Censor Watch

Hugh Hefner died on Wednesday, at the age of 91 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

His son Cooper Hefner, chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, said his father lived an exceptional and impactful life as a media and cultural pioneer and a leading voice behind some of the most significant social and cultural movements of our time in advocating free speech, civil rights, and sexual freedom. He defined a lifestyle and ethos that lie at the heart of the Playboy brand, one of the most recognizable and enduring in history.

Perhaps the impacfulness of Hefner can be gauged from comments from his opponents, the Catholic News Agency which writes:

Christian leaders in the fight against pornography have called the death of Hugh Hefner tragic, while reminding Catholics to take seriously the impact of Hefner's legacy on American culture.

Alan Sears, founder of the misleadingly named Alliance Defending Freedom said:

Nobody should ever take joy in anybody's passing [...BUT...] There have been thousands of people praying for Hugh Hefner's conversion for years, and the saddest part to me of his passing, is that we see no evidence of conversion on his part. Apparently up to the end, he took joy in this exploitation of women, of sexuality and all the other things that the secular media is lauding him for.

Offsite Article: Let's hear it for the Hef

30th September 2017. See article from spiked-online.com by Tim Black

Hugh Hefner's commitment to liberty should be his lasting legacy.

Vera Jourova, the EU's commissioner for justice, is resisting calls to follow Theresa May's censorship lead and legislate to fine internet companies who fail to take down anything deemed hate speech.

Vera Jourova condemned Facebook as a highway for hatred, but the former Czech minister said she was not yet ready to promote EU-wide legislation similar to that being pursued in the UK, France and Germany. I would never say they [the UK, France and Germany] are wrong, but we all have the responsibility to react to this challenge with necessary and proportionate reaction, she told the Guardian.

In Britain, May is demanding that internet companies remove hateful content , in particular that aligned to terror organisations, within two hours of being discovered, or face financial sanctions. Under a law due to come into effect next month in Germany, social media companies face fines of up to £43m if they persistently fail to remove illegal content from their sites.

The commission is instead offering further guidance to internet companies about how they improve their record by complying with a voluntary code of conduct drawn up last year and so far adopted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The ambassadors to the Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain, hardly countries that have any notion of free speech, have said that UK TV censor, Ofcom, should establish if the services breached British or European directives.

Al Jazeera is based in Doha and the four countries boycotting Qatar accuse the TV station of promoting an extremist agenda. Closing down the station and its affiliates was one of the conditions imposed by the Arab quartet leadership for lifting the boycott on Qatar.

The five point request from the ambassadors to Ofcom asked for an assessment that Al Jazeera was fit to hold a broadcasting licence when it was a platform for allegedly positive or sympathetic coverage of ISIL. This includes references to it as an organisation, rather than a terrorist group.

An Ofcom spokeswoman said it had passed this letter of complaint to the media regulator in Italy, where the [Arabic] channel holds its licence, for urgent consideration.

Chris Smith, originally a Labour politician, has stepped down after 10 years as chairman of the advert censors at ASA.

No doubt he has done sterling work on sorting out fraudulent and misleading claims. But when it comes to censoring politically incorrect adverts, he has suffered 'widespread offence' so many times, that he must be a jibbering wreck.

Organizers of pop concerts and some other big events are increasingly wary of including Malaysia on their itineraries due to growing intolerance toward activities regarded as insulting to Islam by some Muslim groups.

The promoters say that international music stars, especially those known for risque lyrics or revealing clothing, are unlikely to be brought to Malaysia as part of regional or global tours. The same goes for any gatherings that could in any way be deemed un-Islamic.

A United Nations cultural rights expert warned in a report last week that there is growing pressure to adopt a more narrow interpretation of the Islamic religion and identity in Malaysia, which excludes the country's cross-cultural history, marginalizes religious minorities, and fails to take account of the diversity of Malay Muslims.

Under disgraceful plans set out last year by the European Commission, news publishers would get extra rights over their content, giving them the right to charge and licence publishers seeking to use snippets or short quotes from articles. The policy has been dubbed 'the link tax'.

Now a key committee of the European Parliament, the Industry, Research and Energy Committee, wants to extend the proposals so that these rights would also cover publishers of academic research. Surely a nightmare for open access and open science. Researchers might have to pay, or might at least have to ask for permission, every time they want to quote another academic's work in their piece.

