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Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free Internet, but now, authorities are trying to imitate Chinas model of government control.

By Emily Parker

When you hear the words Russia and Internet, you probably think of Kremlin-backed hacking. But the Internet is also a powerful tool for President Vladimir Putins opposition. Last month, the Internet helped spark Russias largest anti-government protests in five years. Russia responded by blocking access to websites that promoted demonstrations.

This is part of a larger story. Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free Internet. Now, Russian authorities would like to imitate Chinas model of Internet control. They are unlikely to succeed. The Kremlin will find that, once you give people Internet freedom, its not so easy to completely take it away.

I lived in Moscow in 2010 after spending years researching Internet activism in China. I quickly found that Russia and China had very different attitudes toward the Web. The Great Firewall of China blocked overseas sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In Russia, by contrast, you could find almost any information online. This was largely because Russian authorities didnt view the Internet as a serious political threat. That changed in late 2011 and early 2012, when Moscow was the site of the largest anti-government protests since the end of the Soviet Union. Social media helped organize those demonstrations, and Putin took note. A law that took effect in late 2012, to give just one example, granted Russian authorities the power to block certain online content.

Moscow clearly admires Beijings approach. Last year, former Chinese Internet czar Lu Wei and Great Firewall architect Fang Binxing were invited to speak at a forum on Internet safety. The Russians were apparently hoping to learn Chinese techniques for controlling the Web. Russia has already taken a page or two from Chinas playbook. While Facebook and Twitter remain accessible in Russia, at least for now, a Russian court ruled to ban LinkedIn, apparently for breaking rules that require companies to store personal data about Russian citizens inside the country. This could be a warning to companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which risk being blocked in Russia if they refuse to follow such rules.

Both Russia and China have made clear that they wish to regulate the Internet as they see fit, without outside interference. Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of Internet sovereignty, which essentially means that individual countries should have the right to choose their own model of cyber governance. Putin has taken this idea one step further by calling the Internet a CIA project. By this logic, Russia needs to proactively protect its own interests in the information sphere whether by cracking down on online dissent or using the Internet to spread its own version of events.

Russia Internet expert Andrei Soldatov, author of the book The Red Web, says the Kremlin certainly looks for something close to the China approach these days, mostly because many other things failedfiltering is porous, global platforms defy local legislation, and are still available. Soldatov says that the government would like to have direct control of critical infrastructure such as the national system of domain distribution, Internet exchange points, and cables that cross borders. He adds that this approach, which may not even be successful, would be more of an emergency measure than a realistic attempt to regulate the Internet on a day-to-day basis.

Chinas method has worked because Beijing has long recognized the Internet as both an economic opportunity and a political threat. Chinas isolated Internet culture has given rise to formidable domestic companies. It was once easy to dismiss Chinas local technology players as mere copycatsSina Weibo imitating Twitter, Baidu imitating Google, and so on. But now, some of these companies, notably Tencents WeChat, have become so formidable that we may soon see Western companies imitating them. In the meantime, Chinese Internet users arent necessarily longing for their Western competitors.

In Russia, however, American sites like YouTube have become very powerful. The recent demonstrations were in part sparked by an online report by opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny, who alleged that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had amassed a fortune in yachts, mansions, and estates. Navalnys video on YouTube, viewed more than 16 million times, detailed this alleged corruption. Navalny called for protests after his demands for investigating official corruption was denied by the Russian parliament. According to Global Voices, the Russian prosecutors office recently requested the blocking of a YouTube video calling on young people to rally.

Russian blogger Elia Kabanov believes that YouTube is now too big to block. I doubt the Kremlin will go there, he said. They blocked LinkedIn mostly because it was a niche site in Russia and nobody cared. And of course the government propaganda machine is using YouTube a lot, so it wouldnt make any sense to block it. If they try to take down protest announcements on platforms on YouTube, Kabanov says, new ones will appear. I really cant see the way for the Kremlin to implement the Chinese model now: Everything is too connected, their own agencies are using all these services.

