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Censorship can lead to some funny designs, even when there isn't a comedian involved. So when the person being censored is a standup comic, we could only expect an entertaining response.

Posters advertising Ed Gamble's London tour dates fell foul of Transport for London's (TfL) ban on junk food advertising because they featured a hot dog in reference to the title of the show, Hot Digitty Dog. The comedian has found a suitably ridiculous solution to allow the posters to be put up on the underground network, and it's an even better poster design than the original.

In the original poster, which has been used to promote Gamble's tour around the UK, the comedian and The Off Menu podcast host was pictured with mustard and ketchup on his face and T-Shirt with a hot dog on a plate in front of him. However, TfL said that the hot dog would have to be removed or obscured for the poster to be allowed on the London Tube because of an anti-junk food policy.

TfL introduced a ban on junk food advertising in 2019 in a bid to reduce childhood obesity. In this case, the poster is not advertising junk food, but it seems the network's ban covers any imagery of unhealthy snacks regardless of what is being promoted. Gamble's solution was to doctor the design to replace the offending banger with a cucumber, perhaps using Photoshop Generative Fill.

TfL told me I couldnt have a hot dog on my poster to promote my Hackney Empire shows in June.I guess Im dangerous? So Ive replaced it with a cucumber. Eat your greens, kids," Gamble wrote on Instagram.

It resulting scene looks particularly incongruous. Cucumber with the mustard and sauce? One fan pointed out on Instagram that the result is an image where the comedian appears to have finished a meal without eating his greens.

A TfL spokesman said: We welcome all advertising on our network that complies with our published guidance. Following a review of the advert, we advised that elements would need to be removed or obscured to ensure it complied with our policy. A revised advert is now running on the network and we are always happy to work with people to ensure adverts follow our policy.

Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.

However some people argue that the ban is hypocritical when brands such as Greggs and Lola's Cupcakes are allowed to run stores in Tube stations.

For more entertaining censorship, see HBO's censored movie posters and the California police's Lego mugshots. Need to censor your own designs? See today's best Photoshop deals in your region below, or see our guide to how to download Photoshop for more details.

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UK comedian Photoshops poster to hilariously sidestep censors - Creative Bloq

The Zone of Interest (2023) was one of the most introspective films of the year, noting the intricate dangers of ignoring atrocities as it delves into the complex psychology of individuals at the hands of such horrors. The films director, Jonathan Glazer, took the stage at this years Oscars to condemn the brutal war currently being waged on Gaza.

Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, Glazer said.

In the two weeks since his speech, Glazer has been met with a wave of criticism and backlash from peers, leading to a growing sentiment of him being blacklisted by the industry. This hatred is being directly fueled by reporters misquoting Glazer and intentionally ending the quote after refute their Jewishness to make his statement seem antisemitic, when in reality Glazer was using his Jewish heritage as reasoning to showcase sympathy for horrendous atrocities.

While the Oscars official YouTube channel has posted every winning speech of the night, Glazers speech remains conspicuously absent. The censorship of Glazers words raises questions about the extent to which powerful interests can silence dissenting voices, even in a space that prides itself on pushing boundaries and challenging norms. The suppression of support for Palestine is becoming exceedingly pervasive and overt in multiple mediums.

The United States House of Representatives recently passed a bill to ban TikTok, citing safety concerns and data breaches linked to its parent company, ByteDance, which is owned by Chinese nationals. However, its worth noting that despite collecting more data than TikTok, Facebook and Google have never faced calls for an outright ban or even similar scrutiny.

Some lawmakers appear to actually be concerned with TikTok users fervent support for Palestine and their use of the platform for organizing. Legislators such as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley have even outright declared that TikToks pro-Palestinian advocacy justifies a ban in the U.S., a stance that may be influenced by the substantial $58 million in lobbying support from pro-Israel donors that American lawmakers received in the past election cycle.

