India Is Stifling Kashmir Journalists And Twitter Is Helping Get The Job Done

from the this-isn't-helping dept

India has expressed an interest in being considered a top-tier totalitarian state. Not content to let nearby nations claim all the glory in the "Terrible Places to Live" race, India has been stepping up its censorship and its domestic surveillance, presumably in hopes of being the next country to claim a coveted UN blacklist spot.

The Indian government has asked third party contractors to help it build a massive surveillance network utilizing thousands of cameras and the current cream of the facial recognition crop at the time of deployment. The whole thing needs to be in place less than 8 months after the contract is secured, suggesting the government is more than happy to move forward with whatever it has on hand rather than whatever might actually do the job well.

It's also climbing the global censorship charts, trailing only Russia, China, and Turkey in various social media platform demographics. But it is the king of Facebook censorship, delivering more takedown demands to Facebook than closest rival, Russia. When you're out-censoring Russia, you're playing the censorship game right.

Disputed areas the Indian government claims, but doesn't actually control, are only encouraging further censorship from the Indian government. Unfortunately, US tech companies are helping the government maintain control of the narrative by silencing dissenting voices. Kunal Majumder of the Committee to Protect Journalists has more details:

On August 10, 2018, the Indian government informed Twitter that an account belonging to Kashmir Narrator, a magazine based in Jammu and Kashmir, was breaking Indian law. The magazine had recently published a cover story on a Kashmiri militant who fought against Indian rule. By the end of the month, Indian police had arrested the journalist who wrote it, Aasif Sultan, and Twitter had withheld the magazine’s account in India, blocking local access to more than 5,000 tweets. As of October 2019, Sultan was still in prison, facing terrorism-related charges that CPJ has repeatedly condemned. And the @KashmirNarrator Twitter account was still withheld throughout the country.

There has been almost no improvement over the past year. CPJ reports the government's Kashmir-targeted blackout has only been partially listed. To prevent Kashmir-sympathetic reporting from reaching the territory's residents, the Indian government shut down the region's connection to the outside world by cutting off its internet and phone connections. Some mobile phones have been able to route around the government's blockade, but targeted Twitter accounts remain blocked in the region and journalists have been smuggling out reporting using USB sticks.

Since Twitter is one of the best platforms for spreading news quickly, the Indian government has focused its efforts on this platform. It's following in the footsteps of Turkey and President Recep Erdogan by increasing its targeting of Twitter users. Twitter, unfortunately, has been super-helpful.

A CPJ analysis of those notices reveals that hundreds of thousands of tweets blocked in India since August 2017 under the company’s country withheld content policy were shared by accounts that focus on Kashmir. Among dozens of accounts that were withheld, CPJ identified several besides @KashmirNarrator that were sharing news and opinion, raising serious questions about what safeguards are in place to ensure freedom of the press and the free flow of information.

There are few safeguards built into Indian law. The minimal protections the country allows are not being extended to contested areas the Indian government feels are not deserving of speech protections. Twitter could simply refuse to honor these requests targeting dissenting views, but it has chosen to comply with India's demands, most likely because the country is home to nearly a billion potential users.

If there's any upside to this, it's that the government's targeting appears to be more keyword-based rather than content-based.

CPJ analyzed every account involved, whether the request was based on a single tweet, several tweets, or the account itself, reviewing more than 400 in total. Around 45 percent of those accounts mentioned Kashmir in the handle or bio, or had recently tweeted about Kashmir, according to CPJ’s review.

This censorship is damage that can be routed around. If Kashmir is one of the keywords sought by Indian censors, removing this word might allow links to reporting to sneak past censors. It also appears Twitter is only blocking in certain regions of the country, so tweets and accounts are still visible as long as Twitter believes viewers aren't in the affected areas.

That being said, Twitter's compliance is still problematic. Twitter is unwilling to discuss how it applies local laws to tweets and accounts targeted by governments with track records of stifling dissent. The legal options it has available are generally left unexplored. It makes a certain amount of sense in terms of the bottom line. Challenging foreign rulings and takedown notices requires money and man hours Twitter may not necessarily have to spare. The potential userbase in India is too large to ignore, which means it's probably too large to be considered expendable when principles are on the line.

