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New York would require people applying for a handgun license to turn over a list of social media accounts so officials could verify their character and conduct under a bill being considered by the state legislature.

The provision was part of a proposed redesign of firearms licensing laws hammered out by lawmakers after the US supreme court struck down rules severely limiting who could get a permit to carry a handgun outside their home.

A bill advanced by Democrats would eliminate the most strict barriers to getting a permit but also impose new requirements for applicants.

Applicants would have to show they have the essential character, temperament and judgement necessary to be entrusted with a weapon and to use it only in a manner that does not endanger oneself and others, according to the bill.

As part of that assessment of good character, the bill says, the applicant has to turn over a list of any social media accounts they have had in the past three years to confirm the information regarding the applicants character and conduct.

Applicants would also have to provide four character references, take 16 hours of firearms safety training plus two hours of practice at a range, undergo periodic background checks and turn over the contact information of their spouse, domestic partner or any other adults living in their household.

The bill does not specify whether applicants would be required to provide licensing officers with access to private social media accounts not visible to the general public.

The idea that the state would let licensing officials review an applicants speech as a condition of getting a license infuriated gun rights advocates.

This is the kind of bill that the Gestapo would be proud of. This is the kind of bill youd see in communist China, said Aaron Dorr, executive director of the New York State Firearms Association. This will never survive a court challenge. This is the kind of concept that would pass in those countries.

The Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, released the text of the legislation early on Friday as the legislature continued a special session.

The supreme court struck down a previous rule requiring people to demonstrate an unusual threat to their safety to get a license to carry a handgun outside their homes.

That restriction generally limited the licenses to people who had worked in law enforcement or had another special need that went beyond routine public safety concerns.

Under the new system, the state would not authorize permits for people with criminal convictions within five years for driving while intoxicated, menacing or third-degree assault. People also wouldnt be allowed to carry firearms at a long list of sensitive places, including Times Square in New York City.

That list also includes schools, universities, government buildings, places where people have gathered for public protests, healthcare facilities, places of worship, libraries, public playgrounds and parks, daycare centers, summer camps, addiction and mental health centers, shelters, public transit, bars, theaters, stadiums, museums, polling places and casinos.

New York would also bar people from bringing guns into any business or workplace unless the owners put up signage saying guns were welcome. People who bring guns into places without such a sign could be prosecuted on felony charges.

In many other states businesses that want to keep guns out are required to post signs indicating weapons are not allowed.

Gun advocates said the bill infringes on rights upheld by the supreme court.

Now were going to let the pizzeria owner decide whether or not I can express my constitutional right, said Andrew Lanza, a state senator and Staten Island Republican.

This is a disgrace. See you in the courts. You all know this is unconstitutional. You all know this is just a ruse. Another attempt to say to the people of the state of New York: We dont trust you.

The bill would also fix a recently passed law that barred sales of some types of bullet-resistant vests to the general public but inadvertently left out many types of body armor, including the type worn by a gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket.

Democrats with supermajorities in both legislative chambers expected to pass the bill later on Friday. The bill would then get sent to Hochuls desk for her expected signature, then take effect on 1 September.

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New York bill would force gun owners to reveal social media to obtain license - The Guardian US

Throughout his tenure, Jeff Kennett used the local tabloid as his preferred outlet, maintained a feud against ABC News & Current Affairs on both radio and TV and regularly criticising The Age, all while maintaining a cosy relationship with 3AW. Remember the image of the then premier shovelling sand at the media pack, only half in jest?

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Andrews refusal to be schooled by the tabloid editors is reminiscent of Malcolm Turnbulls fabulous retort to the not-missed-at-all Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones, when the then PM retorted, I will not to take dictation from you as the puffed-up breakfast radio host tried to tell Turnbull what he had to do. Almost nobody remembers the issue they were squabbling about but the attempt by the prime minister to remind Jones of his rightful place in the universe is unforgettable.

Andrews staff now regard themselves as their own publisher. He preferences Twitter for major announcements but also uses Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

He is the most prolific and consistent user of social media in Australian politics with a sizeable team devoted to creating fresh content throughout the day as well as monitoring public reactions. On Twitter alone he has 10 times more followers than his NSW counterpart 419,000 to Dominic Perrottets 41,000. No other state premier relies on tweets as much Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland is closest with half as many followers as Andrews.

In all of Australian politics, only the new Prime Minister has a bigger Twitter base, but he is not as active as Andrews. Anthony Albanese has just over 500,000 Twitter disciples, Penny Wong 390,000. Peter Dutton attracts a mere 130,000. Tellingly, Matthew Guy, the Victorian Opposition Leader, has just 28,000 followers on Twitter and still relies on legacy media to try to get traction.

