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Google has removed the Gab app from Google Play because they claim it violates their speech policy:

Is anyone surprised the company that fired a man for pointing out that men and women are different would consider a free speech site like Gab hate speech?

People who think silencing those they disagree with is a good thing certainly arent capable of understanding this simple point.

Considering how subjective hate is, how do they determine what should be banned? Most Conservatives believe abortion is hateful, but we dont see Google banning or suspending Planned Parenthood.

This is pretty simple, were not sure why Lefties cant figure this out. If you dont like Gab, dont go there. Dont download the app. Why take it from other people who do go there and who want the app?

Freedom isnt always pretty, and whether you like it or not, haters still have the right to be hateful in this country.

And no amount of banning will change that.

And we thought 2016 was stupid.

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Read more from the original source:
'Full net censorship is HERE': Google moves to de-platform Gab for being a 'hate site' - Twitchy

Chinas crackdown on academic freedom has reached the worlds oldest publishing house.

Cambridge University Press (CUP) said it has pulled over 300 articles and book reviews on its China site from the China Quarterly (CQ), one of the most prestigious journals in the China studies field, at the request of the governments General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). The news came to light after an undated screenshot of an email to CQs editorial board from the journals editor, Tim Pringle, went viral on social media today (Aug. 18).

According to Pringle, CUP complied with the request so as to prevent the shutdown of the entire CUP site. Most of the articles in question relate to topics deemed sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and date back to the 1960s, wrote Pringle, adding that CUP had received a similar request to take down more than a thousand e-books a few months earlier.

Yang Guobin, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is also a CQ editorial board member, wrote on social networking site Weibo (link in Chinese) yesterday (Aug. 17) after he received Pringles email: This is one of the most important international publications in contemporary Chinese studies, yet its subject to such restrictions This is unheard of. Isnt the Chinese government trying to promote contemporary Chinese studies?

James Leibold, an associate professor at Australias La Trobe University whose research focuses on Xinjiang, called CUPs decision shameful in a tweet.

CUP said in an emailed statement:

Freedom of thought and expression underpin what we as publishers believe in, yet Cambridge University Press and all international publishers face the challenge of censorship.

We can confirm that we received an instruction from a Chinese import agency to block individual articles from China Quarterly within China. We complied with this initial request to remove individual articles, to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market.

We are aware that other publishers have had entire collections of content blocked in China until they have enabled the import agencies to block access to individual articles. We do not, and will not, proactively censor our content and will only consider blocking individual items (when requested to do so) when the wider availability of content is at risk.

However we are troubled by the recent increase in requests of this nature, and have already planned meetings to discuss our position with the relevant agencies at the Beijing Book Fair next week.

We will not change the nature of our publishing to make content acceptable in China, and we remain committed to ensuring that access to a wide variety of publishing is possible for academics, researchers, students and teachers in this market.

China signed up to the International Publishers Association last year, and one of the bodys guiding principles is that of freedom to publish. The issue of censorship in China and other regions is not a short-term issue and therefore requires a longer-term approach. There are many things we cant control but we will continue to take every opportunity to influence this agenda.

Pringle didnt respond to a request for comment from Quartz. The School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where CQ is based, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. Chinas GAPP couldnt be reached for comment.

A Chinese academic based in Hong Kong, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from speaking publicly, said the academic community was totally shocked by Pringles comments, and noted that there is a broad deterioration in academic freedom in China. What is more worrying, the academic added, is that the long arm of Beijings censorship apparatus is clearly extending beyond its own borders, citing the recent case of the detention of Feng Chongyi in China, a professor working at the University of Technology Sydney.

This story has been updated with comment from Cambridge University Press.

See the article here:
Forced to comply or shut down, Cambridge University Press's China Quarterly removes 300 articles in China - Quartz

PayPal this week banned at least 34 organizations for promoting hate, violence or racial intolerance, including Richard Spencers group and others apparently involved in the Charlottesville riot. PayPals announcement mentions KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups that have violated its acceptable use policy.

