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In an effort to make websites more advertiser friendly some media outlets have taken to eliminating comment sections where, without considerable effort from moderators, they are unable to control the direction of reader conversations. But a Google-funded algorithm could change that via censorship.

The technology, called Perspective, uses machine-learning to ferret out toxic comments. Its designers reportedly based the technologys moderation standards on those used by the team of human moderators tasked with keeping discourse civil on The New York Times website. The Times is also reportedly now using Perspective to expand the number of articles it allows comments to appear on without overtaxing its moderation team.

Developers explain how the tool works thusly:

Perspective is an API that makes it easier to host better conversations. The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give realtime feedback to commenters or help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, as illustrated in two experiments below. Well be releasing more machine learning models later in the year, but our first model identifies whether a comment could be perceived as toxic to a discussion.

The level of potential toxicity appears largely based on the use of vulgarity or insulting language in comments.

Here are a few examples of comments the technology would deem highly toxic in comments:

And here are a few that are considered the least toxic:

Personal insults and name calling cheapen any pointand theres certainly no shortage of uncomfortable language on the internet. But is the top-down sanitation of comment sections really the answer?

How long before the machine decides whole topics are too uncomfortable for discussion and are likely to cause readers to leave?

And if the problem is online harassment, are we really going to pretend that simply silencing the true assholes among us will make them disappear? Theyll still be out there Ever been in a big city traffic jam?

Civility is important. But pretending that life isnt uncomfortable, and partially so because of the personalities of people we have to deal with, isnt the answer.

Besides, sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade or a f*cking moron.

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Behold the censorship machine! - Personal Liberty Digest

The National Press Club has condemned Donald Trumps exclusion of select media outlets from a White House press conference, calling the unprecedented action deeply disturbing and likening it to censorship.

Senior figures from the world's leading professional organisation for journalistsjoined a host of other industry leadersin protesting the decision announced by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to block news outlets including CNN, TheNew York Times, BBC, TheGuardian and BuzzFeed from the off-camera gaggle.

I find it deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable that the White House is actively running a campaign against a constitutionally enshrined free and independent press, the club's president, Jeffrey Ballou, saidin a statement.

The action harkens back to the darkest chapters of US history and reeks of undemocratic, un-American and unconstitutional censorship. The National Press Club supports our colleagues in the White House Correspondents Association in its protest and calls on the White House to reverse course.Mr Spicer did not give any justification as to why the news outlets had been excluded, however far-right organisations Breitbart News, One America News Network and The Washington Times were all granted access.

Othermajor outlets approved included ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, Reuters and Bloomberg, with Associated Press and Time both boycotting the gaggle after the exclusions emerged.

It came just two months after the press secretary promisedthe Trump administration would never ban press access regardless of the political leaning of the publication.

We have a respect for the press when it comes to the government, that that is something you cant ban an entity from, he said. You know conservative, liberal, otherwise I think that is what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.

Donald Trump: We are fighting the phoney, fake news

National Press Club Journalism Institute President, Barbara Cochran, also accused Mr Trump of hypocrisy for claiming he loves the First Amendment, which defends the freedom of the press.

The president said, No one loves the First Amendment more than me. We call on the president and his staff to prove that and stop interfering with the ability of all news organisations to do their job of covering the White House, she wrote.

TheNew York Times and Buzzfeed both issued written statements protesting their exclusion from the briefing.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier discouraged conservative news outlets who celebrated the gaggle, citing organisations who defended his network when former President Obama tried to freeze out Fox News in 2009.

Some at CNN and New York Times stood with Fox News when the Obama admin attacked us and tried to exclude us, he wrote on Twitter, a White House gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs.

It came as the US President renewed his attack on the mainstream media at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. Its phony, fake, he said.I called the fake news the enemy of the people. They are the enemy of the people, because they have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.

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White House media ban is 'unconstitutional censorship', America's National Press Club warns - The Independent

Here in the United States, if the internet isnt working, or is working slowly, the solution is often as simple as calling tech support. In most cases, theyll have the user run a speedtest, and there are millions of sites and applications that provide this service. However, there arent so many sites that allow users to see who has access to their information, and for people in countries where the internet is censored or restricted, even the fastest internet connection wont grant them open access to information.

This is one issue the team working on the Open Observatory of Network Interference project hope to address with their new Ooniprobe app, which, as of Feb. 9, is available in a beta version for free on Google Play and in the App store. The app has three main features, a speed test, a web connectivity test and a test that detects the presence of components that could be responsible for censorship or surveillance.