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Twitter is just one tool in the Andrews social media armoury, but the platform is obsessively watched in political circles and can be highly effective. It can be toxic and a risk to peoples mental health, but is a platform where the creator retains total control over content no pesky gotcha questions or tricky traps set by ambitious journalists. Andrews has invested heavily in creating an expert team of social media specialists to milk every opportunity.

The Premier cannot be accused of being shy of an old-fashioned all in press conference as we saw with the Daily Dan marathons with the press pack throughout Victorias extended lockdowns. But being seen to be in charge during a prolonged emergency is entirely different to massaging the message during an election campaign, where control of every component is vital.

When Andrews returned from his extended rehabilitation after a serious back injury, he addressed Victorians directly, his team filming him talking to their camera, sitting on a couch at home with his wife, Catherine. They knew that all media would re-report his spiel. By speaking directly to the voters through social media, he avoided being edited and was not critiqued for playing favourites with any individual media outlet.

The AFL has long adopted a similar strategy. The league and the clubs are thought to now employ more football journalists than independent media combined. They generate their own stories, their own interviews, their own stunts. They protect their brand by limiting the opportunities for external scrutiny.

Politics and professional sport have much in common.

Excerpt from:
In bypassing the media, Daniel Andrews controls the message - The Age

On the heels of the NATO summit, Turkey has cut access to broadcasters Deutsche Welle and Voice of America in a move that could spark tensions with its Western allies.

An Ankara court on Thursday night ordered the blocking of the websites of the Turkish-language version of German and American public broadcasters Deutsche Welle (DW) and Voice of America (VoA) as a penalty for not applying for licenses under the countrys media regulation.

Access to DW Turkish and Voice of America, which did not apply for a license, was blocked by the Ankara Criminal Judgeship of Peace upon the request of the RTK Presidency, said lhan Tac, a board member of the controversial Turkish media regulator RTK, on Twitter.

Here is freedom of the press and advanced democracy!

A few days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan agreed to align his views with his NATO allies' by lifting his country's objections to the candidacy of Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance, the conservative leader risks stern words from his democratic partners over his renewed crackdown on freedom of expression.

DW and VoA refused to apply for licenses in February over concerns about undue government interference. DW argued that "licensing would have allowed the Turkish government to censor editorial content. A 2019 law grants RTK more control over the online content and websites of media organizations.

RTK is dominated by Erdoan's conservative AKP party and allies, and it regularly sanctions organizations critical of the government.

Turkeys press freedom has particularly deteriorated in the last year and ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. Most Turkish media outlets are run by the government or companies closely connected to it, and the international Turkish-language press remains one of the last options to obtain alternative news. Beyond traditional media, Erdoans government has also pushed to increase control over social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Journalists and press organizations widely lambasted the decision. The Progressive Journalists Association (ada Gazeteciler Dernei) described the ruling as "disgraceful" and a sign of the government's "intolerance to objective journalism."

DW said it would challenge the ruling.

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Turkey blocks access to two German and US media outlets - POLITICO Europe

Since the start of Russias war on Ukraine in late February 2022, Russian internet users have experienced what has been dubbed the descent of a digital iron curtain.

Russian authorities blocked access to all major opposition news sites, as well as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Under the new draconian laws purporting to combat fake news about the Russian-Ukrainian war, internet users have faced administrative and criminal charges for allegedly spreading online disinformation about Russias actions in Ukraine. Most Western technology companies, from Airbnb to Apple, have stopped or limited their Russian operations as part of the broader corporate exodus from the country.

Many Russians downloaded virtual private network software to try to access blocked sites and services in the first weeks of the war. By late April, 23% of Russian internet users reported using VPNs with varying regularity. The state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has been blocking VPNs to prevent people from bypassing government censorship and stepped up its efforts in June 2022.

Although the speed and scale of the wartime internet crackdown are unprecedented, its legal, technical and rhetorical foundations were put in place during the preceding decade under the banner of digital sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty for nations is the exercise of state power within national borders over digital processes like the flow of online data and content, surveillance and privacy, and the production of digital technologies. Under authoritarian regimes like todays Russia, digital sovereignty often serves as a veil for stymieing domestic dissent.

Russia has advocated upholding state sovereignty over information and telecommunications since the early 1990s. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a weakened Russia could no longer compete with the U.S. economically, technologically or militarily. Instead, Russian leaders sought to curtail the emergent U.S. global dominance and hold on to Russias great power status.

