviewed the iconoclastic lawyer, justified ABC News' suppression of his full remarks with a statement that might as well have been written and delivered by Dr. Anthony Fauci himselfnever mind that public health authorities such as he were arguably the most prolific and powerful propagators of mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) regarding virtually every aspect of COVID-19, and that they cajoled social media platforms into censoring many dissenting views as MDM that later became settled science.

Kennedy "made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines," Davis said. "Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease." Therefore, ABC News "used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions" of the relevant exchange.

One must wonder, did any public official past or present communicate with ABC News about the RFK Jr. interview and influence the decision to truncate it? I asked that question of a publicity flack for the "ABC News Live" program on which the interview took place; I had not received a response as of publication time.

Of course, no public official need have called any shot because such corporate media entities are simply mouthpieces of our ruling regime. They propagate the regime's favored narratives and suppress the disfavored onesnamely, those that conflict with the regime's power and prerogatives.

The same goes for Big Tech. As has been revealed in gory detail, America has been laboring for several years now under a mass public-private censorship regime whereby federal agencies, often government-linked third-party organizations, and social media and other communications platforms have coordinated and colluded to silence unauthorized views on a raft of issues.

Elon Musk may have removed Twitter in whole or in part from this regimewhich explains in part the furious backlash he has facedbut the regime persists. No implicated federal agency or public official has yet paid any sort of price for engaging in a conspiracy against the First Amendmentand the very kind of election interference the censors used to justify imposing such a regime in the first place.

The most illuminating sources of information on these efforts, including the Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al. case and the Twitter Files, are backwards-looking. One imagines that this mass public-private censorship regime would have only grown more pervasive, sophisticated, and stealthy since the 2020 election and its Biden-era expansion during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

In part due to the efforts of traditional and social media to stifle dissident voices, many have been relegated to alternative platforms such as Substack and Rumble. The concentration of such contrarians in a small number of spaces, however, creates a risk. To the extent Americans increasingly seek out dissident views in the run-up to the 2024 election, will authorities seek to crush the few digital domains on which dissident voices freely proliferate?

The censorship regime has of course also separately ratcheted up in the form of the chilling, shock-and-awe efforts of law enforcement to pursueand in some instances, prosecuteother Wrongthinkers on often unprecedented grounds. These include everyone from former President Donald Trump to parents critical of their public schools to pious Catholics to Twitter trolls alike.

When the authorities treat dissent as terroristic and criminalize it, we are likely to get less of it.

Recent events further augur poorly for anyone except the ruling regime's choice for the presidency.

The Democratic Party has declared it will be holding no presidential primary debates.

The recent resolution to the Dominion-Fox News litigation could well cause myriad outlets to self-censor on highly debated subjects of political interest, in the run-up to the 2024 electionfrom election integrity to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

In the 2020 presidential election, President Trump faced what Time infamously described as:

a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

Today, America's ruling elites have perhaps never been so unanimous in their views and single-minded in their readiness, willingness, and ability to impose them on the public on a mass scale.

Anyone who wants to defeat Joe Biden in 2024 should expect to have to overcome information flow "fortification" efforts the likes of which we have never seen before.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He also contributes to The Federalist, the New York Post, The Epoch Times, and other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Excerpt from:
Biden Challengers Will Have To Beat Censorship Regime in 2024 | Opinion - Newsweek

opinion

Adam Kovacevich| Austin American-Statesman

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, red states including Texas enacted a wave of legislation barring reproductive health care access. Now, as the one-year mark of the Supreme Courts decision nears, Republican state lawmakers are looking to continue their crackdown on reproductive care, this time taking aim at online information, speech and telemedicine.

Once again, the Lone Star State could make national headlines for its groundbreaking restrictions on womens reproductive health.

Texas legislation would force platforms to proactively censor any speech about abortion access or mutual aid funds in order to avoid liability. It would also require Internet providers to block sites that provide information about abortion access anywhere in the U.S. and information on how to order abortion pills by mail which federal law still protects.

And the bill doesnt stop there. As written, HB 2690 could force services to censor direct messages between patients and caregivers on how to obtain safe care. It may also force services to block or censor telemedicine counseling services in which medical professionals advise pregnant people on a variety of reproductive health services, including legal abortions.

Effectively, the bill would keep tens of millions of Texans in the dark about reliable reproductive health information, creating a vacuum to be filled by potentially life-threatening misinformation.

Online searches for information about abortion are most common in states with the strictest abortion laws, and consumers in these states have already become targets for misinformation on the issue. By banning and blocking sites that direct users to real help, Texas bill would leave behind a collection of deceptive fakes, like anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers that target people in need with phony clinics.

Because the Internet doesnt stop at state lines, Texass HB 2690 would impact access to reproductive health information for Americans across the country. Given the technical and legal burdens imposed by state abortion bans, websites and Internet providers may be forced to block reproductive health information nationwide, rather than state-by-state.

If it were to pass, the fact that HB 2690 will reach beyond state lines may ultimately lead the same court that overturned Roe v. Wade to strike down Texas reproductive health censorship bill.

