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Opposition supporters take part in an unauthorized anti-corruption rally in central Moscow on March 26.

Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty Images

When you hear the words Russia and internet, you probably think of Kremlin-backed hacking. But the internet is also a powerful tool for Putins opposition. Last month, the internet helped spark Russias largest anti-government protests in five years. Russia respondedby blocking access to webpagesthat promoted demonstrations.

This is part of a larger story. Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free internet. Now, Russian authorities would like to imitate Chinas model of internet control. They are unlikely to succeed. The Kremlin will find that once you give people internet freedom, its not so easy to completely take it away.

I lived in Moscow in 2010 after spending years researching internet activism in China. I quickly found that Russia and China had very different attitudes toward the web. The Great Firewall of China blocked overseas sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In Russia, by contrast, you could find almost any information online. This was largely because Russian authorities didnt view the internet as a serious political threat. That changed in late 2011 and early 2012, when Moscow was the site of the largest anti-government protests since the end of the Soviet Union. Social media helped organize those demonstrations, and President Vladimir Putin took note. A law that took effect in late 2012, to give just one example, granted Russian authorities the power to block certain online content.

Moscow clearly admires Beijings approach. Last year, former Chinese internet czar Lu Wei and Great Firewall architect Fang Binxing were invited to speak at a forum on internet safety. The Russians were apparently hoping to learn Chinese techniques for controlling the web. Russia has already taken a page or two from Chinas playbook. While Facebook and Twitter remain accessible in Russia, at least for now, a Russian court ruled to ban LinkedIn, apparently for breaking rules that require companies to store personal data about Russian citizens inside the country. This could be a warning to companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which risk being blocked in Russia if they refuse to follow such rules.

Both Russia and China have made clear that they wish to regulate the internet as they see fit, without outside interference. Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of internet sovereignty, which essentially means that individual countries should have the right to choose their own model of cyber governance. Putin has taken this idea one step further by calling the internet a CIA project. By this logic, Russia needs to proactively protect its own interests in the information sphere whether by cracking down on online dissent or using the internet to spread its own version of events.

Russia internet expert Andrei Soldatov, author of the book The Red Web, says the Kremlin certainly looks for something close to the China approach these days, mostly because many other things failedfiltering is porous, global platforms defy local legislation and are still available. Soldatov says that the government would like to have direct control of critical infrastructure such as the national system of domain distribution, internet exchange points, and cables that cross borders. He adds that this approach, which may not even be successful, would be more of an emergency measure than a realistic attempt to regulate the internet on a day-to-day basis.

Chinas method has worked because Beijing has long recognized the internet as both an economic opportunity and a political threat. Chinas isolated internet culture has given rise to formidable domestic companies. It was once easy to dismiss Chinas local tech players as mere copycatsSina Weibo imitating Twitter, Baidu imitating Google, and so on. But now, some of these companies, notably Tencents WeChat, have become so formidable that we may soon see Western companies imitating them. In the meantime, Chinese internet users arent necessarily longing for their Western competitors.

In Russia, however, American sites like YouTube have become very powerful. The recent demonstrations were in part sparked by an online report by opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, who alleged that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had amassed a fortune in yachts, mansions and estates. Navalnys video on YouTube, viewed more than 16 million times, detailed this alleged corruption. Navalny called for protests after his demands for investigating official corruption was denied by the Russian Parliament. According to Global Voices, the Russian prosecutors officerecently requested the blockingof a YouTubevideo calling on young people to rally.

Russian blogger Elia Kabanov believes that YouTube is now too big to block. I doubt the Kremlin will go there, he said. They blocked LinkedIn mostly because it was a niche site in Russia and nobody cared. And of course the government propaganda machine is using YouTube a lot, so it wouldn't make any sense to block it. If they try to take down protest announcements on platforms on YouTube, Kabanov says, new ones will appear. I really cant see the way for the Kremlin to implement the Chinese model now: Everything is too connected, their own agencies are using all these services.

Russia does have its own domestic social networks, of course. VKontakte (VK), for example, is far more influential than Facebook. Soldatov notes that VK played an unusually big role in the recent protests.But Facebook still has a devoted Russian following, especially among political activists.

