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A few weeks ago, we warned about a dangerous new German law that would fine social media companies if they didn't magically block "hate speech" on their platforms. As we pointed out, this would lead to widespread censorship, as the risk of liability for leaving up even borderline speech would be massive. And, equally important, this would embolden oppressive, dictatorial and autocratic regimes to press on with their own crackdowns on free speech by using laws like this one and claiming that they're doing the exact same thing as supposedly democratic nations like Germany.

We didn't have to wait long. Reporters Without Borders points us to the news that Russia has now rushed out a bill that is basically a cut and paste of the German law:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns a Russian bill that would force social networks to remove unlawful content within 24 hours of notification. It is based very closely on a law that was adopted in Germany on 30 June.

The Russian bill shows that when leading democracies devise draconian legislation, they provide repressive regimes with ideas. Submitted to the Duma on 12 July by members of President Vladimir Putins United Russia party, the bills references to the German law are explicit.

Just like the German bill, the Russian bill would allow anyone to claim certain content is "unlawful" and then the platforms would have 24 hours to remove the content or face massive fines. This will, inevitably, enable much greater control and censorship (already an issue in Russia). But it will be more difficult to argue that Russia is doing something "bad" here as the Russians will quickly point out that Germany has identical legislation. And I wouldn't be surprised to see other countries, such as Iran or China, put in place similar "laws" themselves.

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Russia Does A 'Copy/Paste' Of Germany's New 'Hate Speech' Online Censorship Law - Techdirt

KOLKATA: From censorship problems to gender politics, from the freedom from the male gaze to patriarchy - the run-up to the release of ' Lipstick Under My Burkha ' had the entire nation debating on these issues. In a free-wheeling conversation during their Kolkata trip, directors Prakash Jha and Anlankrita Srivastava have an uncensored chat on patriarchy, power and a lot of other issues in between. Excerpts:

Why do you insist that there is a relationship between patriarchy and censorship? Alankrita: This I noticed from the time my film, 'Lipstick Under My Burkha', was refused a certificate. I realised the whole thing happened because of a patriarchal mindset.

Prakash: If you read the observations of the Central Board of Film Certification using phrases like 'lady-oriented film', 'female fantasy' and 'audio pornography' in the context of this film, you will realise that they have completely missed the whole track. What they can't tolerate is a little struggle of these women and looking at things or hearing things from their points of view. Male gaze and what Pahlaj Nihalani has done in his own films are permitted. The moment you turn and look at things from a female perspective, they can't tolerate it. But have they ever thought what are these women wanting? It's not that they are trying to be rebellious. It's not that she (Konkona Sen Sharma's character) is trying to put her husband in place. Even that isn't permissible. That's because the CBFC or the government or the people with the authority has a patriarchal attitude. In our society, we look at everything from that point of view. The moment your upset that balance, they feel everything will fall.

Is that the reason that time and again the committees formed to amend the Cinematograph Act haven't been able to achieve much success?

Prakash: Eventually, it all boils down to 'should we lose our authority over it?'

Why are the committees then formed? Is there at all any intention to change?

Prakash: There must be some intention to bring about a change. That's why the committees are formed. But the government develops cold feet when they realise what it might mean. They won't allow you to have that freedom.

There is a counter argument that states censorship might not be too bad an idea in times of intolerance and with people being touchy about many issues. Do you buy that argument?

Prakash: But there will always be touchy people in society who are stronger than the government. Here in India, even the fringe elements are strong when it comes to being touchy. Some 15 people can barge into Sanjay Leela Bhansali's sets and disrupt shooting. The government can't do anything about it. Society in India is always stronger than the government. But the sum total of the matter is that unless and until you have the freedom, it doesn't work. You can always classify films. You can create more number of grades. But let people have their choices.

CBFC members have pointed out that if someone comes up with documentary that shows footage of riots and asks for a certification, it wouldn't be wise to oblige. They insist that society also has people who can be worked up by such footage...

Prakash: But the material is available in any case. It's just that today one is seeing more of polarisation. Social media highlights activities quickly and people begin to react. But that's no reason to censor anything. How can one stop if someone makes a documentary with such footage and uploads it?

Recently, when director Suman Ghosh had uploaded the uncensored trailer of his Amartya Sen documentary, Pahlaj Nihalani had called it a 'mistake' insisting that exhibiting something online is also public exhibition and hence needs certification. Is there a norm that says one can't upload an uncertified film online?