If the proposed ancillary right is extended to academic publications, researchers, students and other users of scientific and scholarly journal articles could be forced to ask permission or pay fees to the publisher for including short quotations from a research paper in other scientific publications, according to an open letter from Science Europe.

But even if this latest amendment is not adopted, the wider plan could still make it much harder for everyone, including researchers, to include quotations from news articles in their work, the organisation fears. For example, students might have to buy a licence for every newspaper quote they use in a thesis. Links to news and the use of titles, headlines and fragments of information could now become subject to licensing. Terms could make the last two decades of news less accessible to researchers and the public, leading to a distortion of the public's knowledge and memory of past events.

openmedia.org is campaigning against the link tax and notes:

Next week, MEPs on the European Parliament's powerful Civil Liberties committee will vote on whether to approve the Link Tax and mass content filtering. With your help we've been relentlessly fighting to put a stop to this disastrous duo of copyright policy, and this is what all that pressure and hard work comes down to.

Let's be clear: these proposals are abusing copyright to censor the Internet. Backed by powerful publishing lobbyists and unelected European Commissioners, they include sweeping powers for media giants to charge fees for links, and requirements that websites build censorship machines to monitor and block your content. But with the help of tens of thousands of EU citizens, we've made clear to the European Parliament just how dangerous and unpopular these censorship proposals really are.

See article from boingboing.net . Boing Boing are also somewhat unimpressed by the crap law being generated by the EU.:

The European Commission has a well-deserved reputation for bizarre, destructive, ill-informed copyright plans for the internet , and the latest one is no exception: mandatory copyright filters for any site that allows the public to post material, which will algorithmically determine which words, pictures and videos are lawful to post, untouched by human hands.

These filters already exist, for example in the form of Youtube's notoriously hamfisted Content ID system, which demonstrates just how bad robots are at figuring out copyright law. But even if we could make filters that were 99% accurate, this would still be a catastrophe on a scale never seen in censorship's long and dishonorable history: when you're talking about hundreds of billions of tweets, Facebook updates, videos, pictures, posts and uploads, a 1% false-positive rate would amount to the daily suppression of the entire Library of Alexandria, or all the TV ever broadcast up until, say, 1980.

Complaints to the ASA in the first half of 2017 show that TV continues to be the most complained about advertising medium with 5,127 complaints about 2,272 ads. Online ads are a close second (4,062 complaints), with more individual ads (3,852) complained about than any other medium.

In total, we received 13,131 complaints (19.8% fewer than last year) about 9,486 ads (January - June). As a result of our work, we have secured the amendment or withdrawal of 3,034 ads over the six month period (up 88% compared to the first half of 2016, itself a record year).

Misleading ads continue to prompt the most complaints 8,195 (62%) and represent the bulk of the ASA's workload (accounting for 76% of cases).

There is a clear difference between TV and online ads in terms of the issues that prompt public concern: The majority of complaints about TV ads are on the grounds of offence (3,439) rather than misleadingness (1,677); while the majority of complaints about online ads concern misleadingness (3,673) rather than harm and offence (360).

The reasons for these trends are explained by the differences in audience size and viewing habits for the two media, as well as the pre-clearance checks in place for TV. A large proportion of potentially misleading claims in TV ads are stopped before they're broadcast.

The new figures show that men continue to complain more about ads than women (59% to 38%). In total, men lodged 7,729 complaints compared to 5,031 by women. There are also marked differences in the kind of ads complained about, with women complaining more about harm and offence (F: 56% v M: 44%) while men complain more about misleadingness (M: 70% v F: 30%).

And presumably as a bit of a carrot for newspapers to print an article about the importance of ASA, the advert censor provided the top 3 most complained about adverts for the period:

• The Moneysupermarket dance-off ads featuring a man called Dave wearing denim cutoffs and heels received the most complaints, 455, with viewers objecting that it was offensive and overtly sexual, possibly homophobic and having the potential to encourage hate crimes.
• Match.com's ad showing a woman removing her partner's top and passionately kissing her drew the second-highest number of complaints at 293.
• McDonald's swiftly pulled its poorly received campaign featuring a mother helping her son grieve for his father while sitting in one of the chain's restaurants, but not before viewers lodged 255 complaints that it exploited child bereavement to sell fast food.

None of the complaints were upheld by ASA>

Indonesia's Trans TV will surely become a cropper

Indonesian lawmakers have agreed a proposed law that would ban anything gay on TV. Among the list of criteria for outlawed content in broadcasts includes programs containing LGBT behaviour.