US tech companies aren't doing all that great dealing with competing interests on a worldwide scale. While some concessions can be excused under the theory that some connection is better than nothing, assisting governments in censorship of critics and journalists isn't acceptable, no matter how much market share is at stake.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, india, journalism, kashmir
Companies: twitter

Netflix: We're Not In The Truth To Power Business, We're In The Entertainment Business

from the good-to-know dept

You may recall that back in January Netflix took something of a public pounding for pulling an episode of Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, after Minhaj went hard at Mohammad bin Salman. Netflix pulled the episode inside of Saudi Arabia when the country claimed the episode violated the kingdom's internet laws, which mostly revolve around keeping any criticism of the Saudi royal family off of the internet. Critics in America and elsewhere slammed Netflix for kissing the Saudi family's ring, while still others pointed out that the episode was still available on Netflix's YouTube page, including in Saudi Arabia. Some even argued that Netflix knew that all of this would be Streisanded, actually getting the episode more attention in Saudi Arabia that way.

Such strategic moves to hold to moral values doesn't appear to have been reality, however, as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently came out and publicly washed his company's hands of any kind of value-based stance.

‘We’re not in the truth-to-power business. We’re in the entertainment business.’

That’s Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix Inc., defending a decision earlier this year to pull an episode of comedian Hasan Minaj’s “Patriot Act,” which was critical of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, keeping it from airing in Saudi Arabia.

“We can accomplish a lot more by being entertainment and influencing a global conversation about how people live than trying to be another news channel,” Hastings said Wednesday in an interview at the New York Times’ Dealbook Conference.

I can't say I know for sure exactly who is supposed to be the intended audience for Hastings' remarks, but sure as hell hope the creative public is listening. For content creators, Netflix has made it abundantly clear that it will not support disruptive art in the face of authoritarian criticism. Given how much of art and content is specifically designed to speak truth to power, and given just how squishy many governments legal justifications for censorship are, the future is certain to be filled with these types of take down requests. Do artists really want to utilize such a platform for expression?

Making all of this even more frustrating is where Hastings decides the lines should be drawn, which only serves to throw all of this into more confusion.

Hastings added a caveat on how far he would go: “If they can came to us and said you can’t have gay content, we wouldn’t do that. We would not comply with that.”

What the hell? I'm all in favor of supporting the rights of the LGBT community, but there are plenty of governments out there that are unfriendly to that community, to art made by and about that community, and plenty have laws against such expression. You know, like Russia, for instance. Why is Netflix willing to defy Mother Russia on "gay content" (weird phrase), but Hasan Minhaj's mainstream criticism of MBS's actions somehow are ripe for censoring?

It's a disappointing stance for Netflix to take. Although, to be fair, bowing to authoritarian regimes has become something of a fad lately.

Filed Under: censorship, criticism, culture, entertainment, free speech, hasan minhaj, patriot act, reed hastings, saudi arabia, truth to power
Companies: netflix

Adam Silver Reveals The Chinese Government Asked Him To Fire Daryl Morey

from the thinning-skinning dept

We've been taken on something of a journey over the past several weeks by China and their thin-skinned government's attempt to pressure everyone into forgetting that Hong Kong exists. Specifically, it seems that Beijing is quite afraid of any person with a platform showing any support for the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, which much of the world sees as an attempt to stave off an authoritarian government with a history of human rights abuses. While much of the eSports gaming world has taken the cowardly step to self-censor -- going so far as to punish those competing in a fairly hamfisted manner -- there is also this NBA...thing.

That front of this Orwellian war began when Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, tweeted fairly benign support for the protests. The Rockets are quite popular in China, as is the NBA, and China took an opportunity to ape extreme offense at Morey's tweet. This, despite the fact that Twitter is effectively banned and blocked on the Chinese mainland. Despite that fact, the NBA first made unfortunate noises in apologizing to the Chinese government, before Commissioner Adam Silver eventually walked that back after a public backlash. Silver instead came out in support of players and team officials speaking their minds and attempted to retrieve the NBA's one-time position as one of the most progressive and "woke" professional sports leagues in America.

