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With a (symbolic) (but it's a potent symbol) election looming in Iran, the global Persian diaspora is not lacking for news organs that are producing the kind of unfiltered political news that would get you jailed or killed in Iran.

Iran's "Halal Internet" practices extensive censorship that segregates this kind of news from Iranians themselves, but the Halal Internet has an app-shaped hole in it -- the network surveillance and censorship appliances used by the Iranian government are not smart enough to block apps.

Maziar Bahari is a dissident, exiled Iranian journalist who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for 118 days in 2009. Now he runs Iranwire, a leading Persian politics site. They've just launched Sandoogh96 (Vote 2017), an app that publishes independent political news. Word of the app is spreading in Iran, and it's challenging the dominant narrative.

If you have Persian-speaking friends and you'd like to send them some political reading, there's always this edition of Little Brother, which is a high-quality, free translation created by Iranian expats.

Bahari, who now lives in London and directs the online news organization IranWire, hopes to make the process of picking a candidate in such an environment a little easier with new app called Sandoogh96, or Vote2017 in English. It strips away the government spin and helps Iranians figure out which candidates views align most closely with their own. It utilizes a Tinder-like interface, in which users swipe left or right depending on whether they agree or disagree with a given policy proposal, until they find their perfect match. The app includes information on where candidates stand on womens rights, foreign policy, economics, and a range of other issues, as well as local news from IranWires network of citizen journalists.

This App Lets Iranians Swipe Past Political Propaganda [Issie Lapowskie/Wired]

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Wikitribune (strapline: Evidence-based journalism) is a newly launched project from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, conceived of as a crowd-edited, crowd-funded tonic against fake news.

Intelligence officials from the so-called Five Eyes network, which includes the United States FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, are gathering for an annual intelligence-sharing exchange today in New Zealand. Reuters confirmed the get-together, at which spy agency reps from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will also gather.

When occult historian Mitch Horowitzs excellent 2009 book Occult America was published, he received a phone call from an admiring fan: Stephen K. Bannon. Over at Salon, Mitch writes about the right wings weird connection to New Age mysticism: (Bannon) professed deep interest in the books themes, and encouraged me in my next work, One []

All moms are different. But all moms like getting flowers on Mothers Day, and thats a fact (not, however a fact we can document in any fashion.) Instead of getting chewed out for forgetting to call her on the second Sunday of May, you can take care of it ahead of time with Telefloras flower []

Yeah, Bluetooth audio is pretty common these days, so why should you care about these earbuds? Look how happy that woman up above looks. Shes gotFRESHeBUDSin. Boom. Theres your reason. Shes also at the beach and it appears to be a very nice day.But for the sake of promotion, wireless earbuds are fast becoming the []

Gets stuff done, is a good way to be described by anybody. Especially by coworkers or bosses. Because whether youre in finance or a childrens librarian, stuff needs toget done.But how do you make sure stuff gets done? You definitely cant do all the stuff yourself, unless your company/organization/government office consists entirely of you. And []

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Iran sucks at censoring apps, so the Persian diaspora is using them ... - Boing Boing

I basically agree with everything Wesley Smith says about that tortured op-ed in todays New York Times.

But I still have misgivings with some of the pro-free speech arguments I often hear from my friends and colleagues on the right, including here at National Review.

That may be because Ive long been a defender of censorship, rightly understood. I came to this view by way of Irving Kristol.

Irving wasnt for political censorship, and neither am I (depending what you mean by the term). Irving argued that, If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship. But he more famously said, The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie but only if she is paid the minimum wage.

These two quotes are perfectly consistent. What Kristol was getting at was the fact that societies survive by upholding minimum standards of decency. Such views seem awfully quaint in the era of online porn and whatever-the-Hell-this-is. But I think he was basically right. Progressives spent decades arguing for maximalist free speech in areas not traditionally considered speech at all. I am highly dubious that the authors of the First Amendment ever had strip clubs in mind.

But Im no Comstock and, besides, these horses left the barn long ago. What vexes me is that at the same time progressives have maximized the right to free expression to even cover federal subsidies for craptacular art, they have worked assiduously to constrain the only speech the founders really cared about: Political speech.

As Ive written many times, this approach puts the whole argument of free speech rights on its head. Normally, we defend extreme forms of free speech on the grounds that if we maintain these freedoms on the frontiers of our civilization, our core freedoms will not be threatened. This is the form arguments for everything from abortion rights to gun rights usually work. We must protect this questionable thing less we risk this other, unquestionable, core right.

The argument about free speech on campuses is so maddening because these petty magistrates want to crush the free exchange of serious ideas in a setting that is supposed to encourage such exchanges.

But the more important point, at least for me, is not the censoriousness of the campus commissars, but the ideology. Most of the speakers they want to ban arent spewing hate speech whatever that is theyre offering heresy speech. Defenders of murderous Communist regimes arent banned from speaking on campuses heck they often get tenure. Christina Hoff Sommers, Ayan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray are kept off campuses because they are dangerous to leftwing orthodoxy and they expose the inability of college students to deal with arguments that undermine the secular religion of campus leftism.

