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Recently YouTube has been swamped with controversy over a new filtering feature. Creating a restricted mode, the web streaming service was hoping to provide content for schools and more educational purposes.

However in its design, YouTube ran into a problem. The censoring feature, targeting videos with violent and sexual content, ended up hiding videos featuring LGBT themes. Examples include gay weddings, vlogs, and a variety of non-explicit content. On discovering this, various content creators, such as YouTube icon Tyler Oakley, expressed their frustration over social media, and YouTube was forced to backtrack.

This raises the broader issue of censorship on YouTube, something that is most assuredly bad.

A representative from YouTube, Johanna Wright, vice president of YouTube's product management, issued a statement saying The bottom line is that this feature isnt working the way it should. Were sorry and were going to fix it. And it looks as though YouTube is working to un-restrict these videos, as many creators who have complained have found their videos back to normal.

Most YouTube users arent watching from a school, or area where restricted mode would come into play. So the actual effects of this censorship are small. However this does raise the question of censorship on YouTube. After all, YouTube found its success because of the freedoms it gave creators. YouTube thrives on its differentiation from the culture of traditional television. Seeing censorship take over this medium known for its creativity is concerning to say the least.

Censorship isnt new on YouTube, theres been a gradual progression toward restrictions on content, however this is the first time censorship has affected creators with non-controversial content.

An example of censorship based on controversy happened last month to the current number one YouTuber, PewDiePie. Renowned for his video game commentary and more recently for his vlogs, the Swedish YouTuber found himself accused of being anti-Semitic after making radical jokes about the death of Jews. Given this bad publicity, Disney ended its affiliation with him, and YouTube stripped him of his status as recommended across its site, slashing his ad revenue as a way of trying to censor his content. In fact, YouTube went so far as to cancel his upcoming season on YouTube Red, simply for his comedy.

While anti-Semitism is certainly wrong, Pewdiepie is no Neo-Nazi. Hes an entertainer trying to make jokes. This sort of comedy wouldnt succeed on television, which is why YouTube is such an excellent medium for it; howeve,r even YouTube is beginning to let censorship slip into its policies. And while Anti-Semitism jokes arent ideal, and public backlash is certainly necessary to keep creators from crossing the line, YouTubes selling point is how its creators have more freedom than traditional media outlets.

Placing restrictions on what creators can do or say on YouTube is certainly the websites right, it's responsible for the content it displays. However, just because it possesses that right doesnt mean it should implement it. If individuals want to boycott or denounce PewDiePie for his humor, so be it. But when it comes to dilemmas like this its very hard to draw the line. As a result, when censorship enters the picture, individual expression suffers.

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COLUMN: YouTube must not censor - Indiana Daily Student

This month, the rulers of Pakistan stepped up a campaign against blasphemy, frightening news from an Islamic nation where insulting the official religion is a capital crime.

From an American perspective, this would merely be another, distant nations horror if it werent for one aspect of the story.

As part of the crackdown, Pakistani leaders have asked executives of Facebook and Twitter to help them help root out people who post blasphemous material on social media sites from anywhere in the world.

In response, Facebook said in mid-March that it planned to send a team to Pakistan to discuss the governments request. Really?

And this week, Pakistans interior ministry claimed Facebooks administrators have been blocking and removing blasphemous content from the site. Really?!

Its heartening to read that Facebook said in a statement that, in considering government requests, it keeps in mind the goal of protecting the privacy and rights of our users.

However, the situation calls for stronger assurance that Facebook will do its part to defend the basic human values of free thought and free expression.

Its understood that social networking companies have a complicated challenge in dealing with an array of cultures and standards of freedom in countries all over the world.

But Facebook and Twitter or any American company facing pressure such as this from Pakistani leaders must bluntly refuse to cooperate in any way with a repressive regimes efforts to forcibly squelch free expression and dissent, even if their refusal means having access to their sites blocked in those countries.

As Michael De Dora, the main representative to the United Nations from the non-profit Center for Inquiry, said: We do not want to see the people of Pakistan cut off from such a powerful and far-reaching platform as Facebook. But we hope Facebook makes clear that it will not compromise its users safety or freedom through disclosure.

Pakistan is, sadly, far from the only country that doesnt understand the right to free speech that most Americans take for granted.

The Pew Research Center found last year that, as of 2014, 26 percent of the worlds countries and territories had laws or policies against blasphemy (that is, showing a lack of reverence for a god or sacred thing), and 13 percent had laws or policies against apostasy (the renunciation of a religion), the offenses calling for everything from fines to execution. Such laws are most common in the Middle East and North Africa.

