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Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the internet and the communication and information tools it spawned, like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or "citizen journalists."

It is hard to disagree with these two beliefs. Yet they obscure evidence that governments are having as much success as the internet in disrupting independent media and determining the information that reaches society. Moreover, in many poor countries or in those with autocratic regimes, government actions are more important than the internet in defining how information is produced and consumed, and by whom.

Illustrating this point is a curious fact: Censorship is flourishing in the information age. In theory, new technologies make it more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for governments to control the flow of information. Some have argued that the birth of the internet foreshadowed the death of censorship. In 1993, John Gilmore, an internet pioneer, told Time, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Governments went from spectators in the digital revolution to sophisticated early adopters of advanced technologies that allowed them to monitor journalists, and direct the flow of information.

Today, many governments are routing around the liberating effects of the internet. Like entrepreneurs, they are relying on innovation and imitation. In countries such as Hungary, Ecuador, Turkey, and Kenya, officials are mimicking autocracies like Russia, Iran, or China by redacting critical news and building state media brands. They are also creating more subtle tools to complement the blunt instruments of attacking journalists.

As a result, the internet's promise of open access to independent and diverse sources of information is a reality mostly for the minority of humanity living in mature democracies.

How is this happening? As journalists, we've seen firsthand the transformative effects of the internet. It seems capable of redrafting any equation of power in which information is a variable, starting in newsrooms. But this, it turns out, is not a universal law. When we started to map examples of censorship, we were alarmed to find so many brazen cases in plain sight. But even more surprising is how much censorship is hidden. Its scope seems hard to appreciate for several reasons. First, some tools for controlling the media are masquerading as market disruptions. Second, in many places internet usage and censorship are rapidly expanding at the same time. Third, while the internet is viewed as a global phenomenon, censorship can seem a parochial or national issue-in other words, isolated. Evidence suggests otherwise.

In Venezuela, a case that we examine below in depth, all three of these factors are in play. Internet usage there is among the fastest-growing in the world, even as the government pursues an ambitious program of censorship. Many methods used by the state are beneath the waterline, and have surfaced in other countries. They include, as we and others have discovered, gaining influence over independent media by using shell companies and phantom buyers. According to Tamoa Calzadilla, until last year the investigations editor at Ultimas Noticias, Venezuela's largest-circulation newspaper, the array of pressures on journalists in her country is not well understood in Europe or the United States. She resigned in protest after anonymous buyers took control of the paper, and a new editor demanded what she considered to be politically motivated changes in an investigative story about anti-government protests. "This is not your classic censorship, where they put a soldier in the door of the newspaper and assault the journalists," Calzadilla told us. "Instead, they buy the newspaper, they sue the reporters and drag them into court, they eavesdrop on your communications and then broadcast them on state television. This is censorship for the 21st century."

The new censorship has many practitioners, and increasingly refined practices:

* In Hungary, the government's Media Authority has the power to collect detailed information about journalists as well as advertising and editorial content. Prime Minister Viktor Orban's regime uses fines, taxes, and licensing to pressure critical media, and steers state advertising to friendly outlets. A comprehensive report by several global press freedom organizations concluded: "Hungary's independent media today faces creeping strangulation."

* In Pakistan, the state regulatory authority suspended the license of Geo TV, the most popular channel in the country, after a defamation claim against it was made by the intelligence services following a shooting of one of the station's best-known journalists. The channel was off the air for 15 days starting in June 2014. Pakistani journalists say that self-censorship and bribery are rife.

* In Turkey, a recent amendment to the internet law gave the Telecommunications Directorate the authority to close any website or content "to protect national security and public order, as well as to prevent a crime." President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been criticized for jailing dozens of journalists, and for using tax investigations and huge fines in retaliation for critical coverage (in 2009, for instance, tax authorities fined a leading media group $2.5 billion). More recently, the government blocked Twitter and other social media allegedly in response to a corruption scandal that implicated Erdogan and other senior officials.

* In Russia, President Vladimir Putin is remaking the media landscape in the government's image. In 2014, multiple media outlets were blocked, shuttered, or saw their editorial line change overnight in response to government pressure. While launching its own media operations, the government approved legislation limiting foreign investment in Russian media. The measure took aim at publications like Vedomosti, a daily newspaper respected for its standards and independence and owned by three foreign media groups: Dow Jones, the Financial Times Group and Finland's Sanoma.

Traditional censorship was basically an exercise of cut and paste. Government agents inspected the content of newspapers, magazines, books, movies, or news broadcasts, often prior to release, and suppressed or altered them so that only information judged acceptable would reach the public. For dictatorships, censorship meant that an uncooperative media outlet could be shut down or that unruly editors and journalists exiled, jailed, or murdered.

Starting in the early 1990s, when journalism went online, censorship followed. Filtering, blocking and hacking replaced scissors and black ink. Some governments barred access to Web pages they didn't like, redirected users to sites that looked independent but which in fact they controlled, and influenced the conversation in chat rooms and discussion groups via the participation of trained functionaries. They directed anonymous hackers to vandalize the sites and blogs, and disrupt the internet presence of critics, defacing, or freezing their Facebook pages or Twitter accounts.

