Tag Archive for: censorship

Unpublished Censorship Guidelines Lay Bare The Deepest Fears Of The Chinese Government

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It’s hardly a state secret that China is instituting the most complete surveillance and censorship system ever attempted by a society (so far), and on an unprecedented scale. Techdirt has been tracking that sad saga over the years, mostly reporting on how censorship is being implemented. Less information has been available about what exactly the Chinese government doesn’t want people to know about/discuss. Aside from the obvious issues — repression of Tibetans and Uyghurs, Tiananmen Square protests, environmental problems, government corruption etc. — just what is Beijing afraid of? A document obtained by the The Globe and Mail may shed some light on this question, although it’s still not entirely clear who wrote it:

It began circulating early this year, and is believed to have been issued by the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China, China’s central Internet authority, which did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s also possible that the document, which outlines 10 basic categories of banned content, was written by a government-affiliated trade association, a censorship expert said.

In any case, experts seem to accept that it represents the Chinese government’s position quite well, which makes the insights it gives into official thinking extremely valuable. Forbidden activities include many that come as no surprise, such as: insulting leaders, criticizing official policies, spreading information about “made-up” accidents, epidemics, police incidents, and issues related to the economy. Celebrities are protected to a certain extent, with a ban on over-the-top stories about their sex scandals or luxurious lifestyles. Talking about violence, superstitions or religions are also out, as are the following:

Not only is pornography banned, but so is all obscenity, a category that includes “using a bed or sofa as a prop or background,” appearing shirtless, wearing tattoos or dancing in a way “that has flirtatious and vulgar elements.” Also forbidden is the spreading of harmful information, a category that includes cursing, smoking and drinking, gambling or “vulgar use of a microphone controller (or any mimicking of it).”

But alongside much that is outright wacky — what on earth does “vulgar use of a microphone controller” even mean? — the article quotes Yaxue Cao, the founder and editor of ChinaChange.org, who points out a more serious underlying strategy discernible here:

“It targets political dissent of course, but any activities that might cause a large number of people to coalesce, whether through popular entertainment such as Duanzi (jokes) and cartoons, or through direct sales network,” she said, in an e-mail. “It also aims at content that might give people ideas of resistance and how-to knowledge. I go through each category, this is the theme I see: a heightened sense of regime insecurity.”

It’s a great point that explains much of what the Chinese government has done over the last few years. What the authorities fear above all else is not so much any of the topics mentioned above in themselves, but the thought that they might help people to band together, and even formulate an idea that is truly frightening for Beijing: that they could start to resist.

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Quixotic Approaches To Circumventing Censorship, Using Books And Music

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The topic of censorship crops up far too much here on Techdirt. Less common are stories about how to circumvent it. The two which follow are great examples of how human ingenuity is able to find unexpected ways to tackle this problem. The first story comes from Spain, and concerns a banned book. As the Guardian reports:

Nacho Carretero’s Fariña, an expose of drug trafficking in Galicia, was published in 2015, but publication and sales were halted last month after the former mayor of O Grove in Galicia, Jose Alfredo Bea Gondar, brought legal action against Carretero and his publisher, Libros del KO. Bea Gondar is suing over details in the book about his alleged involvement in drug shipping.

To get around that ban, a new Web site has been created, Finding Fariña, which explains:

A digital tool searches and finds the 80,000 thousand words that make up “Fariña” within “Don Quijote”, the most universal classic of Spanish literature, and then extracts them, one by one, so that you can read the forbidden story.

Because what they will never be able to censor your rights as a reader. Nor words. And least of all, “Don Quijote”.

The site sifts through the classic Spanish text to find the words that are then recombined to form the forbidden book. You can click on any word in the book’s online text to find the corresponding section of Don Quijote. Since Fariña contains words that did not exist in the early 17th century, when Cervantes wrote his novel, the Web site recreates them from fragments of words that are found within the work. That’s quite important, since it means that Don Quijote can potentially be used to reconstitute any book, if necessary breaking down unusual words into fragments or even single letters. Equally, the same approach could be adopted for banned texts in other languages: all that is needed is some well-known public domain work that can be mined in the same way.

