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Australian Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm has criticised the Government and the Australian Classification Board in a speech delivered to the Senate yesterday.

The Senate crossbencher highlighted the recent case of Outlast II, which was refused classification late last week due to a rape sequence during one of the games cut-scenes.

This video game takes place in a fantasy world involving all kinds of creatures both human and non-human, said Leyonhjelm. The mere suggestion of an out-of-screen encounter between a creature and a human character was enough to get it banned altogether by the Australian Classification Board.

All of this operates on the false assumption that people who play video games are impressionable children who would play out anything they saw.

Yet the internet is now awash with all manner of unpleasant images involving real people not computer generated images and violent crime around the world is in decline.

Leyonhjelms description of the problematic event in Outlast II differs with that of the Classification Board, which explained in a report provided to IGN that, while much of the contact between the creature and [the player character] is obscured, by it taking place below screen, the sexualised surroundings and aggressive behaviour of the creature suggest that it is an assault which is sexual in nature. When combined with the player's character's objections the Board found the sequence constituted a depiction of implied sexual violence.

Citing figures from Australias Interactive Games and Entertainment Association Digital Australia 16 report Leyonhjelm correctly notes the average age of gamers in Australia is 33.

Claiming that very few gamers are in a position to make or enforce the laws thanks to an unfortunate quirk of demographics Leyonhjelm also explained that politicians and public servants are blocked from accessing games websites like Polygon, IGN, PC Gamer or Gameplanet.

Leyonhjelm posits that [t]his is presumably because we might stumble across an image of something somebody disapproves of on a medium we dont understand. Its been confirmed to IGN that entertainment sites and Facebook, etc. are commonly blocked for public servants for productivity reasons and this is not an issue specific to games websites.

Prime Minister Turnbull claims to have an innovation agenda, but every signal we send to the gaming community in this country is of censorship, disapproval and discouragement, concluded Leyonhjelm.

Video games do not hurt anybody, and the Government and Classification Board should leave video gamers alone.

Australias current R18+ rating in the Australian Guidelines for the Classification of Computer Games prohibits visually depicted sexual violence, as well as the association of incentives or rewards for controlled drug use. Changes to classification laws in Australia require the approval of all state attorneys-general. For its part, the IGEA is still looking for wholesale reform regarding video game classification and believes an industry-led, self-regulated rating system is the answer.

Leyonhjelm was elected to the Senate at the 2013 federal election and became the Liberal Democratic Partys first senator on July 1, 2014. This is after the 2013 classification hurdles faced by Saints Row IV, State of Decay, andSouth Park: The Stick of Truthbut before the 2015 banning ofHotline Miami 2for visually depicted sexual violence. Hotline Miami 2 remains banned in Australia today. What placed Outlast II on Leyonhjelms agenda over Hotline Miami 2 is unclear. The transcipt of Leyonhjelm's speech was distributed by the IGEA upon request from Leyonhjelm's office.

Alongside The Greens, One Nation, the Nick Xenophon Team, Derryn Hinch, Bob Day, and Jacqui Lambie, David Leyonhjelm is one of a record 20 crossbenchers in the current Australian Senate. The 64-year-old is a controversial figure in Australian politics and has attracted criticism during his Senate stint for utilising events like the Sydneys Lindt Cafe siege and Melbournes Bourke Street vehicle attack to promote his calls for softer gun laws, and his claim that he would be happy for police to lie on the side of the road and bleed to death, amongst other examples.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter@MrLukeReilly.

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Australian Senator Attacks Game Censorship, Classification Board - IGN

Censorship Is Never Acceptable Impact Magazine Yet the beauty of language is in its variety and its flexibility, and therefore we should oppose any attempt to censor language. Alas, that is what Cardiff Metropolitan University has done. By banning the use of certain words, they are impinging on ...

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Censorship Is Never Acceptable - Impact Magazine

Elizabeth Johnston - known online as the Activist Mommy -told CBN News that her followers have reported that they have difficulty accessing her page and sharing her posts.

