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Since its inception, The Commentator has been a constant presence at YU. Even if not everyone reads it, it is always present, churning out articles about happenings on and off campus. As a student-run paper, it is not beholden to the administration or its standards, and over the years writers and editors have taken advantage of that liberty. Unfortunately, not everyone approved of their adversarial antics, and it appears that significant attempts were made to curtail The Commentator's influence.

In the fall semester of 1999, copies of The Commentator and The Observer began to go missing. On two separate occasions, YU Facilities had covertly removed hundreds of issues of The Commentator from public spaces for safety and aesthetic reasons. At the time, it was apparently common practice for YU to remove student publications prior to public events. Administrators were unfazed, with one noting, theyve been doing this for years it's not surprising that they did it this time either.

These two instances, however, drew particular attention, as the issues in question contained several articles deeply critical of the administration. One issue questioned the dismissal of a secretary, and another suggested that YU had misused an $8 million gift. Claims of conspiracy presumably abounded, and an article was published in the next edition of The Commentator alleging that YU Facilities was deliberately censoring the paper. But almost nobody got to read it. Before distribution, 1800 copies of the issue mysteriously disappeared.

When the students investigated, senior security officials confirmed that Jeffrey Socol, director of Facilities Management, had instructed the staff to remove the copies. This was the last straw for the editors, who demanded reimbursement to the tune of $2000 and an immediate stop to the suppressive activity. My goal is to put a stop to this, said co-Editor in Chief Aaron Klein. And if initiating a lawsuit is what it is going to take, we are prepared to do that.

To add even more pressure, Harold Levy, a member of the Board of Regents, sent then-President Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm a letter asking why YU was silencing student publications. A second member of the board suggested that the matter might become subject to investigation if it was not promptly clarified. As public interest grew, reporters from The New York Times reached out to YU for comment, which they elected not to provide. The day before NYT published their article, YU gave The Commentator an $1850 reimbursement, along with a letter from the dean asserting that the university did not condone removing or disposing of any newspapers. The Observers missing copies were not mentioned in the article, nor were they reimbursed for the 1,200 missing newspapers. It pains me to discover that Yeshiva only recognizes the discarding of student newspapers is wrong only when reporters bring it to their attention, and not when their own students do, said SCWSC President April Simon. The removal of issues was discontinued, but the controversy did not end there.

In the February 2000 issue, co-Editor in Chief Alex Traiman reported that the Presidents Circle, a group that allocated funds to various student activities, had elected not to contribute to The Commentator in the upcoming semester. This was despite providing Sterns paper, The Observer, with a whopping $13,000 for new equipment. Traiman attributed this discrepancy to The Commentators ongoing feud with the administration, claiming that stooping to such punitive measures is quite simply immature.

In the following edition, Louis Tuchman, co-chair of the Circle, responded sharply to Traimans allegations, clarifying that the Circle was under no obligation to provide them with funds every semester, and you can be sure we will not do so. In addressing the funding discrepancy, he said that the money given to The Observer only begins to redress the historical funding imbalance between the two papers. As a final riposte, he criticized Tramain for speculating at the Circles intentions without comment from any of the members.

When reviewing The Commentator of twenty years ago, it is difficult to tell how much of the editors criticism (and there is a lot of criticism) is founded, and how much of it is just angsty anti-administration posturing. The relationship between the two organizations in this era was extremely tenuous. This is perhaps best exemplified by Traimans scathing March editorial, Oh. Youre Just Stupid. where he refers to administrators as grumpy, Dumb and Dumber, and simply a few pennies short a dollar. In addition, New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters suggested that Klein deliberately tried to up the paper's metabolism by publishing a series of articles that were highly critical of the school administration. Recognition of this enmity is key when considering the extent to which The Commentator is reliable here.

Commentator issues from this era often present biased accounts of events. The Columbia Scholastic Press Association reviewed The Commentator in 2002 and gave them an overall grade of C+, at least in part for their unreliable reporting. In their notes at the end, their very first criticism stated that more effort should be placed on objective reporting on news pages. Many of the front-page stories reflect a definite bias Front-page news stories must be objective! Opinion should be clearly labeled as such. In addition, they received poor grades for accuracy, fairness and completeness. It seems like reliability was a recurring issue at this time.

In this case, however, it seems that their outrage was, if not justified, at least well-founded. The fact that reputable outside sources like The New York Times and the Board of Regents were involved, and that YU eventually reimbursed The Commentator, both indicate that YU did make some effort to censor the paper, an effort that would repeat itself in the coming months and years.

