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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

See the rest here:
The History of Censorship in the United States

Google has released to developers the source code to Perspective, a new machine tool designed to flag toxic comments online. Its creators hope the AI will clean up internet debate, but critics fear it will lead to censorship instead.

Perspective was created by Jigsaw and Googles Counter Abuse Technology team both subsidiaries of Googles parent company Alphabet in a collaborative research project called Conversation-AI. Its mission is to build technology to deal with problems ranging from online censorship to countering violent extremism to protecting people from online harassment.

Jigsaw has partnered with online communities and publishers to measure the toxicity of comments, including the New York Times, Wikipedia, Guardian and the Economist.

This gives them (news sites and social media) a new option: Take a bunch of collective intelligence that will keep getting better over time about what toxic comments people have said would make them leave, and use that information to help your community discussions, said CJ Adams, product manager of Googles Conversation AI,according to WIRED.

Until now, for news sites and social media trying to rein in comments the options have been upvotes, downvotes, turning off comments altogether or manually moderating, Adams said.

Twitter and Facebook also have recently announced anti-trolling moves.

On a demonstration website launched Thursday, anyone could type a phrase into Perspectives interface to instantaneously see how it rates on the toxicity scale.

RT America tested the AI with some comments from our own website. Type he is a Communist with a Jew nose into its text field, and Perspective will tell you it has a 77 percent similarity to phases people consider toxic. Write I piss on Confederate graves; I wholly agree with your views of these fellows and Perspective will flag it as 42 percent toxic, while Please RT no more Libtards gets a 33 percent rating.

Jigsaw developed the troll detector by taking millions of comments from Wikipedia editorial discussions, The New York Times and other unnamed partners. The comments were shared with ten people recruited online to state whether they found the comments toxic. The resulting judgements provided a large data set of training examples to teach the AI.

Ultimately we want the AI to surface the toxic stuff to us faster, Denise Law, the Economists community editor, told WIRED. If we can remove that, what wed have left is all the really nice comments. Wed create a safe space where everyone can have intelligent debates.

Jared Cohen, Jigsaws founder and president, said the tool is just one step toward better conversations, and he hopes it will be created in other languages to counter state-sponsored use of abusive trolling as a censorship tactic.

"Each time Perspective finds new examples of potentially toxic comments, or is provided with corrections from users, it can get better at scoring future comments," Cohen wrote in a blog post.

Not everyone thinks Perspective is wonderful, however. Libertarian journalist Virgil Vaduva ran his own experiment on Perspective, and concluded that the AI can easily be used to censor controversial speech, whether that speech comes from the left or the right of the American political spectrum.

Applying the AI to censor comments will create an environment empty of value where everyone agrees with everyone, or so it may appear, Vaduva wrote.

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Perspective or censorship? Google shares AI designed to fight online trolling - RT

Despite routinely interrogating dissident writers, the government is losing itsability to control the message.

By Jessie Yang, The University of Hong Kong

In China, citizens freedom of speech is under constant monitor by authorities.

Although the news media ishighly developed, their affiliations with the government make itdifficult to exercise their power as the fourthpillar of democracy. Journalists are constantlyexploring different measures to expose corruption of the government to the public, but its not uncommon for officials toinvite them for tea, which is a term in Chinese indicating interrogation.

Recently, some journalists critical of social issues have disappeared without leaving any message behind. Some suggest that the Chinese government is responsible for their disappearance, and if you examine the cases carefully, it becomes apparent that themissing journalists all haveone thing in commonpolitical dissidence.

Last year, an active journalist in China, Jia Jia, who was prominent in petitioning against President Xi, went missing on his plane to Hong Kong. Jia had a strong political stance, and he commented frequently on social and political issues. Prior to his disappearance, his name showed up in the Chinese media Wujie, and the sensitive article detailed criticisms of the central governments conducting a personal cult.

After his release, the server was immediately cut. It was after several days that government officials released Jia Jia, and he soon afterleveled down on his sharp commentaries.

Image via AVO News

Chinese president Xi has embarked on an unprecedented effort to clamp down on the internet and censor opinions that do not reflect those of Communist party leaders, including imposing tougher penalties for what the government calls spreading rumors through social media, which leads others to suspect the level of free speech that exists in China.

In fact, Jia Jia is not the only journalist who has been interrogated in recent years. Another journalist, Li Xin, a dissident writerwho refused to be an informant for the Ministry of State Security, went missing on his way to Thailand. Although the Bangkok Post reported that the government and police were not aware of the incident, a month later, his wife received a call that he was volunteering and assisting the government in investigation.

I know this is [the Chinese government] speaking, his wife said in a tearful conversation with CNN. It completely contradicts what Li Xin would like to say.

While Jia Jia and Li Xin remained silent after their releases, journalist Wen Tao, who was missing along with famous artist Ai Weiwei, both spoke about their experience.

Just hours after Ai Weiwei was detained at the Beijing airport, five plainclothes officers took away Wen Tao.

I was beaten and they dragged me into a black car. I stayed in a room without curtains for three months. It was three months later when they released me, Taosaid.

Image via NPR

Ai Wei Wei, instead of staying quiet, created a series of artworks about his life in prison as a wayof critiquing thecentral government. As the artist was cruelly denied his freedom by nearby guards, peepholes offered a glimpse at the humiliation on display. Ais vitriol against the Communist Party has made him a polarizing figure in the Chinese art world.

All three cases of missing journalists follow similar patterns, asthe government simply deprives their freedom of speech in order to maintain harmony in society. Human rights are constantly under question, and even though Chinese journalism struggles to take different measures, the complex political environment still meansuncertainty in regard tothe future of Chinese media.