The biggest newspaper in Venezuela had changed hands, and questions about the origin of the funds and the identities of the new owners were met with silence.

Tech-savvy activists quickly found ways to protect themselves and evade digital censorship. For a while it looked like agile, hyperconnected, and decentralized networks of activists, journalists, and critics had the upper hand in a battle against centralized, hierarchal, and unwieldy government bureaucracies. But governments caught up. Many went from spectators in the digital revolution to sophisticated early adopters of advanced technologies that allowed them to monitor content, activists, and journalists, and direct the flow of information.

No place shows the contradictions of this contest on as grand a scale as China. The country with the most internet users and the fastest-growing connected population is also the world's most ambitious censor. Of the three billion internet users in the world, 22 percent live in China (nearly 10 percent live in the US). The government maintains the "Great Firewall" to block unacceptable content, including foreign news sites. An estimated two million censors police the internet and the activities of users. Yet the BBC reports that a 2014 poll found that 76 percent of Chinese questioned said they felt free from government surveillance. This was the highest rate of the 17 countries polled.

The internet has allowed Chinese authorities to deploy censorship strategies that are subtle and harder for the public to see. In Hong Kong, where China is obligated by treaty to respect a free press, Beijing has used an array of measures to limit independent journalism, including selective violence against editors and the arrest of reporters. But it has also arranged the firing of critical reporters and columnists and the withdrawal of advertising by state and private sources, including multinationals, and launched cyberattacks on websites. The Hong Kong Journalists Association described 2014 as "the darkest for press freedom in several decades."

National security policies place the US and other mature democracies in the same discussion as countries, like Russia, that see the internet as both a threat and a means of control.

China's actions demonstrate the emerging censorship menu: It can be direct and visible, or indirect and stealthy. These stealth strategies have become important as more governments try to hide their efforts to control the media. Stealth censorship can involve creating entities that look like private companies, or government-organized, non-governmental organizations, known as GONGOS. These organizations purport to represent civil society, but in practice are government agencies. The approach allows the anonymous hackers in Russia or China who attack the networks of critics at home, or governments abroad, to be portrayed as mysterious members of the sprawling global civil society, rather than allies of the regime.

Stealth censorship appeals to authoritarian governments that want to appear like democracies-or at least not like old-style dictatorships. And they have more options available to them than ever.

In illiberal democracies, how a government censors often reflects the tension between projecting an image of democracy and ruthlessly suppressing dissent. Some governments are trying to reconcile this contradiction by outsourcing censorship to groups they secretly control. Or they use currency controls to starve publishers of newsprint. Or they promote the migration of irritating journalists from major papers to online startups, where they have to build new audiences. This allows the government to keep a grip on the news media while concealing its fingerprints.

That is the story today in Venezuela. The country of 30 million has become a laboratory for testing ways to control the flow of news and information. As a case study in how governments disrupt independent media, the Venezuelan model offers several compelling ingredients: a feisty and courageous independent media, a press establishment serving elite audiences, a socialist revolution that claims to be building a popular democracy, and a deeply polarized citizenry that is witness to a near constant information war.

Recently, as a political and economic crisis has deepened, the state and its allies appear to have unveiled a new weapon: quieting critical reporting through the shadowy purchase of some of the private media companies most vexing to the government.

At first, the deals looked similar to the changing of the guard that is happening at old-line media institutions around the world. They have involved Venezuela's best-selling but financially troubled newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, and its oldest daily, El Universal. But with time the sales seem less the result of market disruption, and more like political meddling using government-friendly buyers, dark money, and a web of foreign companies, some of them created overnight in order to conceal the identities of the new owners.

It is naive to assume there is a technological fix for governments that are determined to concentrate power and do whatever it takes to keep it.

The legal strategies used in the acquisitions make them hard to trace and evaluate. No evidence of a direct connection to government funds has surfaced. But the highly irregular structure of the deals, followed by changes in the editorial lines of the publications, have convinced journalists that their papers have lost their independence.

In the case of Ultimas Noticias and its parent chain, for instance, the buyer was Latam Media Holding, a shell company created in Curaçao less than a month before the sale, according to documents that we've examined. The price, which was not made public at the time, was at least $97 million, a huge sum for newspapers in Venezuela's anemic economy. According to the documents, two days before the sale, one original shareholder sold her stock for $11 million to a Latin American currency fund of opaque ownership, a transaction not disclosed publicly. The biggest paper in the country had changed hands, and questions about the origin of the funds and the identities of the owners were met with silence.

The intrigue thickened when it was revealed that Latam Media Holding is controlled by Robert Hanson, a British businessman with no evident experience investing in media or in Latin America. Hanson is the multimillionaire son of the late British industrialist Lord Hanson, and a familiar figure in London society columns (the "raffish blade about town" in one memorable description in The Times of London). He has declined to talk about the purchase.

The new editors of Ultimas Noticias reassured the staff that the paper's standards would not change. But within weeks, reporters say, they were told to soften pieces critical of the government or pressured not to write them at all, a charge the current editor has denied. Since the purchase, more than 50 journalists have resigned.

