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Electoral losers are increasingly blaming social media for their failure, but this year will demonstrate that censorship is not the answer.

Democracy only works if the losers of elections accept defeat, but sadly few are inclined to do so these days. Now we have five stages of electoral grief that are directly analogous to the original Kbler-Ross model. We still have denial, anger and depression, but instead of bargaining we have litigation and acceptance seems to have been replaced with conspiracy theories in which social media plays a central role.

The central concern is that when people vote for the other team it must be because they were mislead in some way, because no rational, fully informed person could fail to recognise the superiority of my team. In the past some blame could be attached to the mainstream media, something the UK Labour party still persists with. In the US, however, Donald Trumps victory in 2016 despite having the support of no major media, would appear to render that theory obsolete.

Trump was able to prevail because politicians are no longer dependent on the old media to communicate directly with the electorate, thanks to social media. But this significantly lowered barrier to entry into the public sphere also provides fertile ground for electoral losers searching for mitigation and another bite at the cherry.

A favourite on both sides of the pond is to blame the Russians. While the focus of cold war paranoia has largely shifted to China, Russia remains a strong source of bogeymen. Now it should be noted that there is plenty of evidence of social media bot farms originating from a number of countries, including Russia, that apparently seek to meddle in elections. What is much harder to prove is whether they had any effect whatsoever on the outcome.

The small matter of evidence is never going to stand in the way of those refusing to concede defeat, however, and it has now become conventional wisdom that social media censorship is vital if we are to ever have untainted elections again. Since the US is in the middle of another of its interminable general election campaigns this year, the heat is being turned up on social media and they are being forced to respond.

Last week Twitter announced it was turning on a tool for key moments of the 2020 US election that enables people to report misleading information about how to participate in an election or other civic event. The tweet below implies the tool has a broader purpose than that, though, as it also includes intimidation and misrepresenting of political affiliation. Already you can see how a simple censorship objective becomes immediately and massively complicated under the weight of interpretation, semantics and generally chasing its tail.

Then you have Google and its subsidiary YouTube blogging about how much they support elections, whatever thats supposed to mean. Again a lot of this focuses on content that is intended to mislead voters, but since electioneering is biased by definition, surely all of it is intended to mislead to some extent. YouTube also reiterates its aim to promote authoritative voices, which is code for the establishment media and commentariat.

In contrast, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is increasingly pushing back on censorship, having tried and failed to walk that tightrope since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Perhaps motivated by the prospect of an extra four years of Trump, who has made his feelings known on censorship, Zuckerberg is now turning all free speech absolutist on us. Whether that position will survive even the first engagement of the US electoral process, however, remains highly debatable.

Early signs of the immense pressure these platform owners will come under are already appearing, with the Democrats mobilising supposed experts to protect the electoral process. Iowas first-in-the-nation caucus will mark the DNCs greatest challenge so far in efforts to guard its presidential contenders from the same fate that befell Hillary Clinton in 2016 when her campaign was upended by a Russian-backed hacking and disinformation effort, reports the Washington Post in depressingly partisan fashion.

If that WaPo piece is anything to go by everyone is going to be trying to manipulate not only the US Presidential election, but the Democratic primaries too, where non-establishment candidate Bernie Sanders is currently the front-runner. Presumably YouTube doesnt intend to punish the countrys mainstream media for misleading the electorate, so it seems it will support democracy by censoring everyone else.

As ever, restricting speech in free societies is a game of whack-a-mole, in which countermeasures can never hope to keep up with the desire of its people to say what they want. Even if the social media companies are successful in their stated censorship objectives, which they wont be, the team that loses will still blame them. So they might as well not bother and trust their users to sort the wheat from the chaff. After all, theyve been doing that with mainstream media for years.

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The US election will test social media censorship to breaking point - Telecoms.com

HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlets executive editor, Jess Brammar, assists a British government program that censors journalism that may compromise UK military and intelligence operations.By Ben Norton

The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war academics as useful idiots of Russia, claiming they are being used by the Kremlin.

Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own executive editor actively collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors journalism on behalf of UK military and intelligence operations, in order to protect national security interests.

HuffPost UK published a hit piece by Chris York on January 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled The Useful Idiots: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN, Yorks hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments in their hybrid war on Syria.

It was Yorks twelfth piece attacking this small group of academics. From the perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an unusual source of interest. However, it is clear that the UK military-intelligence apparatus that dumped untold millions of pounds into promoting regime change in Syria has a clear agenda here.

Yorks article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions, leaving out key details and misleading readers.

HuffPost UK executive editor Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit piece, claiming it shows how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.