The other approach comes from Germany, but “The Uncensored Playlist,” is being used in China, Egypt, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam to circumvent censorship in those nations:

While press freedom is not available in the worlds most oppressed societies — global music streaming sites are.

Five acclaimed independent journalists from five countries suffering from strict government censorship teamed up with Musical Director Lucas Mayer to turn 10 articles that had previously been censored into 10 uncensored pop songs. These songs were then uploaded onto freely available music streaming sites. Allowing these stories to be slipped back into the countries where they had once been forbidden.

That is, censored information, written by local journalists, is set to music, and then added to playlists that are available on the main streaming platforms like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music. In addition, all the songs are freely available from the project’s Web site, in both the original languages and in English.

Although neither method represents a foolproof anti-circumvention technique, or a serious challenge to the authorities concerned, they do underline that however bad the censorship, there is always a way around it.

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Copyright, Censorship, Pepe & Infowars

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably well aware of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character created by Matt Furie years ago that turned into quite the meme by the 4chan crowd. Over time, the meme morphed into one favored by Trump supporters and the alt-right (though, upset that Pepe has become too “mainstream,” that crowd has moved onto something of a derivative work known as Groyper). As you may have heard, Furie has now decided to sue Infowars over a poster the site is selling that puts together a bunch of… well… the crowd of people you’d expect to be fans of Infowars and Pepe.

The lawsuit — which you can read in its entirety claims copyright infringement — and it’s raising a whole bunch of issues concerning memes and copyright that seemed worth exploring.

To do this, though, I actually find it useful to go back in time a bit, and explore Furie’s changing attitude towards what became of Pepe. Back in the summer of 2015, when Pepe was still a big meme, but not quite one associated with racists, Furie gave an interview with Vice, in which he made it clear that he was pretty chill with what had happened with Pepe.

I don’t really see it as being something that’s negative. It’s this almost post-capitalist kind of success. I’m not making any money off of it, but it’s become its own thing in internet culture. Now, at least, a lot of people make a conscious effort to go out and try and create that kind of meme success, where you’re doing these little one-off characters, little gags, little gifs, and that’s definitely your intention. I’m just flattered by it. I don’t really care. I think it’s cool. In fact, I’m getting kind of inspired by all the weird interpretations of it. I wanna use it to my own advantage and try to come up with comics based on other people’s interpretations of it.

Later in that same interview, he even gives his opinion on people profiting off of Pepe, and again doesn’t have much of a problem with it:

It’s like a decentralized folk art, with people taking it, doing their own thing with it, and then capitalizing on it using bumper stickers or t-shirts. That’s happening to me too. There is a tradition of it.

He even admits to having “a little collection of bootleg Pepe stuff.”

A year or so later, once Pepe had been adopted by the alt-right, Furie still appeared pretty laid back about the whole thing, while making it clear that he, in no way, agreed with the alt-right. But he saw their usage of the meme as a sort of fascinating look at internet culture:

My feelings are pretty neutral, this isn’t the first time that Pepe has been used in a negative, weird context. I think it’s just a reflection of the world at large. The internet is basically encompassing some kind of mass consciousness, and Pepe, with his face, he’s got these large, expressive eyes with puffy eyelids and big rounded lips, I just think that people reinvent him in all these different ways, it’s kind of a blank slate. It’s just out of my control, what people are doing with it, and my thoughts on it, are more of amusement.

He similarly noted that he expected this was just a phase that would fade out over time:

I think that’s it’s just a phase, and come November, it’s just gonna go on to the next phase, obviously that political agenda is exactly the opposite of my own personal feelings, but in terms of meme culture, it’s people reapproppriating things for their own agenda. That’s just a product of the internet. And I think people in whatever dark corners of the internet are just trying to one up each other on how shocking they can make Pepe appear.

And towards the end of the interview, he’s asked if he has any regrets about “not having more control over his image” and Furie responds:

I don’t have any regrets about anything. I do my own thing, and if anything, it’s been kind of interesting to see all the evolutions of Pepe. Yeah, no regrets.

