Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

Vietnam Bans Barbie: What to Know About Hollywoods Nine-Dash … – TIME

The Barbie movie was meant to be for everyone. If you love Barbie, this movie is for you, the trailer for Warner Bros. summer blockbuster declares. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.

But with just weeks before the star-studded film about the titular doll was set to hit theaters, some in Southeast Asia have decided that its not for them.

It was announced in Vietnam on Monday that the cinematic distribution of Barbie would be banned over the display of a map that includes the nine-dash line, a disputed maritime border that China has controversially used to lay claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, even though it was rejected in 2016 by an international tribunal.

Authorities in the Philippines, also troubled by the promotion of the nine-dash line, are currently deliberating whether or not to permit the release of the film. The movie is fiction, and so is the nine-dash line. At the minimum, our cinemas should include an explicit disclaimer that the nine-dash line is a figment of Chinas imagination, Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros said Tuesday.

Photograph by Carlota Guerrero for TIME

Read More: How Barbie Came to Life

The context of the alleged depiction of the nine-dash line in the new Barbie movie is unclear. But its not the first time this kind of censorship has occurred over similar concerns.

Last year, the Philippines and Vietnam both banned screenings of Sonys action-adventure flick Uncharted because of a brief scene depicting the contentious nine-dash line. And in 2019, both the Philippines and Malaysiaanother country that contests Chinas territorial claims to the waterwaystopped the domestic distribution of the DreamWorks animated movie Abominable after producers declined a request to remove a scene showing the nine-dash line. (In Vietnam, Abominable had already been out in cinemas for more than a week before censors pulled it and fined the films distributor.) In 2018, a second-long clip, which featured a designer handbag with a map that showed the South China Seas islands under Chinas control, was cut from Crazy Rich Asians screenings in Vietnam.

Its not just the big screen thats under scrutiny. In 2021, officials in the Philippines ordered Netflix to take down select episodes of Australian spy drama Pine Gap due to scenes containing the nine-dash line, while Vietnam demanded the entire series be removed from the streamer.

The repeated instances of the same issue raise questions about Hollywoods relationship with China, which commands a 1.4 billion-person market. China has been critical to the global box office success of many contemporary films, and studios have been known to try to appease Beijings own stringent censors in an effort to not be shut out.

Recently, however, Hollywood studios, facing pushback for their acquiescence, have started to stand up to China. The trailer from Tom Cruises 2022 movie Top Gun: Maverick initially removed Taiwanese and Japanese flags to placate China, but following a public backlash, the flags reappeared in the film.

A U.S. Defense Department memo obtained by POLITICO last week said that filmmakers wont receive support from the Pentagonwhich typically assists on movies and shows that portray the military or require filming on basesif they alter their productions to comply with Chinese censorship demands.

The growing resistance from Southeast Asian states to even blink-and-youll-miss-it flashes of subtle political propaganda in popular culture demonstrates a heightened vigilance against Chinese influence, says Richard Heydarian, a political analyst and senior lecturer in Asian affairs at the University of the Philippines. Outright bans come at a price: viewers excited to see much anticipated Hollywood blockbusters miss out, and it thrusts the censoring countries into the spotlight for what Heydarian says could be perceived as petty oversensitivity.

But getting attention is the point. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Heydarian says. Vietnam is reminding the world that Chinese state propaganda should have no place in supposedly innocuous productions like Barbie movies. It just doesnt make sense.

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The censorship that alarms Elon Musk does not include the repression practiced by Ron DeSantis – EL PAS USA

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX and so many other projects, is very concerned about censorship. He said as much in a conversation with Bill Maher, kinder than usual to his guest, on Real Time (on HBO Max). Musk claims to be a centrist, but leans Republican, and Maher is openly a Democrat, yet both agree in warning of left-wing activism known as woke, a derogatory term against those who hand out sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or neo-colonial labels to those they consider to be the enemies of their causes.

Musk claims to be a fundamentalist of free speech. Thats why he dismantled Twitters moderation teams, which contained (without great success) hate messages, lies or incitements to violence. Trolls of all kinds - conspiracyists, supremacists, lynchers, misogynists - returned to the jungle of the little blue bird. However, Musk failed to mention that the woke protest, however annoying it may be to him, is also protected by freedom of speech.