The First Amendment prohibits lawmakers from barring citizens of another state from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that state. If a resident in Connecticut wants to blog about how pregnant people can access reproductive care thats legal in Connecticut and under federal law, the U.S. Constitution prohibits Texas from stopping them.

But Texans shouldnt have to wait for the Supreme Court to strike down legislation that was obviously unconstitutional in the first place. Lawmakers should recognize that an abortion-ban-online-censorship bill is a politically toxic non-starter, and move on to tech policy that all voters can get behind, like legislation to crack down on online scams or protect user data.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson, its critical that Texas voters continue speaking up. The harms of Texas abortion ban have come into clear view, and far-right lawmakers have made it plain they arent finished targeting pregnant people with new restrictions unless voters force them to back off. If the public speaks up, theres still hope that legislation wont become law.

Kovacevich is the founder of a tech industry coalition Chamber of Progress and has worked at the intersection of tech and politics for 20 years, leading public policy at Google and Lime.

--

Excerpt from:
Opinion: Reproductive health censorship bill threatens the open internet - Austin American-Statesman

Dont Delete Artsmanifesto is live and seeking signatures. This banner features artwork by Gala Garrido that was removed from Instagram. (image courtesy Dont Delete Art)

Launched in 2020, the artist- and activist-led project Dont Delete Art (DDA) targets social media platforms using suppressive content moderation algorithms that impact the visibility of the worlds most vulnerable creators. Recently, the projects collaborators produced a manifesto calling on artists who use social media to demand change from these platforms now that Internet visibility has largely superseded in-person art experiences.

Social media corporations have become cultural gatekeepers with unprecedented power to determine which artworks can freely circulate and which ones are banned or pushed into the digital margins, DDAs manifesto reads.

In an interview with Hyperallergic, DDAs Editor-at-Large Emma Shapiro detailed the projects goals and spoke about how content moderation polices women-identifying, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled artists from achieving the same metrics when they use their bodies in their work in a way that pushes the boundaries of what Meta (the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) considers objectionable or explicit content. Shapiro, a Hyperallergic contributor and arts writer who has covered the Free the Nipple movement at length, said that while there are many overlaps between DDA and #FreeTheNipple, censored artwork isnt always body-oriented.

Theres definitely some artists who are voicing certain politics with their artwork who are being hit with certain kinds of suppression based on the text that goes with their artwork, Shapiro noted, specifying that the text-based suppression occurs from both uploaded images as well as what is written in the post captions. Were also seeing that Instagram can and will shadowban people, effectively suppressing them without outright suspending their accounts, Shapiro added.

When a social media user is shadowbanned, their content and account are deemed un-recommendable; therefore, their account information wont show up via Instagrams search function, their posts are suppressed by the algorithm, which decimates the number of impressions and interactions on their content, and their posts are no longer viewable under certain hashtags or Instagrams Explore page. Shadowbanned accounts are also not notified that their content is being restricted, leaving users confused about their metrics and the sudden lack of interaction.

Shadowbanning was originally used to thwart spammers by making their content invisible instead of outright banning them so that they wouldnt feel compelled to find a workaround, but the feature has gone on to impact artists, activists, sex workers, and occasionally regular old netizens.

Despite the fact that Instagrams post guidelines explicitly allow nudity in artwork, many artists report that their body-oriented paintings or sculptures were mis-flagged by the platforms content moderation algorithm. Shapiro herself even experienced a shadowban after posting a photo of a drawing containing a nude body.

Many people can misunderstand our focus on social media censorship as something thats pretty frivolous and like unimportant, Shapiro continued. But the truth of the matter is the landscape of internet regulation is changing really fast, and these companies who have not already created the framework to protect artistic expression and already at-risk artists will be very prone to continue to kick us off platforms.

Shapiro asks us to further consider the implications of Internet censorship against artists beyond visibility. Are these creators being passed over for opportunities? Are galleries whose social media accounts are penalized for posting a specific artists work going to reconsider whom they invest in moving forward to protect their brand? Will partisan politics capitalize on these modes of censorship to continuously encroach on the freedoms of women and trans artists who have a web presence?

Were specifically calling on social media companies to give artists a seat at the table for content moderation guidelines and how these decisions get made, Shapiro explained.

Meta has not yet responded to Hyperallergics request for comment.

Cofounded by Savannah Spirit and Spencer Tunick, and backed by the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN Americas Artists At Risk Connection, and FreeMuse, DDA offers censorship evasion and account appeal resources for artists as well as an online gallery supported by a promotional newsletter that showcases artist submissions of artwork that was previously flagged, suppressed, or outright removed from social media through content moderation.

So far, the manifesto has over 1,400 individual signatures since its inception in mid-February. Shapiro told Hyperallergic that the next step is to get more institutional support through signatures and awareness from artist residencies, museums, galleries, collectives, and other community-wide companies and organizations who have a stake in the cause, whether they know it or not.

We want to see the support from the major voices of the art community for this very specific and powerful concern that we have before we present this to social media platforms and demand a seat at the table, Shapiro concluded.

See the original post here:
On Social Media, Art Censorship Is Alive and Well - Hyperallergic