No government can entirely control the flow of information. Even in China, those determined to find information can find a tool, say a virtual private network, to jump over the firewall. Russian censors will face a similar challenge. In recent years, there has been an ongoing increase in Russian use of Tor, a browser that can be used to circumvent censorship. As a 2015 Global Voices article noted, the increase in censorship closely mirrors the upward trend in interest towards Tor.

In the short term Russian street protests may fizzle out, especially as Moscow cracks down on dissent. But the story wont end there. The internet on its own will not cause a revolution in Russia, but it can be an effective tool for organization. Beijing figured this out a long time ago, but the Kremlin is learning it too late.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming Attacks on the Press: The New Face of Censorship, a book from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Russia Is Trying to Copy China's Approach to Internet Censorship - Slate Magazine

Wallkill Senior High School just censored my lecture about censorship.

Several months ago, the school in an upstate New York community known for its prisons and apple orchards invited me to participate in its annual Authors Day event on April 4 and 5. Published writers gab to administrators, librarians and educators over a buffet dinner and then lecture to several classes of students the following day. Its a schlep from Manhattan, but writers receive a modest honorarium and I enjoy talking to kids about my passion.

The talk focused on my book, Killed Cartoons: Casualties From The War On Free Expression (W.W. Norton), a collection of editorial art that newspapers and magazines deemed too controversial to publish. The schools website graciously described me as a top journalist on the front lines of world news and politics who has written 2 critically acclaimed books on the censorship of political cartoons and news articles.

Now I had been warned that the school is located in a conservative district, and I understood that the underlying topic of my talk the embattled free press in the Trump era could prove controversial. But the school should have known what it was getting into. After all, I did not write a young adult novel about a talking purple whale, but hard-hitting nonfiction books on censorship. And my first audience primarily educators with a mission to opening minds for a living would, I assumed, be interested in my message even if it werent exactly theirs.

I assumed wrong.

Around dessert time, I walked to the lectern in the neighborhood Italian restaurant and joked that the audience would be getting a second helping of broccoli.

Unlike the other authors, creators of childrens books who spoke ad hoc about how they became writers, I prepared remarks, because I had something important to say: The leader of the free world has declared war on our free press, and his multi-pronged assault endangers our democracy.

On February 24, President Trump stood before an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., and smeared journalists by calling them enemy of the people.

That particular phrase, enemy of the people, holds a sinister place in the history of political rhetoric, as I told my fidgety audience. Among those who have launched such verbal missiles to demonize their opponents are Adolf Hitlers minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who labeled Jews enemies of the German people murderous Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and Russian autocrat Joseph Stalin.

As the BBC recently recounted, during Stalins long, brutal reign, out-of-favour artists and politicians were designated enemies and many were sent to hard labour camps or killed. Others were stigmatised and denied access to education and employment.

People stared at their brownies and avoided my eyes, except some of the bulked-up guys, maybe gym teachers, who looked like they wanted to fire a dodge ball at my head.

I then noted that just last week, in a tweet that sailed mostly under the radar, Trump, who has sued journalists for writing unflattering stories about him in the past, proposed weakening the laws protecting a free press. The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years, he wrote, ominously adding, Change libel laws?

Eviscerating the laws protecting publishing (which is not unimaginable if Senate Republicans eliminate the filibuster for legislation, as some observers believe will happen) would make it much harder for journalists to do our jobs exposing public corruption and corporate malfeasance and much easier for the super-rich and big business to suppress the truth.

The Trump administrations assault on the media goes beyond attempts at intimidation. The presidents recent budget proposal would eliminate the relatively modest government support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of the most respected sources of news in the country.

I also pointed out that Trump doesnt hate all media. In fact, hes a fan of Alex Jones, a racist radio host who argued that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the U.S. government, and that the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, was a giant hoax.

Not long after Trump launched his presidential campaign, he appeared as a guest on Joness InfoWars show to flatter the host. Your reputation is amazing, gushed the president, a comment that I still find amazing.

Someone walked out about then. Not slinked out to the bathroom, but marched out in audible disgust. Now I know how comedians feel when they bomb.

Maybe some history will work, I thought to myself.

Our Founding Fathers understood that a vibrant, independent press and a well-informed citizenry stood in the way of tyranny and was essential to the success of their experiment, as they referred to democracy. Thats why they included freedom of the press in the First Amendment. Unfortunately, only 11% of Americans could identify freedom of the press as a constitutionally enshrined First Amendment right, according to the Newseum Institute.

