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Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content.

Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose harms, intimidates or excites disaffection toward the government or in other ways hurt the integrity, security, and defence of Pakistan.

Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the tech firms said that they were alarmed by the scope of Pakistans new law targeting internet firms. In addition to Facebook, Google and Twitter, AIC represents Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Expedia Group, Yahoo, Airbnb, Grab, Rakuten, Booking.com, Line and Cloudflare.

If the message sounds familiar, its because this is not the first time these tech giants have publicly expressed their concerns over the new law, which was proposed by Khans ministry in February this year.

After the Pakistani government made the proposal earlier this year, the group had threatened to leave, a move that made the nation retreat and promise an extensive and broad-based consultation process with civil society and tech companies.

That consultation never happened, AIC said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating that its members will be unable to operate in the country with this law in place.

The draconian data localization requirements will damage the ability of people to access a free and open internet and shut Pakistans digital economy off from the rest of the world. Its chilling to see the PTAs powers expanded, allowing them to force social media companies to violate established human rights norms on privacy and freedom of expression, the group said in a statement.

The Rules would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses. If Pakistan wants to be an attractive destination for technology investment and realise its goal of digital transformation, we urge the Government to work with industry on practical, clear rules that protect the benefits of the internet and keep people safe from harm.

Under the new law, tech companies that fail to remove or block the unlawful content from their platforms within 24 hours of notice from Pakistan authorities also face a fine of up to $3.14 million. And like its neighboring nation, India which has also proposed a similar regulation with little to no backlash Pakistan now also requires these companies to have local offices in the country.

The new rules comes as Pakistan has cracked down on what it deems to be inappropriate content on the internet in recent months. Earlier this year, it banned popular mobile game PUBG Mobile and last month it temporarily blocked TikTok.

Countries like Pakistan and India contribute little to the bottom line for tech companies. But India, which has proposed several protectionist laws in recent years, has largely escaped any major protest from global tech companies because of its size. Pakistan has about 75 million internet users.

By contrast, India is the biggest market for Google and Facebook by users. Silicon Valley companies love to come to India because its an MAU (monthly active users) farm, Kunal Shah, a veteran entrepreneur, said in a conference in 2018.

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Google, Facebook and Twitter threaten to leave Pakistan over censorship law - TechCrunch

It was, at that time of its release, the greatest success in German literary history: Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was published on January 29, 1929 and was quickly translated into 26 languages. In Germany alone, nearly half a million copies were sold within months.

Yetthe roaring success of a novel detailing the horrors of the First World War did not go over well with the National Socialists, who were then preparing to assume power. They spread rumors that Remarque had assumed a false surname and was actually called "Kramer." And they claimed that he was a French Jew, and also that he did not fight as a soldier in the First World War.

The film version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" did not appeal to the Nazis

A year later, an American production company adapted the novel into a film directed by Lewis Milestone. Initially, the film was approved for German viewers by the Supreme Censorship Board in Berlin on November 21, 1930. It premiered in early December at the Mozartsaal, a large Art Nouveau-style theater and concert hall in Berlin, and attracted intellectuals, celebrities and other prominent people. The liberal paper Vossische Zeitung wrote that never before had a film "had such a profound effect on the audience," who left the hall "quietly and deeply stirred" at the end of the screening.

However, at another film screening for the general public at Berlin's Nollendorfplatz, astonishment and horror followed when a Nazi mob who had infiltrated the audience demanded that the film be stopped and forced the projectors to shut down. In addition, Reichstag members of the NSDAP, exploiting their parliamentary immunity, released mice and tossed stink bombs into the theater, driving the audience out.

This was at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, then NSDAP district leader of Berlin (and who wouldlater gain notoriety as Nazi Propaganda Minister). He felt that the film's unfavorable view of war ran contrary to Nazi ideology. He further railed against the film in an impassioned speech at Berlin's Wittenbergplatz. As such, subsequent film screenings could only take place under heavy police presence. In December 1930, "for security reasons," the Supreme Censorship Board withdrew the film's screening license. Consequently, the Jewish manager of the Mozartsaal, Hanns Brodnitz, came under the scrutiny of the National Socialists, and was eventually killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz in September 1944. In January 1933, All Quiet on the Western Front was completely banned by the Hitler regime.