It seems that Beijing really wasn't playing around, however, as Silver revealed in a recent interview that China actually asked him to fire Morey.

In case you cannot watch the video, Silver revealed that China asked him to fire Morey and that he refused. He then went on to note that his recent trip to China in the wake of this controversy was conducted at least in part to give Beijing a firm understanding that his league would not again kneel at the altar of their ginned up hurt feelings. The Deadspin rightly calls this what it is: domestic damage control.

“These American values—we are an American business—travel with us wherever we go,” Silver said. “And one of those values is free expression. We wanted to make sure that everyone understood we were supporting free expression.”

Silver does deserve credit for not firing Morey on the spot, and the NBA certainly has caught more flak despite doing less to mollify China than the scores of other, larger companies who have happily rolled over and shown the Chinese government their bellies. Today’s comments are damage control—not with the Chinese officials he has been dealing with for a week now, but with American fans who are pissed at the league and its most prominent player for playing China’s game.

Indeed. And, while it can be difficult for a money-making organization to show some spine against an adversary wielding the world's second largest economy, stories like this are evidence for exactly what will happen if lines in the sand are not drawn. China, and authoritarian regimes, will demand more and more influence over American companies that should at least pretend to have American values.

Is the NBA some knight on a white horse here? Hell no. But the NBA's reaction to public pressure in America is certainly something that would be welcome in the eSports industry.

Filed Under: adam silver, basketball, censorship, china, daryl morey, free speech, hong kong, protests
Companies: nba

The Ellen Show Issues Copyright Takedown On Transformative Video Commenting On Her Friendship With President Bush

from the copyright-as-censorship dept

Another day, another example of copyright being used as censorship. As you may have heard, there was a bit of controversy this weekend when talk show host Ellen DeGeneres attended the Dallas Cowboys game with former President George W. Bush. This made lots of people quite upset as they argued that being friends with Bush was either support for "tolerance of hate and discrimination" or an effort at "whitewashing... his manifest crimes." Others argued, as Ellen did, that there are good reasons to be kind to people you fundamentally disagree with.

Wherever you come down on that debate, hopefully you can agree that, no matter what, the Ellen Show was wrong to use a copyright claim to take down a transformative video, created by Rafael Shimunov, that took Ellen's "be nice to each other" monologue about the situation and superimposed images on the back screen of what appears to be scenes of devastation in the Middle East that came about from President Bush's policies. This is, of course, classic fair use. Taking a bit of video (1 minute and 46 seconds) from Ellen's show, and using it in a transformative way to provide commentary and criticism of Ellen's speech. Even if you think it's unfair or heavy handed, it still should quite clearly be protected by fair use. But, instead:

That's the original tweet posting the video, showing that it has been "disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner."

Of course, in response to this, a whole bunch of folks are now reposting the video on Twitter. So far, (as I type this), they've mostly remained online -- which at least suggests that the original takedown was not an automated takedown notice or machine recognition situation, but a deliberate report. Indeed, other tweets suggest that the "social media manager" of The Ellen Show sent a DMCA takedown over the video.

It's possible (likely?) that this lower level staffer just thought she was stopping "copyright infringement" (and maybe didn't even realize the transformative nature of the video), but it still highlights the incredible censorial powers of copyright law and the DMCA, in which, by mere accusation, the content may get deleted -- especially regarding a time-sensitive and politically relevant discussion.

Still, as happens when these situations come about, tons of people are now reposting the video:

Perhaps this is something that Ellen might want to discuss with Barbra Streisand the next time she has Streisand on her show...

Filed Under: censorship, commentary, dmca, ellen degeneres, fair use, george w. bush, political speech, transformative
Companies: the ellen show, twitter

Twitter Removes Nickelback Meme Trump Tweets, But Leaves All The Others Up

from the what-do-you-meme? dept

By now you're likely aware that Donald Trump tweets. Like, a lot. An unfortunate amount, actually. And he also often takes a break from tweeting his own authored... I don't know, let's call them thoughts... to instead simply retweet any sycophanitic content he can find out there. Sometimes, in fact, he retweets things that may be infringing upon copyright.