Russia does have its own domestic social networks, of course. VKontakte (VK), for example, is far more influential than Facebook. Soldatov notes that VK played an unusually big role in the recent protests. But Facebook still has a devoted Russian following, especially among political activists.

According to Soldatov:

No government can entirely control the flow of information. Even in China, those determined to find information can find a tool, say a virtual private network, to jump over the firewall. Russian censors will face a similar challenge. In recent years, there has been an ongoing increase in Russian use of Tor, a browser that can be used to circumvent censorship. As a 2015 Global Voices article noted, the increase in censorship closely mirrors the upward trend in interest towards Tor.

In the short term Russian street protests may fizzle out, especially as Moscow cracks down on dissent. But the story wont end there. The Internet on its own will not cause a revolution in Russia, but it can be an effective tool for organization. Beijing figured this out a long time ago, but the Kremlin is learning it too late.

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Russia Is Copying China's Approach to Internet Censorship Will It Work? - Pacific Standard

A censorship watchdog has warned that novels by shamed comedian Bill Cosby are vanishing from school libraries.

Educators are perhaps unsurprisingly uncomfortable with the idea of their pupils reading titles from Cosbys Little Bill series after numerous rape allegations him.

The American Library Association named the books among its annual list of titles at risk of being censored, placing it 9th in the top 10.

Bills adventures have been much-loved reading tools for years, and were also the basis for an Emmy-winning Nickelodeon cartoon series.

However, the titles have clearly taken on the taint of scandal since scores of women began making allegations of sexual assault against Cosby.

The comedian is due to stand trial later this year in Pennsylvania on claims that he drugged and molested a student at Temple University in 2004.

Claims by many other women stretch back beyond the statute of limitations, so are unlikely ever to be contested in court, but have been aired extensively in the media.

Officials at the ALA said the turn against the titles was remarkable because it was not based on what is in the books, but the person who wrote them.

James LaRue, who leads the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, told CNN: I think its our fascination with celebrity. If we love the person we love everything about him.

If we hate the person we hate everything about him. We dont seem to be able to separate the message from the messenger.

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Censorship Watchdog: Bill Cosby's Books for Kids Are Vanishing From Schools - Heat Street

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Hannah Hess, E&E News reporter

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) called for a fight against political censorship of climate scientists and their data today during a field hearing in West Palm Beach, Fla., on extreme weather and coastal flooding.

"If a doctor were barred from using the word 'cancer,' he or she can't do his job, and the same is true with scientists and the work they do to understand and educate the public about the Earth's own fever," said Nelson, ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Nelson hosted a panel of experts and local officials at a site less than 5 miles from Mar-a-Lago, the 124-room mansion that's been dubbed President Trump's "Winter White House," to talk about future risks and efforts to address the impacts of climate change which Trump has called a "hoax."

Like Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has drawn repeated criticism from environmental groups for sidestepping questions about climate change and saying he does not believe climate change is caused by humans.

Scott, who served as chairman of a super political action committee supporting Trump during the campaign, also came under fire for reports that Florida environmental regulators had been ordered not to use the phrases "climate change" and "global warming," even as the phenomena continue to affect the state (Greenwire, March 9, 2015).

Nelson invited Ben Kirtman, a professor with the University of Miami's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, who has spoken to Scott about climate science and has offered to educate Trump on the issue (E&E News PM, Dec. 22, 2016).

"Today we sit at ground zero of the impacts of climate change in the U.S. And while there are still some who continue to deny climate change is real, South Florida offers proof that it is real and it's an issue we're going to be grappling with for decades to come," Nelson said.

Kirtman summarized evidence that sea-level rise along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States is accelerating because of a number of factors that could be due to changes in ocean circulation associated with global warming.

"Even if one is skeptical that human activities are the cause of these trends, there is a clear local need to protect lives and property and ensure economic opportunity in response to changes we see today," Kirtman said.