Yetnone of this diminished the film's popularity among the general public and critics. It quickly gained popularity due to its no-holds-barred portrayal of the happenings on the front.

It tells the story of young high school student Paul Bumer before his deployment to the front. At that time, the mood was still buoyant in Germany. This was also the case in school, where Paul's patriotic teacher inspires his students to "die for the fatherland."

Fighting over a slice of bread in "All Quiet on the Western Front"

Thus encouraged, Bumer and his classmates enlist in the army; however, they quickly become disillusioned by the reality on the front. Bumer wounds a French soldier in an attack. He tries to save his life and asks for his forgiveness. Eventually, Bumer himself is also injured, and ends up in a Catholic hospital. Back home on leave, he visits his old school and his teacher again, who praises him for his "German heroism." Bumer, however, speaks of his drastic war experiences and disillusionment and describes it as a mistake to have gone to war. As a consequence, the teachers and students brand him a coward.

Disappointed by this reaction, Bumer returns to the front where many of his comrades have already fallen. The final scene takes place in the fall of 1918, shortly before the end of the war. In the trenches, Bumer reaches for a butterfly and is shot by a French soldier. The film ends with Bumer uttering:"Nothing about dying is sweet." Film critic Siegfried Kracauer stated that the film underscored the fact that war was "not palatable." The harrowing scenes had never before been seen in the then early history of film. The journey of sacrifice of a "lost generation" is realistically and unrelentingly portrayed onscreen.

Russian-American director Lewis Milestone had a budget of $1.2 million(now, 1.01million euros) at his disposal for the film, a substantial sum for that time. (Milestone, hailing from a Jewish family, was born "Leib Milstein" in 1895 in what was then the Bessarabia Governate of the Russian Empire. He arrived in the US in late 1913, just months before the start of the First World War.) Milestone worked with tracking shots, crosscuts and perspectives that drew the viewer directly into the action. Never before was there such a realistic reckoning with war and its killing machines, and which was perceived as senseless. In 1930, Milestone was awarded with two Oscars for Best Film and Best Director.

Erich Maria Remarque at his house on Lago Maggiore

The film's international success even trumped the crude cultural policy of the National Socialists. In 1931, a heavily abridged and censored version returned to German cinemas, but it was only shown "for certain groups of people and at closed events." After Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the film was completely banned again.

Even after the end of the Second World War, the film was only shown in edited and abridged versions: When All Quiet on the Western Front returned to German cinemas in 1952, key scenes from the film were deliberately left out. It was not until 1983/84 that the German public finally got to view the newly dubbed, unabridged, and original American version on television.

Milestone's film was consistently banned, and not just in Germany. Abridged versions were also screened in Austria and France, and even in the US. All these attempts at denigration and censorship, however, did not detract from the film's success. All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, is still considered one of the best 100 films in American film history.

This article was adapted from German.

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How 'All Quiet on the Western Front' ran afoul of Nazi film censors - DW (English)

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos from Wikipedia.

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AdaptedexcerptfromWikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The web was a very different place for news in the United States between 2001 and 2006. The hanging chads from the 2000 presidential election, the spectacular calamity of 9/11, the unrepentant lies around Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the campy reality television featuring Donald Trump were all from this time. The burst of the dot-com bubble and corporate malfeasance of companies like Enron dampened entrepreneurial spirits, news publishers were optimistically sharing their stories online without paywalls, and blogging was heralded as the future of technology-mediated accountability and participatory democracy. You was Time magazines Person of the Year in 2006 because Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life had become tools for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

Wikipedia was a part of this primordial soup, predating news-feed-mediated engagement, recommender-driven polarization, politicized content moderation, and geopolitical disinformation campaigns. From very early in its history, Wikipedia leveraged the supply and demand for information about breaking news and current events into strategies that continue to sustain this radical experiment in online peer production.

I first encountered Wikipedia as an undergraduate student around 2004. My introduction to Wikipedia was likely a product of the socio-technical coupling between Google and Wikipedia during this era. Google helped Wikipedia because Googles ranking algorithms privileged Wikipedias highly interlinked articles, which brought an influx of users, some (tiny) fraction of whom became contributing editors like me. Wikipedia also helped Google because Wikipedia could reliably generate both general-interest and up-to-date content that satisfied its users information-seeking needs, which brought users back to Google rather than to its competitors. The aftermath of a natural disaster, the death of a celebrity, or a new pop culture sensation are all occasions for people to seek out background information to help them make sense of these events. Traditional journalistic offerings provide incremental updates about the immediate subject but often lack context or background: Why are there earthquakes in Indonesia? Who is Saddam Hussein? What is Eurovision? The availability and timeliness of Wikipedia content around topics of general interest would prove to be critical for its own sustainability in addition to complementing other platforms need to serve relevant and up-to-date content.