And sometimes what he retweets is more innocent, at least in the context of intellectual property.

A video posted by Donald Trump has been removed from Twitter after a copyright claim by the rock band Nickelback.

The video took aim at the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, opening with a clip of him saying he had never discussed business dealings with his son Hunter. Trump’s efforts to encourage the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden lie at the centre of an impeachment inquiry launched by House Democrats last week.

Following the Biden segment, the clip posted by Trump then cuts to a popular, if niche, meme based on an edit of the music video for the 2005 Nickelback single Photograph.

In the video Trump tweeted out, Chad Kroeger holds up a picture that shows Biden with his son and someone misleadingly labeled a Ukrainian energy exec (really, Biden's son's long term American business partner) and yes this is all stupid and insane but what can I do guys this is 2019 and I just can't anymore but I have to because life is still probably worth living right or maybe not?

Let me take a breath.

Anyhoo, that tweet no longer contains the video in question, as you can see below.

In case you cannot see that, the video was taken down at the request of the copyright owner, which in this case would either be the band or its label. It's worth noting at this point that this meme is a rather well known one, with a zillion other examples of its use all over Twitter and the internet. The chief difference between those others and Trump's tweet would be including the Bidens in the picture rather than a million other things that people have inserted into that photograph. This might lead some to scream about Twitter being biased...but not so much. Plenty of clearly conservative parties have tweeted out the video and had it remain up as of the time of this writing.

Instead, this looks like a high profile tweet by a President many people don't like got the attention of Nickelback, who didn't want their names associated with Donald Trump. And so they DMCA'd the video in Trump's tweet. Twitter, rather than putting any real thought into how widespread the meme is, whether the meme is Fair Use, or whether this actually constitutes copyright infringement, simply took the video down. Because, frankly, that's how this generally works.

Which sucks. President Trump does many, many, oh so many things that I personally find horrific. Sharing memes that aren't entirely without wit, however, isn't really one of them. And, as we've pointed out in the past, even if you hate the President, you shouldn't celebrate copyright abuse to silence his expression. That's not what copyright is for.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, donald trump, fair use, free speech, memes, nickelback
Companies: twitter

NY Times Opinion Section Gets CDA 230 Wrong AGAIN!

from the hey,-guys... dept

What the fuck is up with the NY Times when it comes to reporting on important laws about the internet? While they did, thankfully, publish Sarah Jeong's piece mocking everyone for failing to read Section 230 and totally misrepresenting it, they have since published three separate stories that completely get Section 230 wrong -- often in embarrassing ways. First there was the laughable piece by Daisuke Wakabayashi that claimed that Section 230 is what made hate speech legal online -- leading to the NY Times having to run a hilarious correction saying "oops, we actually meant the 1st Amendment." Then the NY Times opinion section let internet-hater Jonathan Taplin publish an anti-internet screed. Taplin has a history of misguided histrionics about copyright law, and it appears that he must have had an anti-DMCA safe harbor screed ready to go... but since everyone was hating on Section 230 (which is very different than DMCA 512) they just tried to swap it in... in a way that made no sense at all.

So you might think that the NY Times and especially its Opinion section editors would be a bit more careful any time Section 230 came up, but... nope. Instead, the NY Times has a ridiculously dumb new article by Andrew Marantz who (coincidentally, I'm sure) has a brand new internet-hating book coming out. The title of the piece is Free Speech Is Killing Us, so you just know it's going to be good (and by good I mean, really, really, really, bad). It delivers.

There has never been a bright line between word and deed.

Actually. There has. But, hey, you do you.

Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence.

It's interesting that Marantz seems to know what was in the mind of the founders of all those companies. Impressive. Especially if you talk to some of them and find out that... this is not actually what they thought.

