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The light is beginning to fade in downtown Beirut on the first Friday of Ramadan.

While the original ancient souk was flattened in the civil war, remnants of medieval walls and the bullet-ridden facades of French influenced mansions remain, jostling with soulless modern buildings.

Between Starbucks, Virgin Megastores and Cinema City, theres little to distinguish this part of town from any other city in the word but on a hazy golden evening the plaza outside is a good place for families and teenagers to kill time before its dark enough to break their fast.

The cinema is also a favourite for whiling away the hours without thinking about food and drink. Yet moviegoers who had been looking forward to seeing Wonder Woman, the latest offering from Warner Brothers and the DC Extended Comics Universe, have come away disappointed.

I had to go see a romantic film instead. I was the only boy in the room, 14-year-old Rami said, grimacing.

On Wednesday the Lebanese authorities officially banned Wonder Woman from cinemas,despite the fact posters advertising the film are dotted around the city, there have been trailers for it before other movies and advance screenings were held on Monday and Tuesday.

An employee at the Beirut Souks Cinema City said that management had taken down posters after an emailed government order, instructing staff to refund people who had bought tickets when they arrived.

Although Lebanon is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East (ranking 98th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index) theres still a lot that doesnt make it past the governments censorship bureau. Reasons for banning art, books and other media range from content deemed sexually explicit to work that could inflame sectarian tensions; the only constant is a blanket ban on anything originating from Israel.

The neighbouring countries are technically still at war, and while Lebanons censorship laws are vaguely written and outdated, Wonder Woman fell foul of the authorities because the lead actor Gal Gadot is Israeli.

Wonder Woman Social Teaser

Despite the fact films starring Godot in the same role (such as Batman vs Superman) have previously aired in Lebanon without an issue, the hype with which Wonder Woman was anticipated, and Godots starring role, brought the film to the General Securitys attention.

Its because shes the main star of this film, it freaked some people out, said Anthony Sargon, a dual Lebanese-American national who runs The Comic Stash, Beiruts leading comic bookstore.

Its never been an issue before. Natalie Portman is Israeli and all her films come out here. Its also so unusual to ban something after its already come out... The film already made it past the censorship bureau, he added.

I think some vocal minority, probably some religious group, got flustered about it and started putting pressure on the government once they heard about it.

Godot has attracted particular controversy because she served in the Israeli army. Social media posts from 2006 surfaced recently in which she allegedly proclaimed unequivocal support for Israeli forces in that summers war with Hezbollah a conflict which, although short, killed 1,200 Lebanese civilians and decimated Beirut and south Lebanons infrastructure.

I think its a message Lebanon can send to Israel, passer-by Nawal said outside Cinema City. Its not about Gal Gadot as a person. And its not about banning anything an Israeli touches, that would be silly.

But this is a high-profile movie and it is our way of saying, We reject you and your outlook in the same way thatin Israel, Arab stuff is banned. They censor the deaths of Lebanese and Palestinians all the time.

General Security, the bureau for censorship, and the state Shura Council did not immediately return The Independents requests for comment.

Its absurd what happened, said Gino Raidy, an executive member of MARCH, a Lebanese freedom of expression NGO. To turn around and retroactively ban something once it has already been given the OK. Theres nothing remotely political about the film.

Its kind of good that Wonder Woman has kicked up such a fuss. Warner Brothers will lose some money, sure, but the real victims of the censorship bureau are local Lebanese artists and filmmakers.

If you want to watch Wonder Woman, you will download it. Its local art that suffers because it has no other market.

Lebanons decision is unlikely to dent Hollywood profits: the female-directed, critically acclaimed film is expected to smash initial box office predictions to take in $175m(136m)worldwide.

Many films that get banned on their cinema release are often still sold in Lebanon when they come out on DVD something Raidy anticipates will happen with Wonder Woman.

They just dont look at the big picture. Its exasperating, Raidy continued.

The Israeli ban is a clear example of that. An Israeli person could be the biggest pro-Palestinian activist on the planet, but he and his books and his speeches will be banned here, just because of his birthplace.

MARCH, like many freedom of expression advocates, is worried that the sudden banning of the film from cinemas ostensibly because of the political views of an actor sets a dangerous precedent for censorship in future.