Instagrams recent decision to, by default and without notice, restrict political content from accounts you dont follow may be an even more significant infringement than data collection. This decision could prevent critical political issues from reaching a more neutral audience who dont willingly seek out political content, as it relies on users actively changing their settings to view such content, effectively censoring important discourse and stifling expression on the platform.

In universities, which have long been centers of American political activism, the freedom of faculty to participate in politics is under scrutiny. The University of California Board of Regents is being pressured by pro-Israel lawmakers to consider a policy that would regulate how academic departments can express political views on university websites, including a prohibition on posting such statements on their primary pages.

It is evident that there is a deliberate attempt to suppress dissent against the violence Palestine currently faces. This raises a significant question: Why is there no space for accountability, discussion or even a voice that isnt staunchly pro-Israel when it comes to Palestine?

The situation in Gaza is rapidly deteriorating, with the death toll surpassing 30,000, the majority of which are women and children. In the face of this incredible violence, government entities, social media platforms and academic institutions continue to staunchly support Israel. This backing is largely fueled by monetary and political interests in the form of lobbying efforts and pro-Israel influence within universities.

The unified front of support for Israel from some of the highest ranking positions of power in the U.S. underscores a chilling reality: the bodies of Palestinians are being deemed expendable, especially in the face of immeasurable greed. People in these positions of power are encroaching on new levels of censorship that directly breach the rights of citizens to speak freely or even show an ounce of support for Palestine.

The American people must staunchly oppose any attempts to curtail our freedoms and must persist in championing the rights of Palestinians, which are intertwined with our own. In a world rife with ongoing injustices and violence, powerful entities will always seek to conceal such atrocities. In this instance, it is up to the American people. We possess voices to speak up for voiceless Palestinians, and we must resist with unwavering determination.

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Censorship is only getting worse in the US - Daily Trojan Online

Avril Haines, the US director of national intelligence, said recently that officials cant rule out the possibility of China using TikTok to influence the 2024 election. Plenty of others have expressed their alarm about the ways China could use TikTok to undermine our national security.

Just one problem: the First Amendment doesnt allow censorship just in case. It was downright reckless for the House to pass legislation to effectively ban TikTok the day after Hainess comments, without any proof of the kind of imminent and grave threat that the Constitution would require to justify that kind of unprecedented mass censorship.

TikTok is used by around 150 million Americans. That includes President Joe Biden, as well as plenty of journalists who use the platform to report and to find stories and sources. Independent journalist Jonathan Katz, for example, used TikTok to expose misleading information from Sen. Katie Britts State of the Union rebuttal. Banning TikTok is, in effect, a prior restraint on all of that journalism, with no regard for whether it contains Chinese propaganda.

Heres what else cant be ruled out: that banning TikTok, based on its alleged surveillance and propagandizing of Americans, will set a precedent for all sorts of future censorship, including bans on foreign news sites. And yes, forcing a sale of TikTok is effectively a ban. Imagine the government ordering The Guardian to sell itself to an approved buyer.

If the US government bullying or banning a British newspaper sounds unlikely, what about media owned by current US adversaries, like Russian-owned RT? Some countries banned it when Russia invaded Ukraine. The US did not, presumably because officials recognized the Constitution wouldnt tolerate that. Why cant the same logic behind banning TikTok, which by all current indications China does not own, support banning RT, which Russia does?

And while RT is a uniquely unsympathetic outlet, the slope gets slippery from there. Consider Qatari-funded Al Jazeera. Surely it has plenty of information on the viewing and clicking habits of the millions of Americans who read it online. And the Biden administration is concerned enough about its influence that it has reportedly pressured it to turn down the volume of its criticism of Israel. A future administration could easily view that as ban-worthy.

The concern that censorship could spread beyond TikTok is heightened because the bill the House passed allows for future bans of not just other social media applications but any platform allowing user interaction that the president deems a threat to national security. At least for other platforms, the president is required to issue a report describing the specific national security concern justifying censorship (with the details likely hidden in a classified annex).