Its quite a tale please give it a read, Brammar added. It is indeed a tale and a tall one at that, given the article dabbles in fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era propaganda tropes.

Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous European diplomat, who claimed anti-war British scholars are unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation.

While the HuffPost UKs executive editor smears dissenting academics as agents of propaganda for the Russians, she herself actively collaborates with a British government censorship program as writer Caitlin Johnstone first pointed out.

Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that, according to its official website, exists to prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods or potentially challenge national security interests.

In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor stories and information the UK military and spy operations deem inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.

The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials: the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government assistant.

Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major publishers such as the Huffington Post, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and more.

Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense personally chose her to be on the DSMA Committee a clear stamp of approval for her editorial judgment from the British military establishment.

In a report entitled, How the UK Security Services neutralised the countrys leading liberal newspaper, journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after the Guardian embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice (DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code, and This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.

Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent press against publishing information that would jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.

Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists, and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the British government.

HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to silence critical media.

But it is not just Brammars ongoing, willing participation in a British military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.

HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as Russian puppets while actively peddling propaganda on behalf of Western governments is astoundingly ironic.

In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as agents of propaganda for the Russians.

The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed European diplomat, who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute fact.

The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.

Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.

York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded by the Qatari monarchy and US governments.

Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has gone to absurd lengths to defend NATOs regime-change war on Libya, which destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and enslavement of African refugees.

Another purported expert cited by York is the open source reporter Eliot Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as useful idiots.

Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded directly by the US governments regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a UK government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And Higgins former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATOs unofficial think tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and the arms industry.

While HuffPost UKs in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the Bellingcat founder as an expert, even the New York Times acknowledged in a puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, the paper noted, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.

In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing and even reversing scientific findings under US government pressure.

The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.

The US, British, and French governments claimed without evidence that Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area. In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government in violation of international law.

Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific findings about the incident in Douma.

HuffPost UKs Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there is no reliable evidence to support the theory that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.

Conspicuously absent from Yorks article was the smoking gun that arrived in the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.

In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) teams findings on the ground in Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US government did not give him a visa.)

We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred, Henderson explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.

In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex, claiming they are wrong.

The fact that York would conveniently leave out Hendersons UN testimony the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy, and unprofessional.

Yorks attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM has previously been accused of whitewashing war crimes.' To support this grave accusation, York links to an article by himself from 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of his latest attack.

This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of whitewashing war crimes attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.

Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author of her book, Burning Syria, Leila al-Shami is the pseudonym of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field before the revolution.

For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. During a 2016 event at NYUs Kevorkian Center, for example, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shamis talk for security reasons. In a June 2017 interview with Spains El Nacional (in which she and Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not be seen publicly for security reasons.

However, during an April 2016 event at New York Citys New School, al-Shami was photographed and filmed while on stage. The image was published by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.

Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as crypto-fascists and idiots.

Her book, Burning Country, contained no on-the-ground reporting, relying instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the US government and Gulf states such as the White Helmets and Raed Fares.

While al-Shami claims to have been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria, the human rights group she supposedly co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.

Yorks reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his deceptive tactics. By citing regime change activists as credible experts while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like have been accused of, he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.

Under the leadership of executive editor and British security state collaborator Jess Brammar, Yorks brand of propaganda is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.

Yorks hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful forces have found reliable propagandists at the HuffPost UK.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.comand he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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HuffPost UK editor works with govt censorship program while smearing anti-war scholars as tools of Russia - The Grayzone

National Guard photo (Excerpt) by Tech. Sgt. Daniel Gagnon, JTF-DC [Public domain]

January 31, 2020; Washington Post

Fear of ruffling powers feathers in Washington these days is palpable. Twice, exhibits designed to mark the 100th anniversary of women receiving the right to vote and tell the story of the ongoing struggle for womens rights have been modified to avoid the ire of the president and his supporters. In both cases, leaders pulled between protecting organizational integrity and what they perceived as potential political blowback yielded to fearand ethics and mission integrity were compromised.

Late last week, we learned that back in May, shortly before an exhibit entitled Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote was set to open at the Library of Congress, curators decided that a photograph of the January 2017 Womens March in Washington was inappropriate. Rather than depict the massive crowd that turned out a day following the inauguration, they chose a picture of only eight marchers in Houston, Texas. The new picture chosen showed one sign, reading, Fight Like A Girl. The picture removed included many signs with messages challenging President Trump.

