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LinkedIn has admitted it can make mistakes after becoming embroiled in censorship accusations. This week the accounts of three prominent Scottish hospitality leaders were removed following viral posts calling out the Scottish government's Covid-19 policies.

In a statement to The Drum about the individual cases, a LinkedIn spokesperson said: "We know we wont always get it right and when we do make a mistake, well work directly with the member to correct it.

The LinkedIn accounts for the Scottish Hospitality Group (SHG), founder of The Scottish Gin Society Steven White and Bucks Bar Group owner Michael Bergson have been suspended with limited communication from the platform.

LinkedIn's statement added: We are focused on keeping LinkedIn a safe, trusted, and professional platform. We have clear terms of service and Professional Community Policies that outline what we expect from all our members, including that member profiles must represent a real name and identity."

On Tuesday (December 14) Stephen Montgomery, leader of the SHG, was unable to access the SHG LinkedIn account and asked to verify his identity by submitting a passport photo. The SHG account was also not searchable for the time Montgomery was blocked from the account. At the same time, Twitter took down Montgomerys personal account which was later restored.

Montgomery told The Drum the SHG account had ramped up its communications on both Twitter and LinkedIn over the weekend to campaign against government guidance change on hospitality.

When youve got three big voices in hospitality saying the exact same thing it begs the question why certain social media platforms are taking down our posts and locking down our accounts, Montgomery said. Nothing Ive posted is derogatory or defamatory, its all issues relevant to the pandemic to give people information.

White, a less vocal member of the Scottish hospitality community, claimed his most recent posts had been taken down on Wednesday (December 15) and his account deactivated. He raised a complaint to the platform but was told there was nothing wrong with the account, the posts and account have since been restored.

The missing entries followed Whites LinkedIn post on Friday (December 10) calling out the Scottish government's guidance to cancel Christmas parties. By Sunday the post had been viewed 130,000 times and White was featured on the front page of Scotland on Sunday.

I cant find another explanation for it other than someone making some serious complaints to LinkedIn about our activity, White said. I never use foul language or make accusations or do anything that would get me in trouble Im acutely aware of that stuff.

He added: Yes Im criticizing the Scottish government but Im very measured.

The third hospitality leader, Bergson, has had his account taken down for up to 14 days while LinkedIn reviews his appeal. After two days of his account being deactivated LinkedIn sent an email which said: Your account was restricted due to multiple violations of Linkedlns User Agreement and Professional Community Policies against sharing context that contains misleading or inaccurate information.

The posts in question were as follows:

Bergson admitted he had been vocal about the Scottish government's Covid policies on LinkedIn but said in the days preceding the account deactivation his posts were becoming more viral. He says the trio didnt have any article simultaneously shared, we dont collaborate in what we are saying.

Reported LinkedIn content is reviewed by its Professional Community Policies based on four pillars: Be Safe which includes sharing harmful material or inciting hate; Be Trustworthy which includes sharing misleading information and creating fake accounts; Be Professional includes sharing explicit or inflammatory content and Respect Others Rights which covers intellectual property rights and privacy laws.

In October Microsoft closed LinkedIn in China after it was called out for blocking access to US journalists for its China-based users.

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LinkedIn hit with censorship accusations for removing critics of government Covid policies - The Drum

The corruption-plagued Cyprus government is tearing up textbook pages and seeking to censor artist Giorgos Gavriel.

Dr. Miranda Christou is a Senior Fellow at CARR and Associate Professor in Sociology of Education at the University of Cyprus.

The far-right party of ELAM is growing in Cyprus, the government is mired in corruption scandals and the Ministry of Education is tearing up textbook pages because they mention Atatrk. The artist and teacher, Giorgos Gavriel, has been capturing the spirit of the times in his provocative art, only to face disciplinary action for offending national figures. His artwork is featured in this article

The National Popular Front in Cyprus (Ethniko Laiko Metopo) ELAM doubled its representation in the Cyprus Parliamentary elections in May 2021, with a share of 6,78% (4 MPs). ELAM, an offshoot of Golden Dawn in Greece, is an ultra-nationalist, nativist and anti-immigrant party that maintains a hardline opposition to the bizonal, bicommunal federation as a solution to the division of Cyprus despite this being the official, established framework since the 1970s. More importantly, it has kept itself under the radar by avoiding the brazen neo-Nazi symbolism and violent outbursts of Golden Dawn, focusing instead on building an image of the good kids as the Cyprus Archbishop once called them.

