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If the American people actually believed that censorship was bad, they would throw away their iPhones, stop buying shampoo on Amazon, and quit going to the movies.

Why is it not a cause for concern that the world's wealthiest corporations are cooperating with the Chinese government, employing their considerable technological resources to prevent Chinese citizens from circumventing firewalls or accessing private networks designed to restrict access to information and opinions of which the authorities disapprove? Why do only nerd parodists on YouTube complain about the absurd lengths to which film producers go to appease Chinese censors doing everything from removing same-sex kissing scenes and other sequences considered vulgar or too violent to inserting brand-new characters to appease nationalist sentiment? Why is the pursuit of obscene levels of profit and record-breaking box office numbers a sufficient justification for these pathetic and, in cinematic terms, banal concessions?

The answer is simple: We don't really think censorship is wrong. Or rather, we vaguely think censorship is wrong except when it gets in the way of profits.

Anyone who went to high school in this country is familiar with what I think of as the standard textbook history of the United States. It is an impoverished, mostly uninteresting narrative that begins with some kind of bridge in Alaska and ends with the Cold War, a thing that we won. It has many gaps not much seems to happen between the War of 1812 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates or between the Civil War and the Depression. Huge lumbering abstractions abound: the Gilded Age, Tariff Reform.

One of the most dreadful of these looming specters is censorship, a bad thing that involved a senator named McCarthy who was somehow also a member of a committee in the House of Representatives. At some point or another, between the time when people said "I Like Ike" and Vietnam, censorship mostly went away. But before it did there was something evil called a blacklist that was maintained by Hollywood. People on the blacklist were good because they stood up for free speech in defiance of censorship. Being okay with the blacklist was so bad that if you appeared before the evil House committee that ran it from Washington it was a very good thing decades later for people to protest your receiving an award and for people in the audience to be rude to you and not applaud.

In other words, the fact that a handful of mediocre screenwriters did not get to make lots of money working in the movie business is obviously much more important and interesting than the intricacies of the very real decades-long struggle for world dominance between the United States and her liberal democratic allies and the Soviet Union.

I mention all this because this valorization of a few insignificant characters is one of the only salient facts that millions of Americans know about the conduct of the Cold War at its height. The badness of censorship is an unquestioned article of faith. The idea that obscenity should not be permitted on our screens is as ludicrous as, well, the idea that there is even such a thing as obscenity. Bold pro-freedom of expression warriors renew their commitments every year with annual cost-free exercises in moral preening like Banned Books Week. The notion that somewhere some parent might take issue with one of her children reading a book with sexual themes is a crisis, a kind of secular blasphemy that demands excommunication. There is no room for prudential judgement here: Thinking that some things might be bad is the only thing that it is not okay to think.

Meanwhile, tech CEOs explain away their acquiescence with blanket censorship in countries where they depend upon cheap labor in order to make world-historic profits. Hollywood pretends that absolute creative freedom is a quasi-sacred right except when it isn't and it's totally worth interfering with an artist's vision in order to placate censors with absurd fears like movies with ghosts in them and get more cash at the box office.

And we let them. Why? Because most Americans think censorship is bad as long as we don't need it to make money.

See the original post:
Why are so many Americans okay with corporations bowing to Chinese censorship? - The Week Magazine

There's a grassroots movement brewing to kill the new HBO docudrama "Confederate" before it even begins filming, let alone airs. The Guardian has a useful summary of the controversy so far:

Confederate, the new HBO show from the Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, was announced in a press release a few weeks ago and is slated to begin filming sometime after the final season of Thrones, which will probably air in 2018. But already there seems to be little appetite for the series, which plans to take a revisionist approach to American history, imagining a world in which the South successfully seceded from the union and slavery persists "as a modern-day institution" ... Since the project was revealed in early July, it has become a kind of cultural albatross for HBO, and especially Benioff and Weiss, each of whom have fielded criticisms over the years for both the overwhelming whiteness of Game of Thrones ...

Roxanne Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University, chimed in on the opinion pages of the New York Times:

Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways. ... My exhaustion with the idea of "Confederate" is multiplied by the realization that this show is the brainchild of two white men who oversee a show that has few people of color to speak of and where sexual violence is often gratuitous and treated as no big deal. I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands. And when I think about the number of people who gave this project the green light, the number of people who thought this was a great idea, my weariness grows exponentially. ...