In fact, just a year prior, YU had confiscated and concealed vending machines owned by The New York Times. I was very upset, said Eric Schubert, then NYTs sales manager for YU. It was removed from inside the building, so I knew it had to be Facilities. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the relevant administrators, The Commentator gained access to a storage room where they found and photographed the missing machines. It is still unclear why Facilities objected to the machines in the first place, or why they did not contact The Times to have them removed properly. Despite their differences, the fact that these two newspaper confiscation controversies occurred within a month of each other is curious, and may bolster The Commentators reliability in this case.

The Commentators tumultuous relationship with YUs administration is on full display in this saga, and highlights timely questions about what can and should be said. The era we currently find ourselves in is, like any other, mired in its own tumult, and The Commentator has not shied away from reporting on delicate situations. It is my hope that conscientious reporting remains a priority, and that gripes between the paper and faculty can be left in the past. Despite its challenges, the fight to preserve the papers autonomy was clearly not in vain, as it continues to respectfully tackle the issues and events that shape YU.

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Photo Caption:An empty newspaper rack outside the library

Photo Credit: The Commentator

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Censorship at YU: The Commentator Controversy - The Commentator - The Commentator

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Washington, D.C. Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL), Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Chairman Chris Smith, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Rep. Keith Self (R-TX), Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) sent an oversight letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding censorship perpetrated or facilitated by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). Last year, after the States Departments Inspector General issued a detailed report chronicling inappropriate actions by the GEC, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee determined it was appropriate to delay reauthorizing the GEC until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved.

Since that time, however, additional news has come to light that suggests the GEC continues to stray from its founding mission through its subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions particularly by established conservative media and individuals. The committee intends to exercise its full legislative and oversight jurisdiction over the GECs lack of transparency.

The GECs founding mission, effectively, was to provide a ready resource for the truth about America and our fight against global terror, particularly ISIS, the members wrote. [But now we] are forced to wonder about the authority by which the GEC justifies its mission creep, and the direction of its current evolutionary trajectory. Congress originally authorized the GEC to support the development and dissemination of fact-based narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at the United States and United States allies and partner nations. While the GEC performs some unquestionably important work, it has also provided social media companies with access to tech applications that detect and either knock down or flag malign-foreign-influence activity, but, according to the FBI, also might accidentally pick up U.S. people[s] information.

The full text of the letter can be found here and below.

Last year, after the States Departments Inspector General issued a detailed report1 chronicling inappropriate actions by the Global Engagement Center (GEC), members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee determined it was appropriate to delay reauthorizing the GEC until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved.

Since that time, however, additional news has come to light that suggests the GEC continues to stray from its founding mission through its subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions particularly by established conservative media and individuals through grants, partnerships, and awards to entities including the Global Disinformation Index, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensics Research Lab, and Moonshot CVE. The GEC also appears to take the official position that populism whether at home or abroad is an affront to democracy and the First Amendment rights of all Americans. For example:

In 2021, the GEC spent $275,000 producing a counter-disinformation video game that programmed audiences to associate citizen critiques of government waste, fraud, and abuse with a social media disinformation campaign.

In 2020, the GEC produced a similar counter-disinformation video game explicitly targeting political misinformation, apparently modeled off the U.S. 2020 presidential election cycle.

In the above counter-disinformation video games, the GEC selected and supported the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, whose recent disinformation research includes:

Targeting U.S. conservatives

Targeting climate change deniers

Targeting vaccine skeptics

Targeting election deniers

The GECs founding mission, effectively, was to provide a ready resource for the truth about America and our fight against global terror, particularly ISIS. We therefore are forced to wonder about the authority by which the GEC justifies its mission creep, and the direction of its current evolutionary trajectory.

Congress originally authorized the GEC to support the development and dissemination of fact- based narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at the United States and United States allies and partner nations. While the GEC performs some unquestionably important work, it has also provided social media companies with access to tech applications that detect and either knock down or flag malign-foreign-influence activity, but, according to the FBI, also might accidentally pick up U.S. people[s] information.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government officials from censoring disfavored speakers and viewpoints. Merely labeling speech misinformation or disinformation does not strip away First Amendment protections, and government officials may not circumvent the First Amendment by inducing, threatening, and/or colluding with private entities to suppress protected speech.