They did so by promoting the preeminence of state sovereignty as a foundational principle of international order. In the 2000s, seeking to project its great power resurgence, Moscow joined forces with Beijing to spearhead the global movement for internet sovereignty.

Despite its decades-long advocacy of digital sovereignty on the world stage, the Kremlin didnt begin enforcing state power over its domestic cyberspace until the early 2010s. From late 2011 to mid-2012, Russia saw the largest series of anti-government rallies in its post-Soviet history to protest Vladimir Putins third presidential run and fraudulent parliamentary elections. As in the anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, the internet served as a critical instrument in organizing and coordinating the Russian protests.

Following Putins return to the presidency in March 2012, the Kremlin turned its attention to controlling Russian cyberspace. The so-called Blacklist Law established a framework for blocking websites under the guise of fighting child pornography, suicide, extremism and other widely acknowledged societal ills.

However, the law has been regularly used to ban sites of opposition activists and media. The law widely known as the Bloggers Law then subjected all websites and social media accounts with over 3,000 daily users to traditional media regulations by requiring them to register with the state.

The next pivotal moment in Moscows embrace of authoritarian digital sovereignty came after Russias invasion of eastern Ukraine in the Spring of 2014. Over the following five years, as Russias relations with the West worsened, the Russian government undertook a barrage of initiatives meant to tighten its control over the countrys increasingly networked public.

The data localization law, for example, required foreign technology companies to keep Russian citizens data on servers located within the country and thus easily accessible to the authorities. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, another law required telecom and internet companies to retain users communications for six months and their metadata for three years and hand them over to authorities upon request without a court order.

The Kremlin has used these and other legal innovations to open criminal cases against thousands of internet users and jail hundreds for liking and sharing social media content critical of the government.

In April 2019, Russian authorities took their aspirations for digital sovereignty to another level with the so-called Sovereign Internet Law. The law opened the door for abuse of individual users and isolation of the internet community as a whole.

The law requires all internet service providers to install state-mandated devices for counteracting threats to stability, security, and the functional integrity of the internet within Russian borders. The Russian government has interpreted threats broadly, including social media content.

For example, the authorities have repeatedly used this law to throttle the performance of Twitter on mobile devices when Twitter has failed to comply with government requests to remove illegal content.

Further, the law establishes protocols for rerouting all internet traffic through Russian territory and for a single command center to manage that traffic. Ironically, the Moscow-based center that now controls traffic and fights foreign circumvention tools, such as the Tor browser, requires Chinese and U.S. hardware and software to function in the absence of their Russian equivalents.

Lastly, the law promises to establish a Russian national Domain Name System. DNS is the global internets core database that translates between web names such as theconversation.com and their internet addresses, in this case 151.101.2.133. DNS is operated by a California-based nonprofit, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

At the time of the laws passing, Putin justified the national DNS by arguing that it would allow the Russian internet segment to function even if ICANN disconnected Russia from the global internet in an act of hostility. In practice, when, days into Russias invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian authorities asked ICANN to disconnect Russia from the DNS, ICANN declined the request. ICANN officials said they wanted to avoid setting the precedent of disconnecting entire countries for political reasons.

The Russian-Ukrainian war has undermined the integrity of the global internet, both by Russias actions and the actions of technology companies in the West. In an unprecedented move, social media platforms have blocked access to Russian state media.

The internet is a global network of networks. Interoperability among these networks is the internets foundational principle. The ideal of a single internet, of course, has always run up against the reality of the worlds cultural and linguistic diversity: Unsurprisingly, most users dont clamor for content from faraway lands in unintelligible languages. Yet, politically motivated restrictions threaten to fragment the internet into increasingly disjointed networks.

Though it may not be fought over on the battlefield, global interconnectivity has become one of the values at stake in the Russian-Ukrainian war. And as Russia has solidified its control over sections of eastern Ukraine, it has moved the digital Iron Curtain to those frontiers.

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Kremlin tightens control over Russians' online lives threatening domestic freedoms and the global internet - The Conversation

Russia is exerting control of the media in occupied parts of Ukraine as regional military administrations seek near-total domination of the information space.

The tactic has involved kidnapping journalists, taking over local newsrooms, blocking Ukrainian TV and the internet, while promoting Russian channels and websites.

NATO ups troops on high alert to 300,000 - live Ukraine updates

Analysis of topics covered by Russian media suggests a concerted effort to make Ukraine appear as a failed state. It may be designed to send a message to those in the occupied zone that Russian governance is preferable.