Kevin Carrolls photo of the Washington march was initially selected because it captured the scope, size, and energy of todays womens movement. In an email to Carroll obtained by the Washington Post, Library of Congress senior exhibition director Betsy Nahum-Miller explained the Librarys thinking. While the vast majority of the exhibition will focus on the years leading up to attaining the vote, the exhibit will also give visitors a sense of the ongoing struggle for women in the political, economic and social realms.

For that reason, says Nahum-Miller, we wanted to include an image from the 2017 March on Washington. We believe it captures the essence and energy of the march and serves as a contemporary representation of women using the power of protest and exercising their right to engage in American democracy.

Just days before the exhibit was to open, though, Nahum-Miller informed Carroll that his photo was out. I am so sorry that this happened and Im very disappointed we cant use your spectacular photo. Library of Congress Spokesperson April Slayton explained the decision to the Washington Post:

The Library of Congress strives to present historical exhibitions that are balanced and engaging for all visitors with diverse points of view and generally seeks to avoid content that would unnecessarily alienate visitors based on political viewsvulgar language and political content was not appropriate for the Librarys exhibit.

Slayton says that Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was informed of the decision soon after and supported it.

This mirrors language used by the National Archives when it sought to explain why it had doctored a similar photo at the entrance to its Womens Suffrage commemorative exhibit at the end of 2019. In organizations whose missions were historic accuracy and preservation, the leaders in both cases chose to edit that history for fear that those in power might cut their budgets. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, described this dilemma in comments to the Washington Post: Everybody who leads these institutions has to ask themselves, In taking a principled stand, am I endangering the institution that I consider to be useful and essential to public culture? Thats a tough question.

For the artist whose work is censored, the question is not so difficult. I was a little embarrassed, a little hurt, Carroll says. I really wanted to be a part of it. Ive looked again at the photo, and I dont see anything over the top. Its also not that tough for those whose story is erased from the history being taught. Rinku Sen, co-president of the Womens Marchs board of directors, said in an email to the Post that removing the anti-Trump references from images or choosing an image without such a reference obscures the fact that the Womens March was a pointed oppositional action, not just a sweet expression of womens empowerment. Public institutions have a responsibility to present us accurately.

Protecting the financial and political strength of their institutions is the responsibility of organizational leaders. Worrying about how various segments of the community and key stakeholders will react is part of their jobs. But so too is defending their missions. The National Archives, after widespread reaction to its self-censorship, reversed course and displayed an unaltered picture. The Library of Congress has so far chosen to stand pat. Both organizations censored themselves without being asked to do so. Of course, power operates best when it remains invisible.Martin Levine

Originally posted here:
Et Tu, Library of Congress? How Far Will Self-Censorship Go? - Nonprofit Quarterly

A law that allows Turkish citizens convicted of minor charges to stay out of jail is piling pressure on journalists and activists to censor themselves, Inside Turkey reported.

Article 231 of the Turkish criminal code allows people hit with a prison sentence of under two years to defer their sentences by five years and keep it off their criminal record if they do not face a fresh conviction.

But for writers and activists in the country that has been among the top jailers of journalists in the world, the prospect of a jail sentence looming over their heads is pushing many to self-censor, Inside Turkey said.

Many journalists and activists in Turkey, particularly those linked to the Kurdish political movement, have been charged in recent years for their links to outlawed organisations or for social media posts. Deferments, which can be applied by courts against the defendants wishes, have sometimes been used to avoid making judgements on sensitive or complex cases, leaving the defendants in a state of legal limbo, it said.

Journalists face various accusations, not just crimes against the state but accusations such as defamation, insults or attacks on personal rights, said zcan Kl, a lawyer who often defends Kurdish journalists and social media users in freedom of speech cases. The courts must apply either a sentence or an acquittal.

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Suspended sentence law contributing to self-censorship in Turkey - Ahval

Jan 30th 2020

MOSCOW

ANASTASIA PATLAY thought something was amiss when she checked the young mans ID. He seemed a couple of years below the strict 18+ requirement for this performance of Out of the Closet, a play adapted from interviews with gay men and their families. That restriction was not the choice of Ms Patlay, the director, but a demand of Russian federal law, which since 2013 has banned the promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors. A photocopy of his passport, which Ms Patlay snapped on her phone, suggested he had recently turned 19. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but Teatr.doc, which specialises in verbatim dramas assembled from real-life documents and transcriptsand has long been described as Russias most controversial theatre companyhad already had enough trouble from the authorities.

Her hunch was vindicated; the spectator was a plant sent by a far-right group. Shortly after the show began, he and his friend walked out to rendezvous with a dozen more agitators. Together they accused the theatre staff of illegally exposing children to gay propaganda. (The passport had been doctored; in reality, the youngster was 15.) Then they invaded the auditorium, stopping the play and shouting homophobic slurs. Police were called and a fight broke out; Teatr.doc complained about the invasion, the saboteurs that a minor had been admitted.