Without a tool like Ooniprobe, governments have plausible deniability in terms of censorship events, and actually, people claiming that they can't access a website is not in itself proof of intentional, government-commissioned censorship, Arturo Filast the creator of the app said. Now, anyone around the world can run Ooniprobe and can inspect how their network is working and whether censorship is being implemented. The type of data collected by Ooniprobe cannot really be denied by governments since it provides a clear picture into what is happening in a user's network.

Filast believes access information is a fundamental human right, but in the current state of affairs, many countries either censor or severely restrict the internet; with countries such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and India showing thousands of blocked sites - including many messaging sites like WhatsApp and Telegram, according to OONI World Map Explorer.

While countries like the United States have considerably fewer reports of censorship and blocked sites, the country isnt entirely free of censorship. Even here at Western Michigan University types of censorship are in place, but according to Chief Technology Officer Tom Wolf, there is a fine line between censorship and internet security.

In my opinion preventing malicious cyber activities that are illegal in nature and/or intended to disrupt normal internet traffic would not be considered a form of censorship. I would view this as cyber security, Wolf said.

This begs the question of exactly where one should draw the line between security and censorship. Most firewalls, such as Merits Palo Alto - the firewall currently in place here at WMU - scan for evidence of malicious activities and dont otherwise censor content.

Filast addressed the very fine line between security and censorship, distinguishing that security measures should restrict themselves solely to universally bad content.

Internet censorship, in any form and of any type of content, is a slippery slope. We see this in countless occasions where it's implementation is passed as an excuse to restrict access to content that is universally bad, but then the same system gets used to implement censorship for content whose value is much debatable, Filast said.

However, Nathan Tabor, a visiting professor and historian focusing on South Asia, expressed concerns over this slippery slope mentality, pointing out that when someone knows their internet activity is being censored, theyre more likely to change their patterns of consumption in a form of implicit censorship.

A lot of my work is in Persian, so I often access sites from Iran, another place that has very restricted internet access. The things that I access have to do with history and literature, pretty innocuous subjects, but perhaps my internet history comes up on the radar of some overzealous homeland security official because Im accessing sites from Iran. With the data mining that happens with my search history, Id look like a terrorist, Tabor said. The sites that you read will fall into some kind of aggravated pattern decided by a security apparatus, regardless whether or not youre doing anything wrong.

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New app to bring awareness to internet censorship - Western Herald

Two members of Congress defend and sue, while several colleagues join the censors.

On August 9, 2003, a story in National Journal described a Washington trend: On at least three occasions recently, members of Congress have offered themselves as thoughtful cartoon critics.

That piece detailed how lawmakers lately had enthusiastically written letters to oppose or support several editorial cartoons. These scandalous images depicted: the mocking of an American activist killed after she was run over by a bulldozer in Gaza; President George W. Bush paving with dollar bills a bridge between Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat; and one panel in which Bush, drawn as the Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman, points a gun at himself. Two of these are by Pulitzer Prize winners. The Bush gun cartoon earned its creator, Michael Ramirez of The Los Angeles Times, a visit by the local Secret Service office.

I quote that 2003 piece, which I wrote, to show that, in light of a couple recent incidents, the Capitol Hill art critic instinct has a history. Both liberals and conservatives simply cannot resist. And media love to cover it.

This week, Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), filed a lawsuit in federal court full of entertaining claims, stemming from a single painting that has caused continued consternation in Washington since the beginning of the year. The painting is by a St. Louis high school student named David Pulphus. For half a year, it hung undisturbed in a passageway into the Capitol from the Cannon House Office Building, as part of an art competition. It depicts a police officer as a uniformed wart hog, aiming a pistol at a dark-colored wolf. The St. Louis arch looms in the background, signifying this is all about the 2014 Ferguson shooting of a black teenager by a white officer.

Over several weeks in January, several members of Congress, all Republicans, simply snatched the painting from the wall multiple times, each time helpfully dropping it off at Clays office. Clay would then re-hang the work. The media found out. The Hill covered each moment, but St. Louis media and conservative outlets joined in. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the work disgusting. This is not a question of First Amendment rights, he said. It certainly is, replied Clay, who seemed to enjoy the fight.

A pro-cop blog led the charge against the painting, even after a work representing the law enforcement blue line was tacked up immediately above the painting. Architect of the Capitol Stephen T. Ayers eventually removed the painting for good in mid-January, after determining it violated rules against art of a sensational nature or depicting political controversy.

