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The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, received criticism from researchers after it labeled a link by the investigative journalism group Bellingcat about Russias attack on a childrens hospital in Kyiv as potentially spammy or unsafe.

In their latest research, Bellingcat identified a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile that struck Ukraine's largest children's medical center, Okhmatdyt, during an attack on Kyiv over the weekend that killed 33 people, including 5 children.

Bellingcats investigation debunked claims from pro-Russian accounts that denied responsibility for the attack and sought to shift the blame for the incident onto Ukraine, researchers said.

Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based organization made famous for its use of open-source intelligence and crowdsourcing, has uncovered stories dealing with issues like the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Despite its reputation, X marked the link to the groups latest research as unsafe, saying that it could lead users to violent or misleading content or to a website that misleads people, disrupts their experience, or steals their personal information.

The platform did not reply to a request for comment.

Bellingcat said that it reported the problem to X but, as of the time of writing, the link is still labeled as spam. This hasn't been the case on other social media platforms, researchers added.

The groups founder, Eliot Higgins, said in a post on X that the latest article about the Russian bombing of a children's hospital is the only Bellingcat link that shows the warning.

You have to wonder if this is deliberate censorship from the so-proclaimed free speech absolutist, Higgins said.

According to him, this is not the first time Bellingcat has been censored on X in the Musk-era. Last year, X seemed to shadow-ban the group after their post saying that the alleged perpetrator of the Texas mass shooting had far-right leanings.

Musk questioned this statement, accusing the outlet, without evidence, of "specializing in psychological operations."

Following this standoff, X limited the reach of Bellingcat, as its main account temporarily didnt appear in the apps search tool.

Xs latest decision to label Bellingcats article as unsafe plays into Russian disinformation campaigns surrounding the hospital attack.

Following the strike, several Russian social media accounts, including that of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, began to claim that the missile that hit the hospital was American-made and that it had been launched from a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile system.

Russian propagandists have also tried to portray the attack as a legitimate response to alleged Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilian facilities.

Russian media widely circulated footage and images of the missile seconds before it hit the hospital, and some local military bloggers even published misleading posts falsely claiming that it was a Ukrainian air defense missile and not an attacking Russian Kh-101 missile, according to a report by the U.S. nonprofit Institute for the Study of War.

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Daryna Antoniuk

is a reporter for Recorded Future News based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Eastern Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She previously was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has also been published at Sifted, The Kyiv Independent and The Kyiv Post.

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Bellingcat warns of censorship on X after research on Russian attack is labeled spam - The Record from Recorded Future News

If you dont live under a dictatorship, you expect to have certain rights and freedoms: to enjoy a Western Bacon Cheeseburger during any of Carls Jr.s posted business hours, to sing along to Chappell Roan as loud as you want in your own home and to express yourself however you want, as long as youre not hurting anybody (probably with Chappell Roan lyrics).

Still, supposedly free countries have ruled against artists rights to free speech, free song, free painting, etc.

When rapper BG was released from prison on weapons charges in 2023, one of the conditions of his parole was the submission of any song he intended to record or perform to the government to make sure it wasnt inconsistent with the goals of rehabilitation. Specifically, hesnot allowed to glorify gang life or violence, soooo hes supposed to just get a new job or something. His lawyers are challenging the requirements on First Amendment grounds, but they totally arrested him for performing such songs with Boosie and Gucci Mane, so yes, apparently, they can do that.

In 1989, 2 Live Crew released the albumAs Nasty As They Wanna Be, whose cover featured four nearly naked pairs of womens butts and whose contents upheld this thematic tone. There were probably 12 albums on the shelf just like it this was the 1980s, after all but a Florida judge declared the album obscene, and the group was arrested for performing the songs in a Broward County strip club. Yes, the boob store was deemed an inappropriate place for lyrics about boobs. They were eventually acquitted, but not before dealing with the only reason theyre known today.

Today,The Well of Loneliness would be considered a fairly standard historical romance whose love interests happen to be two women, but it was a pretty big deal in 1928. After it was declared obscene by the British government, author Radclyffe Hall rallied her famous friends to defend the books literary merit, butthey mostly noped out on her. Virginia Woolf herself wrote that she was relieved such a defense wouldnt be permitted because she thought the book kind of sucked. Hall had more luck getting the book published in America, where she gained famous supporters like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who Virginia Woolf also thought kind of sucked.

Naked people rubbing butts has been the most popular subject in art for as long as art has been made, but cave paintings be damned, you couldnt do it in 1966 England. Thats where Stass Paraskos wascharged with lewd and obscene conduct for a Leeds museum exhibit that depicted cartoonish figures in various states of sexy times. He became the last artist successfully prosecuted under those particular laws, but he did have to pay 25 pounds for the trouble, which was probably an artists entire annual income back then.