Journalists and media executives in Venezuela are used to rough treatment from authorities. The late President Hugo Chávez and his handpicked successor, the current President Nicolás Maduro, have attacked private news media for supporting the opposition and accused them of destabilizing the country. The government has passed legislation limiting press freedom, restricted access to public information, levied fines and taxes on media companies, withheld broadcast licenses, forced programs off the air, and used foreign currency controls to create a scarcity of newsprint, which is imported. At least a dozen newspapers have closed for lack of printing supplies.

The state has a long record of harassing, detaining, and beating reporters, and suing them for defamation. Officials routinely take to state media to excoriate individual reporters or news outlets. Reporters know they run high personal risks for writing about corruption or covering shortages of basic necessities, from toilet paper to medicine or food staples, in ways that reflect badly on the government. In a survey of journalists by the Venezuelan branch of the Institute for Press and Society, which supports press freedom, 42 percent reported being pressured by officials to change a story.

Cracking down directly on the media has proven costly to the government, sparking domestic protests and bringing international condemnation. And it has never worked for long. Until recently, Venezuelans could find vigorous coverage of such sensitive topics as Chávez's health (he died of cancer in 2013), shocking crime statistics (the second-highest murder rate in the world), and state management of the energy sector (including the world's largest oil reserves).

Then came the violent clashes between protesters and police during the first half of 2014. Students started the protests in response to a crime on a provincial campus, but they quickly grew into a full-blown crisis for Maduro. As the protests spread, and with them pictures of the dead and wounded, the government banned NTN24, an international cable channel covering the violence. It blocked all images on Twitter. Reporters, photographers, and camera operators were detained and beaten. State media scarcely covered the violence or the motives behind the protests. Particularly startling to some viewers was the lack of tough coverage on Globovision, a 24-hour news channel. It had been the last television station that was critical of the government. But several months earlier, it had been bought by an insurance firm reportedly close to the Maduro regime.

At Ultimas Noticias, the investigative team run by Tamoa Calzadilla obtained an electrifying scoop: a video showing police and men in civilian clothes firing on fleeing protesters, killing one. Despite the recent sale of the paper, Calzadilla and her team put the video online. Their report led to the first arrests of members of the security forces. But a short time later, the president of the chain that owns the newspaper resigned and was replaced by an ally of the ruling party.

The following month, Calzadilla presented the new editor with an inside look at the protesters and the police squaring off in Caracas. She says that he refused to run the piece unless it was changed to say that protesters were financed by the United States (there is no evidence of this). Instead, Calzadilla resigned, going into a bathroom in the newsroom and tweeting, "journalism first," before exiting the building.

A month after the protests subsided last June, the owners of El Universal (whom Maduro had described on television as "rancid oligarchy") announced that they had sold the 106-year-old daily.

If the purchase of Ultimas Noticias was mysterious, the sale of El Universal in July 2014 contained elements of farce. It was bought by a Spanish investment firm that had been founded a year earlier with an initial capital of about $4,000. According to documents published by the blogger Alek Boyd, the sole shareholder in the Spanish firm was a Panama-registered corporation called Tecnobreaks, Inc. But when Boyd contacted the founders of Tecnobreaks, a Venezuelan father and son apparently in the auto repair business, they said they had no idea of the sale and were not people of means. It was as if The New York Times had been bought by a Midas franchisee.

Months later, it is still a mystery who is behind the purchase of El Universal or how much they paid (estimates range from $20 million to $100 million). The Spanish firm remains the purchaser of record. But the impact on the journalism has been clear. In the month after the sale, at least 26 journalists said they were dismissed over critical coverage. Rayma Suprani, a popular editorial cartoonist, was fired for a cartoon that mocked Chávez's famous signature, trailing off in a flat line, to depict the demise of healthcare in Venezuela. "We don't know who bought El Universal or who pays the salaries," she told CNN en Español after her dismissal. "But now we know they are bothered by the critical editorial line. So we can presume that it wasn't some invisible man but the government got its hands on it."

Suprani now posts her cartoons on Twitter, where she has more than half a million followers. Many of Venezuela's most enterprising journalists have migrated online. Tamoa Calzadilla is now investigations editor of runrun.es, an independent news site with reporters in Caracas, where, she told us, "we are doing the journalism that needs to be done." But while internet usage is growing sharply in Venezuela, less than half the population has access to the Web. In a country divided down the middle by politics, most Venezuelans are now getting half the story.

Despite the economic crisis, the government is investing aggressively to build its own media empire. State-owned Telesur has become the largest 24-hour television news channel in Latin America. Started by Chávez "to lead and promote the unification of the peoples of the SOUTH," it now employs 800 reporters. The company reached a milestone last year with the launch of an English-language website and newscast, which it promoted in a full-page ad in The New Yorker.

For a moment in 2011, during the Arab spring, social media seemed to give democracy activists an advantage against entrenched regimes. As protesters triumphed in Egypt, Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim famously told Wolf Blitzer, "If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet." Although the complex dynamics of the uprising went far beyond a "Facebook Revolution," the term captured a sense that something important had changed.

