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China has banned all celebrities from endorsing a range of products and banned those with 'lapsed morals' from endorsing anything.

The regulations, announced by state censors this week, bar Chinese celebrities from publicly endorsing or advertising health, education and financial commodities, including e-cigarettes and baby formula. The new regulations read:

Celebrities should consciously practice socialist core values in their advertising endorsement activities, and endorsement activities should conform to social morals and traditional virtues.

The rules also banned companies from hiring celebrities found to have lapsed morals or engaged in illegal behavior including tax evasion, drunkenness, drug addiction and fraud, and from using images of Communist party leaders, revolutionary leaders and heroes in their advertising.

The Online Censorship Bill is due to be brought back to Parliament later this month when  Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan will present an amended version of the Online Safety Bill to MPs.

It is reported that controversial 'legal but harmful rules' are set to be watered down. She is scrapping sweeping legal but harmful rules which required social media companies to address content that is not illegal but is deemed dangerous.

The rules would have meant social media sites, such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, were responsible for dealing with this content for both adults and children. But, amid criticism that it would have led to a widespread attack on freedom of speech by companies hoping to avoid hefty fines, it seems that the new laws will only apply to material targeted at children.

Tumblr's death knell sounded back in 2018, when the site infamously banned its popular adult content.

The site's popularity quickly tanked: in the three months following the platform lost 30% of its page views. In 2019, the site was sold to WordPress owner Automattic for less than $3 million, a seismic drop compared to the $1.1 billion Yahoo paid for it in 2013.

Now, it appears that Tumblr is hoping to turn back the clock. The platform first announced a new community labels feature back in September which allowed users to tag their own posts that feature depictions of drug and alcohol addiction, violence and sexual content.

Then a staff member reblogged the community labels announcement, writing

 OK, didn't everyone want 'females presenting nipples' back on Tumblr? Here you are. This is it.

The Tumblr blog post reads:

We recently introduced Community Labels to give everyone more control over their dashboard experience. With this new feature, you can adjust your feed to your preferred comfort level by setting the types of content you want to see. It was our first step toward a more open Tumblr.

Today, we're taking the next step: We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).

So, even if your creations contain nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, you can now share them on Tumblr using the appropriate Community Label so that everyone remains in control of the types of content they see on their dash.

We have updated our Community Guidelines to reflect these changes; the rest of our content policies remain the same: We still don't allow hate, spam, violent threats, or anything illegal, and visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr.

We hope this shift creates more room for artistic expression to flourish on Tumblr while empowering each of you to craft your own experience and safely explore and discover the things you love.

The Callisto Protocol is a 2022 single player horror survival game by Striking Distance Studios

The game has now been banned in Japan after it was refused a CERO rating. The developers have decided not to pursue local edits to tryan achieve a rating. String Distance Studios said via its Japanese Twitter account that the localized version for Japan will be discontinued and that anyone who pre-ordered will get a refund, adding:

We have determined that the game cannot pass the CERO rating in its current state and that changing the content will not provide the experience that players expect.

The reason for refusing the rating have not been reported but it is assume that the refusal was down to the game's violence and gore

PoliticsHome spotted the change to the House of Commons schedule last night, reporting that the Online Censorship Bill had been dropped from the Commons business next week.

A source in the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) told TechCrunch that the latest delay to the bill's parliamentary timetable is to allow time for MPs to read new amendments -- which they also confirmed are yet to be laid.

But they suggested the delay will not affect the passage of the bill, saying it will progress within the next few weeks.

The change of PM may not mean major differences in policy approach in the arena of online regulation as Rishi Sunak has expressed similar concerns about the Online Safety Bill's impact on free speech -- also seemingly centred on clauses pertaining to restrictions on the legal but harmful speech of adults.