In 2019, Richard Stengel, the very first head of the GEC after its 2016 founding, published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for an effective end to the First Amendment. This fact calls into question not only the founder, but the founding vision of the GEC itself. Stengel went on to say in a televised interview: [T]he basis of the First Amendment, the marketplace of ideas model, is actually not working. Marketplace of ideas is this notion that good ideas will drive out bad ideas. Well, it was kind of a mystical notion coming from Milton and John Stewart Mill and that doesnt really happen anymore Im actually very sympathetic now to the U.S. adopting some versions of hate speech laws in Europe.

Due to the lack of transparency regarding the GEC, and its potential violations of the Constitution, I write to request that you provide the committee the following documents and information no later than May 11, 2023:

All documents and communications between the GEC and any entity with a domestic presence in the United States, including media outlets, mentioning disinformation, disinfo, misinformation, misinfo or malinformation.

All documents and communications regarding the U.S. Department of States contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, or other agreements for assistance covered in section 200.40 Federal financial assistance of the OMB Uniform Grant Guidance to any of the following entities:

Material preservation is essential for Congress to conduct a comprehensive fact-finding investigation into actions by the GEC and grantees in stifling, censoring, and silencing conservative speech through the guise of labeling it as misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.

More specifically, this request should also be construed as an instruction to preserve all documents, communications, and other information, including electronic information and metadata, that is or may be potentially responsive to this congressional inquiry. This includes electronic messages about the determined topic that are sent using official and personal accounts or drives, including records created using text messages, phone-based messaging applications, or encryption software. For purposes of this request, preserve includes taking reasonable steps to prevent the partial or full destruction, alteration, deletion, shredding, wiping, relocation, migration, theft, mutilation, reckless, or negligent handling of responsive documents, communications, and information that could render the information incomplete or inaccessible.

Please notify all relevant current and former employees, colleagues, officials, contractors, subcontractors, and consultants who may have worked on documents, communications, or information that is or would be potentially responsive to this congressional inquiry. Thank you for your cooperation in this critical oversight matter.

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McCaul, HFAC Members Demand Answers on GEC's Role in ... - House Foreign Affairs Committee

The Supreme Court responded by charging him with contempt, but he refused to apologize, saying in an affidavit: The suggestion that my tweets could shake the foundation of the most powerful court in the world is an overestimation of my abilities.

As a comedian, Kamras work is at risk from the new rules. Other comics have been targeted because of their work. In February 2021, Munawar Faruquiwas arrested in Madhya Pradesh for a joke hed told more than a year before, after a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party accused him of harming religious sentiments.

Kamra points out that the rules could easily be used against satire on the internet. In March, he tweeted a picture of Prime Minister Modi delivering a speech in parliament with several lawmakers listening. The face of billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani had been photoshopped onto all of the lawmakers. Adani has been accused of benefiting from his proximity to Modi.

Comedy is about satire and a bit of exaggeration, Kamra says. But with the new IT rules, I stand the risk of being deplatformed retrospectively by finding three things I said satirically, claiming them to be fake.

But he adds that his legal challenge isnt about him. This is bigger than any one profession. It will affect everyone, he says.

He points to wide discrepancies between the official account of Covids impact on the country and the assessment of international agencies. The WHO has said that Covid deaths in India were about 10 times more than the official count. Anybody even referring to that could be labeled a fake news peddler, and it would have to be taken down.

In April 2021, Indias most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was ravaged by a second wave of Covid-19 and a severe shortage of oxygen in hospitals. The state government denied there was a problem. Amidst this unfolding crisis, one man tweeted an SOS call for oxygen to save his dying grandfather. The authorities in the state charged him with rumor-mongering and causing panic.

Experts believe the amendments to Indias IT rules would enable more of this kind of repression, under a government that has already extended its powers over the internet, forcing social media platforms to remove critical voices and using emergency powers tocensor a BBC documentary critical of Modi.

Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital liberties organization, says the social media team of Modis Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hasitself freely spread misinformation about political opponents and critics, while reporters going to the ground and bringing out the inconvenient truth have faced consequences.

Waghre says the lack of clarity on what constitutes fake news makes matters even worse. Looking at the same data set, it is possible that two people can arrive at different conclusions, he adds. Just because your interpretation of that data set is different to that of the governments doesnt make it fake news. If the government is putting itself in a position to fact-check information about itself, the first likely misuse of it would be against information that is inconvenient to the government.

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The Comedian Taking on India's New Censorship Law - WIRED

When governments come knocking, Twitter is glad to censor. Under Elon Musk, the bird company is honoring most government demands to take down tweets or hand over users data, according to data from Lumen and a new report from our friends at Rest of World.