Let's put aside complaints about the "whiteness" of "Game of Thrones." It makes sense for a fantasy set in a Medieval European-like fantasyland to use predominantly (but not exclusively) European-looking actors, just as it made sense that the 1980 miniseries "Shogun" used many Japanese actors or, for that matter, for the 1977 miniseries "Roots" to use black actors. If actors should be cast without reference to skin color or identity, than that should go both ways.

Let's also put aside the fact that alternative histories are not uncommon. "The Man in the High Castle" imagines the world if Germany and Japan won World War II. "Confederate States of America" is a deeply satirical look at what would happen if the South had won the Civil War. Philip Roth's The Plot against America imagines what would have happened if nativist Charles Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and signed non-interference treaties with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

What is truly discomforting about the current campaign to shut down "Confederate" is that neither those who are leading it nor those who are piling on in an international Twitter campaign have read a single line of its script. They have no idea how the writers will address issues of race and race relations, nor whether the alternative history will open the door to productive discussion and debate.

If the writers do a bad job, critics pan the show, and people stop watching, that's one thing. But to pre-emptively try to shut down a show sight unseen, that's different.

In a sense, what we are seeing increasingly appears to be the Western version of the Satanic Verses affair.

In that 1989 case, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for blasphemy, even though neither he nor those around him had ever read the work.

At the time, dozens of writers stood up for Rushdie's right to write and publish. Today, most are silent, and the leading outlets of progressive thought side with the proverbial lynch mob. True, Khomeini's fatwa is an extreme example. No one is suggesting Benioff and Weiss be murdered, but the idea that it is proper to censor works without first reading their content in order to protect popular mores is similar.

Progressives might cry foul at a comparison between what they seek to do and what Khomeini did. After all, haven't conservatives also sought to censor? In the 1980s, many conservatives criticized the funding choices of the National Endowment for the Arts, especially in the wake of a racy Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit and the production of the "Piss Christ" photograph of the late 1980s. Recently, the Washington Post recalled those controversies:

Conservative Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) took to the Senate floor in May 1989 "to question the NEA's funding procedures." Helms called Serrano "not an artist, he is a jerk," and D'Amato theatrically tore a reproduction of the work to shreds, calling it a "deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity." Meanwhile, more than 50 senators and 150 representatives contacted the NEA to complain about the exhibits. [Piss Christ artist Andres] Serrano still remembers being "shocked" by the angry reaction and, he told The Post on Sunday, how suddenly the work became a "political football." ... But the exhibit that pushed Helms over the edge was a retrospective of work by late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who Andrew Hartman, author of "A War for the Soul Of America: A History of the Culture Wars," wrote "became the Christian Right's bte noire." ... Like the exhibit containing "Piss Christ," it was partially, indirectly funded by the NEA. The exhibit featured 175 photographs. One hundred sixty-eight were inoffensive, such as images of carefully arranged flowers. The seven from his "X-Portfolio," though, were intensely provocative. One presented a finger inserted into a penis. Another was a self-portrait showing Mapplethorpe graphically inserting a bullwhip into his anus. Two displayed nude children.

What the Washington Post misses, however, is that the controversy was over public funding for such exhibits; it did not demand pre-emptive censorship over writers or artists. Likewise, when 25 years ago Vice President Dan Quayle famously criticized the television character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, his goal was not to censor the hit CBS sitcom, but rather simply to criticize its judgment. Likewise, criticisms of the Broadway play "Oslo" or the anti-Israel propaganda play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" focus on how they twist the truth or cherry-pick history rather than demand they be shuttered.

Criticism and censorship are not synonymous. The former advances productive debate; the latter seeks to avoid it. With "Confederate," it seems progressives are siding firmly with censorship as they argue against the right to tackle subjects which run afoul of their own narrow orthodoxy.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.

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On censorship of 'Confederate,' it's 'Satanic Verses' deja vu - Washington Examiner

China held a drill on Thursday with internet service providers to practice taking down websites deemed harmful, as the country's censors tighten control ahead of a sensitive five-yearly political reshuffle set to take place later this year.

Internet data centers (IDC) and cloud companieswhich host website serverswere ordered to participate in a three-hour drill to hone their "emergency response" skills, according to at least four participants that included the operator of Microsoft's cloud service in China.

China's Ministry of Public Security called for the drill "in order to step up online security for the 19th Party Congress and tackle the problem of smaller websites illegally disseminating harmful information," according to a document circulating online attributed to a cyber police unit in Guangzhou.