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But Pakistans policies, and its leaders rhetoric, are worse than most. According to unofficial tallies, since 1990 at least 68 people have been killed there over allegations of blasphemy, including a provincial governor shot dead six years ago by a police guard who accused him of blasphemy after he defended a Christian woman who insulted the Prophet Muhammad; and currently about 40 people are on death row or serving life sentences for blasphemy. Last week, three bloggers were arrested on blasphemy charges.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif calls blasphemy an unpardonable offense.

Here, the unpardonable offense would be failing to push back against such backward thing. Facebook and Twitter should help to lead the push.

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Censorship in Pakistan hits home in the U.S. - LA Daily News

Under censorships nefarious grip, cinema becomes not just a driver of social justice but a sophisticated tool of oppression.

There is, however, a positive side effect of censorship: Sometimes it inspires filmmakers to be more experimental, innovative and free-thinking. Case in point: Poland after World War II.

Under the Communist regime, Polish authorities raged war on moviemakers who tried to reveal that the states ballyhoo about progress was nothing more than propaganda. Any critique of the Soviet Union or the Polish Peoples Republic was silenced. For a new generation of filmmakers, young people disillusioned by the sacrifices made during the war, these laws became an invitation to rebela cinematic revolution handed to them on a silver plate.

Polish censors, under the primary censorship board at Gwny Urzd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk (i.e. the Main Office for Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performances), were highly literary, capable of deciphering even the most sophisticated subversions in books, newspapers and other written formsbut they were quite impotent when it came to evaluating images. So beginning in 1957 with Andrzej Wajdas Kanal, Polish films started to develop and expand upon an intricate cinematic language of metaphors, allegories, symbols, poetic imagery and other means of non-verbal expression. In Kanals devastating final act, the dying fighters of the Warsaw Uprising represent different parts of Polish society, past and present. For censors, this sequence may have seemed like a condemnation of the insurrection.

Polish filmmakers were forced to learn how to say something without saying it directly, how to depict a reality that did not officially exist, says Ryszard Lenczewski, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer of Pawe Pawlikowskis Ida (shot together with ukasz al). Lenczewski began his career in 1970s, when the battle for Polish cinema was raging on many fronts. This was a responsibility we all felt: to create layered images, images with double meanings that dared viewers to interpret them differently.

Andrzej Wajdas 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds

Viewers were depended upon to be active participants, decoding hidden meanings. It was all in the detailslike using wider lenses to show things you would not be able to show any other way. Something may be occurring in the background, slightly blurred. Sometimes all the film needed was to not include something or someone in the frame. Or to show a person in an unbalanced manner, i.e. a drunken assistant to a town mayor in Ashes and Diamonds.

That film, Wajdas 1958 masterpiece shot by cinematographer Jerzy Wjcik, is filled with symbols and layered imagery portraying everything wrong with post-war Poland. It made the censors heads spin. They knew the material was dangeroussome of them tried to stop it from reaching a wider audiencebut ultimately had to back off. Unsurprisingly, some messages were too cryptic for international audiences to decipher. Yet a universal cinematic language resonated for viewers in different parts of the globe. In the films most famous scene, the protagonist lights glasses of vodka as if they were candles, and the world understood the symbolism.

Censors, perturbed by the growing international acclaim, grew more paranoid. After we finished The Wedding, the censors held the material for two or three weeks without uttering a word of explanation, remembers Sawomir Idziak, camera operator under cinematographer Witold Sobociski on that Wajda film. The Oscar-nominated cinematographer (Black Hawk Down) started his career at the end of 1960s. They supposedly watched the film shot by shot, comparing it to the novel by Stanisaw Wyspiaski on which it was based to see if something was added or missing in an attack of the Communist order.

Idziak shot Krzysztof Kielowskis 1988 film A Short Film About Killing. I shot the film in this hideous yellow-greenish color to subtly hint at the directors idea that the country could be a killer, just like the main character. I remember one reviewer in Cannes writing that because the screen assumes the color of urine, it encapsulates the reality of Communist Poland. That was beautiful.

Krzysztof Kielowskis A Short Film About Killing, shot by Sawomir Idziak

The paradox was that state funding of these films and the censors decisions on how they should be seen were intrinsically linked. The government valued art, and wanted to produce films, yet wanted art to be propagandisticso instead of denying moviemakers the ability to create movies, officials chose to marginalize those that they didnt agree with, or those who they suspected of being subversive. Polish films were huge outside of PolandAmerican auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola saw them as masterpiecesbut their directors sometimes had to be content for the titles to, domestically, only reach a handful of city intellectuals who were opposing the regime anyway, as Idziak puts it. The truth is, many of these internationally applauded films, now classics, were commercial failures in Poland.

