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The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed over 42,000 people worldwide according to Johns Hopkins University, but the figure may be far from reality as countries like Turkmenistan take drastic steps to suppress information about the spread of pandemic.

A recent report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reveals that the central Asian country has banned the word Coronavirus as the country continues to deny any information on the spread of virus.

According to Turkmenistan Chronicle, one of the few sources of independent news, the state-controlled media are no longer allowed to use the word and it has even been removed from health information brochures distributed in schools, hospitals and workplaces.

There is no data available on the number of coronavirus patients in the country. A correspondent of Chronicles of Turkmenistan reports from the infectious diseases hospital in Ashgabat that a lot of patients with respiratory infections have been admitted to the hospital but all of them are officially diagnosed with acute respiratory viral infection.

According to journalists based in the capital, Ashgabat, who report for Radio Azatlyk, the Turkmen language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, people wearing face masks or talking about the coronavirus on the street, at bus stops or in lines outside shops are liable to be arrested by plainclothes police.

The Turkmen authorities have lived up to their reputation by adopting this extreme method for eradicating all information about the coronavirus, said Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSFs Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

However, a report by Turkmenistan Chronicle says, despite the official statements about no confirmed cases, large-scale prevention measures are underway in the country. In public places and bank officers people are provided with sanitizers to wipe their hands and are requested to use a mouth spray; at the train stations and at entry checkpoints in Ashgabat residents get their temperature taken; the municipal buses are disinfected with a chlorine solution. Even bus stops are washed with an unidentified sanitizer.

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Turkmenistan bans the word Coronavirus, wearing of masks, in a major censorship move - The Statesman

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Covid-19, the condition that first rose from a wet market in Wuhan, is now crippling a better part of the world. While China says that it is recovering and is returning to normalcy, it is worth noting that the country has time and again wiped evidence, manipulated the state media, and blatantly lied.

This has been the same way the country tackled the SARS outbreak hiding facts and silencing whistleblowers.

A leader of the WHO that recently visited China was in awe of the countrys miraculous recovery from the outbreak. I think the key learning from China is speed its all about the speed, said Dr. Bruce Aylward.

That has been true indeed. Whether it was building an emergency hospital in ten days or suppressing the news of the mysterious infection from December till January, the Chinese Communist Party was indeed swift.

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Heres a brief account of all the activity that took place prior to China officially acknowledging the fact that it was hit with an epidemic disease:

First, the government workers and officials of Wuhan kept mum when several people were falling sick and suffered from a set of common symptoms. Not a single official divulged the dire situation to any media personnel within the country.

Secondly, by December 25, Dr. Lu Xiaohong, who first recognized that some catastrophic was about to occur, hesitated to speak up to the authorities or media persons.

In China, journalists and their sources face a harsh action for speaking up about any concerning happenings in the country.

Had it not been so risky, Lu would have revealed the facts to at least one media outlet, if not higher authorities, who should have probably made the news public.

MORE:Viral video shows Police in China arriving at womans door, telling her to delete coronavirus post

Finally, when a group of whistleblowers tried to make it public knowledge that there was an infection ravaging the masses, they were arrested on grounds of circulating false rumors.

Whats more, eight of these whistleblowers have passed away from coronavirus infection. Finally, by December 31, China broke its silence and intimated the WHO about the to-be pandemic.

Four days after China revealed the Coronavirus outbreak to the WHO, it ended up sequencing the virus, and yet again, chose not to reveal the information immediately. So despite sequencing the virus on January 5th, the information was not out till January 11th, when the first coronavirus-related death surfaced.

MORE:Dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded for warning people of coronavirus on Weibo, has died

Now, despite publicly declaring the news of coronavirus infections, China went on to censor several keywords related to the outbreak on its highly controlled platform, WeChat.

According to an analysis by the University of South Hampton, it was revealed that China could have potentially manipulated the statistics of the number of coronavirus-infected people by as much as 67%.

The study estimates that by the end of February 2020 there was a total of 114, 325 COVID-19 cases in China. It shows that without non-pharmaceutical interventions such as early detection, isolation of cases, travel restrictions and cordon sanitaire the number of infected people would have been 67 times larger than that which actually occurred, reads an excerpt taken from the analysis.

MORE:China tells citizens to only share coronavirus news from state-run media, or face up to seven years in jail

The leading international NGO Reporters Without Borders also claims that Chinas lackadaisical attitude when it came to revealing the growth and spread of the Coronavirus could cost millions of lives around the globe.

Without the control and censorship imposed by the authorities, the Chinese media would have informed the public much earlier of the severity of the coronavirus epidemic, sparing thousands of lives and perhaps avoiding the current pandemic, argued the RSF.