A month after that interview… Furie’s opinion appeared to shift somewhat. In reading how he dealt with it, it certainly appears that Furie more or less got annoyed with everyone asking him about this and/or asking him if he supported the views of the alt right (and more annoyed with their views becoming mainstream as well), and he decided to take action. His initial instincts were to create a new Pepe comic that certainly expresses his opinions on having his own creation adopted by Trump and Trump supporters, and then tried to take back the meme with a sort of anti-meme #SavePepe campaign. Again, this is an interesting move, switching from a passive position of “that nutty internet” to one where you’re fighting memes with memes.

It took another year or so, to last summer, when it appears Furie finally got really fed up with the whole alt-right Pepe thing, and began dispatching cease and desist letters and some DMCA takedowns from a big name law firm. Some news was made when the author of a hateful Islamophobic book using Pepe as a main character agreed not to publish the book, and to donate the $ 1,500 he had made from an earlier self-published version to the Muslim civil liberties group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

And that takes us up to the Infowars lawsuit. It would not surprise me at all to see Infowars cave and settle the case quickly to get it done with. While I think there’s a passable fair use argument here, it’s so mixed up with political emotions, if I were Infowars, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable having a judge make a ruling on it, let alone a jury. As I’ve noted in the past, while some cases are clearer than others, fair use is one of those ones where judges can twist the four factors test in all sorts of ways to reach the outcome they’d prefer — and Furie is definitely a lot more sympathetic here than Alex Jones. So, while I can see the fair use argument, and don’t think it’s a crazy argument at all, it’s certainly not a slam dunk in an actual courtroom.

What’s much more interesting (and bothersome) to me is that for as much as I understand Furie’s decision and anger over how this all turned out, it’s yet another example of how copyright is frequently morphed into a tool for censorship of ideas, rather than what copyright is actually supposed to be. Copyright is an economic right. The entire purpose was to secure the limited exclusive rights to the copyright holder for the sake of economic benefits. For the most part (with a few small exceptions) the US has rejected using copyright for “moral rights.” Yet, this is, quite obviously, a case where Furie and his lawyers are using it as a quasi-moral rights tool. He’s (quite reasonably!) upset with what Pepe has become (even if he was cool with it originally) and is now using the tool of copyright to stop that.

Even if it’s a legit copyright claim that would hold up in court, the overall situation should trouble folks, because it’s not what copyright is supposed to be used for. Using copyright to stop someone from infringing is supposed to protect purely the economic issues, rather than the moral ones. Yet Furie’s statements and actions (including getting previous bootlegs and declaring it a cool thing) show that this lawsuit is very much about the moral issues and his desire not to allow those with political views he vehemently disagrees with, to use his character. And I can certainly understand why he’d feel that way — but that’s not what copyright is supposed to be used for. And this is the problem we’ve discussed in the past of “copyright creep.” Because copyright is such a powerful tool to stop speech, it is often used that way. And even if the claim would hold up here, the motives behind the use of copyright are clearly not within the intended realm of copyright law. And that’s worrisome.

Either way, I still expect Infowars to settle this rather than fight it (I think they’d be crazy not to…), and I completely understand the reason why Furie may not be happy with the whole situation — but I worry about more and more stories of copyright being used directly to stifle speech, not for any economic reasons, but for purely censorial reasons.

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Anti-NRA Censorship Efforts Echo Earlier Pro-NRA Censorship Efforts, And Learn No Lessons From Them

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Lately I’ve been enjoying watching re-runs of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. It’s somewhat reassuring to watch a previous generation get through a period of political angst as we go through this current one, especially as there are quite a few parallels that can be drawn.

I mention this because as people call for Amazon, Apple, Roku, and YouTube to drop NRA-TV, I realize that we’ve seen calls for censorship like this before. What’s happening today:

Amazon, Apple, Roku and YouTube are facing increased calls to drop the National Rifle Association’s TV channel from their streaming services, as backlash against the organization grows following a Florida school shooting last week that killed 17 people.
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On Thursday, Brad Chase ― a friend of Daniel Reed, the father of a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student who survived the shooting ― started a Change.org petition urging Amazon to drop the channel.
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“The NRA has long ignored its role in promoting gun violence and betrayed the names of good and responsible gun owners,” Chase wrote on the petition’s page. “It’s time to hold them, and their partners, accountable … a company like Amazon should not be spreading their message.”