No charges were brought, but that sting last August turned out to be the start of a protracted ordeal for the Moscow-based company at the hands of ultraconservatives. Despite all the official pressure that Teatr.doc had suffered, this campaign was (and is) a new and different problem. It encapsulates the dual challenge of artistic censorship in Russiawhich, as Vladimir Putins rule has progressed, has come to be enforced by freelance outfits as well as the state, and as much for supposedly moral reasons as over political dissent.

Teatr.doc was founded in 2002 by Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov, husband-and-wife playwrights who were inspired by verbatim drama workshops in Russia led by the Royal Court theatre of London. Its shows elicited strong responses from the start, not only because of the contentsubjects included homelessness, immigration and HIVbut also their style and everyday language. Productions that drew particular ire (and acclaim) included September.doc, in which actors read comments made in internet chat rooms following the Beslan school siege of 2004, and One Hour Eighteen Minutes, a reference to the time doctors were denied access to Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing lawyer, before he died in police custody. They went after things that ail the society, says John Freedman, a critic and translator of Russian drama, and they did it in a way that was quite direct.

Despite its quality, Teatr.doc only ever played in small venues. It has been obliged to find a new one three times in the past six years after leases were terminated, supposedly because of noise and safety complaints. Bomb scares have been reported at several performances, shutting them down, but no explosives have been found. Instead, police have exploited the scares to check audience members documents.

It might seem odd for the authorities to expend so much effort on niggling an experimental troupe. But as well as being a salutary demonstration of power, such treatment nudges the Kremlins opponents to rally round artists who can be caricatured as libertine extremists. Some alternative targetspop stars, sayhave higher profiles, but also followings too big to alienate. Teatr.doc is not the only cutting-edge company to have faced official harassment. Kirill Serebrennikov, director of the Gogol Centre theatre in Moscow, spent almost 20 months under house arrest as part of an ongoing embezzlement case.

In 2018 both of Teatr.docs founders died, leaving the company to be run by Ms Greminas son, Alexander Rodionov; many wondered if it would carry on. It did, but the intimidation continuedonly in a new form. A month after the sting on Out of the Closet, protesters threw foul-smelling chemicals through the window during a performance of War is Close, a play about the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Again, no charges were brought. Instead, at the end of last year authorities launched an investigation of Teatr.doc following a complaint from an activist group called the National-Conservative Movement. It accused the theatre of disseminating LGBT propaganda, justifying terrorism in War is Close, and promoting drug use in another production. Staff were questioned; the theatre handed over the scripts of the plays for review.

Last month police said they would not bring criminal charges, in what Ms Patlay called a victory for common sense. But her adversaries have not gone away.

In this parallel censorship drive, far-right agitators have taken aim at several other shows and exhibitions. Side by Side, an LGBT film festival, has been picketed, as have art shows with religious themes. In 2015 the director of a Siberian opera house was forced out after his staging of Wagners Tannhuser was deemed sacrilegious by Orthodox Christians. Such independent provocateurs are scarier than the authorities, says Ms Patlay, because they are unpredictable and they are new. She thinks they have been emboldened by the increasingly reactionary rhetoric of Russias politicians. And they appear to operate with the states tacit consent. The lack of punishment for them and the inaction from policeit sends a signal that we are not defended.

On the contrary, says Valentina Bobrova, the National-Conservative Movements founder. Outfits like hers may further the Kremlins bid to stoke a culture war between conservatives and those it portrays as radicals, but she insists the movement is privately funded and has no links with the authorities. She says she never had much hope that her complaint would close the companyand that it is not the likes of her but liberal voices that hold too much sway in modern Russia. Teatr.doc is an enemy of our country that is working from within, she says. We cannot stay quiet and we decided to act. She was behind the disruption of Out of the Closet, too. Her members are looking out for other signs of anti-Russian activity.

Ms Patlay worries about the effect of all this on the audience, who might conclude that you have to be particularly brave to go to the theatre. And we dont have the right to ask spectators to be brave. As to whether Teatr.doc has managed to change Russian society, she is illusionless. I dont think the percentage of decent people has increased, she accepts. But those people who are still here, who havent emigrated, perhaps it is a support of some kind. At the very least, she says, the company has shown it is possible to talk openly about things that others would rather hush up.

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The many ways to censor cutting-edge art in Russia"

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The many ways to censor cutting-edge art in Russia - The Economist