Censor Watch

Murders In The Zoo is a 1933 US crime horror by A. Edward Sutherland
Starring Charles Ruggles, Lionel Atwill and Gail Patrick

BBFC animal cruelty cuts were required for a PG rated video release in 2023.

Summary Notes

A monomaniacal zoologist is pathologically jealous of his beautiful but unfaithful wife Evelyn and will not stop short of murder to keep her.

Versions

cut: run: 62:08s pal: 59:39s		UK: Passed 12 for sexual threat, moderate horror, threat after BBFC cuts: 2023 Eureka Entertainment Ltd video The BBFC commented: The distributor chose to make cuts to a sequence of animal cruelty.
uncut run: 60:00s pal: 57:36s		UK: 3D version passed A (PG) uncut: 1933 cinema release

A few Christians have slammed a plan to erect a statue of an Amazonian love god near a cathedral as offensive and an insult.

A 6ft 2in bronze figure is being paid for by taxpayers as part of a £1million trail of five sculptures through the centre of Wakefield, West Yorkshire. According to its creator, artist Jason Wilsher-Mills, the sculpture was inspired by a painting of local Victorian conservationist Charles Waterton capturing a caiman or alligator-type creature, the love story of his parents and his own connections with Wakefield.

But a planning application to site the pagan statue on Cathedral Walk, close to the Anglican cathedral's main entrance, has prompted more than 60 complaints from members of the public. One objector commented:

How can you possibly think that the erection of a Sun God opposite the central place of Christian worship in the city and district could be acceptable?

It is at best insensitive and at worst a deliberate attempt to mock Christianity, the cathedral and all it stands for. Is this a precedent?

Should we expect the council to place such offensive statues outside other local centres of worship, Christian and otherwise?

The project is being fully funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. If planning consent is granted the sculptures will be in place this summer.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a 2023 UK horror by Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Starring Nikolai Leon, Maria Taylor and Natasha Rose Mills

After Christopher Robin abandons them for college, Pooh and Piglet embark on a bloody rampage as they search for a new source of food.

The screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher film due to be released in Hong Kong this week, has been cancelled supposedly for technical reasons.

Chinese censors have in the frequently targeted the Winnie the Pooh character due to memes that compare the gait and girth of the bumbling bear to President Xi Jinping. The comparisons began in 2013 when Xi visited the US and met his then counterpart, Barack Obama, and some online commentators seized on their likeness to Pooh and Tigger.

UK: Passed 18 uncut for strong violence, gory images, threat:

• 2023 Altitude Film Distribution (RB) Blu-ray at UK Amazon #ad released on 17th April 2023
• 2023 Altitude Film Distribution R2 DVD at UK Amazon released on 17th April 2023

Tom Tugendhat, the UK security minister, said he is awaiting a report from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) before deciding on whether TikTok should be banned or restricted.

Under pressure from some senior MPs, Rishi Sunak has hinted that Britain could follow the US and the EU by banning the social media app from government phones and devices. The Prime Minister said the UK will look at what our allies are doing, with Washington and the European Commission having banned TikTok on staff phones.

Tugendhat was asked if he would go further and order a fully-fledged ban on the app, like those ordered by India and former US president Donald Trump. He responded:

Looking at the various different apps people have on their phones and the implications for them is a hugely important question and I've asked the National Cyber Security Centre to look into this.

What certainly is clear is for many young people TikTok is now a news source and, just as it's quite right we know who owns the news sources in the UK... it's important we know who owns the news sources that are feeding into our phones.

The government's Internet 'Safety' Bill is coming under a lot of pressure for its disgraceful intention to compromise internet security for all British people by removing secure encrypted communication used to keep out hackers, blackmailers, scammers and thieves.

Perhaps acknowledging the opposition from security experts the government is giving itself another 18 weeks to push it through parliament. Otherwise the bill would be in danger of being timed out.

The extension will be presented to parliament tomorrow.

The British censors allow wealthy streaming giants to self-certify at a reduced cost, while still bleeding physical media distributors dry.

The British Board of Film Classification has just issued another self-congratulatory press release about how they have convinced yet another platform -- this time Amazon Prime -- to take on their ratings rather than having content either unrated or else using non-BBFC standard age classifications.

For the BBFC to allow huge, wealthy corporations to self-certify and use BBFC assets for a small fee (free for up to 100 titles, then from £573.90 plus VAT -- less than it would cost to certify one feature film on disc -- for up to 250 titles a year through to a maximum of £4,591.22 plus VAT for anyone releasing 5000+ titles a year) while still charging much smaller distributors through the nose and making them pay for every element of a film including all the extras --  well, that seems outrageous.

