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By Carolina Are, Northumbria University, Newcastle |

Imagine you share an Instagram post about an upcoming protest, but none of your hundreds of followers like it. Are none of your friends interested in it? Or have you been shadow banned?

Social media can be useful for political activists hoping to share information, calls to action and messages of solidarity. But throughout Israels war on Gaza, social media users have suspected they are being censored through shadow banning for sharing content about Palestine.

Shadow banning describes loss of visibility, low engagement and poor account growth on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Users who believe they are shadow banned suspect platforms may be demoting or not recommending their content and profiles to the main discovery feeds. People are not notified of shadow banning: all they see is the poor engagement they are getting.

Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy non-governmental organisation, has recently documented what it calls systemic censorship of Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram. After several accusations of shadow banning, Meta (Facebook and Instagrams parent company) argued the issue was due to a bug and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content.

I have been observing shadow bans both as a researcher and social media user since 2019. In addition to my work as an academic, I am a pole dancer and pole dance instructor. Instagram directly apologised to me and other pole dancers in 2019, saying they blocked a number of the hashtags we use in error. Based on my own experience, I conducted and published one of the very first academic studies on this practice.

Content moderation is usually automated carried out by algorithms and artificial intelligence. These systems may also, inadvertently or by design, pick up borderline controversial content when moderating at scale.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Most platforms are based in the US and govern even global content according to US law and values. Shadow banning is a case in point, typically targeting sex work, nudity and sexual expression prohibited by platforms community guidelines.

Moderation of nudity and sexuality has become more stringent since 2018, after the introduction of two US laws, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta), that aimed to crack down on online sex trafficking.

The laws followed campaigns by anti-pornography coalitions and made online platforms legally liable for enabling sex trafficking (a crime) and sex work (a job). Fearing legal action, platforms began over-censoring any content featuring nudity and sexuality around the world, including of legal sex work, to avoid breaching Fosta-Sesta.

Although censorship of nudity and sex work is heralded as a means to protect children and victims of non-consensual image sharing, it can have serious consequences for the livelihoods and wellbeing of sex workers and adult content creators, as well as for freedom of expression.

Platforms responses to these laws should have been a warning about what was to come for political speech.

Social media users reported conversations and information about Black Lives Matter protests were shadowbanned in 2020. Now journalistic, activist and fact-checking content about Palestine also appears to be affected by this censorship technique.

Platforms are unlikely to admit to a shadow ban or bias in their content moderation. But their stringent moderation of terrorism and violent content may be leading to posts about Palestine that is neither incitement to violence nor terror-related getting caught in censorships net.

For most social media users, shadow banning is difficult to prove. But as a researcher and a former social media manager, I was able to show it was happening to me.

As my passion for pole dancing (and posts about it) grew, I kept a record of my reach and follower numbers over several years. While my skills were improving and my follower count was growing, I noticed my posts were receiving fewer views. This decline came shortly after Fosta-Sesta was approved.

It wasnt just me. Other pole dancers noticed that content from our favourite dancers was no longer appearing in our Instagram discovery feeds. Shadowbanning appeared to also apply to swathes of pole-dancing-related hashtags.

I was also able to show that when content surrounding one hashtag is censored, algorithms restrict similar content and words. This is one reason why some creators use algospeak editing content to trick the algorithm into not picking up words it would normally censor, as seen in anti-vaccine content throughout the pandemic.

TikTok and Twitter do not notify users that their account is shadow banned, but, as of 2022, Instagram does. By checking your account status in the apps settings, you can see if your content has been marked as non-recommendable due to potential violations of Instagrams content rules. This is also noticeable if other users have to type your full profile name for you to appear in search. In short, you are harder to find. In August 2023, X owner Elon Musk said that the company was working on a way for users to see if they had been affected by shadow bans, but no such function has been introduced. (The Conversation has contacted X for comment.)

The ability to see and appeal a shadow ban are positive changes, but mainly a cosmetic tweak to a freedom of expression problem that mostly targets marginalised groups. While Instagram may now be disclosing their decisions, the effect is the same: users posting about nudity, LGBTQ+ expression, protests and Palestine are often the ones to claim they are shadow banned.

Social media platforms are not just for fun, theyre a source of work and political organising, and a way to spread important information to a large audience. When these companies censor content, it can affect the mental health and the livelihoods of people who use it.

These latest instances of shadow banning show that platforms can pick a side in active crises, and may affect public opinion by hiding or showing certain content. This power over what is visible and what is not should concern us all.

Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow, Northumbria University, Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Social Media Users say their Palestine Content is being Shadow-Banned -- How to Know if it's Happening to You - Informed Comment

Kailey Krantz| Staff Writer

Its no secret social media has a ubiquitous presence in our 21st century lives. Banning it is a redundant, knee-jerk decision that only promotes censorship rather than encourages safety.

Floridas SB 1788 states that anyone under 16 years old is prohibited from creating new social media accounts. It will also terminate existing accounts and implore social media platforms such as Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube and TikTok to use age verification without a parental permission exemption.

The problem with this bill is so many social media users are under the age of 16 that theres no feasible way for the Florida government to kick out every single user in that demographic.

Currently, there are an estimated 834 million users on TikTok and 25% are aged 10-19. Those 208 million users are registered minors which eclipses Floridas population of 22 million people.

Even the federal government has tried to ban TikTok numerous times and the app is still being used in the U.S. Thats a testament to the staying power of social media in the 21st century.

I understand the concerns of parents wanting their kids to have a safe digital experience and not subject them to advertisers without their consent. Especially to avoid another Elsagate event where innocent fictional characters from Disney and Marvel were utilized to depict inappropriate scenarios through child-friendly videos.

However, banning minors altogether isnt going to stop this kind of content from appearing again, nor is it going to stop them from engaging with sensitive content.

Minors can easily lie about their age when signing up for social media platforms, so whats going to stop them from figuring out new ways to get into these platforms, especially since theyre digitally proficient?

This bill will only further highlight the dangers of censorship on social media.

Social media is often used by students to connect with others on and off campus, whether that be with professors, friends or family members.

There are already social media apps that are banned on campus, but allowing this bill to pass on a state level will continue to sever the connections between students, especially international students who talk to their families through social media such as WhatsApp.

Censoring content on social media may also prove to hinder students abilities to do research for their studies. The bill is willing to censor anything, thus eliminating any factual, research-based information that could aid students in their academic projects.

How do students plan to do effective research for their studies if half of their information is banned from social media? It will make their research more biased and more dystopian by only spewing information the government wants them to believe instead of the facts.

Through this lens, it undermines the efforts of students, professors and researchers who have studied their subjects for years and want their research to be as accurate and unbiased as possible.

The inappropriate content that can be found on social media isnt going to disappear, nor will it scare away minors from looking into said content. Banning them altogether is a solution that is going to promote another problem: censorship.

DISCLAIMER:

The opinions presented on this page do not represent the views of the PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.

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Censorship for minors is not the solution | Opinion - PantherNOW

The Hugo Award is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, recognizing outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy. The awards are presented each year at the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, which in 2023 was held in Chengdu, China.

In January last year, questions began to swirl about the nomination process for the 2023 awards. Several authors were deemed not eligible,including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang and Paul Weimer, even though they had received enough nominations to be considered as finalists for the award.

Why, then, were these authors ineligible? The works that received the nominations were widely praised and considered the best of the year, including season one of the television adaptation of Gaimans The Sandman and Kuangs historical speculative fiction novel Babel. There was nothing specific in common between the works of any of the ineligible authors. No explanation was given for their disqualification.

A reportreleased on Feb. 15 by Chris M. Barkley, winner of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, and Jason Sanford, a finalist for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, revealed the truth behind the disqualifications: self-censorship.

Leaked emails included in the report show members of the Hugo Awards committee compiling dossiers on several would-be finalists, debating themes in the nominated works that could be offensive to the Peoples Republic of China and even flagging the authors for criteria unrelated to the awards themselves. Weimer, nominated for the Best Fan Writer category, was flagged for travel[ing] to Tibet outside of the year of eligibility. He had, in fact, traveled to Nepal.

Novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, another author who received enough nominations for the Astounding Award but was considered ineligible, is well-known within the literary community for their TikTok, where theyve posted several videos discussing the controversy and giving their perspective. In the leaked emails, their presence on TikTok was flagged as part of their potential disqualification. Their four-letter last name was also misspelled twice within the email, and the title of their debut novel The Iron Widow was confused with The Iron Giant, the 1999 animated science fiction film.

Although the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards were selected and announced months ago, questions still linger regarding the entire controversy. Why did no one on the committee refuse to compile the dossiers on these authors or otherwise internally protest the censorship? For how long has the Hugo Awards committee allowed ballot manipulation to occur? How legitimate are the finalists and winners of the Hugo Awards not just for 2023, but going back several years, maybe even decades?

Thats not to fault any of the winners themselves, of course. The works that received recognition deserved that recognition. But its an awful look for one of the premier awards in the literary world to have such a deep-rooted breach of ethical responsibility.