I think the censors will be more hawkish after this. Its a slippery slope, Comic Stashs Anthony Sargon said.

In my opinion its totally wrong and it seems the majority of people are against it. If you want to boycott the film, thats fine, but give people the choice.

Read the original here:
Wonder Woman and a dangerous precedent for censorship in Lebanon - The Independent

The Turkish governments dominance over TV and print media and its intimidation of critical journalists with arbitrary detentions and trials is well known.

Less known is a sweeping campaign of misinformation orchestrated by bogus fact-checking groups with ties to the government that propagate explosive claims: The Armenian genocide is a lie; the government didnt try to censor Wikipedia; thousands of government employees who were fired for political reasons have an effective appeals procedure.

These fake fact-checkers aim to refute critical stories about Turkeys government even when they contain verified facts.

Sarphan Uzunolu, a media studies lecturer at Istanbuls Kadir Has University, says Turkey established a post-truth regime before it became the word of the year in 2016. The regime has provided unique contributions to the field, he adds, such as propagandists use of the fact-checking title for political purposes.

Bengi Ruken Cengiz, a doctoral researcher and an editor at Turkeys first and genuine fact-checking service, DogrulukPayi.com, concurs that the popularity of fact-checking made it an appealing format for partisans trying to gain the moral high ground.

Enter Fact Check Armenia.

Fact Check Armenia

Turkey officially denies the Armenian Genocide, conducting campaigns and lobbying efforts against recognition of the genocide worldwide, especially in the United States.

It is aided in this goal by FactCheckArmenia.com, a site with ties to government-affiliated organizations that peddles misinformation about the death of more than a million Armenians.

Last year an aerial stunt spelled out 101 YEARS OF GENO-LIE, and promoted the website FACT CHECK ARMENIA.COM in the skies of Manhattan. The website was also advertised on Google results for search queries on Armenian Genocide.

FactCheckArmenia.com does not reveal who actually owns or runs the website. The whois records, which show ownership of registered websites, are hidden via a company in Bahamas. But their Facebook page say they are funded by the Turkic Platform. That platform, with similarly undeclared owners, is an NGO based in Istanbul according to the Turkish pro-government media, but many activities seem to take place in the United States.

The fact sheets provided on the FactCheckArmenia.com take a firmly pro-Turkish stance. This is most visible in the use of the word relocation, that mirrors Turkeys official narrative, instead of acknowledging orders for the forced deportation of Armenians that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Many other claims, such as No Armenians were harmed of the April 24, 1915 arrests, are simply untrue given that 79 of the first group of 235 intellectuals were reportedly killed.

The individuals who promoted the genocide-denying campaign in the U.S. left trails that connect the Fact Check Armenia project directly to the Ankara government.

Ayhan zmekik, the spokesperson for the Fact Check Armenia, and also for the Turkic Platform, is the founder of the Turkish American Youth and Education Foundation. The organization has good access to government officials, as zmekik later took a role in the AK Partys U.S. outreach activities. In 2015, zmekik produced an interview with President Erdogans son Bilal Erdogan for Fact Check Armenias sister project, LetHistoryDecide. The site was promoted by Turkeys Minister for Foreign Affairs Mevlt avuolu, the Turkish embassy in D.C. and ambassador Serdar Kl, Turkish consulates, and also by the ruling AK Party.

Derya Taskin, who organized the Manhattan stunt, was then the president of Turkish Institute for Progress (TIP), one of the prime Turkish lobbying organizations in the U.S. She also sits on the executive board of the Turkish-American Steering Committee (TASC) which organized the LetHistoryDecide rallies. Back in Turkey, Taskin was considered to run for a parliamentary seat from Turkeys ruling AK Party in the province of Afyon.

Ms. Taskin initially denied being involved with the project, but when provided with her own quote from an article on Turkeys state-run news agency that TIP organized the aerial stunt, she declined to reply further. Mr. zmekik, and the organizations he is affiliated with, did not respond to our requests for comment.

Fact Check Armenia also uses paid campaigns on other news organizations to spread its misinformation. Using the PR Newswire service, Fact Check Armenia managed to publish a paid story on Reuters in April 2015 that claimed Russia was behind the Armenian Genocide commemoration efforts that article was later deleted without correction. On the same day, TASC published an open letter, again paid as an ad on The Washington Post, that disputes the genocide and promotes the other denial website, LetHistoryDecide.org.