This serious Golden Dawn of Cyprus is now heading an ad hoc parliamentary group on the demographic problem after tipping the scale to help the centre-right party of Democratic Rally (DISY), currently in power, win leadership in the Parliament. This move reflects a mainstreaming of ELAMs alarmist rhetoric on the arrival of refugees and asylum seekers whom they refer to as illegal migrants.

In their Fascism is website article, ELAM claims that: Fascism is when your country is in danger because of low fertility rates, when citizens are deprived of basic things but you continue to accept illegal immigrants, and, on top of that, to give them money when you have clearly exhausted the limits of your hospitality.

This twisting and upending of words by ELAM pushes further to the right the boundaries of public discourse on human suffering in a country that has constructed its ethnic identity around the pain and trauma of 1974 refugees. Recently, the Minister of Interior rushed to defend the government amidst reports that the authorities have been illegally pushing boats of asylum seekers back to the Lebanon shores or callously endangering children and minors by keeping them waiting at sea, under the harsh Cyprus sun. This same Minister had dabbled in apartheid politics and the Great Replacement language when he issued a decree that asylum seekers were not allowed to settle in a village area because their arrival caused social problems and demographic change.

Moments like these require unrelenting truthtelling. We take pride in being reader-funded. If you like our work, support our journalism.

The hypocrisy of those who proclaim faith in Christian values but maintain racist posturesELAMs slogan is country, religion, familyis called out by one of Giorgos Gavriels paintings which shows Christ in a refugee holding facility. Much of his work is provocative: a painting of Christ naked or a dog urinating on the Archbishop.

In September 2021, the Ministry of Education and Culture announced that Gavriel had to appear before the Educational Service Committee to apologize for an array of disciplinary charges, including insult to civil-religious institutions, religious symbols and historical-national figures of Cyprus. Following intense public outcry, the Presidents cabinet called off the investigation. The government was already exposed since the issue went all the way to the European Parliament and the Chair of the Committee on Culture and Education had raised concerns about violations of Gavriels freedom of expression.

Around the same time, officials at the Ministry of Education spotted a blurb in the English Language Textbooks (Oxford University Press) for Lyceum which read Turkeys greatest hero, and included a photo of Atatrk. This apparently rattled some high-ranking officials who issued a memo to schools to tear off that particular page. As the Ministry scrambled to save face, they decided to withdraw the book and order an investigation into decision-making procedures. Throughout all of these, ELAM insisted on censuring Gavriel and ridiculed those who condemned tearing off the pages of the book.

In Al-Jazeeras scathing video The Cyprus Papers, the (now former) head of the Cyprus Parliament was secretly recorded raising his wine glass and winking to seal the deal as a prominent lawyer explains in another scene: This is Cyprus! The context was the orchestration of a fake backroom deal where undercover journalists investigated whether Cypriot lawyers and officials would break the law in order to provide a passport to a shady billionaire character through the so-called Cyprus Investment Program. The answer was: absolutely.

After Al-Jazeera dropped the video, Anastasiades government scuttled to cancel the program and run an investigation. While the President distanced himself from the fiasco, his Golden Passports connections through the family law firm have been called out by anti-corruption groups.

But Anastasiades remains fully exposed: a European Parliament draft resolution on the Pandora Papers deplored his specific naming in the papers which provide financial documents linking political leaders to fishy transactions. The depth of the corruption problem in Cyprus has been duly recorded in Makarios Drousiotis book The Gang. An investigative journalist, Drousiotis had a front seat at the 2013 Eurogroup deals and argues that Anastasiades prioritized the interests of his Russian oligarch clients instead of the well-being of his own people.

Drousiotis was scheduled to appear on a national TV program after the Pandora Papers revelations strengthened his argument in The Gang which is still curiously ignored by the local mediahis appearance was canceled at the last minute due to scheduling conflicts.

Interestingly, in the summer of 2020, a few months before publication of The Gang, Drousiotis reported that he had been the victim of years-long surveillance into his documents and home security system. Drousiotis upcoming book Crime in Crans-Montana seals the deal: it argues that Anastasiades tanked the talks and that he was the one who proposed the two-state solution; an anathema to Greek Cypriots.