It wasnt like this before. Publicly available records suggest that the company is fully complying with 80% of government requests, in contrast to the pre-Musk era, when that number hovered around 50%. This was thanks in part to policy staffers who worked hard to figure out when government demands were really legitimate and when they were overblown. But Musk fired most of the people doing this work shortly after taking the helm. And now people around the world are feeling the consequences.

More on this below.

With the fake news bill looming, Brazil blocked Telegram over neo-Nazi channels.

Brazils Congress is poised to vote on a controversial, Bolsonaro-era anti-fake news bill that would require big tech platforms to proactively remove illegal content, curb mass messaging by politicians and make other changes that would give the government more leverage when dealing with foreign tech powers. Silicon Valley wants none of it Google even used its quasi-monopolistic online presence to push its agenda in Brazil and some free expression advocates are concerned too.

As if to offer a case in point, major internet providers in Brazil blocked Telegram on April 26, over the Dubai-based companys refusal to hand over information about neo-Nazi activity on the platform. Police had requested data about two groups they suspect used Telegram to encourage a series of violent attacks at schools in Brazil in recent months. Telegram says the data cant be recovered. The block on Telegram was lifted on May 2, but the company is still racking up fines to the order of $200,000 per day. For Telegrams part, the company says it has never complied with a single data request from a government or anyone else. If the fake news bill passes, this may have to change, or Telegram may need to say, bye bye, Brazil.

African content moderators are uniting. A coalition of workers who clean up troublesome content for some of the worlds largest internet platforms Meta, ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and OpenAI voted to form the African Content Moderators Union this week. This is the latest development coming out of legal battles in Kenyan courts over the rights of content moderation workers who are typically hired by third-party companies Sama and Majorel are two of the biggest players in Nairobi that offer low pay and next to no benefits. Happy May Day, folks.

So now we know: Twitter is taking governments at their word and removing most of the tweets they say are illegal and maybe some that just rub government officials the wrong way. Meanwhile, emerging evidence shows that the company is less interested than ever in proactively removing content that violates its own policies, not to mention content that violates local laws. Im thinking here about all the violent, hateful and otherwise nasty stuff that third-party content moderators have to deal with. At least the ones in Kenya might have union representation soon.

I asked Turkish internet law scholar Yaman Akdeniz about it this week Turkey has made more censorship demands of Twitter than almost any other country on earth. Akdeniz noted that in the past, it was clear that the company ignored most requests from Turkey. I am not sure if this will be the case with the Musk administration, he said. The data from Lumen certainly suggests that it wont.

He described how Turkish authorities restricted access to Twitter following the earthquake earlier this year. The response from Twitter was swift. There was an immediate meeting, he said, and the ban was lifted within hours.

I can only speculate what was promised in that meeting, he said. More tweets will be withheld and more accounts will be suspended, that is for sure. And none of this bodes well for national elections, which are coming up on May 14. Twitter can easily become the long arm of the law enforcement agencies in Turkey if AKP wins, Akdeniz warned.

India was also at the top of the list of governments asking the company to take down tweets. In March, we wrote about Twitters willingness to censor tweets about the police search for a Sikh secessionist preacher in Punjab. The episode made it look as if the company was glad to do whatever the Indian state or federal authorities asked, including suspending the account of a member of the state assembly.

If government officials can simply lean on Twitter to silence not only their critics in the public sphere but also their political opponents, the consequences for public discourse and democracy will be pretty severe.

Censor when governments ask, but let the rest flow as it will. What could go wrong?

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From Turkey to India, Twitter offers censorship on demand - Coda Story

Freedom of expression in Americaespecially the use of language to imprint thoughts and ideas upon a pagehas always been under assault. The removal from classrooms and school libraries of material deemed injurious to young minds is nothing new, but its recent resurgence as promulgated by many of the school and library boards of today reminds us that the freedom to share ideas via the tools of language has never been inviolate. The censorship of booksthis most venerable manifestation of thought preservation in Americacan undergo periodic, politically-engineered recrudescence just when you least expect it.

Or, perhaps, when you do expect it, given the full-stop cultural clashes now insulting the country.

Upon the publication by Dzanc Books of the twentieth-anniversary special edition of my novel Ella Minnow Pea this month, a friend of mine noted sadly, Its like America has become the island of Nollop.

The nation of Nollop, dolloped off the coast of South Carolina (which was founded by former American slaves and abolitionists in the nineteenth century), had always maintained a special, adulatory relationship with the English language. They revered it, elevated it, and then, with bewildering capriciousness, decided to destroy it, through misguided attendance by island leaders to a dead mans perceived postmortem wishes.