See full article from reprobatepress.com

The BBFC press release reads:

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has announced that it has signed an agreement to enable Prime Video to build on their existing Trust & Safety tools, in order to move towards the in-house production of BBFC age ratings that are in line with the BBFC's Classification Guidelines. This marks an important next step in the BBFC's long-standing content classification relationship with Prime Video, which aims to provide families across the UK with the information they need to make safe viewing decisions.

Through enhanced dialogue and processes, the BBFC will support Prime Video as they adapt their rating methodologies in the UK to fully reflect the BBFC's classification standards. This will extend the presence of the BBFC's trusted guidance on the streaming service in the UK. As part of the agreement, the BBFC will share additional expertise and insight into the standards they apply when classifying film, video and TV content.

The BBFC's classification standards are underpinned by a transparent set of published guidelines, which are the result of wide-scale consultations with over 10,000 people across the UK, extensive research, and more than 100 years of experience. The BBFC also works closely with young people, child psychologists and charities so as to ensure that standards continue to reflect the views and expectations of parents and families across the UK. The guidelines are updated every 4-5 years and the BBFC will consult on its guidelines this year, with any changes required by the research coming into force in early 2024.

The announcement comes as recent BBFC research, conducted by We Are Family, reveals that 90% of parents/caregivers of 4-to 15-year-olds and 80% of teenagers aged 16-19 consider age ratings and content advice to be of equal importance on streaming services as they are for films in the cinema. More generally, the research shows a high demand for both age ratings and content advice on streaming services, particularly amongst parents and caregivers. Young people also see the value of such guidance: 51% of teens aged 16-19 check content advice before choosing what to watch, and 89% said that they pay more attention to content advice if choosing for a person younger than them, such as siblings or other family members.

The Belgian government has decided to ban gambling advertising across all media from July 1st 2023. From January 1st, 2025 there will be a further ban on advertising in stadiums and from January 1st, 2028 gambling companies will no longer be able to sponsor professional sports clubs.

Injustice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne said in a statement that the censorship was for those who want to get rid of their gambling addiction. He cited also the tsunami of gambling advertising as an additional problem.

Gambling advertising will be banned from television, radio, cinemas, magazines, newspapers and in public spaces. Online advertising on websites and social media will also be prohibited.

YouTube has been attempting to force its creators into santising their strong language. Not because of some sort of moral highgrounding, but because the company wants to maximise its appeal to advertisers who would prefer not to advertise around content with strong language.

Well it seems that the attempt has wound up creators and now YouTube is rolling back some of its attempts to sanitise strong language. YouTube explains:

Updated Inappropriate language Ad-Friendly Guidelines

Our update last November aimed to improve the clarity and enforcement of our Advertiser-friendly content guidelines and make it easier for Creators to monetize brand safe content. However, we heard concerns from Creators that the new profanity policy actually resulted in a stricter approach than we intended. 

Effective March 7, we are making the following changes:

• Usage of moderate profanity at any time in the video is now eligible for green icons.

• Usage of stronger profanity, like the f-word in the first 7 seconds or repeatedly throughout the majority of the video can now receive limited ads (under the November update, this would have received no ad revenue). See specific examples of moderate and stronger profanity in our Help Center article .

• Video content using profanity, moderate or strong, after the first 7 seconds will now be eligible for green icons, unless used repetitively throughout the majority of the video (under the November update, this would have received no ad revenue).

• We've also clarified our guidance on how profanity in music is treated; moderate or strong profanity used in background music, backing tracks, intro/outro music can now earn full ad revenue (previously this would have received no ad revenue).

• Use of any profanity (moderate or stronger profanity) in titles and thumbnails will still be demonetized and cannot run ads, as was the case before the update in November,

My Mother's Daughter is a 2022 UK documentary short film by Mariam Khan, Ahmen Khawaja

Mehak was 13 when she was abducted by a man known to her family. He repeatedly raped her and forced her to convert to Islam. She managed to escape but not before making a shocking discovery that changed her life forever.

Pakistan's Central Board of Film Censors has banned the short documentary My Mother's Daughter which was due to screen at the Women International Film Festival. Director Mariam Khan shared the letter sent by the censor board which had based its reasons for censoring the film by calling it propaganda as well as for highlighting wrong values which are against the Pakistani culture and society.

The European Commission proposed new EU rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (CSA) in May 2022. Complementing existing frameworks to fight online CSA, the EU proposal would introduce a new, harmonised European structure for assessing and mitigating the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.