Four years later, media freedom in Egypt is under withering assault. Dozens of journalists have been jailed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And last summer, Amnesty International reported having obtained internal documents that describe a government contract to build a system to spy on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other social media.

This might be a slogan for the Facebook counter-revolution: To empower a government, give it the internet.

The Edward Snowden leaks made clear that the internet is a tool for peering into the lives of citizens, including journalists, for every government with the means to do so. Whether domestic spying in the United States or Great Britain qualifies as censorship is a matter of debate. But the Obama administration's authorization of secret wiretaps of journalists and aggressive leak prosecutions has had a well-documented chilling effect on national-security reporting. At the very least, electronic snooping by the government means that no journalist reporting on secrets can promise in good conscience to guarantee a source anonymity.

National security policies place the US and other mature democracies in the same discussion with countries, like Russia, that see the internet as both a threat and a means of control. Most of these countries have not tried to hide from charges that they perform surveillance over the internet. Instead, Russia, India, Australia, and others have approved security legislation that writes the practice into law.

Journalists legitimately fear being swept up in this electronic dragnet. But frequently they are its specific targets. China has hacked foreign journalists' email accounts, presumably to vacuum up their sources, and broke into the servers of leading US newspapers. The NSA hacked into Al Jazeera. The Colombian government spied on communications of foreign journalists covering peace talks with rebels. Ethiopia's Information Network Security Agency has tracked journalists in the United States. Belarus, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan all routinely monitor reporters' communications, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, describes the sinister consequences of surveillance in his recent book, The New Censorship. Simon recounts in chilling detail how Iran turned journalists' reliance on the internet into a weapon against protesters in 2009. Security agents tortured journalists like Maziar Bahari (the subject of the Jon Stewart film Rosewater) until they divulged their social media and email passwords, and then combed through their networks, identifying and arresting sources. Iranian officials also created fake Facebook accounts to lure activists. "The use of Facebook and other social media platforms by governments to dismantle political networks has become a standard practice," Simon writes.

It's not only states that are using these techniques. In Mexico, drug cartels run grotesque online media operations to intimidate rivals, the government, and the public. They have viciously silenced efforts to report anonymously on their activities on social media. In October 2014, cartel members kidnapped a citizen journalist in Reynosa, Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, and then posted pictures of her dead body on her Twitter account.

It is little wonder why governments would pursue a strategy of weakening print and broadcast companies if it meant journalists moved to a platform the state can control and monitor. In Russia and elsewhere, there is a pattern of independent media being pressured not just by markets but by the state to move online, where they must rebuild their audience and the state is a powerful tenant, if not the landlord. If independent media grow too big online, like the popular Russian news site Lenta.ru, they can see their editors suddenly dismissed, the editorial line changed, and the site crumble.

One disturbing trend is the banding together of governments to create an internet that is easier to police. China has advised Iran on how to build a self-contained "Halal" internet. Beijing has also been sharing know-how with Zambia to block critical Web content, according to Reporters Without Borders. Private surveillance firms advertise their wares to countries that want to upgrade their encryption penetrating software.

If that is not enough, some governments can still count on self-censorship to do the work for them. Last October, after a deadly attack on the army by Islamic militants, top editors at more than a dozen Egyptian newspapers pledged to withhold criticism of the government and block "attempts to doubt state institutions or insult the army or police or judiciary." The ownership of Al Nahar television added: "Freedom of expression cannot ever justify belittling the Egyptian Army's morale."

For every government that succeeds in controlling the free flow of information or repressing journalists, there is a counterexample. Courageous citizens have found ways to circumvent or undermine official controls. Or they are willing simply to risk opposing a government's claims that it has the sole authority to write history. This power struggle is far from over, and its outcome will vary among countries and over time. Technological innovation will create new options that enable individuals and organizations to counteract government censorship, even as governments adopt technologies that enhance their ability to censor.

Pressures on governments for transparency, accountability, access to public information, and more citizen participation in public decisions will not go away. Autocratic states face populations that are more politically awake, restless, and harder to silence. Ukrainians showed recently that citizens fed up with the way they are governed could topple a president, even if he has the support of neighboring Russia. Or in Hong Kong, as the world witnessed last fall, a leaderless group of activists can defy China's immense power.

But states retain extraordinary capacities to alter the flow of information to suit their interests. And a growing number of governments are undermining the checks and balances that constrain chief executives. From Russia to Turkey, Hungary to Bolivia, leaders are packing Supreme Courts and the judiciary with loyalists and staging elections that reward their allies. They are weakening the institutions that exist to prevent the concentration of power. In such a political environment, independent media cannot survive for long.

The internet can redistribute power. But it is naïve to assume that there is a simple technological fix for governments and their leaders who are determined to concentrate power and do whatever it takes to keep it. Censorship will rise and fall as technological innovation and the hunger for freedom clash with governments bent on controlling their citizens, starting with what they read, watch, and hear.

Eduardo Marenco provided research assistance on this piece.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Philip Bennett and Moises Naim Philip Bennett is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy and a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. He is a former managing editor of The Washington Post and of Frontline. Moises Naim is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a syndicated columnist, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He was editor in chief of Foreign Policy from 1996-2010. This story was published in the January/February 2015 issue of CJR with the headline, "The new censors."