Turkeys English-language media outlets, such as public broadcaster TRT World TV and the pro-government newspaper Daily Sabah pursue the same objective improving Turkeys image abroad said Koray Kaplca, also an editor at DogrulukPayi. But in the name of national interest these outlets can turn into pure propaganda tools for the ruling party.

Case in point, Fact-Checking Turkey.

Fact-Checking Turkey

Just like Fact Check Armenia, FactCheckingTurkey.com, launched in 2016, is not a fact-checking service. Instead, it is a project to counter articles critical of Turkeys government.

Unlike nonpartisan fact-checkers, FactCheckingTurkey does not use a transparent methodology to adjudicate claims. Conclusions are usually reached by making reference to government statements.

Officials statements are often the only source and are treated as the ultimate truth, Kaplca said.

The recent article, Story behind Wikipedia ban in Turkey, is a case in point: An unnamed Turkish state official is the only source used to completely debunk nine global media outlets news reports about Turkeys censorship of the online encyclopaedia. The article even contends that a representative of Wikipedia privately confirmed the same unnamed state officials story saying the exact opposite of what the executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, stated publicly.

Yet, some counterclaims are more dangerous than others. On Twitter, the group recently targeted Amnestys report on Turkeys post-coup purge.

Based on 61 interviews, Amnesty concluded that in spite of the clear arbitrariness of the dismissal decisions, there is no effective appeal procedure for public sector workers against their expulsions. A commission proposed in January to assess the cases lacks both the independence and the capacity to make it effective. It is yet to start operating.

FactCheckingTurkey countered this with a month-old speech by a presidential advisor, Mehmet Uum, on a TV show, saying that an appeal commission is expected to start out soon.

In fact, the members of the commission have already been appointed. The seven-member commission, chaired by Justice Ministrys deputy undersecretary, is expected to face a barrage of 200,000 appeals in its two-year term. Yet, none of these developments addresses Amnestys warnings about its independence or effectiveness.

There are two main reasons these propaganda projects arent real fact-checkers, Cengiz said.

First, the claims that are chosen for analysis should be verifiable. Second, the fact checks should rely on more than one publicly available, preferably unbiased, source of information.

To debunk Amnestys report, Fact Checking Turkey offers a political argument instead of scrutinizing the effectiveness of the commission. And in the Wikipedia case, they rely entirely on an unnamed official while publicly available sources, such as Wikipedias page history, do not support their counterclaims.

With such sloppy research and no advertisements, how do Turkeys fake fact-checkers operate? A recently leaked cache of government emails provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse at their methods.

Last October, a Marxist hacker collective, The Red Hack, leaked the personal email archive of Turkeys Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdogans son-in-law. The email archive featured the budget for a think-tank, Bosphorus Global, to be run by a pro-Erdogan columnist Hilal Kaplan and her spouse. However, the biggest part of the costs were servers, firewalls, network infrastructure and the salaries of web designers and software developers.

Kaplan, Bosphorus Global and Fact-Checking Turkey did not respond to our requests for comment.

To date, Bosphorus Global has set up at least 20 projects in six languages, including a TV programme on the public broadcaster, TRT, dedicated to refuting criticism about the Turkish government. However, most of these projects initially appeared anonymous. The groups first project, GununYalanlari.com (Lies of the day) acknowledged its connection with the Bosphorus Global only to debunk news stories about an expensive waterside mansion alleged to be used as their headquarters. The leaked emails not only confirmed the existence of said mansion, but also that money came from Berat Albayrak.

Uzunolu credits this type of political propaganda for consolidating the governing AK partys support base and claiming the high ground against challengers.

Yet these fact-checkers are not a match for their global counterparts, he says.

The way they define themselves, with such partisanship and by picking sides, damage the truth the most.

Read more:
These fake 'fact-checkers' are peddling lies about genocide and censorship in Turkey - Poynter (blog)

Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed a federal judge Wednesday for ordering the pro-life group, the Center for Medical Progress, to remove its latest video from YouTube.