The thrust of the proposal is to react in a unified way, either to CSAM detected, or else to systems identified most at risk of being used to disseminate such material.

However as is always the case with campaigners, this is never enough. The campaigners basically want everybody's communications to be open to snooping and surveillance without the slightest consideration for people's safety from hackers, identity thieves, scammers, blackmailers and fraudsters.

The European Commission wrote:

The Commission is proposing new EU legislation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse online. With 85 million pictures and videos depicting child sexual abuse reported worldwide in 2021 alone, and many more going unreported, child sexual abuse is pervasive. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issue, with the Internet Watch foundation noting a 64% increase in reports of confirmed child sexual abuse in 2021 compared to the previous year. The current system based on voluntary detection and reporting by companies has proven to be insufficient to adequately protect children and, in any case, will no longer be possible once the interim solution currently in place expires. Up to 95% of all reports of child sexual abuse received in 2020 came from one company, despite clear evidence that the problem does not only exist on one platform.

To effectively address the misuse of online services for the purposes of child sexual abuse, clear rules are needed, with robust conditions and safeguards. The proposed rules will oblige providers to detect, report and remove child sexual abuse material on their services. Providers will need to assess and mitigate the risk of misuse of their services and the measures taken must be proportionate to that risk and subject to robust conditions and safeguards.

A new independent EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse (EU Centre) will facilitate the efforts of service providers by acting as a hub of expertise, providing reliable information on identified material, receiving and analysing reports from providers to identify erroneous reports and prevent them from reaching law enforcement, swiftly forwarding relevant reports for law enforcement action and by providing support to victims.

The new rules will help rescue children from further abuse, prevent material from reappearing online, and bring offenders to justice. Those rules will include:

• Mandatory risk assessment and risk mitigation measures: Providers of hosting or interpersonal communication services will have to assess the risk that their services are misused to disseminate child sexual abuse material or for the solicitation of children, known as grooming. Providers will also have to propose risk mitigation measures.

• Targeted detection obligations, based on a detection order: Member States will need to designate national authorities in charge of reviewing the risk assessment. Where such authorities determine that a significant risk remains, they can ask a court or an independent national authority to issue a detection order for known or new child sexual abuse material or grooming. Detection orders are limited in time, targeting a specific type of content on a specific service.

• Strong safeguards on detection: Companies having received a detection order will only be able to detect content using indicators of child sexual abuse verified and provided by the EU Centre. Detection technologies must only be used for the purpose of detecting child sexual abuse. Providers will have to deploy technologies that are the least privacy-intrusive in accordance with the state of the art in the industry, and that limit the error rate of false positives to the maximum extent possible.

• Clear reporting obligations: Providers that have detected online child sexual abuse will have to report it to the EU Centre.

• Effective removal: National authorities can issue removal orders if the child sexual abuse material is not swiftly taken down. Internet access providers will also be required to disable access to images and videos that cannot be taken down, e.g., because they are hosted outside the EU in non-cooperative jurisdictions.

• Reducing exposure to grooming: The rules require app stores to ensure that children cannot download apps that may expose them to a high risk of solicitation of children.

• Solid oversight mechanisms and judicial redress: Detection orders will be issued by courts or independent national authorities. To minimise the risk of erroneous detection and reporting, the EU Centre will verify reports of potential online child sexual abuse made by providers before sharing them with law enforcement authorities and Europol. Both providers and users will have the right to challenge any measure affecting them in Court.

The new EU Centre will support:

• Online service providers, in particular in complying with their new obligations to carry out risk assessments, detect, report, remove and disable access to child sexual abuse online, by providing indicators to detect child sexual abuse and receiving the reports from the providers;

• National law enforcement and Europol, by reviewing the reports from the providers to ensure that they are not submitted in error, and channelling them quickly to law enforcement. This will help rescue children from situations of abuse and bring perpetrators to justice.

• Member States, by serving as a knowledge hub for best practices on prevention and assistance to victims, fostering an evidence-based approach.

• Victims, by helping them to take down the materials depicting their abuse.

Next steps

It is now for the European Parliament and the Council to agree on the proposal. Once adopted, the new Regulation will replace the current interim Regulation . Feedback from members of the public on the proposals is open for a minimum of 8 weeks.*

According to child campaigners:

On 8 February 2023, the European Parliament's Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) published its draft report on the European Commission's proposal to prevent and combat child sexual abuse. The draft report seeks a vastly reduced scope for the Regulation. It prioritises the anonymity of perpetrators of abuse over the rights of victims and survivors of sexual abuse and seeks to reverse progress made in keeping children safe as they navigate or are harmed in digital environments that were not built with their safety in mind.