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Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the internet and the communication and information tools it spawned, like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or "citizen journalists."

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In the year 1995, when Hillary Clinton was First Lady in the White House, a now-viral T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!" was pulled from Walmart's shelves. Consider the word PRESIDENT, insistently presented in all caps, and then consider this: Walmart removed the shirt from stores (about 20 years before Clinton would become the first woman U.S. presidential nominee of a major party) because it was "offensive" and went against Walmart's "family values."

The T-shirt, which features feminist-in-training Margaret from Hank Ketcham's "Dennis the Menace" comic strip, went viral on Tuesday night after a Rutgers University professor shared an old Associated Press story on Twitter. This morning, he shared a photo of the shirt:

Here is what the offending shirt looked like: pic.twitter.com/mdiIi7bEQD
- Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) July 27, 2016

The T-shirt's designer, then-70-year-old Florida psychologist Ann Ruben, explained the blowback in 1995 with a response that may sound familiar: "Promoting females as leaders is still a very threatening concept in this country," she said.

She went to the media after Walmart pulled the shirt. "I was never aware that promoting women as leaders flew in the face of family values," she told People. "It didn't make any sense."

As noted by Jezebel, the same 1995 People article reported that Walmart was inundated with "a storm of complaints" after pulling the shirt - so severe that it ordered 30,000 of the shirts to sell nationwide.

Walmart spokesperson Danit Marquardt emailed the Cut to comment: "Wow, it still pains us that we made this mistake 20 years ago. We're proud of the fact that our country - and our company - has made so much progress in advancing women in the workplace, and in society."

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Back in 1995, Walmart Banned This T-Shirt

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In the year 1995, when Hillary Clinton was First Lady in the White House, a now-viral T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!" was pulled from Walmart's shelves. Consider the word PRESIDENT, insistently presented in all caps, and then consider this: Walmart removed the shirt from stores (about 20 years before Clinton would become the first woman U.S.

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News about censorship. Commentary and archival information about censorship from The New York Times.

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A commitment to intellectual freedom transforms your library.

ALA actively advocates and educates in defense of intellectual freedom-the rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Intellectual freedom is a core value of the library profession, and a basic right in our democratic society. A publicly supported library provides free, equitable, and confidential access to information for all people of its community.

Assistance and Consultation

The staff of the Office for Intellectual Freedom is available to answer questions or provide assistance to librarians, trustees, educators and the public about intellectual freedom issues and resources. Areas of assistance include policy development, First Amendment issues, and professional ethics. Inquiries can be directed via email to oif@ala.org or via phone at (312) 280-4226.

Updated 2017

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Intellectual Freedom: Issues and Resources

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A commitment to intellectual freedom transforms your library. ALA actively advocates and educates in defense of intellectual freedom-the rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Intellectual freedom is a core value of the library profession, and a basic right in our democratic society.

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what are common american censorship laws?

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What Are Common American Censorship Laws? - HG.org

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How often have we heard someone say "It's a free country, I can say what I want to?" In most cases, that person is correct. But, America does not always allow free speech without constraint.

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First Amendment
Webquest

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A resource page for Educational Technology

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10 Most Censored Countries - Committee to Protect Journalists

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10 Most Censored Countries 1. Eritrea 2. North Korea 3. Saudi Arabia 4. Ethiopia 5. Azerbaijan 6. Vietnam 7. Iran 8. China 9. Myanmar 10. Cuba Methodology » See updated list of 10 Most Censored Countries at https://cpj.org/reports/2019/09/10-most-censored-eritrea-north-korea-turkmenistan-journalist.php. The 2015 list of 10 Most Censored Countries is part of CPJ’s annual publication, Attacks on the…

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It is possible to argue that North Korea has the world's strictest media censorship system. North Korean media outlets are, essentially, a branch of the government propaganda bureaucracy. Their goal is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and control common people, to explain to them what they should think about the world. In a sense, North Korean media exists to distort the picture of the world in accordance with the ever-changing demands of the ruling elite.

North Korean leaders believe that this system is necessary to keep people obedient and controllable, to prevent the rise of criticism about the government. This might be the case, indeed: Being unaware of the alternatives to their lifestyles, people are less likely to dream about a change.

However, this system of total control also leads to serious side effects which touch not only common people but also the decision-makers and top elite. To put it simply, the hyper-censored media does not merely blind common people, but distorts the vision of the elite as well.

One can say that there are two major tasks a free media usually has. On one hand, it exists to provide the public with a reasonably truthful picture of life, its challenges and problems. On the other hand, it serves as a channel through which the elite can receive critical and independent estimates of the country's external and internal situation. The absence of such a channel is dangerous.
A distorted picture
If you are a dictator with more or less absolute power like Kim Jong Un, North Korea's "Supreme Leader," how can you possibly know about what is going on inside your country? Of course, normally dictators rely on classified official reports, but there is one serious problem with these papers: they are written by officials who have a vested interest in presenting situations in the most favorable light. This is understandable: most officials report about the state of affairs in the regions or fields they are responsible for. Thus, the supreme leader always gets a distorted picture.