Elizabeth Johnson at a pro-life rally last year

"People are contacting me saying, 'I cannot access your page at all--my app shuts down when I click on your page.' They say, 'I cannot share your page--there are no share buttons on your videos' or 'I cannot like your page--when I like your page and I go back the next day it is unliked,'" she said.

Johnston went on to accuse the site of censorship and said that there should be a congressional hearing on the matter.

Facebook said that they were looking into the issues raised by Johnston.

In February, Johnston had her account frozen for seven days after she re-shared comments she made about homosexuality which were previously removed by Facebook.

Johnston, who has nearly more than 83,000 followers on Facebook, said: "Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 similarly call homosexual sex 'detestable' and an 'abomination'."

After the incident, aFacebook spokesperson said the post had been removed in error.

The spokesperson added: "Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."

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Christian blogger accuses Facebook of continual censorship - Premier

President Trump has already labeled major press outlets the fake news media and the enemy of the people. His administration has blocked major news outlets from a briefing because it didnt like what they published.

With that in mind, the public should understand censorship by PIO at the federal level: For years, in many federal agencies, staff members have been prohibited from communicating with any journalist without notifying the authorities, usually the public information officers. And they often are unable to talk without PIO guards actively monitoring them.

Now, conversations will be approved or blocked by people appointed by the Trump Administration, some of them political operatives.

The information about the administrative state that impacts our lives constantly is under these controls. They also cover much of the data through which we understand our world and our lives.

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In January, according to the Washington Post: Trump called the governments job numbers phony. What happens now that he is in charge of them?

Some of us may feel less comfortable with Trump people controlling this information flow. But actually a surge in these controls has been building in the federal government and through the U.S. culture for two decades or more.

In many entities, public and private, federal, state, and local those in power decree that no one will talk to journalists without notifying the PIO. Congressional offices even have the restrictions.

They are convenient for bosses. Under that oversight staff people are unlikely to talk about all the stuff thats always there, outside of the official story.

Beyond that, PIOs often monitor the conversations and tell staff people what they may or may not discuss. Frequently agencies and offices delay contacts or block them altogether. An article on the Association of Health Care Journalists website, advising journalists about dealing with the Department of Health and Human Services, says, Reporters rarely get to interview administration officials

Remember, those HHS people journalists cant talk to are at the hub of information flow on what works and doesnt with Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid. Or they know whether there are other perspectives on the numbers the agency publishes. Not to speak of the understanding about food and drugs, infectious disease, and medical and health policy research. Many of them could quickly stun us with the education they could give, if they were not gagged.

Another fact that gives pause is these restraints are just for journalists. There are no special rules or offices to stop staff people from having fluid communication with lobbyists, special interest groups, contractors, people with a lot of money, etc.

Fifty-three journalism and open government groups wrote to President Obama asking him to lift the mandate that PIOs be notified of contacts and the related restrictions in federal agencies. We met with people in the White House in 2015 to leave that message for the President. A year ago we pleaded in an editorial that Obama not leave these constraints in place, given the authoritarian rhetoric on the campaign trail and the fact no one can know how these controls will be used in one year or 20 years.

We wonder how former Obama officials feel now about their medications, given that FDA officials cant talk without Trump controls.

But is it ever even rational to just believe staff people who are under such coercion?

Some journalists - given our proclivity for believing we always get the story profess to not be concerned about the PIO controls, saying people on the inside will leak. But do we have any sense of how often that happens? Do we have a 75-percent perspective on an entire agency, or a 2-percent? Nobody leaked when EPA staff people knew that kids in Flint were drinking lead in water or when CDC had sloppy practices in handling bad bugs.

Understandably in shock at President Trumps attacks on the press, some feel these PIO controls are not a primary priority. Actually, this era makes it clearer than ever why we dont need to leave these networks of controls to people in power.

Kathryn Foxhall, currently a freelance reporter, has written on health and health policy in Washington, D.C., for over 40 years, including 14 years as editor of the newspaper of the American Public Health Association. Email her at kfoxhall@verizon.net.