The actions of the 2023 Hugo Awards committee are blatantly unjust to every disqualified author, but particularly to authors like Kuang and Zhao English-language writers of Chinese heritage, whose works feature distinctly Chinese narratives and subjects. The sensitive political themes that 2023 Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty asked to be flagged in the inciting email seemed to specifically target Western Chinese diaspora.

The conclusion is simple. If hosting the awards in any given location would necessitate censorship, the awards should not be hosted in that location. This issue is especially prevalent in literature, where censorship has dominated the conversation for the past several years as U.S. governments and schools continue to institute book bans.

The integrity of the worlds most prestigious science fiction and fantasy award has been compromised, and though several members of the 2023 Hugo Awards committee have come forward to apologize, its hard to say how exactly this controversy will affect the upcoming 2024 awards hosted in Glasgow.

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The blatant censorship of the 2023 Hugo Awards - Observer Online

A version of this article appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

Chinas communist government has sharply increased censorship and information controls under President Xi Jinping, posing a growing threat to U.S. security and the free flow of information globally, according to a report by a congressional China commission.

To block Chinese attempts to sow divisions within the United States and preserve freedom of information worldwide, the United States must be more effective in countering Beijings growing information control system, said the report, released Tuesday by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Censorship in China focuses primarily on domestic control, but its effects pose a major challenge to U.S. diplomatic, economic and national security interests, the report concluded.

The reports authors say Beijings information controls make up the worlds most elaborate and pervasive system of censorship. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses censorship to secure political legitimacy and shape popular behavior through public opinion guidance, the report says.

Beyond its borders, China is sharply increasing efforts to combat ideas and narratives Beijing perceives as threatening, the report said.

The lines of effort include disinformation campaigns to sow divisions within U.S. society, the report said.

China also punishes private U.S. companies and people who voice positions opposed by the Communist Party.

China is exporting censorship tools to other authoritarian states and calling for greater state control of the internet. Those actions challenge U.S.-backed norms and agreements that seek to promote the global free flow of information, the report said.

China uses censorship to advance Beijings anti-democratic geostrategic goals. One goal is isolating rival Taiwan and laying the groundwork for eventual cross-strait unification, the report said.

These challenges necessitate that the United States takes action to safeguard its domestic information space and to preserve a free and open internet, both of which are vital factors for continued U.S. economic prosperity and individual liberty, the report said.

The federal government also needs better efforts to counter Chinese disinformation campaigns that are used as de facto censorship outside of China, the report said.

One example, the report said, was Beijings official false assertion that the COVID-19 virus was produced in a U.S. Army lab and then brought to China.

It said U.S. intelligence must share information on activities by state-backed Chinese hacking groups, such as Dragonbridge, that engage in sophisticated information operations.

The U.S. must impose tighter export controls to block China from obtaining advanced hardware and software for its censorship system, the report says.

The 116-page report, Censorship Practices of the Peoples Republic of China, was produced under contract by the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, part of the think tank Exovera.

Frank Miller, Exovera vice president for intelligence integration, said Chinas censorship apparatus is multifaceted and uses removal efforts and deterrence to control content it opposes.

Companies and media outlets that use online content reflecting Beijings deterrence directives and measures are complicit in the censoring of news and/or Western liberal thoughts from the Chinese populace, he said.

Our recommendations to the commission were essentially to use the power of Congress to encourage means to counter the CCP censorship apparatus, especially where the spillover effect includes the U.S. populace, Mr. Miller said.

Expanding under Xi

The study said the Chinese government significantly expanded the censorship system since Mr. Xi came to power in 2012 and focused on solidifying control over internet content. The effort involved new laws, regulations and technical methods to monitor and supervise online activity and became increasingly sophisticated with the rise of artificial intelligence systems.

Before 2012, Chinas internet users, dubbed netizens, operated in a vast online community that often allowed for vibrant debate, including some that touched on Communist Party politics. Under Mr. Xi, however, censors cracked down on such freewheeling internet exchanges by imprisoning or silencing those they said had engaged in online dissent and debate.

Censorship controls in China are spread among several Communist Party and state institutions that collectively control information for the population of some 1.4 billion people.

An example was the governments ability to manage what the report said was an acute crisis set into motion by draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. Censors also targeted what the ruling party calls historical nihilism CCP code for the negative effect on communism produced by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

At the same time, the CCP allows for limited discussions of sensitive topics that do not directly threaten its hold on power, such as Chinas role in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the report said.

Other sensitive discussions permitted by Chinese censors include exchanges highlighting government corruption.

All criticism of senior party leaders, the legitimacy of one-party communist rule or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters is strictly blocked.

Employees and executives of Chinese internet providers face detention and other penalties if company censors fail to monitor and control content online.

