"Rather than prevent the rise of the far-right or combat racism and antisemitism, Germany’s pro-Israel anti-antisemitism has allowed the flourishing of a far-right able to direct their racism towards anti-Zionist migrants while exploiting the fight against antisemitism to increasingly fascist ends."
I've dipped into the #TikTok debate, with a unique proposal. No ban, instead, mandate reciprocity.
Liberal democracies should restrict TikTok and other Chinese apps like #WeChat and #Weibo from accessing their digital markets until #China allows foreign platforms like #LINE, #Spotify, #Signal, and #Facebook equal and fair access to the Chinese #digital market.
> The blanket suspension of student protesters casts “serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach,” 54 law professors wrote.
B'Nai Brith has pressurized #Toronto Public #Library to remove Palestinian Professor, Refaat Alareer's poem, "If I Must Die" on account of a twisted, disingenuous accusation of anti-semitism. The poem has been praised around the world & translated into numerous languages. It speaks of hope & love amidst grief & tragedy. A cynical attempt by a pro-Israel lobby group to hide the fact Israeli forces murdered the beloved teacher in #Gaza amidst the #genocide.
In a year that will be remembered for its relentless assault on intellectual freedom, 2023 saw an unprecedented wave of book bans sweeping across the United States.
The numbers are staggering and the targets are clear. In the first half of the 2022-23 school year alone, 30% of banned books focused on racial topics or featured characters of color, while over half of the bans in 2023 took aim at LGBTQ+ content. —via takeitback.org #Censorship#BookBans#Education#Diversity#DEI#Racism#LGBTQ
Librarians in several states can now be jailed for years for making “pornography” available. Let’s be clear about intent here - it is to limit descriptions of the lives of LGBTQ people, where possible down to the level that we even exist. @bookstodon#bookstodon#lgbtq#books#censorship#libraries#librarians
"X issued a statement accusing the watchdog of pursuing global censorship and vowing the company will 'robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court'."
Can anyone find a link to this statement on the web? It's not linked in the Guardian piece, and all web searches are giving me is news media articles, many of which don't even mention it.
In a democracy, it's not the role of government to decide for the public what's information and what's "misinformation" or "disinformation". That's for a free press and public debate to determine.
In this context, Xitter is a printing company serving millions of one-person newsletters. Printing companies should not be censoring the newsletters they print on a government's behalf.
What Xitter's recommendation algorithms are amplifying is a separate issue.
"what bothers me about Bluesky. There is implicitly a censorship regime being implemented here, and it must necessarily be centralised. There must be a single set of decisions affecting everyone in the world. Those decisions are being made by an American company bound by American laws, which in turn are decided by the American people participating in American democracy."
Love when Instagram refreshes right after I post yet again about the seething hypocrisy, #sexism, #misogyny and #transphobia of all the mainstream social media platforms and US legislation banning "female nipples" as "sexually explicit nudity" while "male nipples" aren't and LITERALLY THE FIRST POST TO SHOW is some YouTube dude I follow posting a topless "fitness update" 🙃 Fuck the #patriarchy, and if you consider yourself #progressive, please notice and speak the fuck up about the insanity of #gender based #censorship. I'm tired of feeling so alone.
Here's a photo of my p*ssy to please encourage everyone to speak out more about the blatant hypocrisy of #genderDiscrimination in how the #patriarchy categorizes the chests of "people who look female" as "seggsually ekspleeseet newdeetay" while placing no such restrictions against "people who look male."
6 Badass Librarians Who Changed History
They will not be shushed.
by April White April 5, 2024
"Librarians have never been a quiet bunch: Information, after all, is power. To mark National Library Week—typically celebrated the second full week of April—Atlas Obscura, fittingly, went into the archives to find our favorite stories of librarians who have fostered cultural movements, protected national secrets, and fought criminals..."
…The bill in CT, pending before an #education cmte, is 1 of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit #BookBans or forbid the #harassment of school & public librarians…. Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, & 2 have become #law….
But the #library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly #RedStates that aim to restrict which #books#libraries can offer & #threaten#librarians w/ #prison or thousands in #fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, 3 of which have become #law…. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last 3 yrs across 10 states.
"The Intercept analysis showed that the major newspapers reserved terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks"
Even words the UN uses regularly in its resolutions, like “occupied territory” “Palestine” “refugee camps” are censored
#EU#Neoliberalism#Neoiliberalism#Censorship#Surveillance#DSA: "Despite the significance of digitalisation in mediating these political-economic shifts, mainstream platform regulation scholarship remains largely disconnected from these wider trends. EU laws are predominantly analysed using normative framings aligned with ‘progressive neoliberalism’, as efforts to balance growth and innovation against fundamental rights and ‘public values’. Schematically, EU regulation is distinguished on this basis from a free-market US approach and authoritarian, state-capitalist Chinese approach.
Against this, the paper makes two key claims. First, EU platform regulation can more helpfully be framed as manifesting an ongoing shift away from progressive neoliberalism and towards neo-illiberalism. Fundamental rights and liberal-democratic norms which previously legitimised EU policy are increasingly sacrificed in favour of unrestrained state surveillance and private-sector-led innovation. Second, methodologically, researchers should not only consider how these laws are being implemented currently, but also look ahead to an increasingly-plausible ‘far-right Europe’.
To demonstrate this framework’s analytical value, the paper examines the 2022 Digital Services Act, arguing that its overall regulatory approach is characteristically neo-illiberal: economically, it embraces marketised media governance and corporate power, while politically, it creates extensive possibilities for state censorship. Broadly, it seeks to strengthen platforms’ accountability in three main ways: individual consumer rights; empowering civil society via transparency and consultation; and technocratic risk management procedures."