One can share the fear that in the name of just causes there is an attempt to constrain the public debate, especially in universities, the supposed temples of free thought. This is what they call cancel culture. But nothing really represses the extreme rhetoric, which can be heard everywhere. While the most conservative right wing, in the U.S. states it controls, with Florida at the head, does impose gags. Especially in education: they prohibit any content on sexuality or gender; they prevent explaining the racist past of the country; they have banned books in libraries.

A high school principal in Florida was forced to resign for showing 11 and 12 year-old students Michelangelos David. Some parents found it too obscene: perhaps there were more open minds in the Renaissance. The Republicans anti-woke laws, with that explicit name they present them with, go much further in their censorious rage than the demonized woke crowd ever went.

The person who cancels like nobody else, even Disney, is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, one of the few Republican alternatives to Donald Trump for the nomination in 2024. The new reactionaries claim to fight woke censorship but wherever they rule, they impose their old repression. As would their emulators on this side of the Atlantic.

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The censorship that alarms Elon Musk does not include the repression practiced by Ron DeSantis - EL PAS USA

The international community must resist Hong Kongs attempts to … – Index on Censorship

Index on Censorship is deeply alarmed by the reports that the Hong Kong Police Force have issued arrest warrants for eight pro-democracy activists living in exile in the UK, USA and Australia. According to the police force, all those targeted are alleged to have continued to commit offences under the Hong Kong National Security Law that seriously endanger national security, including incitement to secession, subversion, incitement to subversion and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. Index has long condemned the National Security Law as it has fundamentally criminalised dissent and paralysed pro-independence and pro-democracy advocates in the city.

Index further condemns the reward offered by the Hong Kong authorities of HK$1 million (100,581) for information leading to their capture. By offering financial incentives to members of the public to report on these pro-democracy activists, the authorities are trying to turn society against itself to isolate those who have spoken out against Chinas attack on human rights. This is especially damaging for those living in exile. Through the Banned By Beijing project, Index has documented how Chinese authorities both in Hong Kong and mainland China have threatened those who have fled to Europe, targeting their ability to work, express themselves, seek education, or continue advocating for human rights back home in China.

The extraterritorial reach of the National Security Law explicitly targets those who have fled due to their work defending democracy. The US Government highlighted this specific issue in their statement responding to the warrants, stating that the extraterritorial application of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law is a dangerous precedent that threatens the human rights and fundamental freedoms of people all over the world. All states must ensure they can respond robustly to all threats of transnational repression. This was highlighted in an exhibition launched by Index last week in London to mark the third anniversary of the enactment of Hong Kongs National Security Law, which featured Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian artist and human rights defender; Lumli Lumlong, a husband and wife painting duo; and leading Uyghur campaigner, Rahima Mahmut.

All countries must stand firm to their commitment to ensure that all those targeted by these warrants and the National Security Law are protected from transnational threats wherever they are.

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The international community must resist Hong Kongs attempts to ... - Index on Censorship

Wherever I take this exhibition, they follow me – Index on Censorship

A packed-out audience gathered at St Johns Church in Waterloo, London on Tuesday to see and hear an extraordinary night of talk, music and art aimed at showing how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reaches beyond its borders to repress freedom of expression around the world.

Badiucao, the political cartoonist, artist and human rights activist who is a target of the CCP, was the main speaker and detailed how the CCP attempts to suppress his work abroad and the lengths they will go to.

Known as the Chinese Banksy, Badiucao was born into an artistic family in 1986. He explained he was told by his father at a young age that to be an artist in China is dangerous, and he would have to leave the country to pursue his career. He left in 2009.

I didnt want to be silenced and devalued by this terrible regime, and the way to go forward was to make art they dont believe in, he said.

However, in 2018 an exhibition of his work in Hong Kong was cancelled by organisers after threats made by the Chinese authorities. After this, he also felt there was a lack of interest to show his work in Australia but blamed a strategy of the CCP for this.

The Chinese government are very good at playing mind games, he said. They will use a tactic of accusing people and countries of being racist, of simply being anti-Chinese.

Fresh from his exhibition in Warsaw in June, Badiucao said the pressure from China not to exhibit his work in Europe has so far been successfully fought against, but the pressure has been ramped up. He explained that in Warsaw, when the exhibition was announced, the Chinese Embassy visited the museum and demanded its cancellation.

Wherever I take this exhibition, they follow me, he said. Its a warning to anybody wanting to host my show, that you must handle the pressure youll get. However, what the CCP is doing is raising the bar for my future work.