Thomas Jefferson, who endured intense scrutiny from reporters during his presidency, nevertheless consistently defended the field of journalism. Were it left to me, he wrote in 1787, to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.

Donald Trumps war on the press has prompted protests from prominent members of his own party. Former president George W. Bush, hardly a liberal, pointed out that we need the media to hold people like me to account. I mean, power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and its important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power.

Without a free press, Sen. John McCain worried that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time thats how dictators get started.

That approach didnt work either, so I wrapped up, explaining that the administrations palpable hostility prompts some media organizations to rededicate themselves to the mission of public interest journalism and others to cower in fear and engage in self-censorship. And, that editorial cartoonists are arguably the most vulnerable of journalisms foot soldiers, given the simple power of their expression. A vulnerability shown by the number of full-time cartoonists at newspapers dropping, from about 2000 in the year 1900, to around 90 when I published my book in 2007, and fewer than 30 today.

Reprinted with permission of Paul Combs.

Killed by the Tampa Tribune, 2005.

Youve been a terrific audience

Keepin it light, David, said one of my hosts, who later delivered the news by phone that my talk to the students the next day would be canceled due to a scheduling conflict. I am pretty sure that the other authors, who discussed less contentious topics, such as the teacher who first inspired them to read, spoke right on schedule.

The students arguably are the ones losing out. They would have benefited from a interacting with a professional journalist with experience on the front lines of world news and politics, and by civilly discussing polarizing issues with someone they might not necessarily agree with.

Still, I learned a few lessons from the experience: The divisions in this country are deeper than I expected; people seem less willing than ever to engage in debate, and the status of the press down to about 20% in 2016 from 51% in 1979, [according to Gallup], (http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx) is seriously damaged, hindering our ability to effectively communicate sometimes difficult-to-digest truths.

On the bright side, at least I didnt have to eat lunch in the cafeteria.

David Wallis is the Forwards opinion editor. Contact him at wallis@forward.com

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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Trigger Warning: A High School Censors A Speech About Censorship - Forward

(Photo: the International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism and Responsibility conference)

It was originally scheduled in 2014 for the Britains Southampton University and was canceled after Zionists pressured university officials. It was briefly rescheduled once more in Southampton in response to outrage over the censorship only to be canceled once again. However, lead organizers, Oren Ben-Dor, James Bowen and George Bisharat did not give up. In the intervening months questions about the legitimacy of Israeli government actions only increased, and the original conference organizers were joined by more scholars and international legal experts determined to carry out a serious discussion about Palestine and international law.

For many of the attendees, the timing this spring couldnt have been better. The ascendancy of the right wing in Europe and the United States and the recent vociferous reactions to the UN report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley made the discussions all the more timely and necessary. The warm Irish welcome was such that the first two days were actually held in the atrium auditorium of Corks City Hall. The sessions were packed at both City Hall and the Sunday session at the University of Cork. Although there was security hired by conference organizers, there were no violent incidents, nor even any sustained complaints from the audience. The only sustained reactions were the enthusiastic applause outbursts whenever the courage and persistence of the conference organizers was mentioned.

Eitan Bronstein from the Israeli human rights group De-Colonizert speaks at the International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism and Responsibility conference. (Photo: Facebook)

Richard Falk, co-author of the recent UN report:Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA),was the first keynote speaker with amagisterial overview of the legal history of the state formation of Israel. Ugo Mattai from the University of Turin and Hastings College of Law was the keynote for the second day and gave an eloquent perspective on the functional limits of international law. Other presenters included Ghada Karmi, University of Exeter; Vasuki Nesiah, NYU; Anthony Lowstedt, Webster University in Vienna; anti-house demolition Activist Jeff Halper; London barrister Salma Karmi-Ayyoub; Jaffa journalist Ofra Yeshua-Lyth; Joel Kovel, NY writer and activist and many others.

The sessions, listed with titles such as Legitimacy, Self Determination and Political Zionism and Settler Colonialism: Exceptional or Typical, could have veered off into repetitive rhetoric and bitter denouncements, but the skillful panel arrangements and choice of speakers by the organizers made for thoughtful, though sometimes intense discussion and reflection.