The criteria are shockingly vague, but at least its more than the cant rule it out reasoning for censoring TikTok, regarding which no president has issued any such report. The double standard is an implicit admission by the bills drafters that the speculation-based TikTok ban is constitutionally inadequate.

The reality is that even definitive proof that a platform is propagandizing or surveilling Americans wouldnt justify censorship. The Pentagon Papers case established that national security isnt a magic word that nullifies the First Amendmentand there, the alleged threat was to troops lives, not college kids political thought. Nonetheless, Justice Hugo Black explained that the word security is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.

Years before that, the Supreme Court rejected a law delaying mail containing communist political propaganda. The Supreme Court said the law was at war with the uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate and discussion that are contemplated by the First Amendment. But even that unconstitutional law was narrow compared with a complete ban on TikTok, which would prevent millions of Americans from using their preferred medium to speak online.

In other words, Americans have the right to consume foreign propaganda if they choose, and foreigners dont need to stay on US politicians good side to be able to speak to Americans. Thats why courts have rejected the Trump administrations efforts to ban TikTok (Trump has since reversed himself, and now opposes a ban) as well as the state of Montanas prohibition.

The TikTok ban is far more problematic than the communist mail delay because its not the least bit targetedit seeks to shutter TikToks whole operation. The Supreme Court has also rejected efforts to shut down entire bookstores and media outlets, even if they allegedly carried some illegal content. Lawmakers arent even claiming that TikToks content is illegal, just that they dislike some of it for being false or misleading.

Sure, TikTok is used to spread lies. Thats true of every social media outlet. But Congress could reduce Americans susceptibility to disinformation by cutting down on excessive government secrecy, which breeds conspiracy theories and distrust. That would not only be more effective than censorship but would strengthen, not undermine, First Amendment freedoms. TikTokers might not have been so fascinated by Osama bin Ladens ridiculous and genocidal manifesto if they hadnt been raised on they hate us for our freedom.

After all, while TikTok (and any other social media platform) can be abused to spread foreign propaganda, it is also a helpful tool in combating domestic propaganda. Could our government have misled Americans about the Vietnam War nearly as effectively if TikTok existed?

Perhaps because the propaganda justification for the ban is so flimsy, lawmakers have raised the alarm about Chinese surveillance of TikTok users as a fallback basis for censorship. Those claims are every bit as nebulous. If that were really the concern, Congress would pass a data privacy law binding American platforms too, as well as data brokers that TikTok could continue to buy Americans data from even after a ban. No one can explain how TikTok user data in the hands of Chinese spies would justify an unprecedented prior restraint, particularly when they can easily get the same data elsewhere.

Former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who wants to buy TikTok, says theres no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China. Its true that China bans US platforms. But the US shouldnt be resorting to stooping to authoritarians levels, and thats exactly why a bill that kicks open the door for it to do just that is so troubling. Russia, for example, recently declared US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty an undesirable organization, requiring it to stop all work inside Russia. By banning TikTok, the US lowers its moral standing to oppose those kinds of shameful antics.

If the Senate passes this unconstitutional TikTok ban, and the White House lets it stand, then what we really cant rule out is the US becoming every bit as censorial as the adversaries it claims to be defending us against.

Originally posted here:
TikTok ban forgets the lessons of the Pentagon Papers - Columbia Journalism Review

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Ryan Knutson: When the baseball star Hank Aaron died in 2021 at the age of 86, people took to social media to remember his legendary career. Some posted about his legacy as a civil rights icon. Others posted about his incredible swing and how he held the career home run record for more than three decades. But there was one tweet that caused a firestorm. It was from the politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who suggested that Aaron's death was caused by the COVID vaccine. He said, "Hank Aaron's tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly, closely following administration of COVID vaccines." The Biden administration asked Twitter to remove Kennedy's tweet, which the company did. It was one of many posts the government asked social media sites to take down during the pandemic. Now, the administration's effort to go after what it saw as misinformation online is under the spotlight of the Supreme Court, in a case known as Murthy versus Missouri. It's one of the biggest tests of the First Amendment in years.