Baudicau feels that as a dissident abroad his work means the CCP will eventually catch up with him. He said: To me its no longer a yes or no. Its just a case of when. But the more people join [protest the CCP], we can all share this big burden together.

Music was provided by the London Silk Road Collective, who performed the diverse music traditions found along the ancient Silk Road route, connecting Europe, Central Asia and South East Asia, with a particular focus on songs (both melancholy and hopeful) from the Uyghur region. Its singer, Uyghur campaigner Rahima Mahmut, spoke about the personal effects of being a dissident abroad when she explained the anguish of her sister recently dying in China but being unable to contact her family due to the CCP.

The event also marked the opening of the Banned by Beijing art exhibition, aimed at highlighting transnational repression from China. Badiucaos artwork featured, as well as works from husband-and-wife painting duo Lumli Lumlong and cartoonist and former secondary school visual arts teacher Vawongsir. The exhibition will run in the crypt of St Johns Church, Waterloo until 10 July 2023.

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Wherever I take this exhibition, they follow me - Index on Censorship

Twitter ‘Blue’: Sex workers, censorship and the fight for online visibility – Index on Censorship

In the past couple years, Ive gotten kicked off of PayPal and Venmo, sex worker Maya Morena told me. Ive gotten kicked off Twitter. I had 80,000 followers on Twitter; I had 30,000 followers on Instagram, I had 30,000 on Tumblr. I lost all those platforms.

Morenas experience isnt unusual, though it also isnt well known. When the right talks about censorship, it focuses obsessively on liberals protesting conservative speakers. When the left focuses on censorship, it points to the efforts by red states to criminalise the teaching ofLGBTandBlackstudies. The longstanding, and worsening, policing and censorship of sex workers online is seen by all as either justifiable or unimportant. It is neither though; the censorship of sex workers affects their livelihood, their ability to advocate for themselves, and puts their safety and their very lives at risk.

Thats why when Twitter started promising that Twitter Blue would boost visibility and engagement on the platform, many sex workers signed up. The service hasnt really solved sex workers problems. But the hopes around it, and the backlash to it, demonstrate just how isolated sex workers are, and how much they need solidarity from those who care about free speech.

A Sustained Assault on Sex Worker Speech

Government, gatekeepers and the public have long been very uncomfortable with sexual speech, going all the way back to laws thatcriminalisedthe shipping of sexual material through the mail in the late 1800s.

The early internet gave sex workers the ability to advertise directly to clients and to be visible online in ways that had been previously unimaginable. Sites likeBackpage and Craigslistallowed people to promote erotic services and, importantly, allowed them to vet clients. Homicides of sex workerscrateredin cities where Craigslist opened erotic services websites as sex workers were able to get off the streets and out of danger.

Despite clear evidence that free speech made sex workers safer, policy makers and anti-sex advocates insisted, with little to back them up, that adult services on the internet contributed to trafficking.

The watershed moment for sexual censorship, according to Olivia Snow, a dominatrix and a research fellow at theUCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, came in 2018, with the bipartisan passage of FOSTA/SESTA. These laws made platforms legally responsible for user-generated sexual content. That gave many platforms an incentive, or an excuse, to purge sex workers.

Backpage wasshut downby the government in 2018; Tumblrpurgedmost NSFW content the same year. So didPatreon. Payment processors and banks have beenescalatingalongstanding waron sex workers, preventing them from accessing funds or doing business. Even OnlyFans, which has built its business almost entirely on sex workers, decided to get rid of sexual content, though itreversedits decision after a backlash from creators.

As sex workers have been shut out of most sites, Twitter has become more and more important to the community. Twitter is the only major social media platform that tolerates us, Snow said. It is by default the least shitty of the platforms.

Twitter Is WelcomingBut Not That Welcoming

Arecent studyfound that 97% of sex workers rely on Twitter as their top site for finding followers. Writer and sex workerJessie Sageexplained that while she has accounts on sex worker sites like Eros and Tryst, the people who book me tend to do so because they find me and then they go look at my socials. Clients use twitter to verify that sex workers are who they say they are, and to see if they have shared interests. And, Sage says, Twitter allows sex workers to share information. Being able to connect with other sex workers allows us to create pathways and resources and screening resources for each other that keep us safe.