Alankrita: There nothing governing content online. I keep on hearing new things that CBFC is doing every other day. I heard that there was a poll to decide if a certain word can be used in a trailer. Where's that written? Then, there would be so many polls. If there is a law, we should be clearly told that. I don't think India is a country where someone can just announce something and it becomes a law. Can you just turn around and say that you can't post anything online that isn't certified? Can you just tell someone that he or she can't show films at festival abroad without certification? I don't think we can just announce laws this way.

Prakash: The law has to clarify that. What if somebody uploads it to a different land? Your law doesn't apply to that land. What will you do?

Alankrita: I think, it is totally absurd and makes no sense. If we are living in a matured democracy, we shouldn't even entertain such stuff.

Prakash: Society has to accept that people will have different views, will think differently and will have choices. You can't tailor-make choices for them. You can't govern their thinking. You can't tell people to eat what, wear what or think what.

After your experience with 'Lipstick Under My Burkha', did you feel that something like what had happened in the Amartya Sen documentary was bound to happen?

Prakash: It's not just about Amartya Sen. Why don't we talk about what happened to Anand Patwardhan's documentaries?

Akankrita: The problem lies in the fact that India as a nation has always accepted censorship. That's why have had had two flowers and pigeons flying to express love. There is so much self-censorship that film-makers are in any case doing that the mind doesn't even go into certain spaces since we know that we will not be able to show so many things. We just accepted it and now these things are coming to the fore because younger film-makers want to express their stories in a certain way. That's when we are realising that we can't do so many things. Hence, we are having these conversations. Today, we are being a witness to a wakeup call but fact is as a society, we have been okay with someone telling us that this is where to draw the line.

Now, do you feel people are more aware about censorship issues than ever before?

Alankrita: What's interesting is that so many college-goers are now so aware about censorship issues. I was not aware about CBFC when I was in college. India is changing and that is good. Earlier, there used to be a custom like Sati that people accepted. Then, they realised that it needs to be stopped. It's the same with censorship. We have to realise that if we are truly free then there is no space for censorship. The problem in India is also that nothing is clearly defined. In Iran, there is a clear line that says one can't show physical contact between a man and a woman on screen. Keeping that line in mind, a new movement of cinema emerged in Iran. They have figured out a way of story telling where they show so much without any sexual content. In India, sexual content is great if it is from the male point of view and shows male fulfilment. It becomes problematic when it is shown from a woman's point of view. If there is a standard for censorship, it should apply to everybody.

Are lines deliberately kept blurred?

Prakash: Society's mindset is patriarchal. There is a genetic indoctrination that women are supposed to be good, decent, silent, sacrificing and subservient to men. Women are praised if they can produce children and manage a job simultaneously. Women are trained to be this way. But people still feel if women are allowed to speak even in an enlightened society, the whole balance changes. Even in an enlightened society if a women starts thinking or saying much, she will have to hear things like: 'aha, sochne lagi aajkal?' To take one decision, she has to think about five men. In order to change this mindset, one has to start educating people.

While society thinks in a certain way, there are many women who endorse this idea too...

Prakash: Absolutely.

Alankrita: The other day, Ratna (actor Ratna Pathak Shah) was describing patriarchy and she said that it uses women as guard dogs. Women are taught to pass on patriarchy from one generation to another.

What's your reaction to the 'Indu Sarkar' controvery?

Prakash: When protests over 'Indu Sarkar' happened, I didn't like that. I tweeted that too. But then, I thought this has always been the case. As a film-maker or writer, you can't take any names of people, caste, ideology, party... You can't show anything of that sort in movies. When MF Husain did a painting, people objected. Someone wrote a poem and there were objections. When I had made 'Aarakshan', 1000 people landed in my office and started pelting stones.

So, the censorship row over 'Lipstick Under My Burkha' shouldn't have surprised you?

Alankrita: I wasn't expecting this.

Prakash: The blanket refusal to entertain the film was something I wasn't expecting. By writing that letter the CBFC turned suicidal.

More people are now intrigued to watch the film because of the censorship row. That is navigating a lot of audience to the film...

Prakash: Such a controversy will only work if the content is good.

Alankrita: The good that came up is that so many conversations started. That includes representation of women in cinema, the male gaze versus female gaze and gender politics in popular culture. Such conversations are long overdue. We need to acknowledge the lop-sided gender representation in popular culture. So many young girls are now writing blogs. It is the purpose of all art to put out a mirror to society.