Joel Kovel, speaking at Cork conference

Several key Jewish academics and the presentation by Buckingham Professor Geoffrey Alderman insured that pro-Israel voices were also presented. The only tense moment came when someone in the audience questioned a panelists contention that Israeli children are being taught to hate. That discussion was quickly defused by expanding to include statements about diverse cultures and the need to empathize with the other.

One of the sessions on the last day was enhanced with a variety of maps. Instead of the usual depressing images of encroaching wall construction and escalating settlement development, in this discussion the maps were shown as possible guides for potential future reconciliation and repatriation. Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta from the Land Society of Palestine showed slides of map points locating carefully researched sites of former Palestinian homes and villages placed over a map of current Israeli population centers. When viewed via his overlapping graphics, one could see that there was room on the land for ensuring space for the right to return. As an experienced civil engineer, Abu-Sitta outlined some of the planning and construction that could be created for a truly authentic peace process. His plan, he assured the audience, would cost a lot less than even one year of U.S. aid to Israel, and, as he pointed out, would only be a one-time cost, not an annual expenditure. One should be cautious about any technological solution to human problems, but Abu-Sittas positive and good humored look at what has been such an insoluble issue was refreshing and persuasive.

Eitan Bronstein Aparicio also used cartography in a positive presentation. He passed out copies of a large fold-out map which shows the many historic settlements that were destroyedbut not just Palestinian ones. His map includes Jewish and Syrian destructions also from way before 1948 until 2016. This is part of the extensive work Bronstein Aparicio has done to increase understanding of the history of land and population centers for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Throughout the conference, there were occasional Thoughts for the Day by Philip Franses, a representative from the Schumacher College. These short presentations must have been scheduled by the organizers to circumvent what was the anticipated dissension. Like the bored security personnel, these hedges against rancor were completely unnecessary at this overwhelmingly positive and hopeful conference. The expected dissension was non-existent and these programmed new age moments seemed forced and patronizing. The mantra of were all equal humans and we are the world moments seemed rather insulting.

The final panel included a presentation by Cheryl Harris, Professor ofConstitutional Law at UCLA, who began with a review of events in Ferguson, Missouri, and a short history of the Black Lives Matter movement. According to Harris, this movement has become aware of the need to connect with international struggles against racism and the global struggle for justice. Both Harris and Richard Falk adroitly, with diplomatic grace, responded to the feel good, everyones equal proscription by reminding the audience that Franses confident rhetoric did not take power into account. Yes, all lives do matter, but a togetherness chant is not going to remedy unjust situationsin Missouri or Palestine.

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It happened! Cork conference overcomes academic censorship ... - Mondoweiss

Anticipating federal elections in September, Germanys Minister of Justice has proposed a new law aimed at limiting the spread of hate speech and fake news on social media sites. But the proposal, called the Social Network Enforcement Bill or NetzDG, goes far beyond a mere encouragement for social media platforms to respond quickly to hoaxes and disinformation campaigns and would create massive incentives for companies to censor a broad range of speech.

The NetzDG scopes very broadly: It would apply not only to social networking sites but to any other service that enables users to exchange or share any kind of content with other users or make such content accessible to other users. That would mean that email providers such as Gmail and ProtonMail, web hosting companies such as Greenhost and 1&1, remote storage services such as Dropbox, and any other interactive website could fall within the bills reach.

Under the proposal, providers would be required to promptly remove illegal speech from their services or face fines of up to 50 million euros. NetzDG would require providers to respond to complaints about Violating Content, defined as material that violates one of 24 provisions of the German Criminal Code. These provisions cover a wide range of topics and reveal prohibitions against speech in German law that may come as a surprise to the international community, including prohibitions against defamation of the President (Sec. 90), the state, and its symbols (Sec. 90a); defamation of religions (Sec. 166); distribution of pornographic performances (Sec. 184d); and dissemination of depictions of violence (Sec. 131).

NetzDG would put online service providers in the position of a judge, requiring that they accept notifications from users about allegedly Violating Content and render a decision about whether that content violates the German Criminal Code. Providers would be required to remove obvious violations of the Code within 24 hours and resolve all other notifications within 7 days. Providers are also instructed to delete or block any copies of the Violating Content, which would require providers not only to remove content at a specified URL but to filter all content on their service.