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

Yeah, see, no one doubted this. Indeed, lots of qualified people have researched this in the past, including Susan Benesch who studied this issue in detail, but didn't conclude that free speech is the problem, but rather recognized that the ability of speech to lead to violence compels us to pay attention and then figure out ways to counter that speech. Marantz, on the other hand, leaps straight to censorship. First, of course, he mocks those who dares suggest that maybe censorship would be a problem.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

Nothing. Or at least that’s the answer one often hears from liberals and conservatives alike. Some speech might be bad, this line of thinking goes, but censorship is always worse. The First Amendment is first for a reason.

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt.

Yeah, but the thing is, people who actually have spent more time studying this than Marantz have long pointed out that they're not just using "free speech" as a cop out, but pointing out, in great detail, the actual harms that are done by chipping away at free speech.

From there, Marantz dips into some of the common ridiculous free speech tropes that people who have first discovered the subject jump to if they've never had to actually confront the reasons why we have a 1st Amendment.

For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

That's the "not all speech is protected" trope. As Ken White has noted, while this is true, it's not at all helpful in looking at if this particular speech is protected, and it assumes (incorrectly) that courts are adding new exceptions to the 1st Amendment all the time. They are not.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

This is more or less the “We must balance free speech with [social good].” / “There is a line between free speech and [social evil]." trope that White describes. Yes, free speech creates tension with other things, but the courts don't run a "balancing" test. And, yes, there are trade-offs. And, as a society we've long looked (mostly successfully) at ways of lessening the negative consequences of speech not by censoring, but by coming up with other ways to deal with that fallout. But Marantz, apparently, either doesn't know this or doesn't care.

In 1993 and 1994, talk-radio hosts in Rwanda calling for bloodshed helped create the atmosphere that led to genocide. The Clinton administration could have jammed the radio signals and taken those broadcasts off the air, but Pentagon lawyers decided against it, citing free speech. It’s true that the propagandists’ speech would have been curtailed. It’s also possible that a genocide would have been averted.

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing that Benesch studied, and what she found was that merely trying to censor the speakers, who are often getting out what many people are feeling, you have to figure out more constructive ways to change views to prevent violence. Censoring them doesn't tend to work.

I am not calling for repealing the First Amendment, or even for banning speech I find offensive on private platforms.

Oh sure you're not. You just have a whole NY Times article criticizing the 1st Amendment and an entire book coming out suggesting the same.

We can protect unpopular speech from government interference while also admitting that unchecked speech can expose us to real risks. And we can take steps to mitigate those risks.

Yeah. That's what lots of people have already been doing. Welcome to the party, Andrew. Nice of you to pretend you started it.

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming.

I mean. Sure. But do you really think that the people who want to hate on this or that politician are doing so because they weren't taught "news literacy"?

It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC.

Why?

It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder.

Well, Andrew, I think I see your problem. There is no Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes me think that your research ability may not be up to snuff. It also makes me wonder why you're weighing in on this issue when you clearly haven't read the law since you don't even know what it is. You're actually talking about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which also is the law that allows Facebook and YouTube to moderate their platforms in exactly the way you're asking them to.

If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

How is this nonsense in the NY Times? This is such a dumb idea it's barely worth responding to.

Or the private sector could pitch in on its own. Tomorrow, by fiat, Mark Zuckerberg could make Facebook slightly less profitable and enormously less immoral: He could hire thousands more content moderators and pay them fairly.

Dude. Have you not been paying attention? The company already has over 10,000 content moderators and has said it's hiring at least another 10,000 and I'm betting that number would go up.

Or he could replace Sheryl Sandberg with Susan Benesch, a human rights lawyer and an expert on how speech can lead to violence.

So, you do know Susan! Then... don't you also know that she's against censorship and for more creative approaches to countering such dangerous speech online? And I think it would be great if Facebook hired her, but not in Sheryl's role. Susan is one of the smartest people in the world on these issues, but Sheryl is the company's Chief Operating Officer, and I'm unclear on Susan's experience in running one of the largest companies in the world.

Either way, this article is garbage. The NY Times is, of course, free to print such garbage, just as we're free to criticize it. And wonder who the hell is editing and fact checking stuff when it can't get basic facts like which law you're talking about correct.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, andrew marantz, cda 230, censorship, free speech, free speech tropes, ny times opinion, section 230
Companies: ny times