Do men and women approach art differently. If Prakash Jha was directing 'Lipstick under ', would you have done it differently because of your gender?

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'Censorship results from a patriarchal mindset' - Times of India

The crisis created by Polands ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is nearing a boiling point. Having taken control of the Constitutional Tribunal last year, PiS is pushing new legislation through parliament that will place the rest of the judiciary firmly under the political control of the partys majority in parliament. The European Commission is urgently examining whether it should an initiate an Article 7 proceeding against Poland for violations of fundamental rights.

The crisis in Poland is not only an assault on the judiciary; it is an attack on all independent institutions. As Freedom House documented in a report published in June 2017, the media has been a special target for PiS since it won elections in October 2015. Following the playbook, established by Viktor Orban in Hungary, PiS launched an attack against the public broadcaster early on, rushing through laws that shifted personnel management, unconstitutionally, from the National Broadcasting Council to the Treasury Ministry. The top management of the public broadcaster resigned, or was fired, and a PiS party member was appointed to head the influential TVP.

Since then, the public broadcaster has become a mouthpiece for the party. Critics struggle to get airtime, and the main news shows savage the opposition. When the opposition and civic activists held protests in December 2016, over a proposal to limit journalists access to parliament, TVP broadcast a thirty-minute documentary titled Coup, claiming the opposition had intended to take power through force. Now, during the controversies over the judiciary bills, the broadcasters chyron reads, The opposition is trying to organise a coup against the democratically elected government. The private media may be next.

Polands media landscape is relatively diversified, competitive and attractive to international investors, without the oligarchic ownership that made Hungary so vulnerable to state-led capture. As a result, PiS has had limited means to control private media, although it has increasingly redirected state support through advertising and other channels away from its critics and towards supportive outlets.

Gazeta Wyborcza, the countrys most widely read newspaper and a fierce critic of the party, had a 21 per cent decline in revenue, from 2015 to 2016, which was partially attributable to reductions in state and state-owned enterprise advertising. PiS leader Jarosaw Kaczyski (in the photo), de facto the most powerful man in the country although he holds no government post higher than MP, has emphasised the importance of a repolonisation of the media sector to rid it of foreign influences. How PiS can advance repolonisation without running afoul of Polish and EU laws remains unclear, but the goal is there.

Instead, individual prosecutions may be the next frontier for PiS authorities. One of the partys early changes, in 2015, was to fold the general prosecutors office into the Ministry of Justice, decreasing the prosecutors independence and making its case decisions more subject to political influence.

Now, Minister of Defence, Antoni Macierewicz, has sent a criminal complaint against Gazeta Wyborcza journalist, Tomasz Pitek, to the General Prosecutor after Pitek reported, in a book, about Macierewiczs links, through far-right Polish actors, to Russian intelligence. Freedom House, along with nine other media freedom organisations, has called for the complaint to be withdrawn. During the crisis over the judicial laws this week, one PiS MP was caught on tape telling a journalist they would come after them next.

These attacks on independent institutions, whether it is the judiciary or the media, are rooted in PiSs rejection of liberal democracy as a form of government. PiS promotes a world view that democratic institutions are just a mask for power; tools to be used by whoever is able to take control. It believes these institutions have previously been manipulated against PiS and that now the party sees it as their turn to transform the state to their own ends.

The question is whether after their turn, anyone else will ever be able to have one.

_______________

The views expressed in this opinion editorial are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Emerging Europes editorial policy.

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PiS Uses Media Control to Bring Poland to Heel - Emerging Europe (registration)

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Black America figured that O.J. Simpson would be in prison forever. To hear white people tell it, O.J. is responsible for: ex-wife Nicole Simpsons and Ron Goldmans deaths; the current Black Lives Matter movement; Colin Kaepernicks protest and hair; Jay-Z and Beyoncs martial issues; and Drakes supposed baby with a former video vixen. (Side note: How does a video vixen retire? Does she turn in her performance thong and wedges? Just wondering.)

Somehow, unbeknownst to any black person with a high school diploma or an equivalency degree, O.J. became the symbolic embodiment of black people, as far as white people were concerned. Maybe it was because he wanted so badly to be appreciated by them; maybe it was because during his trial on charges of killing Simpson and Goldman, black America embraced O.J. in a way that even took O.J. aback. Truthfully, what black America was embracing was an opportunity to challenge a racist, oppressive judicial system that continuously feeds on black and brown bodies, and O.J. just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But on this Thursday, on this day of Our Lord and Savior Stephen Curry, let me let white folks in on a little secret: Black folks dont fuck with O.J. Truthfully, we never really did. In fact, we didnt care if O.J. served 200 years inside the Sunken Place; inside a boot that was placed squarely up his own ass. We dont ride for O.J. no more. Thats so 2000. But that doesnt mean we arent shocked that hes being released.