The panel also heard from Leonard Berry, a professor emeritus of geosciences at Florida Atlantic University who co-founded Coastal Risk Consulting LLC. The Florida-based company has estimated Mar-a-Lago will eventually be under at least 1 foot of water for 210 days a year due to tidal flooding (Greenwire, Oct. 5, 2016).

Berry testified that the work of climate scientists depends on "the continued information flow from the federal government."

Nelson used the forum to stress his concerns about Trump's preliminary budget proposal, which includes cuts to climate science funding and monitoring resources.

The Interior Department's internal watchdog today largely cleared one of the National Park Service's former top superintendents of allegations of harassment and hostility toward women.

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Hate speech has includedcritiquesof Merkels migration policies. To be in disagreement with the governments policies is now potentially criminal.

By: Judith Bergman, The Gatestone Institute

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germanys Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the code of conduct, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours.

This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content, Justice Minister Heiko Maassaidin a statement announcing the planned legislation.

Criminal content? Statements that are deemed illegal under German law are now being conflated with statements that are merely deemed, subjectively and on the basis of entirely random complaints from social media users who are free to abuse the code of conduct to their hearts content to be hate speech.

Hate speech has includedcritiquesof Chancellor Angela Merkels migration policies. To be in disagreement with the governments policies is now potentially criminal. Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German governments informers and enforcers qualified by whom and in what way? working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule. Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.

Maas is not pleased with the efforts of the social media companies. They do not, supposedly, delete enough reported content, nor do they delete it fast enough, according to asurveyby the Justice Ministrys youth protection agency. It found that YouTube was able to remove around 90% of illegal postings within a week, while Facebook deleted or blocked 39% of content and Twitter only 1%. The German minister, it seems, wants more efficiency.

We need to increase the pressure on social networks There is just as little room for criminal propaganda and slander [on social media] as on the streets,saidMaas. For this we need legal regulations. He has now presented these legal regulations in the form of a draft bill, which provides for complaints, reporting and fines.

There also appears to be no differentiation made between primary-source hate speech, as in many religious tenets, and secondary-source hate speech, reporting on the former.

According to the draft, social media platforms with more than two million users would be obliged to delete or block any criminal offenses, such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. The networks receive seven days for more complicated cases. Germany could fine a social media company up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law; it could fine a companys chief representative in Germany up to 5 million euros.

It does not stop there. Germany does not want these measures to be limited to its own jurisdiction. It wants to share them with the rest of Europe: In the end, we also need European solutions for European-wide companies,saidMaas. The European Union already has a similarcode of conductin place, so that should not be very hard to accomplish.

Facebook, for its part, hasannouncedthat by the end of 2017, the number of employees in complaints-management in Berlin will be increased to more than 700. A spokeswoman said that Facebook had clear rules against hate speech and works hard on removing criminal content.

If Facebook insists on operating under rules of censorship, it should at the very least aim to administer those rules in a fair manner. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness. Instead, Facebooks practice of its so-called Community Standards the standards to which Facebook refers when deleting or allowing content on its platform in response to user complaints shows evidence of entrenched bias. Posts critical of Merkels migrant policies, for example, can get categorized as Islamophobia, and are often found toviolateCommunity Standards, while incitement toactualviolence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebooks Community Standards.

Facebooks bias, in fact, became so pronounced that in October 2015, Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center filed an unprecedented lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of some 20,000 Israelis, to stop allowing Palestinian Arab terrorists to use the social network to incite violent attacks against Jews. The complaint sought an injunction against Facebook that required it to monitor incitement and to respond immediately to complaints about content that incites people to violence. Shurat Hadinwroteat the time:

Facebook is much more than a neutral internet platform or a mere publisher of speech because its algorithms connect the terrorists to the inciters. Facebook actively assists the inciters to find people who are interested in acting on their hateful messages by offering friend, group and event suggestions Additionally, Facebook often refuses to take down the inciting pages, claiming that they do not violate its community standards. Calling on people to commit crimes is not constitutionally protected speech and endangers the lives of Jews and Israelis.