That said, in a morally and intellectually healthy society, Id have no problem with campuses refusing to lend resources to certain speakers. The idea that, say, the administrators of Yeshiva University, should be required to offer a venue to David Duke strikes me as silly as silly as saying he has a right to run an article in National Review.

In other words, the problem isnt a lack of commitment to free speech (though that is a problem). The free speech argument is downstream of the real dilemma: The people running what should be citadels of civilizational confidence have turned against our civilization. Maybe some atheist speaker has been banned because he would hurt the feelings of religious students, but Ive not heard about it. In other words, these administrators arent principally concerned with the sensitivities of students or even students of color or female students, but of particular students who adhere to a specific ideology. The administrators use them as props and excuses to justify their ideological, quasi-religious, agenda.

The irony comes when the defenders of these totalitarian enclaves must defend their stance to the larger society. Normal people and other elite critics shout What about free speech? And so the secular priests contort themselves into pretzels trying to make the case that their censorship is somehow consistent with some nonsensical notion of a higher principle of what free speech is. They cant be honest and say, We have a hecklers veto for anything that smacks of heresy and were not afraid to use it.

So much of the arguments about free speech would be better served if they skirted the issue of rights and stuck to old-fashioned notions of decency, good manners and sound judgment. But such antiquarian considerations dont do the work the left wants them to do. Those standards wont keep Charles Murray & Co out (though they might leave Richard Spencer in the anonymity he deserves). Worse, such values stem from a mainstream tradition of what college is supposed to be and how democracy is supposed to work, and in the new time religion, those wellsprings have been rendered off-limits.

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What The Free Speech Debate Misses - National Review

All who cherish free expression, especially on campuses, must combat the growing zeal for censorship.

Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas that they dont like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row earlier this month, the more serious incidentat Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and a less virulent one at UCLA.

Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to shut down this notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald. A Facebook post from we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges announced grandiosely that as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.

A Facebook event titled Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald and hosted by Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists encouraged students to protest the event because Mac Donald condemns (the) Black Lives Matter movement, supports racist police officers and supports increasing fascist law and order.

When I arrived on campus, I was shuttled to what was in effect a safe house: a guest suite for campus visitors, with blinds drawn. I could hear the growing crowds chanting and drumming, but I could not see the auditorium that the protesters were surrounding. One female voice rose above the chants with particularly shrill hysteria. From the balcony, I saw a petite blonde walk by, her face covered by a Palestinian head scarf and carrying an amplifier on her back for her bullhorn.

Just before 6p.m., I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator into CMCs Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows.

The administration had decided that I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators outside.

I completed my speech to the accompaniment of chants and banging on the windows. I was able to take two questions from students via live-streaming. But by then, the administrators and police officers in the room, who had spent my talk nervously staring at the windows, decided that things were growing too unruly outside to continue. I was given the cue that the presentation was over. Walkie-talkies were used to coordinate my exit from the Athenaeums kitchen to the exact moment that a black, unmarked Claremont Police Department van rolled up. We passed startled students sitting on the stoop outside the kitchen. Before I entered the van, one student came up and thanked me for coming to Claremont. We sped off to the police station.

Theseevents should be the final wakeup call to the professoriate, coming on the heels of the more dangerousattacks on Charles Murray at Middlebury College and theriots in Berkeley, Calif.,against Milo Yiannapoulos.

When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry. Of course, an ever-growing part of the faculty is the reason that police protection is needed in the first place. Professors in all but the hardest of hard sciences increasingly indoctrinate students in the belief that to be a non-Asian minority or a female in America today is to be the target of nonstop oppression, even, uproariously, if you are among the privileged few to attend a fantastically well-endowed, resource-rich American college.

Those professors also maintain that to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in hate speech, and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty, I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of communication rights.

We are thus cultivating students who lack all understanding of the principles of the American Founding. The mark of any civilization is its commitment to reason and discourse. The great accomplishment of the European enlightenment was to require all forms of authority to justify themselves through rational argument, rather than through coercion or an unadorned appeal to tradition. The resort to brute force in the face of disagreement is particularly disturbing in a university, which should provide a model of civil discourse.

But the students currently stewing in delusional resentments and self-pity will eventually graduate, and some will seize levers of power more far-reaching than those they currently wield over toadying campus bureaucrats and spineless faculty. Unless the campus zest for censorship is combated now, what we have always regarded as a precious inheritance could be eroded beyond recognition, and a soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.

Heather Mac Donaldis the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor ofManhattans City Journal,and the author of The War on Cops. She wrote this for InsideSources.com, and it is adapted from Manhattans http://www.city-journal.org.

Published: April 24, 2017 3:01 AM EDT

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Fight the campus zest for censorship - Philly.com

Apple is once again running into issues with state censorship in China, according toXinhua. Two different agencies will call Apple into their offices to demand tightercontrols over streaming apps in the App Store.

The move is part of a crackdown on streaming content from three Chinese sites: toutiao.com, huoshanzhibo.com, and huajiao.com. Government regulators said those three sites were offering illegal content, including porn.