No one saw O.J. being back on the streets while Trumps America is all Lets build a wall and red #MAGA hats are the new white sheets. We all just figured that O.J. would stay in prison, contract some incurable disease, and slowly die off in the back of our minds the way that Hill Street Blues and Coolio have before him. In fact, we were taking bets on whether Orenthal J. Simpson was going to walk out a free man after serving almost nine years in prison for, get this, taking his own shit back!

I know that the law calls this stealing, but what has always been troubling to me is how someone can steal O.J.s stuff, which the men who were robbed admitted to, and then O.J. finds out that the stuff is not only stolen, but goes to get it back, and the state awards him all of the items, which he reportedly stole, and O.J. still gets 33 years in prison. Thats ultimate white justice. Black folks knew that this was payback for the acquittal on the murder charges. And soon, O.J. will be free, which means he will go back to being O.J., and, sadly, hes black Americas George Zimmerman, but more charming.

In fact, during his parole hearing, which was televised, O.J. reached into his Naked Gun acting trick bag to pull out a few moves that would make young Denzel, before the big teeth memes, jealous. O.J. was affable and funny and remorseful and convincing. He was dinner-party O.J. at his finest because O.J. cant stop O.J.-ing which means I give him three days after his release before hes caught on a TMZ video saying some freakishly dumb shit. I give him a few weeks before hes on the golf course, and a few years before O.J. is back in jail because the one telling sign that O.J. hasnt changed one bit came when he was drilled on whether or not he attended Alcoholics Anonymous classes like instructed during his last parole hearing in 2013.

O.J. waxed on about being a Christian and how he hadnt gone to AA but had found other classes that he thought were better like conflict resolution. Point is: O.J. is still doing whatever the fuck O.J. wants to do, and when left to his own devices, weve seen how that has turned out.

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He's Not Black, He's OJ: Simpson Manages to Get Parole in Trump's America and We're Shocked! - The Root

People often ask me how I decide what to review for this column. Most of the time I just go with the shows that are getting the most buzz. But I can also choose a show because of the stars or writers - especially if they have a local connection.

And sometimes I review a show because the network publicists do such a great job promoting it. That was certainly the case with Oxygen Media, which used a special "jury summons" mailer to promote its new show, "The Jury Speaks."

Of course, Oxygen had excellent timing since my husband and I are both currently serving in jury pools, so I pay attention to anything that says summons. But it was still clever enough that I ended up watching the first episode of the series, which takes four fascinating court cases and manages to make them even more fascinating by showing us the point of view of members of the jury who delivered the verdicts.

The first episode focuses on the case I can never get enough of - the O.J. Simpson trial. Four Simpson jurors (one of whom was dismissed before the trial was over) recount the stress of their 10 months of sequestration and how it affected them and their families. The four detail juror fights, attending family events while under guard, and what actually happened in the jury room during deliberations. The episode also features interviews with Assistant Prosecutor Christopher Darden and defense attorney Carl Douglas. At the end of the hour, three jurors reunite to discuss how they would vote today.

Even with all the shows I've watched about this case - and I've watched a ton - I still managed to hear some things I had never heard before, like the ridiculous way jurors got exercise and the story of the juror who had a heart attack during the trial. And it was interesting to hear how the jurors felt about certain evidence, like the DNA, the bloody glove and the testimony of Mark Fuhrman.

There are many people who still ask how could the jury find Simpson not guilty? This hour will go a long way toward answering that question.

Oxygen Media is now billing itself as the new network for crime fans, and "Jury" goes a long way toward establishing it as just that with an interesting four nights spotlighting all angles of some pretty controversial cases.

"The Jury Speaks" airs four straight nights at 9 p.m. on Oxygen, beginning Saturday July 22, with "The Jury Speaks: O.J. Simpson." The other three nights will focus on the trials of Michael Jackson, George Zimmerman and Robert Durst.

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Angela Henderson-Bentley: Cases seen from fresh angle in series 'The Jury Speaks' - Huntington Herald Dispatch