For example, if there is a region which is just about to be struck by a famine, we should not normally expect that a region's governor (or, in the case of North Korea, party secretary) is going to compile an honest report about the problems. At the end of the day, the party secretary is likely to be held responsible for the food shortages, so he has every reason to play the problems down on the assumption that the crisis will somehow solve itself.

Of course, the party secretary can also be punished for submitting false reports, but if he frankly admits the chaos in agriculture within his jurisdiction, the punishment is nearly certain.

Thus, North Korean officials have every reason to exaggerate their successes while hiding their lack of performance. As a result, North Korea's "Supreme Leader" has no means to find out what is actually going on in his country and unavoidably lives in a world of illusions. His tough approach to the officials does not help either: being terrified, they are even less likely to tell bad news to the ruler.

If North Korea had a free or at least less controlled press, things would be very different. An independent media would find out the problems immediately, so the top leaders would soon learn about possible difficulties. And local Party secretaries and other officials, being unable to cover things up, would also be more inclined to compile honest reports.
Political problems
Political problems might pose an even bigger challenge. Officials will sometimes report economic problems, but they are almost certain to remain silent about sensitive but important political issues like, say, a decline in the government's popularity. They are bound to assure the dictator that he and his entourage are widely popular, even when the country is actually on the brink of a revolution.

It is not surprising that a majority of overthrown dictators sincerely believed themselves to be popular and admired virtually until the moment when rebels began to ram the gates of their palaces. If the dictators had a less controlled press, they would be much more likely to see coming trouble and readjust their policies or, alternatively, look for escape before it was too late.

So dictators use strict media control to blind the people, but they also end up blinding themselves. And North Korea, the country with the world's toughest censorship, iseems to be a place where this dangerous trend is especially pronounced.
Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, is a Russian historian, North Korea expert, and regular RFA contributor.

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North Korean Censorship Blinds Not Just the People, But Also Their Rulers

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It is possible to argue that North Korea has the world's strictest media censorship system. North Korean media outlets are, essentially, a branch of the government propaganda bureaucracy. Their goal is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and control common people, to explain to them what they should think about the world.

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Of all the narratives coming out of Ferguson, Missouri-the militarization of local cops, the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the acceptable uses of force-the constitutional story that has most captured our attention is that of the police persistently violating the First Amendment rights of both the protesters and the press. When we talk about constitutional violations there, we do so primarily with respect to our freedom of speech and assembly.

Now it is beyond dispute that what the media is doing in Ferguson is vitally important and that the arrest and incarceration of reporters is a scandal. And there is no denying that we learn something important about the scale of police lawlessness when they cross the line into arresting journalists, who are traditionally off-limits. It is also indisputable that the right of protesters to peaceably assemble and speak is being undermined by mass arrests, curfews, and attempted news blackouts. But search for the words unconstitutional and amendment in Ferguson coverage on Google, and the extent to which our outrage seems to begin and end at the First Amendment is quite striking. Searching Google News (admittedly not a scientific method, but pretty good), we got six times as many results on Ferguson coverage that mentioned the First Amendment as mentioned the 14 th Amendment, which is the amendment that covers a wide range of police abuses having nothing to do with freedom of speech.

A number of superb articles detailing the dangers of suppressing speech and dissent have illuminated the problem of police crackdowns on the First Amendment. And this week the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law published a joint letter calling for the end of the curfew in Ferguson because it "suspends the constitutional right to assemble by punishing the misdeeds of the few through the theft of constitutionally protected rights of the many."

Far fewer articles describe the other constitutional violations taking place on the streets of Missouri, and those violations are every bit as urgent as the infringements on speech and assembly. We've seen very little coverage of the use of tear gas and rubber bullets as constitutional violations. But the due process clause bans the police from using excessive force even when they are within their rights to control a crowd or arrest a suspect. And tear gas is in a category all its own. Not only is unleashing it into a crowd an unconstitutional exercise of excessive force, but its use is banned by international law. That's one of the reasons Amnesty International sent a team of investigators to Ferguson. Similarly, the use of rubber bullets under the circumstances is also unconstitutional. Some kinds of rubber bullets are more unconstitutional than others, because certain types are more likely to injure and maim.

But excessive use of force is only the beginning. Pulling people out of the crowd and arresting them without probable cause (or for being 2 feet off the sidewalk) violates the Fourth and 14 th Amendments, particularly when those arrests are disproportionately of black protesters. The general arrest statistics in Ferguson reveal what looks to be a stunning constitutional problem. According to an annual report last year from the Missouri attorney general's office, Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest blacks during traffic stops as they were whites. Emerging reports about racial disparities in Ferguson's criminal justice system and the ways in which the town uses trivial violations by blacks to bankroll the city (and disenfranchise offenders) all represent constitutional questions. Why don't we characterize them as such? These are not just violations of the law or bad policy. These are violations of our most basic and fundamental civil liberties.