Clay makes the case that the painting was reviewed and accepted like all the others in the competition, with no objection. He adds, in a press release: Davids painting was wrongly disqualified and removed from the public exhibit at the direction of the Architect of the Capitol who shamefully chose to retroactively censor and suppress Mr. Pulphus artwork in response to the enormous political pressure he experienced from the Speaker of the House and certain right-wing media outlets.

This is indisputably correct on every count.

But Clay then claims in the suit that he is experiencing ongoing stress and anger over the retroactive and viewpoint-based exclusion of his district from the competition and that his and his staffers time has been diverted from important legislative responsibilities as a result of the Architect of the Capitols decision, The Hill reports.

No word on whether the offending Republicans are counter-suing, as a result of their daring, not-so-undercover raids on the Congressional high school art show, claiming back injuries or perhaps insufficient access to OSHA-approved ladders. But one Republican Senator stood up to art censors recently. Curiously, hes also from Missouri. The painting served as a backdrop during the traditional Inauguration Day luncheon in the Capitol. The one where President Trump asked for recognition of Hillary Clinton.

Executed in 1855, Verdict of the People, by Missourian George Caleb Bingham, depicts a small town reacting to the announcement of the outcome of an election, some with joy and others in despair. As the inauguration approached, an artist and an academic attracted more than 4000 signers to a Change.org petition to stop the display. The petition notes that since Trump received fewer popular votes that his opponent, the result is certainly not the verdict of the people. Trump did win Missouri by nearly 19 points.

In July, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-MO, asked if the painting, housed at the St. Louis Art Museum, could be displayed during the inauguration luncheon. Blunt chairs the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Any decision to put a representative of your collection into a political situation makes a political statement," Ivy Cooper, one of the petition organizers, and a member of the faulty at Southern Illinois University, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "If there were a discussion of the meaning of the painting, it would be different. But it's being used as a prop."

But Cooper makes no effort to lead that discussion. Her petition makes no reference to the content of the painting. That left The Washington Posts Phillip Kennicott to provide a surprisingly intriguing tour through the fraught, pre-Civil War moment Bingham depicts. Kennicott, eventually, determines the painting to be a break from tradition for the luncheon, a politically charged representation of one of the darkest moments in American history. So thats bad? Does the painting even work? Kennicott really never seems to decide. So a conservative senator is defending art, and a progressive critic waffles. Weird.

The painting stood in the Capitol for one day. No violent marches or Starbucks window smashings by black-masked art censors were reported.

These individual dust-ups attract way too much attention, relatively, but they speak to the censorious instinct of the country at large, in a time when claiming grievance has power as never before. A letter to Ryan from Clay and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, invokes Hustler magazine, Animal Farm, Antonin Scalia and William Brennan. In America, we dont arrest artwork, the letter begins.

But, in America, of course we do. All the time.

The Gaza activist cartoon referenced in the 2003 National Journal piece was produced by Daniel J. Friedman, for the Diamondback student newspaper at the University of Maryland. The cartoon mocked the action by an American woman to block demolition of a house. A student sit-in at Maryland followed publication, and a pro-Palestinian organization published the email addresses and home phone numbers of Diamondback editors.

The citizenry loves to censor and bully and petition demanding its elected representatives censor and bully and sue. And its elected representatives pay attention. With two recent exceptions.

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The Missouri Delegation: Standing Against Censorship - Splice Today

By Tom Head

Updated February 10, 2017.

The right to free speech is a long-standing U.S. tradition, but actually respecting the right to free speech is not.

"Old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams," one supporter of challenger Thomas Jefferson called the incumbent president. But Adams got the last laugh, signing a bill in 1798 that made it illegal to criticize a government official without backing up one's criticisms in court. 25 people were arrested under the law, though Jefferson pardoned its victims after he defeated Adams in the 1800 election.

Later sedition acts focused primarily on punishing those who advocated civil disobedience. The Sedition Act of 1918, for example, targeted draft resisters. More

The bawdy novel Fanny Hill (1748), written by John Cleland as an exercise in what he imagined a prostitute's memoirs might sound like, was no doubt familiar to the Founding Fathers; we know that Benjamin Franklin, who himself wrote some fairly risque material, had a copy. But later generations were less latitudinarian.

The book holds the record for being banned longer than any other literary work in the United States--prohibited in 1821, and not legally published until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban in Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966). Of course, once it was legal it lost much of its appeal; by 1966 standards, nothing written in 1748 was liable to shock anybody. More

If you're looking for a clear-cut villain in the history of U.S. censorship, you've found him.