Wikipedia also entered the popular awareness of undergraduates like me through the pitiless warnings from instructors and librarians about its lack of reliability as a citation. While these anxieties were largely reversed through empirical research and changes in professional culture, they also missed the forest for the trees: The value and authority of Wikipedia was not in any single articles quality but in its network of hyperlinked articles. More than synthesizing knowledge as a tertiary source like traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedias hyperlink network invited users to follow their interests, dive deeper into topics, introduce missing connections, and create new articles where none existed. Where the decentralized web created a fragmented user experience requiring directories (Yahoo) and search engines (Google) for navigation, Wikipedias hyperlinked articles foreshadowed an era of centralized web platforms that sustain user engagement with a consistent experience and bottomless content to consume and engage.

There are many ways to promote Wikipedia articles to its front page. Immediately to the right of From todays featured article is the In the news (or ITN) box, featuring articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest. The presence of newslike content in an encyclopedia is uncanny. On the one hand, encyclopedias are supposed to be stable references of historical knowledge, rather than dynamic accounts of current events. On the other hand, there is a long history of encyclopedia editors grappling with how to incorporate new knowledge, and encyclopedia publishers competing to be the most up to date. Wikipedias choice to privilege content related to current events via the ITN is also shrewd: It simultaneously is a shortcut to content users may already be searching for, it showcases the dynamism and quality of Wikipedia articles, and it invites users to consume and contribute to content outside of their primary interests.

To understand how Wikipedias ITN template and its broader culture of breaking news collaborations came about, we have to return to the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Wikipedia was 10 months old at the time of the attacks, and while it already surpassed its elder sibling Nupedia in its number of articles, it was far from certain that the project would ever reach a sustainable level of activity. Although a comprehensive accounting of the editing activity in the immediate aftermath of the events has been lost to a server migration, snapshots from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, along with listserv discussions, document the extent to which the Wikipedia community at the time went into overdrive in response to the attacks. Far from being an idiosyncratic case of online collaboration, the decisions made by editors at the time to use Wikipedias unique collaborative capacities to deeply cover the Sept. 11 attacks would fundamentally change the direction, scope, and culture of Wikipedia as a project to the present day.

A Wayback Machine snapshot of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack article from Oct. 31, 2011, captures the remarkable breadth and depth of topics that were authored and organized together about the attacks. There were timelines, documentation of closings and cancellations, lists of casualties, links to donating blood and money, articles on political and economic effects, and newly created articles about the buildings, cities, flights, and perpetrators as well as topics like terrorism, box-cutter knife, and collective trauma. Approximately 100 Sept. 11related articles were created in total (at a time when Wikipedia as a whole had only 13,000 articles), but Wikipedias content attracted links from other prominent web gateways like Yahoo that brought in an influx of desperately needed new users to the project.

Wikipedias unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of theproject.

The list of casualties enumerating each of the nearly 3,000 victims (sorted by name and location and categorized by civilian or first responder) became a source of tension in the weeks following the attacks. Some editors argued this level of detailed coverage was unbecoming of the traditional encyclopedia Wikipedia was trying to emulate stylistically. Supporters referenced the rule that Wikipedia is not paper to justify a goal of writing biographies for thousands of victims, survivors, and leaders. As the trauma-induced altruism continued to fade, Wikipedia editors continued to raise concerns about the quality, notability, and importance of these memorialization efforts given the other demands of writing an encyclopedia. By September 2002, the community reached a consensus decision to move the Sept. 11related recollections and non-notable pages to a memorial wiki. The launch of the memorial wiki led to heated discussions about which Sept. 11related articles would get to stay on Wikipedia and which would be relegated to the memorial wiki. The memorial wiki ultimately failed to thrive: Its stagnant content and lack of editing activity led to accumulating vandalism, and it was effectively shuttered by September 2006. The creation, rejection, and disappearance of the Sept. 11 memorial wikis content remains an underappreciated cautionary tale about the presumed durability of peer-produced knowledge: This content only persists when it remains integrated with the larger common project rather than being relegated to a smaller and more specialized project. Wikipedias peer production model is not immune from rich get richer mechanisms.

