Group items tagged

"THE GLARING FALLACY that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one's own views. The most cursory review of history, and the most minimal understanding of how these tech giants function, instantly reveals the folly of that pipe dream."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"Censorship, or rather his stance against it, is a key reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn last year. His social media company's lawsuit against an anti-hate speech group refers to censorship, or variations on the word, eight times. But for critics of his complaint against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), it is Musk who is doing the censoring. "The intent is definitely to get the centre to shut up. That's the whole point of this suit, to prevent the centre from exercising any speech that Musk doesn't like," says Prof Brian Quinn from Boston College law school."

"The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Lenz's and EFF's favor today, ruling that rightsholders must consider fair use before issuing takedowns. The court found that people whose creations were censored through DMCA abuse could sue the companies that filed the censorship demands, even if they couldn't show monetary damages from the censorship. "

"India's government has ordered that all online news, social media and video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are to be subject to state regulation, raising fears of increased censorship of digital media. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which regulates and censors print newspapers, television, films and theatre, will also have jurisdiction, under the new order, over digital news and entertainment platforms in India."

"Keyword-based filtering allows blocking of sites and texts containing candidates' names and slogans, say security experts"

""It seems Cameron and Perry have ignored official government policy, invented their own policy and forced it onto UK ISPs. With no legislation, and no complaints from Lib Dem MPS or the ISPs, we have completely unaccountable "nudge censorship" being forced onto the UK population with no debate.""

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

""China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state's resources," said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. "It's not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale." "This is a huge thing," he added. "No other country has that." "

"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"There are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries. Have the stories added up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having more and more civic engagement over digital media? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. There are still no good examples of countries with rapidly growing internet populations and increasingly authoritarian governments."

Interesting to see the censorship of such a controlled system as iOS - is it a good or bad thing?

Cory Doctorow article - thought provoking...

"Turkey's brutal new Internet law grants the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate the power to arbitrarily censor Web-pages to the individual URL level, much like the Great Firewall of China -- meaning that specific articles that are critical of the state can be censored while leaving the remainder of the site intact."

Software developed to bypass Iranian Internet censorship has been scrapped, due to various reasons.

Software created to help Iranians escape government control of the web has been withdrawn over security fears.

Firewalls and China....censorship or protection?