In order to better understand the nature of Chinese journalism, it is necessary to understand its development. Since 1976, when China adopted socialism with Chinese characteristics to satisfy material aspirations of the people, the media also drifted from being a mouthpiece for the government to making profit to sustain business.

While the government cut down on sponsorship, media agencies began to gain power to choose personnel and manage their own finances. The opportunity gave media agencies in China a new space for expression. Increased press autonomy diversified the news content, but itdoes not mean that news media are free of government control.

Journalists are often under scrutiny, from applying self-censorship to ending up in prison.

For the sake of combating the strict regulation, more and more investigative journalists have emerged, forming a bottom-up approach to better assesspublic perception ofgovernment policies.

Moreover, diverging interests open up space to pursue investigative reporting without prior official sanction; however, asthe previous examples of missing journalists prove, the media still cantfully exercise their power to monitor the government.

As a result, inrecent years, there has been a rise in citizen journalism, which is when ordinary citizens take up an active role to collect and report news, documenting social issues instantly in order to break through government control.

On July 23, 2011, two high-speed trains crashed into each other and caused serious casualties in China. Before the news was released by Xinhua, a major news agency in China, citizen journalists and photographers quickly responded to the incident and spread photos and news on Weibo, which accumulated more than two million related tweets in a month. The eyewitnesses also served as evidence to criticize and monitor the governments actions in the crisis, and the public were further mobilized by social media to provide immediate assistance to the victims.

Citizen journalism has expanded the role of social media to provide a platform that allows for instant response to social issues in order to mobilize the public. When only certain news is published, and dissenting journalists are banned from their publications, social media offers an alternative in news reporting to airthe hidden stories.

The nature of social media brings certain political and social issues into discussions, and further challenges the existing problems and regulations. As a result, journalists in China, both citizen and professional, are continuing to exploredifferent platforms to foster discussion and exert influence as whistle-blowers, exposingevidence of corruption and misconduct by their government.

censorshipChinaChinese journalism

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Journalistic Censorship in China Is Struggling to Silence Social Media - Study Breaks

Here's an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.

There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Farhrenheit 451 was published in 1953.

Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post news story:

Before a book is published and released to the public, it's passed through the hands (and eyes) of many people: an author's friends and family, an agent and, of course, an editor.

These days, though, a book may get an additional check from an unusual source: a sensitivity reader, a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content. These readers give feedback based on self-ascribed areas of expertise such as "dealing with terminal illness," "racial dynamics in Muslim communities within families" or "transgender issues."

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climatefueled in part by social mediain which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.

The Washington Post article was published in 2017.

As Post reporter Everdeen Mason points out, if you're an author of best-selling renown whose published works include Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone just for starters, you might think you don't need to be screened by a sensitivity reader. You'd be wrong:

Last year, for instance, J.K. Rowling was strongly criticized by Native American readers and scholars for her portrayal of Navajo traditions in the 2016 story "History of Magic in North America." Young-adult author Keira Drake was forced to revise her fantasy novel "The Continent" after an online uproar over its portrayal of people of color and Native backgrounds. More recently, author Veronica Rothof "Divergent" famecame under fire for her new novel, "Carve the Mark." In addition to being called racist, the book was criticized for its portrayal of chronic pain in its main character.

Furthermore, sensitivity readers aren't even controversial in the eyes of a surprising number of the media. "What's not to like?" asks Claire Fallon of the Huffington Post:

There's really no meaningful difference between the content editing any reputable publisher would offer and sensitivity readingexcept that most agents and editors, to this day, are white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied women. The average editor at a publishing house isn't personally familiar with the experiences of an American bisexual child of Chinese immigrants, or a black teenager, or a deaf woman. An editor can and will alert their author that an odd coincidence reads as ridiculously contrived, or that a character's dialogue seems stiff and unrealistic; that's part of helping a writer hone their craft and polish their book. What, then, if the book's flaw lies in a cultural detail misrepresented, or a glaringly dated stereotype of a person of color? Unless the editor has more fluency in a given culture than the author, the editing process could skip right over that weakness.

And Slate's Katy Waldman, although not quite so enthusiastic about the sensitivity industry as Fallon, still thinks it's a generally good industry to have around:

As a push for diversity in fiction reshapes the publishing landscape, the emergence of sensitivity readers seems almost inevitable. A flowering sense of social conscience, not to mention a strong market incentive, is elevating stories that richly reflect the variety of human experience. Americaspecifically young Americais currently more diverse than ever. As writers attempt to reflect these realities in their fiction, they often must step outside of their intimate knowledge. And in a cultural climate newly attuned to the complexities of representation, many authors face anxiety at the prospect of backlash, especially when social media leaves both book sales and literary reputations more vulnerable than ever to criticism. Enter the sensitivity reader: one more line of defense against writers' tone-deaf, unthinking mistakes.

Even authors these days seem to see no problem in having to rewrite their books to fit the exquisite sensitivities of sensitivity readers. Waldman mentions one author "who totaled 12 sensitivity reads for her second novel on LGBTQ, black, Korean American, anxiety, obesity, and Jewish representation issues, among others."

There's another name for sensitivity screening, of course. It's called self-censorship. In Fahrenheit 451 some 64 years ago, Ray Bradbury prophesied that ever-increasing authorial sensitivity to the demands of an ever-increasing group of aggrieved minorities would result in books so blandly inoffensive that no one would care about books anymore. And then you'd have actual censorship.

Read more from the original source:
'Sensitivity' or Self-Censorship? - The Weekly Standard