Its a private company (thats not yet regulated as a utility) so it can do as it pleases, and the Nazi/Klan creeps certainly arent going to evoke any sympathy. But as someone whos been at the receiving end of hate group smears, it would be good to know how such decisions are made. PayPals announcement notes that our highly trained team of experts addresses each case individually highly trained in what? Sniffing out heresy? (No one expects the PayPal Inquisition!) When PayPal goes beyond the objective standard of banning activity prohibited by law to banning those it simply doesnt like (however loathsome they might be), all dissenters are vulnerable.

PayPals highly trained experts havent yet targeted my organization, but Twitter has, albeit in a small way so far. You can pay them to promote a tweet thats already been posted, as a form of advertising, and here are three that we submitted for promotion that were rejected:

All three were rejected on the grounds of Hate:

They contain nothing hateful, obviously, but the common thread appears to be that all three refer to the costs to society of illegal immigration, and all three contain the word illegal two refer to illegal immigrants and one to illegal aliens.

When you look at Twitters Hateful content in advertising page, it looks like the very word illegal is indeed prohibited with regard to immigrants (as opposed to the U.S. Code, where its common). It mentions Hate speech or advocacy against a protected group or an individual or organization based on, but not limited to, the following including Status as a refugee and Status as an immigrant.

This is merely a nuisance for me, so far, but it does point to the broader issue addressed by Jeremy Carl in his piece on the homepage this week about regulating the big internet firmsas public utilities. Carl writes What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech regulation put on monopolist and market-dominant companies that have abused their positions repeatedly.

One internet company this week abused its position but at the same time practically begged for the government to step in. Cloudflare is a sort of middleman facilitator between users and the web sites theyre visiting. Because of the companys position in the infrastructure of the internet, its CEO, Matthew Prince, was able to simply shut down the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website: Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldnt be allowed on the Internet. He explained his decision by noting that the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes, which they no doubt are.

But to Princes credit, he continued: No one should have that power:

We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldnt be what determines what should be online, he said. I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I dont think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldnt be on the internet.

As Prince wrote in a blog post on the incident, Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.

The internet is now a utility more important than phones or cable TV. If people can be denied access to it based on the content of their ideas and speech (rather than specific, illegal acts), why not make phone service contingent on your political views? Or mail delivery? Garbage pickup? Electric power? Water and sewer? (I hope Im not giving the SPLCs brownshirts any ideas.)

Read the original here:
More Internet Censorship - National Review

Zhao Bandi's Night View includes the words China Dream, president Xi Jinpings signature propaganda slogan

On 21 July, the UCCA's director Philip Tinari posted on Twitter: While we're on the topic of the Beijing Culture Bureau (Bieber), see these #ZhaoBandi paintings they banned for import for our upcoming show, along with the original images depicting surveillance cameras and a neon sign saying China Dream. Part of the Uli Sigg collection, the works were not authorised to re-enter the mainland.

Surveillance is a popular subject matter for Chinese artists, from dissident Ai Weiwei to establishment yet incisively observant artists like Xu Bing and Song Dong. The China Dreampresident Xi Jinpings signature propaganda slogan for the first few years of his administrationremains as unavoidable yet unmentionable as Beijings smog.

Zhao Bandi's Scenery with Cameras was also censored

UCCA at least kept the party going by finding a creative workaround, and reproducing the offending works. They joined works from Zhaos early career including Nursery Rhyme, a 1994 and 2017 sculpture of a flower made of 10 RMB notes immersed in a vase of blood, and 1990s Butterfly of a woman posing for a photograph at Tiananmen, a year after that iconic location took on a heavy new meaning.

Zhao Bandi is best-known though for his incorporation of pandas, the beloved and adorable national animal providing cover for Zhaos social commentary. China Party includes his 2005 video One Mans Olympics, in which a toy panda toting Zhao runs as a torchbearer during a performance of an imaginary opening ceremony in Bern, Switzerland. Like the China Dream, the 2008 Beijing Olympics were ubiquitous in the state media but taboo to comment upon.