Of course, probably the biggest potential constitutional violation of all-and eyewitness testimony suggests this as a real possibility-is the alleged use of excessive force by the police in shooting an unarmed 18-year-old at least six times. Under the law, each of those bullets must be separately justified, as necessary, even if one believes the officer's story that Michael Brown rushed him. To be sure, the news media has covered this, but very few of us talk about the shooting as a potential violation of the Constitution. Remember, the Constitution is the foundational bargain between the people and their government, the framework on which our legal order rests. When we fail to talk about the arrests, searches, racial profiling, and government brutality in constitutional terms, we are failing to capture how profoundly the state has betrayed its promises.

Howard Zinn famously said: "The First Amendment is whatever the cop on the beat says it is." But as a former public defender told one of us on Wednesday, precisely the same thing is true for the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Eighth Amendment, as well as a lot of the rest of the Bill of Rights. We ignore those other constitutional violations at our peril.

This past term, the Supreme Court found it extremely easy (and in fact unanimously agreed) to see that a police's warrantless search of a cellphone is unconstitutional. More than one commentator observed that it was very easy for the justices to find a constitutional affront here because they all have cellphones and can imagine how intrusive a police search of those phones would be. But it's much harder for the courts, and even sometimes for the press, to imagine a lifetime of aggregated constitutional violations, from stop-and-frisk policies that disproportionately affect people of color, to civil forfeiture laws and the "war on drugs" that do the same.

One need look no further than the current Supreme Court to understand that the First Amendment now plays an outsize role in the national constitutional conversation about everything ranging from money in politics to maintaining order around health clinics to limiting the reach of public-sector unions. And given that the First Amendment is-in Pac-Man fashion-beginning to swallow up all the rest of our doctrine, perhaps it's no surprise that we see the First Amendment dominating the conversation on the ground in Ferguson as well. We all like to speak, regardless of race and income. And suppression of speech is something that offends all of us across race, gender, and economic lines. But what about those other provisions, the ones that protect prisoners and criminals and people who steal cigars? They are far more abstract for many of us.

Of course, one could argue (as has legal luminary Burt Neuborne) that the First Amendment is first for a reason. How else can we publicize the other constitutional violations in Ferguson if we cannot speak and share them? The right of free citizens and the press to film what they see and disseminate it widely is central to the efforts to correct the other, more systemic and entrenched race and economic violations that have made Michael Brown's killing a national story. Stephen Wood, a protester in Ferguson, made precisely this point to the Los Angeles Times: "When people are oppressed and they want to be heard, they go to an extreme," he said. "What good is the Constitution; what good are these laws if we don't use them?"

At the same time, it feels as though the relentless focus on First Amendment suppression-the focus on what happens when the sun goes down each night and the protesters and cops face off-has taken our eyes off the other equally meaningful constitutional affronts and has distracted us from the deeper conversations about the ways that racial profiling, discrimination, and outright brutality need to be addressed. Ferguson will not be a freer, better, or more just place when the protesters are allowed to gather without cops in riot gear down the block. It will be the same constitutional nightmare it has evidently been for years. We need to expand our vision of what is a constitutional violation to include what happens when the cameras roll out of town. Because even when the world stops watching, Ferguson and all the Fergusons across the country will need a lot of constitutional protection.
Read more of Slate's coverage of Ferguson.

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The Trashing of the Constitution in Ferguson, Missouri

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Of all the narratives coming out of Ferguson, Missouri-the militarization of local cops, the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the acceptable uses of force-the constitutional story that has most captured our attention is that of the police persistently violating the First Amendment rights of both the protesters and the press.

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The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data about banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of frequently challenged books or authors before that date.

OIF receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books and compiles this information into lists in order to inform the public about censorship in libraries and schools. The ALA condemns censorship and works to ensure free access to information. For more information on ALA's efforts to condemn censorship, please explore Banned Books Week: Celebrating Your Freedom to Read.

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100 most frequently challenged books by decade

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The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data about banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of frequently challenged books or authors before that date.

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Great to use for inferencing, have students explain what the quote is saying and its implication for the students.

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Censorship Quotes from BrainyQuote, an extensive collection of quotations by famous authors, celebrities, and newsmakers.

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(ANTIMEDIA) United Kingdom - Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter play an increasingly important role in our lives, but a brand new study into online censorship has revealed a number of developing trends regarding how social media platforms are attempting to regulate their users' speech.

While most readers have likely been lucky enough to evade Facebook jail, others might have friends who have been kicked off the social networking site for designated periods of time for 'violating community standards.' Some may even have had their Facebook accounts closed permanently due to the site's 'real names' policy. Others have likely had posts flagged or removed for containing nudity or other allegedly offensive content.

" UNFRIENDING CENSORSHIP: Insights from four months of crowdsourced data on social media censorship" is a brand new report that draws on data gathered from users of six social networking sites between November 2015 and March 2016. The inaugural study by Onlinecensorship.org - a collaborative effort between the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact - asked users to submit reports when their content was reported or their accounts were removed from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and YouTube.

"Account suspensions, the most stringent form of moderation, were the most frequent type of content takedown in our dataset," the report notes.