The Wikipedia communitys overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the discussions about the memorial content led to reflexive rule-making about news that persists today. The What Wikipedia is not (WP:NOT) policy predates the attacks and enumerates that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, manual, directory, or a variety of other reference genres. In the midst of the debates in 2002 about what to do with the Sept. 11 memorial content, the WP:NOT policy was expanded to assert that Wikipedia is not a news report. The revised policy attempted to thread the needle between the channeling of collaborative energy following current events against diluting the mission of writing an encyclopedia. The policy emphasized that Wikipedia should not offer news reports on breaking stories but conceded creating encyclopedia articles on topics currently in the news is an excellent idea as long as current events articles are written in an encyclopedic style. This NOT NEWS policy has persisted to the present, and the policy now emphasizes that Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories and newsworthy events do not [automatically] qualify for inclusion breaking news should not be emphasized or treated differently from other information. Another change in identity that emerged as a result of the Sept. 11 memorial content was the addition of Memorials to the WP:NOT policy. The policy, revised in 2004, now emphasizes that Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements. These normative guardrails remain in place today to channel the outpouring of pro-social collaborative energy and sense-making in the aftermath of traumatic events.

Encyclopedists have always struggled with the limitations of synthesizing knowledge into paper documents because when the knowledge changes, so must the paper. Wikipedia was not the first encyclopedia to use the online medium to rapidly and inexpensively revise content in response to changes, but its unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of the project.

Wikipedia editors continue to invest enormous amounts of effort in covering breaking news and current events within the confines of these guardrails. Articles about the recently deceased, natural disasters, conflicts, and popular culture are sites of large and extremely dynamic collaborations involving dozens of editors making hundreds of revisions within hours. While Wikipedias MediaWiki software was not designed with this use case in mind, these high-tempo collaborations continue to serve crucial roles in sustaining the health of the broader project, close to 20 years after the early precedent of the Sept. 11 attacks: They bring in new users to the project, provide opportunities to disparate subcommunities to temporarily congregate, disseminate innovations and best practices into the rest of the community, and produce high-quality content hyperlinked to other relevant background.

Wikipedia remains a product of a particular historical moment from the early 2000s, in terms of not only its adorably dated interface but also the absence of the advertising and engagement, news feeds and recommendation systems, and virality and polarization as central features that define so much of the user experience on other social platforms. Wikipedias resilience to the disinformation that plagued Facebook, YouTube, and Google in 2016 would suggest this archaic user experience provided an important defense against actors who weaponized these attention amplification mechanisms on other platforms to malicious ends. But this story overlooks other explanations for Wikipedias apparent resilience: Wikipedia users and editors attention is shared around common articles, instead of being distributed across personalized news feeds.

Does Wikipedias success in covering breaking news and current events chart a path for other platforms to follow? Information seeking and sense-making about current events drive enormous flows of online collective attention, which explains why news feeds and trending topics are ubiquitous on social platforms. Whether and how Wikipedia can channel this demand for information likewise has been central to its ongoing identity, relevance, and sustainability. Wikipedia remains a valuable counterfactual for the potential of designing around information commons, human-in-the-loop decision-making, and strong editorial stances in the face of the Silicon Valley consensus emphasizing content personalization, automated moderation, and editorial indifference. The differences in how Wikipedia handles current event information may have insulated it from manipulation, but as platforms increasingly turn to Wikipedia for providing and moderating content, Wikipedias very real vulnerabilities risk becoming a target.

Edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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How Sept. 11 made Wikipedia what it is today. - Slate Magazine

The first reports of a new virus emerging in Wuhan came around Christmas 2019. By early January, there were 27 cases in the Chinese city. Within a couple of weeks, airports in Asia were screening all passengers who passed through their doors. Weeks on, UK airports still were not despite three direct flights a week from Wuhan to Heathrow.

Screening is ineffective as a method to stop the spread of a virus such as Covid-19, said one scientist.

We should have done it at least for the Wuhan flights, said another. It wouldnt have been a great imposition.