These revelations are not your average type of clientelism that has been battering Cypriot life and politics for centuries. They put Cyprus squarely on the level of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government the way Sarah Kendzior describes USA politics in Hiding in Plain Sight. Notably, ELAM voted with Anastasiades party against registering the issue of Pandora Papers for Parliamentary discussion.

There have been glimpses of hope: Os Dame, (meaning enough!) a loosely connected network of progressive youth groups, organized rallies condemning government corruption and racist politics. In February 2021, the police used a water cannon to disperse their peaceful protest causing severe injuries and the partial blindness of a singer. Gavriel captured the scene: the Minister of Justice and Public Order (until recently, a close friend of Anastasiades daughters) standing over the singers wounded body.

All of these find ELAM in prime position: their rhetoric infiltrates the highest levels of government while they maintain their opposition to Anastasiades handling of the Cyprus problem. In the meantime, they can continue feeding off of the nihilism and disillusionment that has been eroding Greek Cypriot society that comes with the realization that the national interest is secondary to some politicians own self-interest.

This article is brought to you by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). Through their research, CARR intends to lead discussions on the development of radical right extremism around the world. Rantt has been partnered with CARR for 3 years. Weve published over 150 articles from CARRs network of PhDs, historians, professors, and experts analyzing extremism and combating disinformation.

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The Rise Of Far-Right Educational Censorship And Corruption In Cyprus - Rantt Media

There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.

The Aspen Institutes Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.

With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the groups marketing materials claim, Traditional media is failing. Disinformation is flourishing. Its time for a new kind of media. The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.

And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platforms role in spreading misinformation.

The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harpers, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo.

Its a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research, he writes. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of toxicity on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.

As Bernstein argues, As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.

Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the infodemic they claim is upon us.

The Aspen Institutes commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the commissions advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his sites users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Bidens laptop just before the 2020 election.

Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.

The commissions co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the national anthem. Ginsburgs criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared.

Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett, who last week was convicted on criminal charges related to the staging of the attack, was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whining to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle).

Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment bonkers.

The Aspen Commissions report says there is no such thing as an arbiter of truth, and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves with decidedly mixed results for some time.

Consider the fact that Russiagate, a yearslong effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Bidens laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Bidens chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.

And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvards Shorenstein Center used the New York Posts story on Hunter Bidens laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions.

The lesson that the centers leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns. In other words, the suppression of information deemed by experts to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was designed to cause conversation its not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.

But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of chief information censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?

Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Barack Obama, boasted about creating an echo chamber in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obamas Iran nuclear deal.

It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movements major actors.

As Bernstein noted, in some sense the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations. The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trumps war against fake news.

Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: peoples attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isnt to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information.

Their record of late Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has not been stellar. It would be far better for the health of the information ecosystem that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. Instead, they are powers handmaidens.

From Commentary

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Inside the hypocrisy of media manipulators, censors who claim to fight misinformation - New York Post

Students shouldnt need to be speaking up on behalf of their right to books, and yet, in todays America, its students who are being forced to defend books about people of color, about queer people, and about inclusivity. We saw this in York, Pennsylvania, earlier this fall. We saw it in Downers Grove, Illinois, where Proud Boys showed up to a school board meeting, and that group, along with other politically-aligned censorious groups, were the reason meeting rules at the district were changed. This week, its students in Ankeny, Iowa the tenth fastest growing community in the U.S. who are demanding books remain accessible in school libraries.

The Ames Tribune covered the student comments at the latest board meeting, including this one from high school junior Natalie Jasso:

Being who I am and growing up in my community and my family, Ive had to deal with my own adversities because I am a bisexual African American young woman, she said. The looks I get from other parents, the whispers that I get in classthe most common phrase I receive is, You have two moms? with the most disgusted look on their face.

She continued, As a teenager who grew up with negative feedback in both racial and LGBTQ issues in the community of Ankeny all my life, reading books like All Boys Arent Blue and other great literary works that hit these topics really hard have really helped me acknowledge who I am and what I hope my community can be and what it means to me.

Read through the rest of the student comments, as they highlight precisely whats been said elsewhere, but from the mouths of those directly impacted by these challenges.

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More, the article itself represents what The New York Times explores in a recent piece about the things being ignored at school board meetings when political discourse over issues like masks and library books. Beyond the realities of living through a global pandemic which has killed nearly 800,000 in the U.S. alone, these meetings and the focus concerned citizens are taking is ignoring the reality of the twin student mental health crisis and extreme pressure school teachers, support staff, and other employees are having.