In 2016, Shurat Hadinfiled a separate $1 billion lawsuiton behalf of five victims of Hamas terrorism and their families. They are seeking damages against Facebook under the U.S. Antiterrorism Act, for Facebooks having provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook services, which Hamas then used to carry out their terrorist activities. The US has officially designated Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization which means that it is a criminal offense to provide material support to such an organization.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebooks bias is so strong that it recentlyrestoredPalestinian Arab terrorist group Fatahs Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of130 posts glorifying terror and the murder of Jews.

It is only a small step from imposing censorship on social media companies to asking the same of email providers, or ordering postal authorities to screen letters, magazines and brochures in the event that citizens spread supposed xenophobia and fake news. There is ample precedent for such a course of action on the continent: During the Cold War, people living behind the Iron Curtain had their private letters opened by the Communist authorities; those passages deemed to be out of line with the Communist orthodoxy, were simply blacked out.

Who would have thought that more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), Western Europe would be reinventing itself in the image of the Former Soviet Union?

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

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Back to the USSR? Europe's out-of-control censorship - World Israel News

6:38 p.m. MT April 8, 2017

Is all editing censorship?

The question came up during a recent Sunshine Week panel discussion at New Mexico State University when I expressed my frustrations with Facebook and online news outlets that make no effort to verify that what they are disseminating is true.

An audience member disagreed, arguing that if Facebook were to weed out the untrue stories, that would be censorship.

No, I responded, censorship is when the government prohibits something from being published. County Attorney Nelson Goodin, a fellow panelist, correctly pointed out that the word has more than one meaning. But I still couldnt grasp her argument.

She was claiming that any exercise of editorial discretion is, in fact, censorship. The Associated Press sends out several hundred stories every day. We only put a few of them in our newspaper. Thats censorship. The AP chooses its several hundred stories from the many thousands it could have reported on. That is also censorship. Any attempt to organize and prioritize the events of the day is censorship.

Is that what the new media has come to?

A few years ago, author Michael Lewis wrote a book called Moneyball, in which he explained how analytics had revolutionized baseball. Oakland As General Manager Billy Beane had snookered opposing teams with much larger payrolls by eschewing the common wisdom espoused by old-time scouts and instead listening to a bunch of computer nerds running probability ratios on runs and outs.

Now, you cant watch a ballgame without hearing somebody blather on about launch angle or exit velocity.

Analytics have taken over, and not just in baseball. We used to gauge the interest in our work based on subscriptions and reader feedback. Now we have internet and social media analytics on everything, supposedly to help guide the way.

On Tuesday, a rumor spread that actor Jim Carrey was driving through Las Cruces when his car broke down. A local resident helped him get his car fixed and took him to lunch. Carrey was so impressed that he said he was thinking about retiring here.

We checked it out and ran a brief story reporting that it wasnt true. And that, based on the analytics, was our top story of the day. On a day when there was important breaking news in the Tai Chan murder trial.

When I say we checked it out, that suggests a level of investigation greater than what was required. The website WBN10 News, which ran the story, has a disclaimer right on its home page telling readers it is a satirical and fantasy website. And yet enough people believed it that the rumor spread throughout town.

The writers in Russia and Macedonia offer no such disclaimers for the satirical and fantasy stories they inject into our daily news cycle, sometime just for fun and profit, but often to sway public opinion.

Which is where editors come in. We looked at the analytics, and decided that the Tai Chan murder trial story was still more important.

Facebook doesnt have editors. That would be censorship. It only has analytics. And, the guys in Macedonia have figured out how to climb to the lead of each days news feed.

There has been some great reporting on Russias attempts to influence our election, with more undoubtedly to come.

But the story being overlooked is how easily our information stream was poisoned and how willingly our citizens were duped. Russian propaganda is nothing new. Our susceptibility to it is.

Walter Rubel is editorial page editor of the Sun-News. He can be reached at wrubel@lcsun-news.com or follow @WalterRubel on Twitter.

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Rubel: Analytics, censorship and our poisoned information stream - Las Cruces Sun-News