Those companies had apps in Apples App Store in China.The Beijing Public Security Bureau and Beijing Cultural Market Administrative Law Enforcement Team want Apple more involved in policing such things.

This is part and parcel of the struggle Apple faces in China. On the one hand, Chinas government is an authoritarian communist government in the hands of a single party very focused on perpetuating the control of that party. Really, thats the other hand, too, but the other hand is highly interested in tamping down the success of western companies in China.

And thus we have Apple forced to shut down its iBooks and movie offerings on iTunes. More recently, Apple was forced to pull The New York Times app from the Chinese app store. China hates the idea of its people getting unfettered access to information.

Apple is far from the first U.S. tech giant to face such pressures. Facebook is banned outright. Microsoft chose to censor Bing to stay in business in China, while Google closed down its China business and redirected Chinese queries to its Hong Kong operation.

The problem for Apple is that these kinds of pressures are bound to increase. The bigger Apple gets, the more interest China has in knocking it down. At the same time, the bigger Apple gets, the more it becomes a pawn in political jousting between China and the U.S.

Its a tricky spot for Apple to be in, to be sure.

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Apple Runs Up Against State Censorship in China, Again - The Mac Observer

On Easter Sunday horrific footage of a 74-year-old man being gunned down on a Cleveland sidewalk was posted on Facebook by his killer, reigniting an ongoing debate over how social-media content should be policed.

But effective strategies forblocking every piece of offensive and illegal content have been elusive and may never be 100 percent effective, according to some experts. Others including Facebook itself say more can and should be done to root out offensive content, including hate speech, horrific and illegal snuff videos and fake news items that mold the opinions of gullible users.

Facebook says it receives millions of complaints objecting tocontent everyweek from its nearly 2 billion active users. When the company receives a complaint, an algorithm automatically flags the content, which is then reviewed by moderators to quickly determine if itviolates the law or the companys terms and conditions.

Footage of the murder of Robert Godwin Sr. by deranged killer Steve Stephens, 37, who committed suicide on Tuesday following a police chase in Pennsylvania, was publicly viewable on Stephens Facebook profile for about two hours on Sunday. Facebook said it disabled Stephens account 23 minutes after it received reports of the murder video, but it was publicly viewable long enough for users to capture the footage, prompting a pleaon Twitter from one of Godwins grandchildren for people tostop sharing the video.

Desmond Patton,an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, said that while the Godwin murder video should clearly have been taken down, it one extreme example of a larger issue. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google (which owns YouTube), he said, need to recruit specialists and elicit feedback from community leaders to improve how content is moderated, including material that might not seem offensive to every user.

I study violence on social media and all of the [problematic] content that I see almost never gets taken down, Patton told Salon. If youre just using tech people from Silicon Valley [as content monitors,] youre going to miss a lot of things. You need to diversify who makes these decisions.

Facebook declined to comment to Salon about thestrategies its considering to fortify its efforts to block objectionable and illegal content uploaded by its users, but having a more aggressive content filtering system could have unintended consequences. For example, would a stricterpolicy lead to the censorship of footage like the July 2016 shooting of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer? It could be argued that this video servesthe publics interest because it viscerally highlights the ongoing problem of excessive force inflicted on African-Americans by members of law enforcement.

Sarah Esther Lageson, a sociologist at Rutgers Universitys School of Criminal Justice, saidthat Facebook is under intense pressure to take a stance and define its position on monitoring user-uploaded content, which couldleadto more surveillance something that not all Facebook users will welcome. But she said the benefits of having an open and easy way to produce and share online videos, which can highlight injustices and expose crimes, outweigh the negative effects of giving people so much freedom.

Facebook will likely provide an array of creative solutions and will likely do their best to streamline oversight of user-uploaded content using [artificial intelligence] or machine learning, but I wont make an argument that those efforts would catch every instance of an extremely rare event like this, Lageson told Salon in an email.

Besides, she said in a follow-up phone conversation, horrific crimes take place in public no matter what we do to prevent them; its the new medium by which criminals can advertise their crimes that concerns people.

This is clearly an innovative way of doing something that has always been done: People have always killed people in public, mass shootings happen, she said. That being said the internet is a way to get into peoples homes, which I think is what scares people, that you cant even feel protected from witnessing a crime on your cell phone or your laptop. Its one thing to see a crime happen on the street and another thing to see it when youre on your couch.

As Facebook and other social-networking service providers struggle to moderate the immense content stream coming at them from their users, the solution to the many problems that can arise is complicated. It requires, as Patton suggested, more feedback from experts and community members abouthow to establish policies for all types of harmful, violent and offensive content. And as Lageson pointed out, the fact that people can produce and share content so easily has helped fight crime and injustice.

The solution to the problem of preventing offensive, hateful, violent and murderous content from being distributed onsocial networks is as complicated as people are themselves, and there may never be a solution that satisfies everyones concerns.

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Murder on Facebook raises big censorship questions: What should social-media companies do about violent content? - Salon