The dead man was, significantly, one Nevin Nollop, purported author of the familiar pangram The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. On the island of Nollop, the fox stopped jumping, and the lazy dog, lapsed right into canine coma.

Ella Minnow Pea was intended as a cautionary tale about the fragility of language and the risks attached to assuming that the use of language as a public tool and commodity is an inalienable human birthright. The pen, as it has been famously put, is mightier than the sword. Which means that its far more effective for oppressive forces to go after the pen.

The publication of my novel about Miss Minnow Pea and her fight against those who would eviscerate language through the progressive outlawing of letters of the alphabet put Ella and her fellow equally-beleaguered Nollopians on a two-decade-long journey. She found her way to the shelves of bookstores and libraries throughout the world, was discussed in book clubs and chat rooms and literary forums, was used as clues in both the New York Times and the New Yorker crossword puzzles, and even wound up in stage-musical adaptation as LMNOP (the muzical!).

For a book that never made the New York Times bestseller list, Ella slipped into the zeitgeistian cultural consciousness of America through the backdoor. Which put me as the books author in the interesting position of having to introduce Ella to those who had still never heard of it, while at the same time hearing it lauded by others as their favorite novel.

There were some who told me, Of course I know Ella Minnow Pea. I had to write a paper on it for one of my high school English classes. Those folks are now the parents of kids whose own English teachers have tucked the novel right into their own classroom curriculum. (There are now student study guides written for Ella, which have taught the books author a thing or two he didnt know about his own novel.)

Ella Minnow Pea isnt alone in addressing the struggle to oppose those who seek to outlaw or, at the very least, put ludicrous fetters on language. On the isle of Nollop, its citizens are forbidden, under heavy penalty, to use, first, the letter Z, then Q, then J, then, significantly, the letter D. And the illicitabetical laws keep piling up to a ridiculous extreme.

Is this any different from Vladimir Putins directive to throw people in jail for the crime of using the word war to describe his countrys invasion of Ukraine? In some parts of America, a man is allowed to read a story to children in a public space, but only if he doesnt dress as a woman; then the words that come out of his mouth become bizarrely suspect.

Coincident to Ella getting early attention after its original hardback publication in 2001, a community outside of Kansas City, Missouri, decided to publish its list of books that should be removed from local school libraries. (Note: should, not will. This is otherwise known as the good old days.)

Lest one believe that this particular community didnt recognize the contrasting existence of safe and non-controversial literature when they saw it, Ella was put on a second list of books of which they approvedthis novel of mine about censorship and book banning. In this town, located in suburban middle-America in the year 2001, irony took a powder.

In my novel, the Nollopian Library is eventually shut down and boarded up, since, with the passage of anti-alphabet laws, its shelves are now filled with books that contain the illegal letters. Could the shutting down of libraries actually happen in todays America? Ask members of the community in Texas who have recently expressed their desire to do just that.

I am sure there are those who wonder what its like to write a book that suddenly becomes topically relevant. But, of course, Id have to correct them: my novel hasnt stumbled inadvertently into political pertinence. Destroying the ability of members of our species to express themselves through language, through art, through the discourse that flows from untrammeled freedom of thought isnt without historic precedent. Its antecedents stretch back through the ages.

But today, the weapons are different, or at least differently configured, and, interestingly, freedom of thought and expressionespecially through the employment of the many linguistic riches to be found in the gleaming treasure chest that is the English languagedoesnt fall neatly and conveniently on one side of the political and ideological spectrum, as those who decry excessive attendance to political correctness will tell you.

Ella Minnow Pea, Im happy to report, has found a timeless place in the literary canon, and Im equally happy to have my name attached to it. But my quirky novel about letters of the alphabet which literally (and literally!) disappear from its pages does find itself invoked in timely moments, just like those were living through today. If Im lucky, its relevancewhether advertent or inadvertentwill keep it on the shelves far into the future.

Which, of course, is a good thing. But it is also an indication that fighting for the ability to use the tools of language without government intrusion is a cause that will never be put out to pasture.

As the son of two visual artists, Im excited that Dzanc Books has chosen in this special commemorative edition to include illustrations by the very talented Brittany Worsham. And Ella and her cousin Tassie are pleased to see their story illuminated upon crisp new pages. I would imagine that at this very moment, one cousin is writing to the other, using all the letters of the alphabet, not taking a single one of them for granted.

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Ella Minnow Pea: 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition by Mark Dunn is available via Dzanc.

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On Shuttered Libraries, Censorship, the Threat of Book Bans - Literary Hub