The letter also criticises the removal of age verification and claims that technology can meet high privacy standards, explaining that the new legislation adds in additional safeguards to already effective measures to prevent the spread of this material online.

And of course the campaigners demand that technology companies allow the surveillance of all messages via backdoors to encryption or perhaps just to ban encryption.

See the letter from the likes of the NSPCC. See article from iwf.org.uk

All of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels are to be reissued in April 2023 to mark 70 years since Casino Royale , the first book in the series. Unfortunately this will be a gobblefucked release that has been cut by sensitivity censors.

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author's work, commissioned a review by sensitivity censors of the classic texts under its control. The Telegraph understands that a disclaimer accompanying the reissued texts will read:

This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.

The changes to Fleming's books result in some depictions of black people being reworked or removed. Dated references to other ethnicities remain, such as Bond's racial terms for east Asian people and the spy's disparaging views of Oddjob, Goldfinger's Korean henchman.

In the sensitivity censor-approved version of Live and Let Die , Bond's assessment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they've drunk too much becomes pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.

Another altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated. The original passage read: Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.

The revised section replaces the pigs reference with: Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.

A further lengthy passage describing Bond's night out in Harlem, including an argument between a man and his girlfriend conducted largely in accented dialogue Fleming describes as straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in, has been entirely removed.

The word 'nigger', which Fleming used to refer to black people when he was writing during the Fifties and Sixties, has been almost entirely expunged from the censored texts. In most cases, this is replaced by black person or black man, but racial descriptors are entirely dropped in some instances. In one example, some criminals escaping from Bond in Dr No become simply gangsters.

The ethnicity of a barman in Thunderball is similarly omitted in new editions. In Quantum of Solace , a butler's race now also goes unmentioned.

A bill introduced by North Dakota Republican state senators would redefine obscene material and performance and explicit sexual material in extremely broad terms that would result in creating criminal liability for almost all instances of nudity and references to sex outside of adult venues.

Senate Bill 2360, aiming to amend Obscenity Control provisions, was introduced last week by State Sen. Keith Boehm and four fellow Republicans. State Rep. Jim Kasper sponsored the House version of the bill.

Although the purported aim of the bill is to address a questionable pornography crisis in North Dakota's school libraries, Boehm's bill would in fact redefine obscenity as

Material or a performance which:

Taken as a whole, the average person, applying contemporary North Dakota standards, would find predominantly appeals to a prurient interest; depicts or describes in a patently offensive manner sexual conduct, whether normal or perverted; and taken as a whole, the reasonable person would find lacking in serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Whether material or a performance is obscene must be judged with reference to reasonable adults, unless it appears from the character of the material or the circumstances of its dissemination that the material or performance is designed for minors or other specially susceptible audience, in which case the material or performance must be judged with reference to that type of audience.

Another section of the bill defines objectionable materials or performance and criminalizes anyone who may:

Willfully display at newsstands or any other business establishment frequented by minors, or where minors are or may be invited as a part of the general public, any photograph, book, paperback book, pamphlet, or magazine, the exposed cover or available content of which either contains explicit sexual material that is harmful to minors or exploits, is devoted to, or contains depictions or written descriptions of nude or partially denuded human figures posed or presented in a manner to exploit sex, lust or perversion.

Then SB 2360 proceeds to specify a sweeping redefinition of explicit sexual material, which would now mean any written, pictorial, three-dimensional, or visual depiction that is patently offensive, including any photography, picture, or computer-generated image, showing or describing:

1. Human masturbation;
2. Deviant sexual intercourse;
3. Sexual intercourse;
4. Direct physical stimulation of genitals;
5. Sadomasochistic abuse;
6. Postpubertal human genitals;
7. Sexual activity;
8. Sexual perversion; or
9. Sex-based classifications.

Leaving nothing to chance, the Republican senators also defined nude or partially denuded human figures to mean less than completely and opaquely covered human genitals, pubic regions, female breasts or a female breast, if the breast or breasts are exposed below a point immediately above the top of the areola, or human buttocks; and includes human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state even if completely and opaquely covered.

Finally, ensuring that any public space not zoned as adult-only would be covered by the censorship bill, the phrase where minors are or may be invited as a part of the general public was specifically clarified to mean any public roadway or public walkway, with the exception of a bona fide school, college, university, museum, public library or art gallery.