An officer who answered the phone in the Guangzhou public security bureau confirmed the drill but declined to elaborate.

President Xi Jinping has overseen a tightening of China's cyberspace controls , including tough new data surveillance and censorship rules. This push is now ramping up ahead of an expected consolidation of power at the Communist Party Congress this autumn.

The drill asked internet data centers to practice shutting down target web pages speedily and report relevant details to the police, including the affected websites' contact details, IP address and server location.

China's Ministry of Public Security and China's cyberspace administration did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

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Several service providers, including 21Vianet Group and VeryCloud, issued notices to users, warning of possible temporary service disruptions on Thursday afternoon as a result of the drill, which were confirmed to Reuters by their customer service representatives.

Nasdaq-listed 21 Vianet Group is China's largest carrier-neutral internet data center services provider according to its website, and counts many Western multinationals including Microsoft , IBM , Cisco and HP among its clients. It runs Microsoft's Azure-based services in China.

21 Vianet Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

China has been tightening its grip on the internet , including a recent drive to crack down on the usage of VPNs to bypass internet censorship, enlisting the help of state-owned telecommunication service providers to upgrade the so-called Great Firewall.

Apple last week removed VPN apps from its app store, while Amazon's China partner warned users not to use VPNs.

Visit link:
China Holds Drill to Shut Down 'Harmful' Websites - Fortune

Courts in modern times are generally protective of the First Amendment, specifically our freedoms of speech and press. On the whole, they vigorously oppose any attempt by government to minimize those essential liberties; they recognize that a free press is critical to any society that values expression and intellectual diversity. The Supreme Courts 1983 ruling inMinneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue(1983), striking down certain taxes on ink and paper, shows that attempts to regulate the media as a group, even when broadly applied, are considered unacceptable if they crowd out certain viewpoints.

The University of California San Diego (UCSD), a public university, attempted to do something similar when it defunded certain student organizations in a thinly veiled attempt to censor one organizations opinions. The Koala, a satirical newspaper funded by student activity fees, published an article mocking safe places that sparked controversy on campus and debate in the schools student government. In response, the student government enacted a Media Act that defunded all student-printed media organizations, in order to prevent the The Koala from publishing further articles that contradicted the student governments political sensibilities.

The Koalasued in an attempt to restore its funding, but the federal district court remarkably ruled against them. Cato has joined the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on an amicus brief supporting its claim.

There is a longstanding, constitutionally based tradition of public universities serving as conduits for freedom of expression, a tradition that UCSD has unceremoniously abandoned. By providing funding to certain groups and not others, the university is effectively restricting certain members of the public from a public forum, in blatant violation of the First Amendment.

The lower court misread well-established jurisprudence regarding the scope of such forums, and failed to consider the evidence of viewpoint discrimination prevalent in the schools Media Act. Not only does this rule have a discriminatory effect, but also it constitutes unconstitutional retaliation in direct response to the controversy surrounding The Koalas article.

In addition, the Supreme Court has established that student activity fee programs are required to respect viewpoint-neutrality, in order to ensure that political bias does not stifle speech. UCSD has violated all of these core constitutional principles in pursuit of political correctness and the comfort of ideological homogeneity.

In The Koala v. Khosla, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit should reverse the lower courts decision and stop UCSDs efforts to seek vengeance against student groups for satirical articles.

See more here:
Should the Koala Bear the Brunt of Censorship? - Cato Institute (blog)

Tencent, Microsoft MSFT and Action Alerts PLUScharity portfolio holding Apple (AAPL) have all in the last five days learned the hard way that in China, software is power.

Tech companies that might put up a fight elsewhere over content restrictions or access to their products crumble in the face of the Communist Party. With Web restrictions tightening in China, the issue is only going to gain in prominence, and the ranks of companies caving are likely to grow.

Comically, Tencent (TCEHY) has removed chatbots developed by Microsoft and Beijing-based Turing Robot after they started giving so-called unpatriotic answers.

The BabyQ bot co-developed by Beijing-based Turing Robot answered the question "Do you love the Communist Party?" with "No," the Financial Times reports. The XiaoBing bot from Microsoft (MSFT) reportedly told users: "My China dream is go to America."

On a more serious note, Applecame under fire for removing VPN-related apps from its app store. VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, can help Chinese citizens get around the stringent governmentcontrols of Web content to access overseas information.