The law would require the screening of all TV shows, films and adverts by an external censorship body prior to broadcast in order to ensure compliance with the new rules.

The ban has broad support from across the parties in the country. Supiadin Aries Saputra of the NasDem Party said:

We can't allow LGBT behaviour on TV. It is against our culture. We have to ban it early before it becomes a lifestyle. It's dangerous and can ruin the morality of the younger generation.

It is legal to be gay in Indonesia apart from Aceh province, which implements its own nasty punishments under Islamic law.

Councillors are set to vote on a proposal to ban the The Sun newspaper and its journalists from Flintshire County Council offices.

The motion has been put forward by Deputy Leader Cllr Bernie Attridge and Cllr Kevin Hughes. It also seeks to ban Sun journalists from reporting on council meetings. The motion is said to reflect continued strong feelings about the Sun's reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy.

However the council move has been met with criticism from the Welsh Conservatives. Shadow Local Government Secretary, Janet Finch-Saunders said it was was an attempt at censorship of the media. She said:

This is a childish and typically spiteful move from a Labour Party which no longer cares for the fundamental principle of free speech, and which no longer backs a free press.

Whilst we might not like certain newspapers -- and might question the impartiality of other platforms -- we have a right not to consume their output. But we shouldn't have a right to ban them. This is how dictatorships start, and Jeremy Corbyn should know a thing or two about them.

The legality of the motion is being considered ahead of a scheduled council discussion on September 27.

Update: Support shops banning the Sun

28th September 2017 See article from bbc.com

Flintshire council has voted to support newspaper sellers who refuse to sell The Sun. The motion was carried by 36 councillors to six, with 18 abstentions, at a meeting on Wednesday.

The motion, put forward by councillors Bernie Attridge and Kevin Hughes, asked the council to support the Total Eclipse of the Sun boycott campaign in solidarity with councils in England.

The initial motion had tried to ban The Sun from council buildings and stop any of the newspaper's journalists attending council meetings, but these aspects have since been removed.

Chinese internet censors have handed down maximum fines to the operators of three major social-media platforms in the country for failing to deal with pornography, violence and other banned content on their sites. The affected platforms are Baidu's online forum Tieba, microblogging site Weibo and Tencent's massively popular social app WeChat.

The Cyberspace Administration of China issued a notice saying the companies were fined for failing to fulfill their management duties in dealing with pornographic and violent content, as well as information that promotes ethnic hatred.

Separately, Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp seemed to be functioning properly after it earlier appeared to have been blocked again on the mainland. However WhatsApp was totally blocked again a few days later.

In recent months, China has raised the pressure on the country's internet space in what some say is an attempt to exert control in the lead up to the Communist Party Congress next month.

Update: Weibo recruits an army of snitches

28th September 2017 See article from sixthtone.com

Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo has said that it wants to hire a team of social media vigilantes to help identify and stamp out supposedly 'inappropriate' online content. The company said the scheme was designed to strengthen supervision of netizens and to more effectively rid the platform of what it referred to as pornographic, illegal, and harmful information.

Those selected for what appear to be part-time roles will be compensated for their efforts if they achieve certain monthly targets, such as reporting at least 200 valid cases of inappropriate content. These supervisors will be given VIP membership, paid 200 yuan ($30) in online credits, and may qualify to receive a special orange electronic badge displayed on their Weibo accounts.

For social media sleuths whose prowess at sniffing out undesirable content ranks them among the company's top 10 supervisors, the rewards will be even greater, potentially including Apple smartphones and laptops.

Weibo said it was introducing the program in response to guidelines issued by the Beijing office of the Cyberspace Administration of China. On Monday, the same office announced that it had fined Weibo and other online platforms for neglecting to prevent users from spreading pornographic content and ethnic hate speech.

Russia will block access to Facebook next year if the websites refuses to comply with a law requiring websites to store personal data of Russian citizens on Russian servers so as to facilitate state snooping. Russia's internet censor, Roskomnadzor, told reporters that either Facebook abides by the law or the social network will cease to work on Russian territory.

Roskomnadzor blocked Russian access to LinkedIn last November as a result of the social media company being found guilty of violating the same data storage law. Since then, foreign internet companies have been under pressure to comply or risk losing their service in the country. Twitter has told Roskomnadzor that it aims to localise the personal data of its users by mid-2018. Companies including Google and Alibaba have already complied .