Guiding global opinion

Overseas, the censorship apparatus is engaged in what the report called international public opinion guidance. The effort employs many of the same tools used for domestic information control.

Chinese information agents can flood the zone on foreign social media outlets to hijack and deflate discussions opposed by Beijing, such as the ongoing harsh repression of ethnic Uyghurs in western China and Tibet.

To influence online discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war, Chinese government censors seek to control overseas discussions using tactics similar to those for domestic censorship. Chinese citizens can discuss the conflict openly, but any discussion of how the war could affect plans for a future Chinese attack on Taiwan is blocked or muted through state-linked trolls.

The report recommends developing and deploying emerging telecommunications technology, such as satellite-based internet constellations, that can impose costs on Chinese censorship systems.

Satellite-supplied internet service, such as that from Starlink, has the potential to undermine the CCPs stranglehold over data flows into and out of China, the report said. China is already working to counter the potential use of satellite clouds to prevent the systems from weakening censorship.

The report called on the State Department to improve its public diplomacy in China. Diplomats should provide better reporting on misconduct and misgovernment by the government and the Communist Party.

Access to objective information plays a key role in enabling Chinas citizenry to hold their government accountable, especially during inflection points such as the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, and the subsequent 2022 anti-lockdown protest movements, the report said.

The government should increase federal grants to groups such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts while supporting research and independent journalism.

Independent journalism and scholarly research have been central to undermining [Chinese] censorship of sensitive topics, ranging from the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong to the CCPs mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the report said.

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U.S. urged to do more to counter China's growing censorship system - Washington Times

Marian, madame librarian Heaven help us if the library caught on fire. So sang Robert Preston in The Music Man, the 1962 movie about a smooth-talking grifter trying to bilk the citizens of a small Iowa town. Today, libraries and librarians face troubles as campaigns are waged across America against books that might contain controversial content.

Near Athens in 1994, one parent complained about the profanity God damn uttered by a crusty character in The Red Pony, the classic novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck that was included in Oconee County school libraries. The ensuing book-banning battle attracted state and national attention, but Steinbecks novel remained available in the county. Flash forward nearly 30 years, to 2023, and Oconee County was again the scene of challenges to libraries from self-anointed censors in high dudgeon over books in the local library that mentioned LGBTQ relationships.

Those parents who would circumscribe the reading rights of all in favor of the ideology of a few are people who would prevent your children from reading a book just because they dont want their own children to read it. They should read the wise words of playwright and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce: Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.

Writer Ray Bradbury was correct when he said, Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future. Bradburys love of books and libraries was a source for perhaps his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian tale of a totalitarian society that burns books, as did Hitlers Nazi regime in Germany. As a young and struggling writer, Bradbury wrote his book on a coin-operated typewriter in a university library. American printer and patriot Benjamin Franklin spearheaded the creation of public libraries in America nearly 300 years ago, and ever since then libraries have provided information and inspiration for writers like Bradbury and for all this nations citizens.

Libraries are under attack today as a torrent of anti-intellectualism, extremism and divisiveness threatens to drown the American body politic in a flood of fear, repression and regression. Past U.S. presidents knew the role of the library in stemming the tide of ignorance and intolerance. Thomas Jefferson said, A democratic society depends upon an informed and educated citizenry. As fascism was on the march and book burnings raged in Germany, Franklin Roosevelt reminded his fellow Americans that, Libraries are great symbols of the freedom of the mind The library is central to our free society. It is a critical element in the free exchange of information at the heart of our democracy. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that libraries should be places where free and inquiring minds can freely seek the whole truth, unvarnished by fashion and uncompromised by expediency.

When I was a young person in the small town Jim Crow South of the 1950s and 60s, the town library was a place for the free and inquiring minds of people of every age and race. Though strict segregation ruled the rest of the town, the local librarian opened her doors to citizens of any color, and books with titles like Facts of Life for Boys and Facts of Life for Girls were accessible on the librarys bookshelves. That librarian was a quiet hero like the fictional librarian in The Obsolete Man, a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone TV series written by Rod Serling. In the episode, actor Burgess Meredith portrays a librarian who stands up to an authoritarian state in which logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

Support your local library and support your local librarians. The Athens-Clarke County Library on Baxter Street offers thousands of books, and it was one of the first libraries in Georgia to provide internet access for its patrons. It is the site of public meetings and book signings, and is an invaluable resource for genealogy researchers and history buffs.

In these times of overflowing online misinformation, libraries and librarians are more important than ever. They prove what writer Neil Gaiman meant when he said, Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.

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Libraries, Beacons of Freedom, Now Face the Dangers of Censorship - Flagpole - Flagpole Magazine