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Ankush Arora, May 2, 2013:

Getting directors, producers and activists into a room to figure out Indian cinemas connection to violence toward women, rape and crudeness in society can be like a family gathering. People shout, get angry and fail to solve fundamental problems because they cant agree on anything.

The Siri Fort auditorium in New Delhi recently presented the latest forum for the debate. Indias Ministry of Information and Broadcasting held a six-day festival there to celebrate 100 years of moviemaking, and there was little agreement on how much responsibility Bollywood and the film industry bear for the poor attitude toward women that many people evince. It was perhaps a more pressing discussion than usual, given the name of the three-day workshop, Cut-Uncut, which dealt with official censorship in India, the role of sex and violence in movies and the influence of films on society.

To be fair, its a question with no apparent answers. Indian films are wildly popular. Storylines and songs become part of the thread of everyday life in a way thats different than nearly everywhere else in the world. They also reflect a strange prudishness when it comes to love scenes with dance numbers as a substitute strange because the dance numbers can seem infinitely more erotic than any kiss on the lips or lovemaking scene that theyre supposed to be representing.

Then there is the premise, debated for years in the United States by the music and movie worlds, that these images and the attitudes behind them in cinema reinforce a mindset toward women that brought us horrific stories in the past several months such as the Delhi gang rape and the rape of a Swiss tourist in Madhya Pradesh. Verdict? No answer.

You want to tell me that rapes are happening in the society because of item numbers? Are you kidding me? said Luv Ranjan, the director of Pyaar ka Punchnama (2011), speaking on day two of the workshop. Helen was doing item numbers 40 years back. No one was talking about it then.

Men sit beside posters of Indian films in Mumbai in this picture taken March 21, 2006. REUTERS/Adeel Halim/Files Ranjans comment highlighted one of the common themes: you cannot connect item numbers featuring lightly clad women dancing provocatively and singing saucy lyrics to an impulse to rape or to take sexual advantage of women perceived as loose. To censor art as a result is to destroy artistic freedom and vision.

Another argument: women do not need to be treated as property or hidden away lest men lose their control to their lustful passions.

Stop your men. Dont just cover your women. Theres a bigger problem with the mentality of the men in this country, said Ekta Kapoor, who co-produced The Dirty Picture (2011), speaking on day two. The controversial National Award winning film about the late, legendary softcore pornography actress Silk Smitha, took 59 cuts before the censor board allowed it to show on Indian television.

K. Hariharan, a National Award winning director, said on the first day of the workshop that cinema is not a source of decadence. Cinema informs. It doesnt tell you to do this or that. Are we teaching you how to be criminals? Come on! Nobody watches movies for a manual on how to do things.

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No consensus on sex, violence and censorship in Bollywood

remix SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP is it here thanks Tatoott
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remix SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP is it here thanks Tatoott - Video

New Delhi, April 30 (ANI): The Supreme Court has agreed to examine the validity of Information Technology Rules making it mandatory for a website owner to screen content and exercise online censorship of contents posted on the portal.

A two-judge bench of the apex court, comprising of Mr. Justices T.S.Thakur and S.J. Mukhopadhaya has issued notices to the Central Government and all state governments on a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by a company Mouthshut.com(India) Pvt, which runs a portal mouthshut, challenging the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011.

The company pleaded with the apex court that the rules be declared as illegal, null and void as they are ultravires of the Constitution.

"It is submitted that the impugned Rules impose significant burden on it forcing it to screen content and exercise online censorship which in turn impacts the freedom of speech and expression of its customers thereby risking a loss of its large consumer base or incurring legal costs and facing criminal action for third party user-generated content," the petitioner said. (ANI)

Excerpt from:
SC to examine validity of IT rules to make online censorship mandatory for portals

What gets removed from Chinas social networks shows how censorship strategies are advancing, and can even hint at the governments plans.

In February last year, political scandal rocked China when the fast-rising politician Bo Xilai suddenly demoted his top lieutenant, who then accused his boss of murder, triggering Bos political downfall.

Gary King, a researcher at Harvard University, believes software he developed to monitor government censorship on multiple Chinese social media sites picked up hints days earlier that a major political event was about to occur.

Five days before Bo demoted his advisor, the Harvard software registered the start of a steady climb in the proportion of posts blocked by censors, a trend that lasted for several days. King says he has noticed similar patterns several times in advance of major political news events in the country. We have examples where its perfectly clear what the Chinese government is about to do, he says. It conveys way more about the Chinese governments intents and actions than anything before.

King has seen dissidents names suddenly begin to be censored, days before they are arrested. A jump in the overall censorship rate, like the one that foreshadowed Bos fall, also presaged the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei in 2011. The rate declined in the days before the Chinese government announced a surprise peace agreement with Vietnam in June 2011, defusing a dispute over oil rights in the South China Sea. King suspects those patterns show that censors are being used as a tool to dampen and shape the public response to forthcoming news. That tallies with his other findings that censors focus on messages encouraging collective action rather than just blocking all negative comments.

Chinas social media censorship is less well known, and less understood, than the system known as the Great Firewall, which blocks access to foreign sites, including Facebook and Wikipedia, from inside the country. But social media censoring is arguably as important to the countrys efforts to control online speech. Social media is attractive in a country where conventional media is tightly controlled, and the Great Firewall directs that interest toward sites under government direction.

Studies like Kings tracking which posts disappear from social media services in China have now begun to reveal how the countrys censorship works. They paint a picture of a sophisticated, efficient operation that can be carefully deployed to steer the nations online conversation.

The most popular social media services in China are microblog networks, or weibos, roughly equivalent to Twitter and used by an estimated 270 million people, according to government figures. In China, all microblog service providers must establish an internal censorship team, which takes directions from the government on filtering sensitive posts. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo between them claim the majority of active users, and are said to have censorship teams as large as 1,000 people.

Those teams can act fast, as a study of 2.38 million posts on Sina Weibo (12 percent were censored) showed last year. Its minutes or hours, not days, says Jed Crandall, an assistant professor at University of New Mexico, who took part in research with colleagues from Rice University and Bowdoin College. Previous studies had only checked for deleted posts at intervals of a day or more, says Crandall, who concludes that assumptions that social network censorship was largely manual were incorrect. There must be some automation tools that would help them, or they wouldnt be able to do the rate that we observed.

Crandall has also uncovered evidence of how Chinese censorship is used to steer the direction of public conversation rather than just being used to block out sensitive topics for good. His software saw censors successfully dampen the online outcry after a major train crash in July 2011 before carefully relenting once politicians had managed to shift public chatter onto more favorable terms. It demonstrates the kind of PR that the censors are trying to pull off, says Crandall. They delay the discussion until the news cycle changeswhen the conversation changes to a favorable one, people can talk all they want.

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Social Media Censorship Offers Clues to China’s Plans

Controversy stems from decision not to broadcast meeting

Rehoboth Town Hall. (Sun Chronicle file photo)

Posted: Sunday, April 28, 2013 1:16 am | Updated: 1:59 am, Sun Apr 28, 2013.

Rehoboth officials deny censorship in cable TV flap BY JOSEPH S. SIEGEL FOR THE SUN CHRONICLE The Sun Chronicle |

REHOBOTH - Town officials are denying charges of censorship stemming from an April 4 meeting of the finance committee that was not broadcast.

Robert McKim, a member of the cable television advisory committee, said Selectmen Chairwoman Sue Pimental and finance committee Chairman Michael Deignan halted the broadcast due to the presence of former Selectman Christopher Morra.

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Rehoboth officials deny censorship in cable TV flap