We left our doors open, said a public health expert, with barely controlled fury. And it contributed substantially to the rapid growth of the virus in the UK.

Such a back and forth was the defining feature of BBC Twos Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? It is the latest contribution to what I suspect will become a string of more-or-less excellent documentaries about the UKs handling of the coronavirus pandemic. (The first was Channel 4s The Country That Beat the Virus, which compared and contrasted South Koreas response to the advent of Covid with ours no spoilers, but we dont come out of it well.)

Lockdown 1.0 also intertwined, though less overtly, two narratives. One involved the evolving amount and quality of the data that the scientists modellers, virologists, epidemiologists were receiving and, therefore, the predictions and other information they could obtain from it and hand on to groups such as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and then to government ministers. The other narrative strand involved those ministers and what Professor Anthony Costello, a former director of maternal, child and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, described as the managerial issue how to test, how to gather the results, how to lock down, how to trace, how to isolate, and how to scale all that up quickly. Again, no spoilers but

What we might call, in bleak reference to earlier, happier, altogether easier times, the science bit was perhaps the more illuminating. The managerial issue is generally writ larger on our screens and in our newspapers as it is happening. The beavering away with numbers and in laboratories, less so. The science bit, perhaps tellingly, was also where most of the back-and-forth took place. The managerial response did not admit much nuance.

There was evident frustration, for example, among many of the modellers who comprised the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) about the fact that only Imperial College as an established collaborative centre with the WHO had access to what was, at the beginning, the best (though by no means perfect) data, coming out of China. Dr Ian Hall from Manchester University, deputy chair of SPI-M, noted: The public may be surprised to hear we were using data from Wikipedia very early on but it really was the only data publicly available.

Juxtaposed with them was Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and chair of SPI-M. Its not as simple as saying: Make it all publicly available. People own it; it includes patient information.

Costello professed himself pretty shocked by the situation. The whole point of science and scientists in these circumstances, he said, was to share findings openly.

There were many more moments and insights that complicated in a good way, by giving more detail, by exposing more structures, by expanding vistas the view we take from headlines, social media or, if we are committed, articles. The uncomfortable truth is that there are often no good choices, and that it can be irremediably unclear which choice is the best of a bad lot. Likewise, the bitter fact is that people cannot always be made to follow the best paths and, therefore, impositions on them must be watered down if they are to have any effect.

The data scientists made the nearest thing to an unequivocal error with the modelling they did around the risk in care homes, by failing to understand the movement of staff between homes. Should they have known about agency workers? If not, who should have told them?

Still, we are not yet at the stage of apportioning blame although there will surely be many documentaries to come that will deal with exactly that. By the end of this one, it was possible to feel both better and worse about the state we are in. There are people out there, definitely, who have our ignorant little backs. But the search for an overarching synthesising intelligence some kind of prime minister who could gather up all the reins, say continues.

Excerpt from:
Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? review Wikipedia, Wuhan and worrying mistakes - The Guardian

NBA fans can do a lot of crazy things to tease rival teams and players. Some of them take things to the next level, using different tactics to troll their opponents. Myles Turner has been the last victim of these trolls, as his Wikipedia page was hacked recently.

The 24-year-old saw his official Wikipedia page altered by some hackers that put him in the Boston Celtics. The NBA offseason just started but Turner hasnt been part of any rumors in the last couple of days. Hes under contract with the Indiana Pacers until 2023 and the team hasnt shown any signs of wanting to trade him, even less to the Boston Celtics.

The person or people behind the attack had a lot of fun messing with Turners information. They took things off the court and wrote some crazy things about Turner. They even said he was a WNBA player and used a pic of Adolf Hitler to change Turners.

NBA Twitter noticed this activity and was quick to report it. Turner later found out about the whole thing and reacted on Twitter; he found these little changes funny and everything went back to normal in a matter of hours. He had his laugh, the hackers, too, and now its time to move on.

The Pacers have been mentioned in several reports in recent days thanks to Victor Oladipo and his future in the league. The combo guard doesnt have trade value and the team needs to figure out what to do next since the relationship between the player and his teammates isnt the best. Oladipo reportedly asked rivals if he could join them in front of teammates, something that caused trouble in the Pacers locker room.

More here:
Myles Turner's Wikipedia Is Hacked: 'He Is Playing For The Boston Celtics' - Fadeaway World