In 1872, feminist Victoria Woodhull published an account of an affair between a celebrity evangelical minister and one of his parishioners. Comstock, who despised feminists, requested a copy of the book under a fake name, then reported Woodhull and had her arrested on obscenity charges.

He soon became head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, where he successfully campaigned for an 1873 federal obscenity law, commonly referred to as the Comstock Act, that allowed warrantless searches of the mail for "obscene" materials.

Comstock later boasted that during his career as censor, his work led to the suicides of 15 alleged "smut-peddlers." More

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice successfully blocked the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1921, citing a relatively tame masturbation scene as proof of obscenity. U.S. publication was finally permitted in 1933 following the U.S. District Court ruling United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, in which Judge John Woolsey found that the book was not obscene and essentially established artistic merit as an affirmative defense against obscenity charges. More

The Hays Code was never enforced by the government--it was voluntarily agreed upon by film distributors--but the threat of government censorship made it necessary. The U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915) that movies were not protected by the First Amendment, and some foreign films had been seized on obscenity charges. The film industry adopted the Code as a means of avoiding outright federal censorship.

The Code, which regulated the industry from 1930 until 1968, banned what you might expect it to ban--violence, sex, profanity--but also prohibited portrayals of interracial or same-sex relationships, as well as any content that was deemed anti-religious or anti-Christian. More

Like the Hays Code, the Comics Code Authority is a voluntary industry standard. Because comics are still primarily read by children, and because it has historically been less binding on retailers than the Hays Code was on distributors, the CCA is less dangerous than its film counterpart. This may be why it is still in use today, though most comic book publishers ignore it and no longer submit material for CCA approval.

The driving force behind the CCA was the fear that violent, dirty, or otherwise questionable comics might turn children into juvenile delinquents--the central thesis of Frederic Wertham's 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent (which also argued, less credibly, that the Batman-Robin relationship might turn children gay). More

Although Senator Reed Smoot (shown left) admitted that he had not read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), he expressed strong opinions about the book. "It is most damnable!" he complained in a 1930 speech. "It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"

Lawrence's odd story about an adulterous affair between Constance Chatterley and her husband's servant was so offensive because, at the time, non-tragic portrayals of adultery were, for practical purposes, nonexistent--the Hays Code banned them from films, and federal censors banned them from print media.

A 1959 federal obscenity trial lifted the ban on the book, now recognized as a classic. More

The massive military study titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, later known as the Pentagon Papers, was supposed to be classified. But when excerpts of the document were leaked to the New York Times in 1971, which published them, all hell broke loose--with President Richard Nixon threatening to have journalists indicted for treason, and federal prosecutors attempting to block further publication. (They had reason to do so; the documents revealed that U.S. leaders had--among other things--specifically taken measures to prolong and escalate the unpopular war.)

In June 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Times could legally publish the Papers.

A 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Warren Burger (shown left), outlined the current definition of obscenity in Miller v. California (1973), a mail-order porn case, as follows:

While the Supreme Court has held since 1897 that the First Amendment does not protect obscenity, the relatively small number of obscenity prosecutions in recent years suggests otherwise. More

When George Carlin's "seven dirty words" routine was aired on a New York radio station in 1973, a father listening to the station complained to the FCC. The FCC, in turn, wrote the station a firm letter of reprimand.

The station challenged the reprimand, ultimately leading to the Supreme Court's landmark FCC v. Pacifica (1978) in which the Court held that material that is "indecent," but not necessarily obscene, may be regulated by the FCC if it is distributed through publicly-owned wavelengths.

Indecency, as defined by the FCC, refers to "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities." More

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 mandated a federal prison sentence of up to two years for anyone who...

The Supreme Court mercifully struck the Act down in ACLU v. Reno (1997), but the concept of the bill was revived with the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998, which criminalized any content deemed "harmful to minors." Courts immediately blocked COPA, which was formally struck down in 2009. More

During the live broadcast Super Bowl halftime show on February 1st, 2004, Janet Jackson's right breast was exposed (sort of) and the FCC responded to an organized campaign by enforcing indecency standards more aggressively than it ever had before. Soon every expletive uttered at an awards show, every bit of nudity (even pixellated nudity) on reality television, and every other potentially offensive act became a possible target of FCC scrutiny.

But the FCC has gotten more relaxed over the past five years, and under the Obama administration is likely to become more so still. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court will review the original Janet Jackson "wardrobemalfunction" fine and with it the FCC's indecency standards--later in 2009. More

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The History of Censorship in the United States