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from Breakingviews:
Review: Censors are still China’s newsmakers
By Katrina Hamlin
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.
China’s censorship system is in good working order. Despite recent protests and the advent of new media, the country’s propaganda machine is far from broken. As a new book makes clear, the news is made by the state and for the state.
Much of “The Party Line”, by veteran correspondent Doug Young, will not be news to regular China-watchers. They know very well that the domestic media remain tightly controlled. They read and see the fixed line every day, after all. Nonetheless, the book shows just how the state makes and breaks the news. Young reveals the inner workings of the machine and the full scope of its impact.
“The Party Line” should dampen the expectations of many outside observers that the new generation of leaders will soon relax the current restrictions, which leave China languishing at 173rd place on Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 Press Freedom Index. A recent rebellion of journalists against the censor at one publication, Southern Weekly, was successful. Young’s book provides a sober reminder of what reformers are up against. The censorship system is a well-oiled machine, and its role in the Communist Party of China’s government runs far deeper than the headlines.
from India Insight:
“Vishwaroopam” touches yet another Indian nerve
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily of Reuters)
Actor and filmmaker Kamal Haasan’s film "Vishwaroopam" was supposed to open in cinemas last Friday, but that's not happening in Tamil Nadu after Muslim groups protested against scenes that they consider offensive.
from The Great Debate:
Social media and the new Cold War
There is a new Cold War starting. It does not involve opposing military forces, but it does involve competing ideas about how political life should be organized. The battles are between broadcast media outlets and social-media upstarts, which have very different approaches to news production, ownership and censorship. And some of the biggest battles are in Russia, where the ruling elites that dominate broadcast media are pitted against the civil society groups that flourish through social media.
Whereas broadcast media is most useful for authoritarian governments, social media is now used by citizens to monitor their government. For example, in early 2012, rumors circulated that a young ultranationalist, Alexander Bosykh, was going to be appointed to run a Multinational Youth Policy Commission. A famous picture of Bosykh disciplining a free-speech advocate was dug up and widely circulated among Russian language blogs and news sites, killing his prospects for the job (though not ending his career).
from India Insight:
Cleaning up TV’s dirty pictures
I was watching a documentary on Greta Garbo on television. The film was in English with English subtitles for people more comfortable following written English than quick spoken English. Every time the word "sex" or something related to it would come up, the subtitles avoided it. "Heterosexual" became "hetero." "Her sexuality" became "her femininity." Dedicated channel surfing revealed similar evasions. In a conversation about breast cancer on an English channel, the station inserted an asterisk to partially mask the word "breast" in the subtitles, even though you could hear it onscreen.
TV stations and networks in India, similar to broadcast TV channels in the United States, remove objectionable content (sex scenes, nudity, some foul language and violence) from movies and other programming (see this recent Reuters story about how it works). This is thanks to the Indian Broadcasting Federation's Broadcasting Content Complaint Council. The idea is to make sure that public airwaves remain friendly enough for the ears of children and sensitive adults, though it can result in unintentional bloopers like the breast cancer example.
from Anthony De Rosa:
Lingering concerns about Twitter’s censorship policy
There's a bit of a debate going about whether Twitter's new censorship policy is reasonable or not. My colleague Paul Smalera wrote one of the better posts leaning toward Twitter's policy having some merits, in the way it makes it easier for those outside censoring countries to see what's being censored. But I also see some flaws with this, which Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin helped me realize. She calls it "a polite step down a slippery slope"
First, the very act of tweets being censored in those countries, even if those outside the country can read them, removes an early warning system for the folks in country to know of incoming danger. Let's say, for example, there is a riot on the march toward the village they live in, or there is police activity by an oppressive regime under which they're force to live headed their way. Twitter's supposedly enlightened method of censorship isn't going to protect them.
from Paul Smalera:
Twitter’s censorship is a gray box of shame, but not for Twitter
Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be... well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.
Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.
from Anthony De Rosa:
Disturbing development at Twitter: countries will silence tweets
Word came down yesterday that Twitter will begin giving the governments of some countries the ability to request to have messages censored over their service. This is a big change from Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray's previous statement from last year that the company was "from the free speech wing of the free speech party."
Twitter claims they have not yet censored anyone under this new policy and will tell the public when they do, possibly with greater cooperation with the website Chilling Effects.
from The Great Debate:
As a biological weapon, H5N1 is for the birds
By Peter Christian Hall
The opinions expressed are his own.
Amid the furor over the U.S. government’s move to restrict publication of vital research into H5N1 avian flu, no one seems to be challenging a key assumption—that H5N1 could make a useful weapon. It wouldn’t.
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recently pressured Science and Nature not to fully publish two widely discussed papers detailing separate efforts to devise an H5N1 avian flu strain that transmits easily in ferrets and might do so among human beings. The proposed solution is to issue redacted versions and circulate details only to approved institutions.
from The Great Debate:
Stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act
Now that Congress has hit pause on its controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and nearly every argument about the merits and failings of the piece of copyright legislation has been made, it’s a good time to ask: what, in 2012, will it take to actually stop a bill like this?
Because despite the delay, the situation still isn’t looking so hot for those looking to bring down SOPA. Amendments to tone down the bill’s more disliked points have been routinely defeated in the House Judiciary Committee by numbers sufficient to pass the bill to the full House floor.
from Jack Shafer:
Why are we censoring bird flu science?
Scientists working in the Netherlands and Wisconsin have engineered a version of the highly lethal H5N1 "bird flu" that easily transmits in ferrets, the best animal model for human spread. This news has so alarmed a federal advisory panel that it has now asked the two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, to censor the papers each lab has submitted for publication lest the information fall into the hands of terrorists. (Here's the Page One coverage of the story from the New York Times and Washington Post.)
The request has roiled the scientific community, with some researchers backing the panel's request, which is not binding, others lamenting the fact that the research was ever done, and others defending the bird flu work as essential research.