Sadly, most social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are also blocked in China, meaning that the citizens cant even reach out to social media and share their angst with their fellow countrymen.

While tech-savvy individuals still browse the social media networks with the help of VPNs, they still remain silent about the surrounding happenings. Because in China, expressing dissent from the governments actions can end up causing costly repercussions.

Cut to a decade earlier, there was another epidemic, much like the coronavirus, that the Chinese government ended up successfully dealing with: The SARS pandemic.

China got away with manipulating the figures, consequences, and every possible detail of the epidemic; back then, the internet was still in its nascent stages, meaning that people did not have social media and other similar outlets to spread information.

While the WHO is simply blowing the trumpet of the Chinese government and its excellent measures in tackling the coronavirus outbreak, it must account for the blatant censorship and manipulation of the truth that takes place behind the scenes and the lives that it cost.

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The mounting human cost of Chinas coronavirus censorship - Reclaim The Net

Albanian journalists and cameramen reporting about COVID-19 Pandemics in Tirana, on 30 March 2020. Photo: LSA

Singling out Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic as especially worrying examples, ten human rights organisations including Index on Censorship and Reporters Without Borders have written to the Council of Europe and other official bodies, urging them to address the danger of governments misusing the coronavirus crisis to pursue authoritarian policies.

Several governments across Europe are already using the pandemic to claim extraordinary powers that can undermine democratic institutions, including the free press, the organisations said. We believe that some Council of Europe Member States are at risk of derogating from the European Convention on Human Rights, they noted.

Among the concerns expressed in the letter is an emergency law that aims to tackle false information by penalties of up to five years in jail, limits to press conferences introduced in several countries and an outright ban on them in Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Such measures must not be allowed to restrict media scrutiny of governments, the ten organisations say.

They say governments across the world have pushed the boundaries of what they are allowed to do during the COVID-19 crisis, adopting measures including the almost unchecked use of private data collected by mobile phone networks and, in some cases, use of facial recognition surveillance systems that were allegedly conceived before the crisis to tackle dissident activity.

Our organisations are concerned about the effects of enhanced surveillance measures introduced to monitor the spread of the virus, the letter said.

While we recognise the potential benefits in terms of combating the spread of the virus, the use of surveillance must have proper oversight and be clearly limited to tackling the pandemic, it added.

The letter has been signed by ARTICLE 19, the Association of European Journalists, AEJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, ECPMF, the European Federation of Journalists, EFJ, the Free Press Unlimited, FPU, Index on Censorship, the International Federation of Journalists, IFJ, International Press Institute, IPI and Reporters Without Borders, RSF.

The letter was published on the Council of Europe website.

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CoE Urged to Stop Countries Abusing Pandemic to Curb Freedoms - Balkan Insight

The producer of John Wick has been ordered to pay $2.4 million to Huayi Bros. in connection with a failed attempt to release the violent action film in China.

Huayi Bros. agreed in 2013 to pay the producer a $1.5 million minimum guarantee to distribute the film in China, provided the movie made it past the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the Chinese censorship body.

After the film was produced, in late 2014, state-run distributor China Film Group reported that the film was simply too violent to get a China release. Huayi Bros. asked the producer, a subsidiary of Basil Iwanyks Thunder Road Pictures, for the return of the $1.5 million.

That was the beginning of a conflict which is still ongoing five years later over whether the Chinese censorship agency had rejected the film, or if Huayi Bros. was merely refusing to exercise its considerable clout in China to push for a release because it feared the film would bomb.

Thunder Road refused the request to return the $1.5 million to Huayi Bros. In response, Huayi Bros. took the film back to China Film Group, which agreed to submit the film without edits to SARFT. In August 2015, SARFT screened the film and rejected it. Huayi Bros. then went back to Thunder Road to again insist on the return of the $1.5 million.

Thunder Road continued to refuse, which prompted Huayi Bros. to file an arbitration claim with the Independent Film and Television Alliance. After an unusually protracted arbitration hearing, which was held on 22 dates over the course of 18 months, arbitrator Michael R. Diliberto ruled in favor of Huayi Bros.

Considering the totality of the evidence, especially the fact that after Huayis efforts to obtain censorship approval for the theatrical release of the Picture in China, the Picture was ultimately rejected by SARFT for censorship purposes, the arbitrator finds that (Thunder Road) breached the (agreement) by failing to pay Huayi, Diliberto ruled.

Diliberto ordered Thunder Road to pay $1.5 million to Huayi Bros., plus more than $800,000 in attorneys fees.