Though projects like his panda fashion shows are usually more playful than provocative, Zhao has been a bellwether before. His early series of public service posters, featuring him talking to his toy panda about locally delicate issues such as environmental protection, AIDS prevention, unemployment, and the dangers of smoking, signaled a new era of openness when they were allowed to be publicly displayed on Shanghai streets and its airport in 2000.

Read the original:
Zhao Bandi's party crashed by censorship at the Ullens Center in Beijing - Art Newspaper

Wanting to ban the haters is understandable.

It was inevitable that the fallout from violent protests in Virginia organized by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups would extend to the virtual world of the web. The internet is our modern commons. But the past few days have shown how fast we can glide down the slippery slope to web censorship.

Facebook and Twitter were perfectly within their rights, legally and ethically, when they banned accounts of certain hate groups and their leaders. These are private companies enforcing their own rules about how their services and platforms can be used. Providers of web infrastructure, however, must be held to a stricter standard since they act as choke points that can prevent an individual or group from being able to express themselves online.

Soon after the Charlottesville events, domain name registrars GoDaddy and Google separately decided to no longer serve the Daily Stormer after the neo-Nazi site wrote a disparaging story about Heather Heyer, the woman who died after being struck by a car while protesting the Charlottesville rally. Registrars act as a sort of phone book for the internet by turning a raw IP address -- like 62.23.150.94 -- into a line of text, like "Bloomberg.com." Without GoDaddy or Google, it would be impossible for people to find the Daily Stormer online. Shortly afterwards, CloudFlare, which offers firewall services for websites to help them ward off attacks, kicked the Daily Stormer off its servers.

In a refreshingly candid email to his employees and blog post, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince admitted that his decision was "arbitrary" and "dangerous," and departed from years of maintaining strict neutrality about the content of the sites his company protected. As Prince told Gizmodo: I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I dont think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldnt be on the internet.

It's hard not to cheer Prince's courage and his motives. But his decision and those of the registrars have big implications for the debate over how the internet should be regulated. To reach web users, publishers of content small and large rely on a complex machinery of web hosts, domain registrars, transit providers, platforms, proxy servers and search engines.

While the companies that provide the back-end services of the web are less well known than the Facebook and Snapchats of the world, they're indispensable to its smooth functioning; they are effectively the plumbing that allows the whole system to function. When they take sides, everyone loses.

Many may be happy to see the Daily Stormer pushed into web oblivion, myself included, but we probably wouldn't feel the same way for publishers of content we agreed with. What if a dissident politician or a corporate whistle-blower got similar treatment?

Currently there are no U.S. laws or regulations to prevent web infrastructure providers from taking such actions. Under federal law, private corporations can deny service to groups or individuals, as long as it's not because of their race, religion or sexuality. Nor does the principle of "net neutrality" really apply since that just calls for broadband providers like Verizon or Comcast to treat all data equally.

We may need new rules in the U.S. that specifically bar web infrastructure providers from cutting off services to publishers based on their content. This would limit firms like GoDaddy's ability to use their terms of service to silence people with controversial views.

Clear thinking from leading voices in business, economics, politics, foreign affairs, culture, and more.

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It would be preferable to keep efforts to eradicate hate speech at the platform level and not among the providers of internet infrastructure services. After long resisting, platforms like Facebook and Twitter now acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for what people post.Since they are governed by local laws where they operate, they fall under the jurisdiction of elected officials with the legitimacy to regulate. Just look at Germany's tough new law that levies fines up to 50 million euro ($58.5 million) if social networks don't remove hate speech promptly.

Regulators will make mistakes and may even overreach. But they have more standing to make tough calls on free speech than the internet's plumbers.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Leila Abboud at labboud@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net

Go here to see the original:
Keep the Internet's Backbone Free From Censorship - Bloomberg