Jess Bravin: This is a case about what the plaintiffs call censorship and what the government calls guidance.

Ryan Knutson: That's our colleague Jess Bravin. He covers the Supreme Court and was listening as the justices heard oral arguments earlier this week. So what would you say is the central question at the heart of this case?

Jess Bravin: The central question is where is the line between expressing an opinion and censoring speech?

Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Thursday, March 21st. Coming up on the show, should the government be allowed to ask social media platforms to remove content? The fight against misinformation online goes back years. But in 2021, as the pandemic was killing thousands of Americans each week, the issue took on new urgency. The newly elected Biden administration said bad information put people at risk. Officials reached out to social media companies and asked them to take action on posts they viewed as problematic.

Jess Bravin: There were several types of posts that officials objected to, but the most important one from the government's point of view was generating fear of vaccines. The government believed that vaccines and mass vaccination was the way to get the pandemic under control and that having millions and millions of people fearful of vaccines would be devastating to public health. And there were some very prominent people who had a different point of view and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is of course one of them.

Ryan Knutson: Kennedy, who tweeted about Hank Aaron, has been a long time critic of vaccines. For the record, the medical examiner said Aaron died of natural causes. The Biden administration also asked social media sites to remove posts that said the virus was manmade, that criticized lockdowns, or that questioned the efficacy of masks.

Jess Bravin: The government would sometimes flag specific posts and point them out to their contacts at the social media platforms and say, "We think this one's a problem." They also liked to talk to the platforms about the algorithms they were using to identify problematic information and, "How are you sorting it? How are you filtering it? How are you finding it?" And this was public. I mean, there were news articles about it in 2021. It wasn't this was like some classified thing. The government's fairly open about complaining about bad information moving across social media platforms.

Ryan Knutson: But some people, Republicans in particular, didn't like what the government was doing. And in 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with other individuals, sued the Biden administration. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General under Biden, was named as a lead defendant. The plaintiffs alleged the government's actions amounted to censorship. What was this case's path to the Supreme Court?

Jess Bravin: Well, the case was filed in a courthouse in Monroe, Louisiana where there is a Trump appointed judge who was expected to be very sympathetic to this argument. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana asserted the right to protect the interests of the residents of those states, saying those residents, either their views might be suppressed by this illegal censorship, or alternatively their right to read or hear or learn things was being interfered with by this censorship.

Ryan Knutson: On July 4th last year, that judge ruled in favor of Louisiana and Missouri.

Jess Bravin: He issued a sweeping opinion calling this an Orwellian form of censorship that the government was imposing on Americans.

Ryan Knutson: The government appealed the ruling and eventually it made its way up to the Supreme Court this week.

Speaker 3: We'll hear argument first this morning in case 23411 Murthy versus Missouri.

Ryan Knutson: Okay, so what were Louisiana and Missouri's main arguments in this case?

Jess Bravin: The Solicitor General of Louisiana who argued this case for all the plaintiffs said that, "Okay, the government has a right to express an opinion. It has a right to use the bully pulpit and say, 'Americans, don't listen to that foolish information or whatever,' but they don't have the right to say to a publisher or a platform, 'Take down that information. Take down that post.'" Their argument is that when the government takes that step, it crosses into coercion, and coercion of private speech is not permitted under the First Amendment.

Speaker 4: The government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans' Constitutional rights. And pressuring platforms in back rooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all. That's just being a bully.

Ryan Knutson: I mean, did they have evidence to support that the government was being coercive or forcing them to do it?