Russia's media narratives

A media monitor developed by Ukrainian publication Texty.UA shows the topics that Russian media has focused on and how they have changed since the war began:

The Russian media has consistently sought to justify the invasion by referring to Ukrainian forces and their leadership as ''Nazis''. Usage of the term in Russian media peaked at the start of the war.

But other narratives have become more prominent over time. Articles that refer to Ukraine as a ''failed state'' increased in mid-April.

This included articles such as the one below, which has been translated, accusing the Kyiv government of being completely corrupt.

News that supports the occupying regional administrations has also featured prominently. For example, articles that reference people in the occupied zones receiving Russian passports - something the military administration has promoted - have been common.

But other stories haven't been covered. In mid-March anti-Russian protests broke out in Melitopol yet there was little trace of the words ''Melitopol'' and ''protest'' appearing in Russian news articles.

It is clear that the Russian media now being broadcast in the occupied parts of Ukraine gives a particular view of the war.

How have the Russians controlled the media in occupied zones?

The first stage of Russian media control involved taking over the physical infrastructure used to broadcast TV.

On 4 March it was reported that Russian forces installed new equipment on two TV towers in Kherson and Melitopol, two of the largest cities in the southern occupied regions, in order to broadcast Russian TV channels.

Local newsrooms have also been taken over. Some have been repurposed to broadcast Russian channels, while others have faced the choice of collaborating or being shut down.

The NGO Detector Media said this month that 44 companies had ceased broadcasting due to the Russian attacks and their occupation.

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Russian forces have also been targeting individual journalists. Oleh Baturyn, for example, who works for the Kherson newspaper Novyi Den, was abducted in March and held captive for eight days, during which he was beaten, tied to a radiator, and interrogated about his work and knowledge of local protests.

And it's not just through traditional media formats that Russia is exerting control. On 30 May, Ukrainian internet services, which had been working intermittently since the occupation, ceased to function in the Kherson region. The internet has since been routed through Russian service providers based in Crimea, meaning Ukrainian websites are often blocked.

There have also been reports of the Russian backed administration handing out SIM cards that use a Russian dial code. The fear is these could be easily monitored by Russian forces.

It appears Russia is trying to gain total domination of the communications network.

What are the Russians trying to achieve?

The Russian media blitz is, according to Dr Ofer Fridman, the director of operations for King's Centre for Strategic Communications, "straight out of the manual" of information operations.

Control of the information space behind the front line of the kinetic war can better allow governance to be implemented in the occupied zone by repressing dissent.

Dr Fridman believes media messaging in the occupied areas will increasingly focus on stability and security.

"What does it mean to win the hearts and minds of 'Russian' people living in Ukraine?" he said. "You win them by telling them one thing: you can have stability in silence. You say we provided stability to Russia. We can also do it here."

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But Dr Joanna Szostek, a lecturer in political communication at the University of Glasgow, thinks any campaign to win over the population is unlikely to succeed.

"Based on surveys I've done and others who do them in Ukraine, the number of Ukrainians that were looking to rejoin Russia - that one might imagine somehow welcoming this occupying force - are just tiny numbers," she said.

That spirit of resistance can be seen in Oleksiy, a resident of Kherson who recently fled the region but who found a way to access Ukrainian news.

"Communication in occupation is just like air for a scuba diver," he said. "We woke up checking the news, and we fell asleep checking it. If there is a connection, there is hope. When the connection was down, it seemed that life had stopped."

Oleksiy's ability to still access Ukrainian news shows how difficult Russia's task will be in completely controlling the information flow in the occupied zones.

By using Virtual Private Networks - tools that mask the location of internet users - people have still been able to access blocked websites. Data from Google Trends shows that the highest proportion of searches for "VPN" over the past 90 days have occurred in the occupied zones in the south and east of Ukraine.

Many people in Ukraine also get their information via Telegram, a messaging and social media site, which isn't blocked by Russian internet service providers.

And even in controlling the TV networks, Russia appears to be having trouble. The Telegram channel of the Russian imposed administration in Kherson complained their broadcasts had gone off-air due to faulty equipment.

But they are not to be deterred. Earlier this month, they announced they would be recruiting a chief engineer and director to the radio and TV transmitting station of Kherson.

The Russian government didn't respond when asked by Sky News about media repression in occupied Ukraine.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Ukraine war: Russia takes TV and websites offline as part of media blackout in occupied territories - Sky News