On Friday, Thunder Roads attorneys filed a petition to vacate the award in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Thunder Roads attorney, Sonia Lee, contends that Huayi Bros. gave up on John Wick after the poor performance of two other Keanu Reeves films, Ronin 47 and Man of Tai Chi. They allege that Huayi Bros. tried to use the censorship provision as a pretext to wriggle out of the distribution deal.

The evidence in this case makes clear that Huayi has sufficient clout and influence to have the bigger boss at CFG issue a quota slot and to have SARFT do what Huayi wishes, Lee wrote in a filing last year. The same evidence makes clear that Huayi easily could have had CFG issue a quota slot in 2014 and have SARFT approve John Wick for release in China, albeit with some edits Had Huayi done what was supposed to have done in the first instance, Huayi along with (Thunder Road) would have made a tremendous amount of money, as did the distributors in all the other territories that released the movie and its sequel.

Neither John Wick nor its two sequels have been released in China.

More:
John Wick Producer Ordered to Pay Huayi Bros. Over Axed China Release - Variety

Apart from the devastating crash that Bitcoin is currently facing, another potential threat to the pioneer cryptocurrency and the entire crypto industry at large is censorship from giant tech companies like YouTube.

In a recent bout of censorship, two separate crypto YouTube channels had videos deleted temporarily.

The two YouTubers who had their videos deleted include Ivan on Tech (a crypto programmer) and The Moon (a crypto reporter and technical analyst).

Both responded to the matter via twitter saying that they had received several strikes from YouTube about Bitcoin being harmful content.

YouTube has a long history of censoring crypto content.

At the tail end of 2019, many crypto YouTubers including seasoned content creators like Nicholas Merten received content strikes from YouTube despite not uploading videos for days.

In a tweet, Merten said,

In response, The MoonCarl also replied in a tweet that acknowledged a similar move by YouTube on his channel.

Other channels like Nugget News received up to two content strikes in a single day with 50 videos being removed from the channel.

Saunders, the owner of Nugget News, expressed fears of the channel getting deleted from YouTube in a tweet that read,

Also affected was a Canadian Bitcoin educator with a channel called BTCSessions and Chriss Dunn a crypto and finance reporter.

Following the crypto purge of 2019 on YouTube, an outrage emerged on twitter to which YouTube replied saying that the decision to ban Bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos from its site was an error and the removed videos would be reinstated.

It might be argued that the move was meant to protect consumers from scams.

However, for most onlookers as well as the entire crypto community, the move does not make any sense especially since Google and Facebook already lifted the crypto advertising ban in 2018.

Invezz asked Mati Greenspan, the founder of Quantum Economics, about his opinion on whether the current bout of crypto censorship is as a result of the companys hidden agenda or the result of an internal error.

In his reply, Greenspan said that it is difficult to know for sure but many in the community feel that the censorship is international.

He adds,

We could only speculate on why they might want to censor crypto content, perhaps it threatens their current future business model in some way.

While speaking to Decrypt, a YouTube spokesman said,

With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call.When its brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.

However, with recent reports indicating a continuation of the crypto ban on YouTube, the reasons for deletion crypto-related videos remains to be anyones guess.

While YouTube hasnt responded to the recent bout of censorship and why its still affecting crypto-related channels, some on twitter have suggested moving crypto content to decentralized platforms that are censorship-resistant.

In reaction to last years crypto purge on YouTube, Greenspan together with several crypto YouTubers moved to boycott YouTube.

This time around, when asked whether there are any other viable decentralized alternatives for crypto YouTubers, Greenspan replied,

Im not sure there are any viable decentralized options at this point. For myself though, Ive preferred not to stream on YouTube for the time being and instead am hosting live streams on Periscope and Twitter.

Weighing in on the matter, Chris Burniske, a renowned crypto influencer, tweeted that such violations by companies like YouTube, will push suppliers and consumers away from platforms and towards protocols.

Burniske also added that since platforms like YouTube are owned by shareholders and give no governance rights to suppliers and consumers and further centralize economic resources over time, the violations crypto YouTubers are facing currently are bound to repeatedly occur.

Censorship on platforms like YouTube has existed for a long time. While there are many theories on twitter explaining the reasons for the latest censorship bout, it is clear to most like Burniske that this will not be the end of it. Platforms like YouTube face pressure from different governments, advertisers, and organizations to remove a wide range of content. Perhaps its time for the crypto community to create their decentralized alternatives much like how Everipedia is disrupting the Wikipedia formula without the use of advertisement.

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YouTube continues to ban crypto content; None knows the reason - iNVEZZ