Apple says it was merely complying with tightened Chinese regulations. But there was none of the defiance that Apple showed when it fought back on home soil against a court order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone, as the agency investigated the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

The president of Golden Frog, which saw its privacy software VyprVPN knocked off the Apple app tree in China, said it was "disappointed" Apple bowed to pressure from Beijing, without even citing the specific law that makes a VPN illegal.

"We view access to Internet in China as a human rights issue, and I would expect Apple to value human rights over profits," Sunday Yokubaitis told The New York Times. Golden Frog filed an amicus brief in support of Apple's action against the FBI.

The pulling of the chatbots is no surprise. They were likely tricked into giving their answers by users, just as provocative Twitter comments helped swindle Microsoft's Tay bot into making anti-Semitic and offensive comments such as "feminism is cancer."

But online access is a mounting concern.

Amazon.com (AMZN) , too, appears to be under pressure in China over its cloud computing services. One of Amazon's operators in China has told its customers to stop using software that would let someone get around China's controls.

Cloud computing is an increasingly thorny issue for the Chinese government, since it raises the potential for controversial content to be held outside China. In response, China is insisting that companies operating data services store the data within China's borders, ostensibly on public safety grounds. Banking data, for instance, could go missing.

But we know the real reason. It's so China can regulate what its citizens see, in a bid to control what they think, particularly on issues concerning the Communist Party and its unelected authority to govern.

The perils of operating in China are many, but top among them would be running afoul of the Communist Party. Bloomberg has given in by suppressing touchy news stories about Chinese officials, such as this non-working link to its own story once about the wealth of the family Chinese President Xi Jinping. Most companies capitulate. Chinese yuan are too good to give up.

Google, and now its parent Alphabet (GOOGL) , has been the only major company that springs to mind that has taken a stand against Chinese censorship. It pulled its search engine from China, redirecting traffic to its uncensored Hong Kong engine, in 2010 in a fight over China's censorship rules. The company is reportedly in talks to get access in China for some of its offerings, such as Google Scholar.

There are plenty of sites you can't access in China, including Facebook , Pinterest and Snapchat. But many would like to get in, given the chance. For instance, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been happy to chat with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Mandarin and post this Facebook photo of the two together.

You'd think online censorship is a battle destined to fail. Web access only grows with the production of every new digital site, app and device, while content proliferates faster exponentially.

But the Chinese government fights hard. And while they may know they're not getting the full truth, many of China's citizens believe a large amount of what they're told.

The Chinese government orchestrates 488 million fake social-media posts every year, according to a study led by Harvard University data scientist Gary King. In many cases, the government pays the equivalent of $0.08 for people who post comments cheer-leading for China, talking about the Communist Party's revolutionary history, or supporting the regime.

The first thing I do every time I visit mainland China is to log in to the hotel's WiFi and search for "Tiananmen Square." Here in Hong Kong, the Chinese government's 1989 massacre of students protesting in favor of democracy pops right up. It's appeared at a couple of Chinese hotels, too, presumably because the Chinese government hadn't yet paid them a digital visit.

Hong Kong and Macau are the only parts of China with their own rules on issues like censorship. Macau, relying on Beijing's approval of mainland travel visas to prop up its casino business, toes the party line. For now, I'm free to say what I want from my base in Hong Kong, but that freedom of expression is also disappearing, and fast.

The new administration of Chief Executive Carrie Lam, known for her stubborn streak and devotion to Beijing in equal parts, is under pressure to resurrect a highly unpopular "national education" curriculum, viewed by many teachers as patriotic airbrushing and brainwashing. It is also likely to attempt to introduce a "security" law, which by outlawing "sedition and subversion" will obliterate that theoretical freedom of speech.

It would certainly make it illegal for Hong Kong politicians to suggest that they support autonomy or independence for Hong Kong. To "challenge the power of the central government" or "endanger China's sovereignty," both terms that can and will be interpreted broadly, "crosses a red line."

That's what Chinese President Xi Jinping told Hong Kongers on his July 1 visit to "celebrate" the 20thanniversary of Hong Kong's reversion to China. Freedom of speech only allows you to say, it seems, what the Communists want you to say.

In China, it determines what you can read, see and hear online. Don't question authority, and don't get any upstart ideas.

That applies as much at the corporate level as the personal. Even providing the platform, the software, on which to express controversial sentiments crosses a very ill-defined line.

Will other companies take a stand like Google? Or will they all cave?

See more here:
Comic Chatbot Errors in China Mask Serious Corporate Caving on Censorship - TheStreet.com