Sage also says Twitter is vital because it lets sex workers show that theyre not just sex workers. Most of my Twitters just talking about books I like to read and things that Im thinking about, she told me. But theres something very political about that, because Im saying that I am a sex worker, and Im also all of these other things. And when we get shoved off of social media, we lose that and we become dehumanised. And when we become dehumanised, our existence becomes much more ripe for abuse.

While Twitter is somewhat welcoming to sex workers though, its notthatwelcoming. Sex worker accounts are often deprioritized by the algorithm (a process sometimes referred to asshadowbanning). Deprioritisation can mean that accounts dont show up in search results or that they dont show up in followers feeds. That makes it hard to build an audience. It can also make it easy for bad actors to impersonate sex workers and catfish clients. Fake accounts on Twitter are able to get more followers than me, because Im already censored, Morena told me. Its a big problem for all sex workers.

Twitter Blueto the Rescue, Sort Of

In December, new Twitter owner Elon Muskclaimedthat for $8/month, Twitter Blue users would begin to be prioritised in search and in conversations on Twitter.Many sex workershoped Twitter Blue would give them more visibility.

Sex worker Andres Stones says that in his experience post-Musk Twitter has strangled his engagement and has had a very large and negative impact on his business. Its not clear whether this is because Musk is more aggressive in restricting adult content, or whether the new Twitter simply throttles engagement for everyone who isnt on Twitter Blue. Either way, Stones says, I started subscribing [to Twitter Blue] out of necessity. It hasnt gotten him back to where he was before, but its at least slowed the slide. Its been helpful only insofar as not having it was a death knell for engagement.

Other sex workers report similar experiences. Morena says it hasnt been that helpful, though its given her content an extra push. Sage struggled because Twitter Blue didnt allow her to change her screen name easily, which made it difficult for her to advertise her travel dates.

Block the Blue

Sex workers saw Twitter Blue as a possible way to navigate censorship and deprioritisation on the one important social media platform that warily tolerates their existence. But in the broader cultural conversation, Twitter Blue was portrayed as a service solely for Elon Musk superfans and fascist trolls.

Mashablereported ona Block the Blue campaign, which encouraged Twitter users to adopt a Blocklist targeting all Twitter Blue accounts. It was embraced by NBC News reporter Ben Collins, Alejandra Caballo of the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic andotherlargeprogressive accounts. Twitter comedian and celebrity @dril told Binder, 99% of twitter blue guys are dead-eyed cretins who are usually trying to sell you something stupid and expensive. Blocking them, @dril suggested, was funny and a way to undermine Musks right wing political agenda.

But a small study byTechCrunchfound that the vast majority of Twitter Blue accounts were not right wing harassment accounts. Instead, people used the service because they wanted features like the ability to post longer videos, or two-factor authenticationor because they were, like sex workers, businesspeople trying to boost engagement.

Ashley, a sex worker and researcher of online platform behavior who did her own study of Twitter Blue users, told me that the Block the Blue list is frustratingly counterproductive. The best way to block hateful trolls, she argued, is to block the followers of large right-wing troll accounts.

Im all in favour of users being empowered to block people, she says, but combined with the fact that so many sex workers are using this, [Block the Blue] is really just sharing a sex worker block list. Because theres way more sex workers than hateful people on there.

No Voice

Ashley adds that the majority of Twitter Blue users are probably just random people experimenting with the service. The point though is that sex workers are using the service at high rates, but have had little success in getting their interests, or existence, recognised by progressives who are supposedly fighting for marginalised people. Matt Binder, who wrote the Mashable article about Block the Blue, told me he doesnt believe that sex worker concerns did much to interrupt or slow the Block the Blue campaign which has become somewhat of a meme on the platform, he said. (He added that he thinks more people block individual users than use the block list, and doesnt think theres been much friendly fire.)

Musk and the right are no friends to sex workers; as Snow told me, the right-wing neo-fash, neo-Satanic Panic targeting LGBT people is built on terror and hatred of anything associated with sexuality, which includes sex workers (many of whom are LGBT themselves.) But progressive leaders often dont feel accountable to sex workers either, and mostly ignore sex workers when they say (for example) that blocking everyone using Twitter Blue will further isolate them.

Twitter Blue isnt a solution. But its a reminder that sex workers face extreme and debilitating censorship. More people need to listen to them.

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Twitter 'Blue': Sex workers, censorship and the fight for online visibility - Index on Censorship