The approach of this bill is fundamentally inconsistent with maintaining opportunities for freedom of expression and access to information online. Requiring providers to interpret the vagaries of 24 provisions of the German Criminal Code is a massive burden. Determining whether a post violates a given law is a complex question that requires deep legal expertise and analysis of relevant context, something private companies are not equipped to do, particularly at mass scale. Adding similar requirements to apply the law of every country in which these companies operate (or risk potentially bankrupting fines) would be unsustainable.

The likely response from hosts of user-generated content would be to err on the side of caution and take down any flagged content that broaches controversial subjects such as religion, foreign policy, and opinions about world leaders. And individuals inside and outside of Germany would likely have minimal access to a meaningful remedy if a provider censors their lawful speech under NetzDG.

The proposal is also completely out of sync with international standards for promoting free expression online. It has long been recognized that limiting liability for intermediaries is a key component to support a robust online speech environment. As then-Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Frank La Rue, noted in his 2011 report:

Holding intermediaries liable for the content disseminated or created by their users severely undermines the enjoyment of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, because it leads to self-protective and over-broad private censorship, often without transparency and the due process of the law.

The Council of Europe has likewise cautioned against the consequences of shifting the burden to intermediaries to determine what speech is illegal, in conjunction with the report it commissioned in 2016 on comparative approaches to blocking, filtering, and takedown of content: [T]he decision on what constitutes illegal content is often delegated to private entities, which in order to avoid being held liable for transmission of illegal content may exercise excessive control over information accessible on the Internet.

Shielding intermediaries from liability for third-party content is the first of the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, a set of principles supported by more than 100 civil society organizations worldwide. The Manila Principles further caution that Intermediaries must not be required to restrict content unless an order has been issued by an independent and impartial judicial authority that has determined that the material at issue is unlawful. It is a mistake to force private companies to be judge, jury, and executioner for controversial speech.

CDT recommends that the German legislature reject this proposed measure. It clearly impinges on fundamental rights to free expression and due process. The challenges posed to our democracies by fake news, hate speech, and incitement to violence are matters of deep concern. But laws that undermine individuals due process rights and co-opt private companies into the censorship apparatus for the state are not the way to defend democratic societies. Governments must work with industry and civil society to address these problems without undermining fundamental rights and the rule of law.

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German Proposal Threatens Censorship on Wide Array of Online Services - Center for Democracy and Technology (blog)

Censorship is long proclaimed as one of the worst moral crimes against the press or the peoples voice. Oppressive, in fact. But where is the line drawn on what is and what is not censorship? I argue that censorship only occurs when the platform being controlled is a public platform.

Twitter and Facebook have both taken part in a campaign against fake news. Twitter has been much quieter about this, preferring to kick back and prevent certain hashtags from trending. Mr. Zuckerberg from Facebook, on the other hand, has proposed solutions such as attaching warnings to posts that other have flagged as false.

Are either of these situations censorship? If Twitter was a right to all people, or if all stories were constitutionally protected to be published, then probably yes, it would be censorship. But that is not the case.

It turns out, Twitter owns Twitter and Facebook owns Facebook, and they have the right to allow content and users to participate in their networks as they see fit.

As Americans, we tend to not like when someone prevents us from saying what we want. We need to make sure we had a right to use that platform in the first place.

Colleges around the country have blocked speakers, including more conservative speakers like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos, from giving lectures to students. Ignoring all the implications of blocking speakers, the colleges who do so are usually private, and do have a right to do so.

Censorship can only occur on public platforms because it is only government who is truly wrong to pick and choose which ideas as acceptable.

During the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic establishment charged Martin Luther with heresy for his criticisms of the Catholic church.

Another instance comes from an interview of a Saudi Arabian ambassador to the UN, Abdallah al-Mouallimi. He states that it is subversive for an atheist to go out into public and tell others that he does not believe in God, and that the atheist could be a terrorist.

In both cases, the government is forcing out any ideologies that do not align with itself. Clearly censorship.

Among other things, censorship has been generalized as part of the sharpening of the blade which divides the nations ideology. However, a case by case study woul be the best way to be honest about what is and is not censorship.

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The student voice of Mines since 1920 - The Oredigger Newspaper