Meanwhile on the other side of the iron curtain, Facebook said it will turn over to the United States Congress Russian-linked ads that may have been intended to sway the 2016 US election. The social network revealed that it identified around 500 fake accounts with ties to Russia that purchased $100,000 worth of ads during the campaign, as well as $50,000 ad purchases from Russian accounts.

We support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

The latest adaptation of Stephen King's It has set box-office records around the world, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated horror of all time.

But Burger King's Russian division has filled an official government complaint to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) demanding the film be banned from cinemas. The reason?. The villainous clown Pennywise apparently looks like Ronald McDonald from rival chain McDonald's.

Amanda Holden and her dress choice were the most controversial thing on UK television in 2017 according to complaints to Ofcom.

Holden left a few viewers 'outraged' with her dress choice during a live show of Britain's Got Talent back in June of this year. A total of 663 complaints were registered about it.

However, Ofcom reviewed the episode and chose not to investigate the matter further. They said that Ms Holden's choice of attire would not have exceeded most viewers expectations.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York has pulled three exhibits featuring animals after receiving explicit and repeated threats of violence. The museum said they will not now be shown out of concern for the safety of its staff, visitors, and participating artists.'Cruel manipulation of animals'

Campaigners had complained that the works showed cruelty against animals in the name of art. A petition to pull the exhibits had gained more than 500,000 signatures.

One of the works, titled Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other , shows a film of pitbull dogs on treadmills facing each other but aren't able to reach each other. The dogs are being observed in a presumably Chinese gallery setting with onlookers rather passively observing and photographing proceedings.

The other exhibits are Theatre of the World , in which insects and reptiles live in a see-through dome and eat each other; and A Case Study of Transference , a video of a previous live performance of two mating pigs stamped with Roman and Greek letters.

The museum has explained that the exhibit is an intentionally challenging and provocative artwork saying:

We recognise that the work may be upsetting. The curators of the exhibition hope that viewers will consider why the artists produced it and what they may be saying about the social conditions of globalisation and the complex nature of the world we share.

The museum said it was dismayed that we must withhold works of art, adding: Freedom of expression has always been and will remain a paramount value of the Guggenheim.

The American Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals issued a statement objecting to the cruel manipulation of animals. It said:

Such treadmills are typical of brutal dog fighting training regimens, and the mere positioning of animals to face each other and encourage aggression often meets the definition of illegal dog fighting in most states.

It is interesting to observe that campaigners against the exhibition pointed out the offending video on YouTube, thinking that people would take offence and join the protest, in very much the same way that the Guggenheim exhibition is pointing out the cruelty going on in China, perhaps with the aim of provoking protest.

The works were due to be in an exhibition titled Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World, which opens on 6 October.

Streaming service Netflix has pulled an episode of the cartoon series Maya the Bee after a viewer complained it contained an explicit drawing.

A screen grab of the offending scene appears to show an outline of a penis etched on a log in the background.

The 35th episode of the show's first season was pulled after US mother Chey Robinson posted a clip on Facebook,

The TV show is not available to UK Netflix subscribers

Cheeky animators have a history of sneaking in suggestive imagery into cartoons, apparently in the expectation their private jokes would remain so.

Update: Cartoon makers apologise for being dicks

25th September 2017. See article from bbc.com . Thanks to Nick.

An outline of a penis that appeared in a Maya the Bee episode was the result of a very bad joke, the makers of the children's animated series have said. Belgian company Studio 100 said the image was absolutely inappropriate and offered apologies to everybody who has been offended by it.

Studio 100 told the BBC the penis, etched on a log in the background of a scene, obviously results from a very bad joke from one of the 150 artists working on the production. This is indeed unacceptable to Studio 100 as owner of the brand and all its affiliates and doesn't reflect the quality of our work and our values, it continued. The Paris-based company said it was very sorry and that it was taking all suitable technical measures to remedy the situation.

South Korea's internet censor made a large amount of censorship requests to the social network Tumblr but these were turned down on the grounds that the 'offending' posts did not actually violate Tumblr's policies.

Tumblr received 22,468 requests from the Korean government from January to June to delete posts related to prostitution and porn.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), the country's internet censor, sent 30,200 requests to several internet companies to delete posts related to prostitution and porn. Requests to Tumblr accounted for over two-thirds, totalling 22,468. By comparison, Twitter received 1,771, Instagram 12, and Facebook 5.

Tumblr rejected the requests to censor adult content saying that it had no physical presence in South Korea and was not subject to local laws. It also said it allows wide-range freedom of expression on its service. The company also said posts reported by KCSC didn't violate its policy.