Jess Bravin: Well, it's an implication. The implication is that the government has behind it the ability to take all kinds of serious steps against these private companies. And the theory of this case is that when White House officials or people in the Surgeon General's office or at the FBI call Facebook and say, "Take down these posts or don't let this known purveyor of disinformation continue to spread these dangerous theories about COVID," when they do that, they carry with them the implication of retaliation if there isn't compliance, because there could be an antitrust investigation, there could be the White House supporting legislation that would be bad for some of these companies. All those things lurk, at least in theory, in the background. The Louisiana argument, the argument of the plaintiffs, is that this was a kind of pervasive behind the scenes campaign that really left these platforms no choice but to comply.

Ryan Knutson: So what was the Biden Administration's defense?

Jess Bravin: The Biden administration said that, "What we did regarding these COVID posts is no different from what the government has done for decades and decades and decades."

Speaker 5: I think the idea that there'd be back and forth between the government and the media isn't unusual at all when the White House-

Jess Bravin: And government officials are not shy about telling the media when they think they got something wrong or asking them not to publish something or saying, "This person you're relying on is a known charlatan or is a foreign agent," or something like that, "and you shouldn't print that." So they say there are many, many times that you've heard government officials say publicly that they don't like certain things that were published or that TV networks shouldn't run certain shows or shouldn't propel certain storylines on the news or what have you.

Ryan Knutson: The government says it's done this in situations involving national security or war and that this kind of back and forth should be allowed because it's necessary to keep the public safe.

Jess Bravin: From the government's point of view, they have an obligation to protect the public and to prevent the spread of dangerous information that misleads people, and particularly in the context of the COVID pandemic, where public health depended on a critical mass of people obtaining vaccinations in order to stop the spread of this sometimes deadly disease, interfering with the vaccination program, based on completely unsupported theories, was a danger to the nation. It was an emergency. It was a literal public health emergency that required people to know what the actual risks were, and the government says they have to take steps to do that.

Ryan Knutson: Coming up, how the Supreme Court justices responded to these arguments. Our colleague Jess says that many of the justices seem receptive to the government's argument that there is and always has been a normal back and forth between officials and the press. What were you able to tell about how the Supreme Court justices who were hearing these arguments were responding to them?

Jess Bravin: It seemed to me that most of the justices found the plaintiff's arguments problematic, from a number of reasons. Some of the justices seemed to have personal experience in dealing with the media. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Elena Kagan, and Chief Justice John Roberts all worked in the White House for one President of one party or another and all of them seem to recall their own interactions or the interactions of the press staff with the news media and occasions where they reached out to complain about certain stories, complained about certain information that was being published, and urge reporters or editors not to publish it. And Justice Kavanaugh, for instance, he likened it, he said he had a national security analogy.

Justice Kavanaugh: Probably not uncommon for government officials to protest an upcoming story on surveillance or detention policy and say, "If you run that, it's going to harm the war effort and put Americans at risk."

Jess Bravin: And so they seemed to be thinking about, "Well, I used to complain all the time about stuff I didn't like being published and I didn't see any problem with it." And they seemed to believe it was just a feature of the way the government works and the way our democracy works.

Ryan Knutson: Were there camps that seemed to emerge among the justices on this issue or did it seem that they were more uniformly skeptical?

Jess Bravin: In this instance, it seemed that most of the court was leaning toward the government's view of these kinds of interactions being allowable. The only justice who appeared very skeptical of the Biden administration's position was Justice Samuel Alito. He said he looked at these kinds of emails and these communications and the tenor of the language used by government officials, and he said, "The White House is treating Facebook as a subordinate." It's basically asking, "Why haven't you shown us? Why are you hiding the ball from us?"

Justice Alito: They want to have regular meetings and they suggest rules that should be applied, and "Why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you and we can look it over?" And I thought, "Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media, our representatives over there."

Jess Bravin: And he said he couldn't imagine that that is the kind of interaction that the White House has with the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The Associated Press or other major news organizations and from his point of view, this was not like the traditional back and forth between the news media and the government. This was something that looked different.