But compare these calls for television networks to drop pro-NRA views with the calls NRA supporters used to make to television networks to pressure them to drop anti-NRA views instead.

In the case of Laugh-In, a precursor to shows like Saturday Night Live and often lauded for its humorous handling of topics of public interest, it appears that gun control was one topic that was off-limits to it. From a letter Dan Rowan wrote in October 1973, lamenting his show’s inability to do a send-up of America’s gun control laws because the TV network was too afraid of the NRA to allow Laugh-in take it on:

…[T]here are so many things we can’t talk about because [the network is] running so damn scared. We have been trying to get a gun control piece on since the beginning of the season, and they are so afraid of the NRA lobby we haven’t been able to. Now I don’t know one solid argument against the control of hand guns and we will keep trying but that’s just one example of the problem.

(From the book, “A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. McDonald, 1967-1974.”)

Granted, this comment came up in the context of Rowan’s broader frustration with a much more general culture of fear at the network, which appears to have been predicated on licensing concerns due to the saber-rattling of eventually-deposed Vice President Spiro Agnew. But the essential point remains that pressure by people with one set of views was preventing the airing of any contrary views. And so the future inherited ignorance on the subject, because that’s what censorship gives it.

Television is not what it was in the 1970s, when the major networks served as gatekeepers. Now Amazon, Apple, and Roku et al play the role of the gatekeepers. And the consequences of asking them to close their gates to certain ideas will be the same now as they were then: the loss of important discourse, discourse we need in order to achieve meaningful and lasting change.

There are of course a few points to note here. One is that asking television networks to censor is different than asking other businesses to cut ties to organizations whose views may be odious. Withdrawing sponsorships, for instance, takes away the oxygen an entity needs to survive as a viable enterprise. True, cutting off an avenue for expression may certainly make spreading its ideas more difficult, and perhaps cut down on its income, but it can at most damage the organization. It doesn’t get rid of its ideas. Its ideas will persist.

Furthermore these are calls for private censorship, not public censorship, the latter of which the First Amendment applies to. The First Amendment also protects calls for private censorship, but it doesn’t make them a good idea. And calls for private censorship have a habit of leaking into public policy. Laugh-In was produced in an age where its network’s FCC license was threatened. Apple, YouTube, Roku et al exist in an age where reactive legislatures keep finding themselves tempted to slap the hands of technology companies, whether it’s a good idea to or not. It’s not a healthy reflex to look to banning an idea as a way to deal with an undesirable one, and it would not be good to become so inured to responding this way in a private context that we tempt in in the public one. The First Amendment doesn’t automatically stop every censoring policy, and a lot of damage to discourse can occur before the First Amendment can put an end to an unconstitutional regulatory response.

But the reason it’s not a healthy response is because banning ideas is not an effective way to deal with them. The only way to defeat bad ideas is in the marketplace of ideas, where through open conversation a better consensus can evolve. There are no shortcuts; better ideas can’t win the day by trying to suppress contrary ones. Pushing for censorship that favors certain ideas only creates a vacuum where those ideas can become artificially distorted and more extreme, with no countervailing views available to temper them. And it risks having those very same preferred ideas later shut out, because restricting public discourse to only some ideas is not the same thing as convincing anyone of their merit.

What is happening to the NRA now is testament to this reality: suppressing gun control discussion didn’t give the NRA a world where those contrary ideas no longer existed. Instead it gave itself a world where its own views arguably became more extreme and now stand to be repudiated – or even themselves potentially suppressed.

But such anti-NRA suppression would be unfortunate, for the exact same reason that it was wrong, and ultimately ineffective, when the NRA did it. Censorship only inhibits progress. Meaningful and lasting change only happens when minds are changed, and that can only happen when people can talk freely about the issues affecting them. Perhaps the NRA thought its views had prevailed when it was able to control the public discussion about guns, but the backlash today shows that it was a fleeting and feeble victory. Those who wish to push an alternative policy agenda now should heed that lesson, to make sure that any gains they hope to make are not equally feeble and fleeting.

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