2017 marks the 28th anniversary of the fall of Communism in Poland, and the beginnings of a differentperhaps harsher and less forgivingtype of censorship: the dictates of the commercial market. Yet Idziak and Lenczewski, both distinguished film educators, consider this a good test for their countrymen.

We had to work with many limitations and yet we managed to speak our own voices, says Idziak. Now, the limitation is only within yourself. MM

Darek Kuma is a cinephile, film journalist, translator, freelancer, husband, father and Camerimage Film Festival programmer, not necessarily in that order.

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Turning Censorship Into Symbolism: How State Censorship Defined and Strengthened Post-War Polish Cinema - MovieMaker Magazine

The Holland Brothers are a good-time, beer-drinking act, specializing in a mix of old country and blues styles, says Mark Holland. So the trio, consisting of Mark, his brother Mike, and bassist Billie Feather, were a natural fit for the Meadowmont Music Series, a small Chapel Hill event now in its second year.

But after being hired to play, the band suddenly found itself disinvited due to the content of a single song, one that is not in the trio's collective repertoire and which they were not even planning on playing. Ultimately, after being besieged by emails charging censorship,Meadowmont reversed course. But the episode highlights the sensitive atmospheresurrounding the mixture of politics and public events, one that promises to be ongoing in the arts-unfriendly Trump years.

About a month ago, Rollie Olin, a volunteer for the Meadowmont Music Series, contacted the brothers about playing at the event, and they agreed. Things got complicated soon thereafter. Mark Holland posted a new songan entirely solo efforton the website of their record label, something he and his brother often do. Called Trump Fools, the song grew out of his frustration with current political climate. A sample verse goes, Look at all the sheep/Lambs to the slaughter, y'all/He's a wolf in sheep's clothing/And his hands are small."

As he usually does, he sent out an email to his contact list to let people know hed posted a new song. Inadvertently, Rollie Olin had been added to the contact list, and shortly thereafter, Olin sent an email saying that the series is a nonpartisan event and that, because of his concerns about the song, the Holland Brothers performance had been canceled.

Because Olin had used the term we, Holland figured he was speaking on behalf of Meadowmont. He responded, I respect it if thats your decision, but the fact is, that song isnt a Holland Brothers song and wouldnt have been performed anywhere. Its just performed by me as a solo artist.

After a few days had passed without a response from Olin, Holland, incensed, posted about the situation on Facebook. As people began to weigh in via the post's comment thread, a clear consensus developed: the cancellation was ridiculous. Holland wrote back to Olin to let him know that the local community was supporting the band and that Chapel Hillians in general are deeply opposed to censorship; others wrote their own dissenting emails to Olin.

Finally, Holland heard from Bill Ferrell, manager of Meadowmont Community Association. When they talked, Holland explained to him that they had no plans to sing Trump Fools, and that were about as nonpartisan an act as you can get. Holland says Ferrell was sympathetic and only wanted to make things right again. Soon enough, the Brothers were back on the bill.

Bill was outstanding to intervene.He showed great respect for art and my right to create whatever I wanted to and post it, says Holland. Ferrell himself did not want to comment on the situation, but Holland notes the irony of the whole episode, even with the happy ending.

"This song is gonna get a lot more attention than it normally would have received," he says.

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Meadowmont Music Series Reverses Course on Cancelation After Local Outcry Against Censorship - The Independent Weekly

Twitter has upped its censorship game and is now blocking certain terms from showing up on the platforms built-in search engine. The added filters are part of the companys plans to reduce harassment on the service. Some of these filters were deployed earlier this month when users were given the option to mute certain types of accounts.

As with previous efforts to convert Twitter into a safe space, free from wrongthink and uncomfortable opinions, the company that once branded itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party has offered little transparency on the terms it filters out of its search engine. Furthermore, its enabled by defaultand the settings to disable safe search are hidden away on the Search page, so you wont find them with the rest of your account preferences.

Users on the platform were quick to discover how looking up certain terms returnedzero results. Examples of prohibited terms include porn, BDSM, sex, and kink. Other censored words include hentai, and nsfwneither of which show up in the search results. Curiously, racial slurs like the n-word and terms like jihad still show up unfiltered.

Over the weekend, the terms marijuana and cannabis were also filtered out out the search engine. Butcomplaints may have prompted the platform to uncensor the term, as it now shows up.

The filtering system doesnt even work as its developers intendedsensitive terms are filtered out on the Latest tab, but youll still find some of them in the Top tab. Twitters censorship is confusing and lacks the transparency necessary to be useful to users.

Twitter is well within its rights to implement safety features, but so far, theyve only hurt usability. After all, who uses Twitter search to look for porn?

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Twitter Censors Search Terms, Offers No Transparency and Mixed ... - Heat Street