Last week, a law firm representing the Center for Medical Progress released a video recorded by the pro-life group showing Planned Parenthood employees using gruesome terms to describe abortion procedures.

A judge previously blocked the Center for Medical Progress from releasing the undercover footage its filmmakers recorded of conversations that took place at the National Abortion Federations 2014 and 2015 annual conferences. NAF argued that the videos publication could endanger its members. The pro-life group is currently appealing that injunction.

The video released by the law firm was described as a preview of the footage from those conferences that is under injunction. Soon after the video was published, U.S. District Judge William Orrick said it violated the injunction and ordered it removed from YouTube.

The video has since been removed from YouTube, as well as other social media websites. At press time, the video was available on Newsbusters:

On his show, Carlson read quotes from the video, including a Planned Parenthood employee who described a fetus as a tough little object and a member of the Consortium of Abortion Providers who said, An eyeball just fell down into my lap, and that is gross!

Wed love to show you the video, but we cant, because of a man called William Orrick, Carlson said.

Carlson said that Orrick is a massive donor to Democrats and that he intentionally suppressed the video. He argued that Orricks claim means the First Amendment doesnt exist.

Its an atrocity and its gotten very little attention, Carlson said.

Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, a pro-life group, told Carlson that the effort to remove the video by NAF and Planned Parenthood shows us that theyre very afraid of whats on these tapes.

Rose said that the video is horrific and so difficult to hear but that its exactly what the public should hear, Tucker, because Planned Parenthood, the very abortionists that are laughing about what theyre doing on these tapes, are receiving half a billion dollars every single year from taxpayers.

Earlier this week, a coalition of pro-life groups sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe asking them to direct their respective departments to investigate allegations raised by the Center for Medical Progress videos that Planned Parenthood trafficked aborted fetal body parts.

Planned Parenthood has denied illegal conduct.

Original post:
Tucker Carlson slams censorship of Planned Parenthood video - TheBlaze.com

Wikipedia has made it much harder for governments to block access to individual articles.

AFP/Getty Images

In Iranas you might expectinternet content about womens rights, sex, and religion are censored and filtered. Wikipedia articles on the topic used to be blocked. But in 2015, people in Iran were suddenly able to access Wikipedia posts that were previously censoredall because Wikipedia made a simple switch.

Wikipedia used to operate under both HTTP or HTTPS. With HTTPS, the information in your browser is encrypted. People can see what site youre on, but not which specific page of that site when you use HTTPS. For example, someone eavesdropping on the network could see that youre on Facebook, but not which ex from high school youre looking at.

So if a country didnt want you looking at, say, the Wikipedia page about Tiananmen Square, it could just block that single article. That is, until the Wikimedia Foundation switched over to being completely HTTPS in 2015. Now, if a nation wants to stop its citizens from reading some Wikipedia pages, it has to block the entire site. Without encryption, governments can more easily surveil sensitive information, creating a chilling effect, and deterring participation, or in extreme cases they can isolate or discipline citizens, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement back in 2015.

In May, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard released a study on the effects of the Wikimedia Foundations switch to HTTPS-only. For the most part, according to the report, it has been positive for the fight against censorship. Wikipedia has repeatedly found itself the target of government censors, the authors of the study wrote. But the sites efforts seem to be working. Our research suggests that on balance, there is less censorship happening now than before the transition to HTTPS-only content delivery in June 2015. This initial data suggests the decision to shift to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge, the study says.

To conduct the study, the Berkman Center used both client-side data and server-side data. Client data comes from the perspective of users around the globe, and server data deals with traffic coming in to Wikimedia servers.

The researchers focused on 15 different countries that had histories of either specifically blocking Wikipedia or general internet censorship. The study found that the primary countries that are censoring Wikipedia at least somewhat are China, Thailand, and Uzbekistan.

The Chinese-language Wikipedia project began in May 2001. Its first brush with censorship came in 2004, when the government blocked the project during the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Currently, the entire Chinese Wikipedia site is blocked. Chinas government its own official digital encyclopedia in 2018. A digitized version of the print version that has been around since the 1970s, it will contain 300,000-plus entries made by more than 20,000 scholars.