Ryan Knutson: The ruling is expected to come by July. What will it mean for the future of misinformation on the internet if Louisiana wins or if the US government wins?

Jess Bravin: Well, if the US government wins, firstly, it depends on what the US government wants to do. I mean, who controls the US government is up to the voters this November. And so a lot of it depends on that. Were this challenge to succeed, I think that you will see a much more freewheeling internet because one of the checks on what appears on social media will be gone. Or is the government's ability to influence what appears on social media will be significantly reduced. Now, whether that has a good or bad effect obviously depends on where you stand.

Ryan Knutson: Murthy versus Missouri is one of several cases involving free speech and online content moderation that the Supreme Court is taking on this year. For example, last month, the justice has heard challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that seek to limit how much social media companies can moderate people's posts.

Jess Bravin: The other major cases involving free speech in the internet also come out of the same view by some people on the right that social media platforms are censoring their views ,are keeping their ideas out of the public discourse. And this particularly came into focus when Facebook and Twitter blocked Donald Trump after they viewed his role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol as violating their policies or the things that he was tweeting and posting were violating their policies against inciting violence or unlawful conduct or what have you. So that really crystallized for some conservatives the idea that our opinions and our views and our perspective is being blocked by these social media platforms.

Ryan Knutson: Have all these cases had an impact on how social media platforms and also the government are approaching misinformation on their platforms and policing it this year?

Jess Bravin: Well, the government pulled back on some of these encounters because they are facing this type of legal assault. I think for the social media platforms, I mean, they are very powerful. They are ubiquitous for many Americans. And they are facing a range of pressure. I mean, at the same time that they face complaints that they're taking down too many posts, they're also facing complaints that they're allowing up too many dangerous posts. I mean, they are in a position, that they certainly worked hard to achieve, that makes them central to a lot of the discourse in the United States and therefore they get pressure from all sides.

Ryan Knutson: That's all for today, Thursday, March 21st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Jan Wolfe and Jacob Gershman. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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Is Fighting Misinformation Censorship? The Supreme Court Will Decide. - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts - The Wall Street Journal

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If you opened Instagram last week, you may have seen one of many tutorials on how to opt out of a setting that was quietly released in February: Instagram and Threads users will no longer be recommended political content from people they dont follow.

Instagram wont proactively recommend content about politics, according to a blog post it issued Feb. 9. While the policy was launched without making headlines, it spiked attention last week as Instagram users took to the platform to raise awareness about the change.

What counts as politics? The companys announcement defined political content as potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics, and Instagrams help page adds content about governments to the list. But the most comprehensive definition is displayed where users can go to turn off the limits on political content: Political content is likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large.

While not every Instagram user will be able to review whether their content is considered politicaland therefore no longer eligible for recommendationprofessional users such as creators or businesses have the power to check. (If you can see Instagrams Insights analytics for your account, you have a professional account.)

On a desktop or mobile browser: You can go to Account Status directly.

On your Account Status page, you can check whether Instagram will no longer recommend something youve posted (such as content deemed political), by clicking through What cant be recommended.

This is what Account Status looked like on The Markups account today. So far, none of our recent posts have been flagged as political:

The Markups account status on March 25, 2024.

Credit: The Markup

While all users have an Account Status page, only professional accounts have the What cant be recommended and Monetization status checks.

Help us figure out exactly what Instagram counts as political content. If, after checking the Account Status of your professional account, you see that one or more of your posts have been flagged as political, take a screenshot and send it to The Markup. You can DM us on Instagram directly @the.markup, or email it to us at maria@themarkup.org.

A Markup investigation published in February found that Instagram demoted nongraphic photos of soldiers, destroyed buildings, and military tanks from on the ground in Gaza. If you think youve been shadowbanned on Instagramor if the app has notified you that it has removed your content or limited your account in some wayheres what you can do.

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Instagram Creators: Check If Your Posts Are Political The Markup - The Markup