WhenThe Little Review began publishing James JoycesUlysses in serial form in 1918, the U.S. Post Office responded byburning every copy of the magazine featuring the story that entered the country. You might be thinking, Well, hey, its a little confusing, but its notthat bad, but the issue wasnt quality. In particular, a scene in which protagonist Leopold Bloom masturbates while a young woman exposes herself to him got its publishers arrested and eventually convicted on the grounds that the story could deprave and corrupt young minds.

The novel wasnt published in the U.S. again until 1933, when it was unbanned as a result of theUnited States v. One Book Called Ulysses. We really dont name our court cases sassily enough anymore.

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5 Times the Courts Chose Censorship - Cracked.com

University says project will continue research on 2024 election misinformation

The status of Stanford Universitys controversial Internet Observatory, a research group accused of participating in social media censorship, appears unclear after recent conflicting reports about its future.

A recent report by the tech newsletter Platformer suggested the observatory may be closing after several key staffers, including founding director Alex Stamos, left or did not have their contracts renewed.

Other news outlets reported the observatory was collaps[ing] under pressure, being wound down and closing. Some popular social media posts suggested it was being permanently shut down.

However, the university contradicted those reports in a recent statement on the observatorys website.

Stanford has not shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside pressure, it stated. SIO does, however, face funding challenges as its founding grants will soon be exhausted. As a result, SIO continues to actively seek support for its research and teaching programs under new leadership.

SIO will continue its critical work through the publication of the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, the Trust & Safety Research Conference, and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium, it stated.

Furthermore, the observatorys staff will be conducting research on misinformation during the 2024 election, according to the statement.

The observatory is a non-partisan, on-campus political research group that focuses on the misuse of social media, including issues related to elections and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, according to its website.

But it has faced criticism for its role in a joint project called the Election Integrity Partnership with the University of Washington during the 2020 and 2022 elections. Its purpose was to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment. However, reports allege the universities frequently collaborated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in order to censor what they viewed as misinformation online.

According to the Stanfords recent statement, its SIO project will continue under new leadership. It also stated Stanford remains deeply concerned about congressional and legal efforts to undermine the legitimacy of much needed academic research at universities across the country.

University spokesperson Mara Vandlik directed The College Fix to the statement in an email Wednesday in response to multiple inquiries about the observatorys future. Vandlik did not respond to a follow-up email asking for more details about the observatorys 2024 election research and the online censorship accusations.

Meanwhile, a receptionist at the university presidents office told The Fix on Wednesday to send its questions via email, but the office did not respond to the email.

Matt Taibbi, who has written extensively about online censorship as the publisher of Racket News, said he would not be too quick to celebrate if the Stanford Internet Observatory truly is closing.

Rumors persist that even more aggressive EIP-type programs are in development for use in this cycle, perhaps not under Stanfords roof, but somewhere, using some of the same personnel and making use of support from deep-pocketed funders of anti-disinformation programs, he wrote in a recent article on his substack.

Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project and former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, said he also thinks censorship problems are more wide-spread.

College campuses are the central battlefield for Americans freedom to speak their mind. A culture of censorship is pervasive at college campuses, and theres no reason to believe this was an isolated incident, he told The Fix in a statement via email this week.

MORE: Universities get $3 million from feds after helping government censor election integrity stories

According to a Real Clear Investigations report, the Election Integrity Partnership surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts and collected from the cooperating government and non-governmental entities that it calls its stakeholders. According to the report, this could be a potential violation of social media platforms policies concerning election speech.

Team members of the partnership would highlight a piece of offending social media content, or narrative consisting of many offending posts, by creating a ticket, and share it with other relevant participants by tagging them, according to the report.

This would then prompt social media companies to take action by removing the content outright, reducing its spread, or informing users about dubious posts by slapping corrective or contextualizing labels on them, the report states.

During the 2020 election cycle, EIP generated a total of 639 tickets, covering some 4,784 unique URLs disproportionately related to the delegitimization of election results, according to the report.

Platforms such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook responded to tagged tickets at a response rate of 75 percent or higher; the platforms labeled, removed, or soft-blocked 35 percent of the URLs shared through EIP, the report states.

Taibbi wrote the EIP scheme occurred on as many as 10 different platforms, including Twitter, now known as X. However, Stanford has outright denied its actions of switchboarding and censorship, he wrote.

According to Taibbi, Stanford also wrongly claimed the Election Integrity Partnership did not receive direct requests from the Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to eliminate or censor tweets and did not make recommendations to the platforms about what actions they should take.

According to Taibbi, a U.S. House committee investigation, led by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, found 75 instances of the EIP ticketing system specifically using the words recommendation or we recommend.

Imagine the arrogance of denying that one makes concrete recommendations while sitting on a pile of documents doing exactly that, Taibbi wrote.

As for not receiving direct requests to eliminate or censor tweets, he wrote, a combination of emails Jordans team dug up and documents we ourselves either had in the Twitter Files or obtained via FOIA made it clear that the EIPs labyrinthine reporting system was designed so the government could deny it originated complaints, while EIP could deny it received complaints from the government.