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Another View: Trump-era PIO censorship - The Saratogian

Barney Rosset, the spirited subject of Michael Rosenthals new biography,Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, Americas Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship which will be the subject of a reading and book signing event at 4 p.m. Saturday, March 18at the Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street, Woodstock seems to have made only one key trip to Woodstock in his lifetime. That was in summer of 1951 when he headed here to buy half of the fledgling publishing company hed make his name with from Robert Phelps for $1500. Within weeks hed bought the other half and, while simultaneously studying at the New School, began a career.

Which isnt to suggest that Rossets ties to Woodstock ended there. Consider the nature of what this mischievous Chicago native, who based himself in the Hamptons for decades, created and eventually lost at Grove and its offshoots Evergreen magazine and Grove Press Films. He was the guy who brought Beckett and Gide, Robbe-Grillet and the Beats to mass markets. His taking on the nations once-strict censorship laws on behalf of D.H. LawrencesLady Chatterleys Lover, Henry MillersTropic of Cancer, and William BurroughsNaked Lunchcost him years and fortunes, but also ended all such fights against books while also earning him huge profits for a small, idiosyncratic indie publishing firm. Evergreen, during its short but noteworthy run, premiered Sartre and Camus essays, Albee plays, and Che Guevaras deathbed diaries alongside nudie photos and the first underground comics. Rossets distribution ofI Am Curious (Yellow)broke down screen taboos against nudity, opening the floodgates for the New American Cinema (while also, according to Rosenthal, sounding the death knell for a burgeoning foreign art film cinema in the U.S.).

Barney Rosset was born and raised during a time where liberal, and even socialist or communist, was not a bad word. He came out of a Chicago known for its art and progressivism; worked in the Army during a war that championed democratic values over bullying fascism. And he found his way with the help of a family fortune small enough to have limits yet big enough to allow him a bit of playing. He flourished at a time when literature and the arts in general, alongside science and philosophy, were as respected as business acumen. It was a brief era when you could sell hundreds of thousands of copies of edgy books such asThe Autobiography of Malcolm Xor the early self-help pioneerGames People Play, or push anti-colonial theses into the nations classrooms with ease.

It was what led to a wave of well-to-do, hard-charging New Yorkers finding ways to set up alternative lives outside of their city, in a Quonset hut in East Hampton as Rosset did, or upstate as many others (including his fellow Chicagoan Albert Grossman) would do. Which in turn led to a bettering of circumstances for creators of all stripes, even without the incomes a Rosset and his peers could boast.

Rosenthal, who splits time between NYC and Woodland Valley outside Phoenicia, is expert at zooming in on the societal elements that make Barney Rosset and Grove Press story important. We get the crusading free speech battles, the confident manner in which our best and brightest business folks were once able to push their own tastes on a culture not yet fully enamored with bottom lines and prurient mass tastes, and what life during the Great Society final years of progressivisms golden age could be like, from all-day rum and cokes to open sexuality.

But Rosenthal, while never supplying the novelistic touches many readers have come to expect from these life and times style biographies, is also pitch-perfect at demonstrating the underbelly of Rosset and Groves success, as well as that of the entire 1960s. Publication of works by Che and Castro lead to someones shooting of a missile into the publishers offices (no one was hurt), which much later leads to his paranoia about having been targeted by the CIAwhich even later proves to be partly true. The mans fondness for women and open sexuality, rushes through a slew of marriages (including his first to noted Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell) to distanced kids and eventual charges of misogyny that led, in combination with his employees wish for better terms, to union pressures and a much-publicized labor battle. Moreover, Groves very success pushed Rosset to overestimate his own prowess as a tastemaker and business force, which led to over-expansion and the loss of his business first to the Getty family, and later to Atlantic Press (where it still hobbles on).

Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, Americas Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorshipis much more than a local interest book, although its local connections are still strong (including its editor, Nick Lyons). Its a book for book lovers, culture mavens, and all who still harbor interest in the 1960s and how we got to where we all are now from where we thought we were then.

Michael Rosenthal, also known for his years as a professor at Columbia University, reads from and signs copy of this fun and deep book at Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street in Woodstock, at4 p.m.onSaturday, March 18. Seewww.goldennotebook.comfor further information

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Michael Rosenthal's Barney: Fighting censorship - Hudson Valley One