China is an extreme case, but other countries have dabbled in Wikipedia blockage, too. While states in America have begun to legalize marijuana, Russia still has a problem allowing its citizens to merely look at articles on the subject. Roskomnadzor, the federal agency that supervises electronic media in Russia, blocked all of Russian Wikipedia, aka ru.wikipedia.org, in August 2015 after Wikipedia editors refused to remove an article about cannabis. Because this happened after the switch to HTTPS, the government had to block all access to Wikipedia, instead of just the page. However, the site was restored a few hours later after Roskomnadzor said the article met its standards after being edited, even though Wikipedia editors claimed the article hadnt been changed.

The study concludes that while Russias internet censorship at large continues to grow, the government has not been interfering with Wikipedia. Clients based in Russia were able to access Wikipedia and its subdomains, and the network request round trip was the fastest out of all the countries in the study.

Go here to read the rest:
Wikipedia Seems to Be Winning Its Battle Against Government Censorship - Slate Magazine (blog)

What do we call it when a state broadcaster bans a song critical of the government? Censorship? No, not in Iran right here in Britain. Right now, in fact.

The BBC claims that reggae band Captain SKAs Liar Liar, which was at the top of the iTunes chart last week, breaks impartiality rules during the election. The song is about Theresa May, you see.

The BBCs stance sounds straightforward but something isn't quite right. Its radio stations will report that Liar Liar reached No 1 on iTunes, but refuse to play it. This matters, as playing a song because it tops the charts is a different rationale to playing it because a DJ likes it. The former decision is driven by public choice, the latter is a matter of personal taste. The former shouldnt really be up for debate.

I asked Ofcom what they thought. They couldn't offer a view since it hadn't been aired yet. I went through their rules covering elections (section 6) and found nothing to justify the ban. The same goes for BBC guidelines. The song doesnt advocate for one party over another; it is merely critical of the Government. I found nothing to suggest that any music with a political message cannot be played during elections.

In other words, the BBC has banned a political song not because of rules but because it doesnt want to anger the Government. That is outrageous in itself. But the real problem isnt just one banned song it's that the BBCs rules on impartiality have been broken. And moreover, that BBC bosses don't want a fight with the Tory Government. The ban on Liar Liar illustrates the problem with the prevailing culture at the top of the BBC.

The job of a journalist should be to get to the truth, not worry about impartiality. It should be to serve the audience, not care for how politicians feel they are being treated.

The problem with BBC news journalism in this instance is twofold: first, that producers feel they are being balanced by giving each side equal time. That is a convenient illusion. A news programme can be biased even if it offers two sides equal time, merely by prioritising one story over another.

On Tuesday morning Corbyn briefly forgot his costings for a key policy in an interview. Theres no doubt it was a gaffe. But the BBC ran it as their top story even at 10pm, on a day when Osborne slammed the PM over her key manifesto pledges. In any other universe a former Chancellor criticising a former close colleague would be big news. Instead the BBC led with a minor gaffe from the morning.

This isn't a one-off either. For years BBC management didnt even acknowledge the absurdity of having a balanced debate on climate change because, apparently, the weight of scientific opinion counted for nothing. Now, after acknowledging mistakes, BBC producers avoid accusations of bias by ignoring the issue entirely. Its coverage of climate change on political programmes is almost non-existent. Its barely featured anywhere this election.

General Election polls and projections: June 1

This isnt to say all attempts at balance are useless. I know plenty of journalists and producers who try their best to offer all sides of the story. But sometimes false balance does no one any favours.

The second problem is that BBC executives lack the courage to cross the Government. Again, this isnt new, but its now a glaring problem.

May has been so shameless in exploiting the media that some journalists have become rightly exasperated. Why does [Theresa May] go around just saying things that arent true?, Channel 4s Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked David Davis last night. He had no answer. Other than the one interview by Andrew Neil, there has been no such grilling across the BBC.

Our national broadcaster suffers from weak executives who dont have the courage to take on the Government. It has plenty of excellent journalists but the corporate culture fails them. And in turn that fails the vast majority of its audience.

In the past a BBC executive may have defended playing Captain Skas song by saying they were simply reflecting popular public opinion.

Read more here:
The BBC is censoring political content by banning 'Liar Liar' but not because it is biased towards the Government - The Independent