You want to jump up and say, This is not really what we need to be talking about! said Deborah Wysocki, who teaches 8th grade science, to The New York Times. We really need to be talking about the fact that there are 29 students in a room that holds 24. Or we need to be talking about the fact that your learning support students children who need the attention of education assistants arent getting it so that those assistants can go babysit kids in the auditorium who dont have a substitute.

This pressure from the buzzword mafia is not only creating burnout, frustration, and exacerbating mental health challenges in schools. Its happening in public libraries as well.

Last week, interim library director Martha Furman of the ImagineIF Library system in Kalispell, Montana, announced her departure from the library. Furman cites overreach from the board as why shes stepped away, and as the librarys senior librarian Sean Anderson said, hes not interested in moving into that position (or the also-vacant assistant director position) because the behavior of the board has now driven out two directors. He said that the board needs to value the work librarians do and be there to support them, rather than support their own political agendas, religious beliefs, and other affiliations.

The vice chair of the ImagineIF library board said he had no idea how library collection development worked, but he had a lot of opinions about it. According to the Daily Inter Lake:

[Vice chair Doug] Adams further questioned the librarys affiliation with the American Library Association, an organization he sees as having a radical leftist agenda disguised as intellectual freedom.

My goal is to disassociate with them completely and rewrite policies, Adams said.

Ones goals on a library board should be to support the library in its role as a place to provide information and access to information freely, without judgment or hindrance. Its not to rewrite policies.

School and library employees have been in a pressure cooker for years, with the pandemic only amplifying the systemic issues that have been ignored. And now, rather than address those issues, parents aligned with groups dedicated to anti-critical race theory and anti-mask agendas are only making progress more and more impossible. Its going to continue to get worse, and were going to continue seeing some of the most well-educated, hard-working, dedicated, and severely underpaid people in the workforce leaving these roles and choosing new jobs where they dont have to fear for their lives leaving a school board meeting.

Before digging into this weeks book challenges and censorship, which offers a mixed bag of good news and not-good news, its worth sharing this piece from The Washington Post about the continued growth of news deserts across the U.S. This matters because of the stories being missed, the issues being overlooked that are big issues in some communities but not big enough for major papers to cover, and because of how the growth of book challenges and censorship is linked to the loss of local news.

As always, here is our toolkit for how to fight book challenges. If youve got ten minutes or ten hours this month, you can do something to ensure intellectual freedom a First Amendment right remains intact.

Two more important reads for the week that are worth highlighting on their own include this piece from George M. Johnson on their book being banned in ten states and Ashley HopePrez on what happened after her book was challenged and banned in Texas.

And this is worthy of a whole deep dive in and of itself, but absolutely essential reading: the dark money behind the anti-critical race theory fervor.

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Students, Teachers, and Librarians are Fed Up With Book Challenges: This Weeks Censorship News, Dece... - Book Riot

The White House is seen at sunrise, from the South Lawn Driveway in Washington, U.S, December 7, 2021. REUTERS/Tom Brenner

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WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The White House will launch an initiative on Wednesday to award grants to innovators working on technology to bolster democracy by developing tools that enhance privacy or circumvent censorship, a White House official told Reuters.

A total of $3.75 million will be awarded to winners of the grants, the official said.

The project, part of U.S. President Joe Biden's Dec. 9-10 "Summit for Democracy," aims to promote democratic values "in the face of asymmetries in the way democratic and autocratic actors leverage and derive value from emerging technologies," the White House will say in its announcement.

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As part of the program, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with the United Kingdom to offer grants to advance and boost the adoption of technology that promotes privacy and protects intellectual property.

The Open Technology Fund will offer grants to international applicants for technology that enables content-sharing and communication without an Internet or cellular connection, with the goal of bypassing an internet shutdown.

Finally, regional competitions in Democratic countries will identify entrepreneurs that create and advance technologies that foster democracy.

More than 100 world leaders have been invited to the White House's virtual Democracy event, which aims to help stop the erosion of rights and freedoms worldwide. China and Russia were not invited.

(This story officially corrects second paragraph to show total award amount will be $3.75 million)

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Reporting by Alexandra AlperEditing by Sonya Hepinstall

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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White House to fund tech to evade censorship and increase privacy - Reuters