Moreover, Taibbi wrote EIPs opinion on removing content had a large effect on whether a social media platform decided to remove the content.

The EIP even allegedly chastised sites like YouTube that expressed hesitancy about removing misleading content, according to Taibbi.

Additionally, the observatory is being sued. One case accuses the university of conspiracy with the federal government to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, The Fix reported.

MORE: Stanford flagged thousands of election social media posts with Homeland Security

IMAGE: M3Li55@/flickr

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Stanford insists Internet Observatory, which engaged in election-time censorship, will stay open - The College Fix

Turkey blocked 219,054 URLs (website addresses) in 2023, with corruption and misconduct-related news being the most frequently targeted, a report released on Wednesday revealed. The report was presented during a panel organised by the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) and Free Web Turkey on Friday in Istanbul.

The Free Web Turkey 2023 Internet Censorship Report details that 14,680 news articles were blocked, primarily covering corruption involving public officials and individuals close to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Additionally, the report highlights that censorship extended to domain names, social media posts, accounts and even Google reviews.

Journalist Diren Yurtsever from Mezopotamya Agency stated, As our news gets censored, we produce even more. Yurtsever emphasised that 35 of their articles have faced access restrictions, mainly those addressing human rights violations and corruption involving government-appointed trustees.

Panellist Furkan Karabey underscored the gravity of media suppression, saying, No power can rule for long with such illegality. Journalists must persist in reporting the truth. He added that censorship infringes on the publics right to be informed, and journalists must steadfastly uphold their duty to report the truth.

Yiit Gnay, Chief Editor of Sol news portal, called for a more robust media presence and resistance against censorship. Despite years of pressure, Kurdish media continues to work. Those trying to stifle free press cannot break the chain surrounding it, he highlighted.

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Censorship report reveals extensive media suppression in Turkey - Medya News

(JTA) - A gallery in London canceled an exhibition about censorship under Vladimir Putin because it objected to social media posts by one of the artists mourning the victims of Hamas attack on October 7.

In an Instagram statement posted July 4, Metamorphika studio accused Maria Sarkisyants, who is Jewish and comprises one-half of the artist duo Pomidor, of neglecting the deaths of Palestinians. The exhibition, Even Elephants Have Elections, was open for one day.

As a coalition of artists, founders, and more, we believe in the freedom of occupied Palestine, the studio wrote. And we ask our collaborators and artists to condemn oppression in its all [sic] geopolitical contexts without exemptions.

The statement added, Some of our members have contacted us sharing their concerns about certain publications by Mrs. Sarkisyants [on her] personal page taking [a] position on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

The artist, who goes by Maria, told the London Jewish Chronicle the gallery had received complaints about her social media posts. They said it was wrong that I support Israel, she said. She added that she had offered to remove her name from the exhibition to keep it open, but the gallery owners had refused.

The problem came up because Maria is from Israel, Maria and her partner, Polina Egorushkina, who also goes by her first name, wrote on Instagram in Russian. On another post accompanying an image of a poster at the exhibition reading Silence Like A Cancer Grows they added, Why were we allowed to put in so much effort only to have it canceled the opening day?

The incident was reminiscent of other Israel-related controversies that have swept the art world since October 7. Last fall, the staff of Artforum magazine resigned in protest after their editor was fired for publishing a letter that strongly criticized Israel. In April, Israels chosen representative artist at the Venice Biennale shut down her countrys pavilion while calling for a ceasefire and the return of hostages.

This move was itself condemned by a pro-Palestinian artist coalition, who argued that Israel never should have been invited to participate in the first place. And last month, a Vancouver comics festival banned an artist over her past Israeli military service before later apologizing.

The London cancellation comes after Maria expressed sympathy for Israel on social media on October 7, the day of Hamas attack. She grew up in Russia, where she and Polina founded Pomidor in 2018 before relocating it to the United Kingdom in 2022 following Russias invasion of Ukraine. Maria, who holds Israeli citizenship, moved to Israel in 2022 and lived in Ashkelon, one of the coastal cities attacked by Hamas on October 7.

Israel my beloved, we are here, we are here to support each other, all my thoughts are with the kidnapped, she wrote in Russian in one post, adding a prayer that they be returned home alive. A month later, she called for Israeli hostages in Gaza to be freed.

Her posts in the aftermath of October 7 remain pinned to her Instagram profile, as does another mourning Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The posts were unacceptable to Metamorphika, the studio said, because Maria did not acknowledge the deaths of Palestinians. The gallery suggested that this made the politics of her exhibit, which confronts the repressive state of Russia, inconsistent: We believe that this understanding of brutality and violence shouldnt stop at one countrys borders.

The gallery also insisted their decision has nothing to do with ones nationality or identity but with a two [sic] polarized understanding of repression.

Excerpt from:
Censorship gallery in London censors exhibition over artist's pro-Israel stance - The Jerusalem Post