After analysing the collected data across geography, platform, content type and issue areas, the analysis revealed a number of trends in social media censorship. Here are some highlights of the information gathered from 161 submissions across 26 countries, with content in 11 languages:

- Facebook was the most frequently reported platform, with account suspensions the most reported content type.

- Nudity and false identity were the most frequent reasons given for the removal of content on Facebook.

- Of 119 reports received from Facebook users, 13% had been asked to prove their identity to Facebook under its name policy.

- Instagram users tended to report "inappropriate content" as the reason their content was taken down.

- Twitter takedowns tended to be linked to targeted abuse, harassment, or fraud/spam.

- Nearly half of copyright-related takedown submissions came from YouTube.

- 53% of users did not appeal the takedown of their content, 50% said they didn't know how, and 41.9% said they didn't expect a response. In four cases content was restored, but in 50 cases the user didn't receive a response.

- There were widespread reports that flagging is being used for censorship, and 61.6% of users believed that this was the cause for the removal of their content.

"The content was the Wikipedia photo of human anatomy showing a man and a woman in full frontal nudity. It is against Facebook's guidelines about nudity," reads one case study.

Although measures were used to help verify reports - and users were given the opportunity to send screenshots to support their claims - onlinecensorship.org did not work with the social media companies to obtain their data. Consequently, the study does not claim to be representative of all content takedowns or user experiences.

EFF explained the importance of tracking how social media companies are regulating the speech of their users:
"As self-ordained content moderators, these companies face thorny issues; deciding what constitutes hate speech, harassment, and terrorism is challenging, particularly across many different cultures, languages, and social circumstances."
EFF added that while the U.S.-based companies don't believe their policies constitute censorship, the purpose of onlinecensorship.org is to challenge this assertion by examining how their policies (and their enforcement) may be having a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

After examining how the policies of social media platforms are being enforced - and how this affects the lives of users - the report goes on to make a set of recommendations for how the social media sites can improve the experiences of users and boost their commitment to free expression.
READ NEXT: Wikileaks Drops Hillary Email Bomb That Could End Her Campaign but FB Censored It
Those who wish to report content blocking and online censorship can do so here.
This article (How Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter Use Censorship to Kill Free Speech) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Michaela Whitton and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Tyler Menezes. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.
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How Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter Use Censorship to Kill Free Speech

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Michaela Whitton May 3, 2016 (ANTIMEDIA) United Kingdom - Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter play an increasingly important role in our lives, but a brand new study into online censorship has revealed a number of developing trends regarding how social media platforms are attempting to regulate their users' speech.

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North Korea has officially announced it is blocking Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and South Korean websites in a move underscoring its concern with the spread of online information.

The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announcement was posted this week at the country's main mobile service provider, Koryolink, and other places serving Internet users.

Very few North Koreans have Internet access. Typically they can see only a sealed-off, government-sanctioned intranet. But foreigners had previously been able to surf the Web with almost no overt restrictions, though most likely with behind-the-scenes monitoring of their Internet activities.

The new restrictions will make it more difficult for visitors or the small community of foreign residents in North Korea to post real-time information about the country to the outside world, and will further limit the ability of North Koreans with Internet access to view information about their country posted elsewhere.

The government announcement named YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Voice of America and South Korean media sites as specific examples of what it is blocking "for a certain period of time."

It also said gambling and "sex and adult websites" have been blocked.

Facebook and Twitter had been informally blocked for months and could not be accessed Friday in a Web search from Pyongyang.

The announcement added that anyone who tries to hack onto such sites, access them in an "improper" way or distribute "anti-republic data" from them will be subject to punishment under North Korean law. It did not say what the punishment would be.

The new North Korean restrictions are similar to Internet censorship in neighboring China, which allows more access in general but also maintains strict bans on sites that Beijing deems politically sensitive or socially harmful.

They also mirror some restrictions in South Korea, which, despite being one of the world's most Internet-crazy countries, also bans North Korean websites and a wide variety of what the government deems to be adult content.

It is estimated that more than 2 million North Koreans now use mobile phones, but with few exceptions access to the Internet is limited to officials, technicians or others who have special permission to use it, usually under close supervision.

North Korea decided in 2013 to allow foreigners in the country to use 3G on their mobile phones, which generally require a local SIM card to get onto the Koryolink mobile carrier network.

That opened the door for them to surf the net and to post to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. More recently, even live-streaming video had been posted using the new Twitter app Periscope.

But Pyongyang, looking to maintain control over the flow of news getting out and concerned that local people may have also been finding ways onto the Web, has been quietly experimenting with Internet controls for some time.

In June last year, warnings began appearing on Instagram accounts in North Korea that claimed access to the popular photo-sharing app was being denied for "harmful content." Access to other sites was also denied with a screen notification saying, "Warning! You can't connect to this website because it's in blacklist site."

Instagram was not on the new list of officially banned sites and was functioning normally.
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North Korea officially blocks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

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North Korea has officially announced it is blocking Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and South Korean websites in a move underscoring its concern with the spread of online information. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announcement was posted this week at the country's main mobile service provider, Koryolink, and other places serving Internet users.