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Liberal journalists and celebrities praised the Badlands National Parks brief moment of defiance against the Trump administration Tuesday when it published a series of tweets related to global warming.

When Badlands tweets were taken down, journalists and actors decried the fascist Trump administration for censoring scientific facts.

Well, it turned out none of that was true. The National Park Service put out a statement claiming a former employee compromised its official Twitter account. The Park Service also said the Trump administration did not tell them to remove the tweets, and that it did it on its own.

So, much for a defiant agency.

But the Park Service statement came out after sensational media headlines. The Washington Post wrote For a few hours, Badlands National Park was bad to the bone in defiance of Trump.

The Verge reported, Badlands National Park stands up to Trump administration by tweeting facts. Some journalists took to Twitter to vent their frustration with fascism in America.

Badlands National Parks Twitter account published a series messages about the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, claiming the greenhouse gas increased ocean acidity since pre-industrial times.

The tweets seemed out of line with the National Park Services mission, especially since Badlands National Park is in landlocked South Dakota and wouldnt be affected by ocean acidification.

The NPS preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations, according to its website.

New York Magazine tied the compromised Badlands tweets to a Trump administration gag order for the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on talking to the press and putting out officials statements and documents.

With new rules like this in place, wheres the public going to get its scientific information? NY Magazine asked, unironically.

The tweets also came after at least two other government social media accounts were used to share posts critical of President Trump. The National Park Service retweeted a New York Times post showing how much smaller Trumps inauguration crow was than President Obamas in 2008. The Parks Service also shared an Esquire.com article claiming mentions of climate change were scrubbed from Whitehouse.gov.

The Parks Service temporarily suspended its Twitter activity before apologizing Saturday.

Then the National Hurricane Center shared a Facebook post from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders critical of Trump. NHC issued an apology before deleting that as well.

So, when a rogue former Badlands National Park started tweeting about global warming, then took them down, celebrities went wild.

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Excerpt from:
Journos, Celebrities Falsely Claim 'Fascism,' 'Censorship' After National Park Tweets Taken Offline - Daily Caller

Less than three months into his new post as culture and Islamic guidance minister, Reza Salehi Amiri boasted about banning ten films from entering the Tehran Fajr International Film Festival, in line with the policies of the supreme leader, on January 19, 2017.

For the first time, we cut out films with feminist and inappropriate themes and supported 30 films made by young directors about the sacred defense (Iran-Iraq War), he said during a meeting with Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, a senior Qom-based theologian.

Amiri did not name the films, but the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has learned that they included productions by directors who focused in part on controversial topics like the hijab, which the Islamic Republic forces all women to cover their hair with in public, and domestic violence.

Some directors who had their films banned have responded angrily to the ban by decrying the governments repeated interference with their artistic process.

I will no longer make any films where women are wearing headscarves in a private space or in front of strangers, saidveteran Iranian director Kianoush Ayari, via a statement on his website on January 8, after learning that his latest film, Kanape (Canopy), was rejected even after he tried to pacify censors by showing four actresses wearing wigs to avoid religious objections to their shaved heads.

Im in this situation because of my commitment to realism, he added.

Tahmineh Milani, one of Irans leading female directors, also blamed the censors.

The truth is that my film deals with the subject of domestic violence, which is very important to me and my husband, and thats why it was not accepted by the festivals selection committee, she wrote on her Instagram page.Thats the only reason.

I hope when its released in cinemas, it will help reduce domestic violence, she added. We believe it deserved to be supported, but that didnt happen.

Salehi took over the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in November 2016 after the resignation of his predecessor, Ali Jannati, who fought many political battles with hardline conservatives over censorship and cultural issues.

Excerpt from:
Prominent Iranian Directors Decry Censorship After Minister Bans Films From Tehran Fajr Festival - International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

French authorities ordered the blockage or removal of more than 2,700 websites in 2016, Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said Tuesday, a spike in censorship that some critics in the tech industry fear will do little to snuff out extremist content online.

Le Roux told a cybersecurity conference in the northern French city of Lille that his government has requested blocks for 834 websites and that 1,929 more be pulled from search engines' results as part of the fight against "child pornographic and terrorist content."

"To face an extremely serious terror threat, we've given ourselves unprecedented means to reinforce the efficacy of our actions," he said, also pointing to reinforced online policing units and new forensic laboratories for analyzing digital evidence.

Le Roux didn't provide a breakdown or other details but the website censorship numbers represent a sharp increase over the figures tracked by France's online privacy watchdog, known by its French acronym CNIL. In April, CNIL reported that 312 sites were blocked and 855 de-listing requests were made in France between March 11, 2015, and Feb. 29, 2016.

French authorities can block sites without a judge's order under a 2011 law that was brought into effect in after jihadist attacks killed 17 people at a satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in January 2015. The first blockage was reported two months later.

Some in the audience were skeptical that yanking search results or blocking sites in France would work at all.

Octave Klaba, who founded OVH, one of Europe's top internet hosting providers, said the expanding censorship regime amounted to political posturing given the global nature of the internet.

"I understand it, but it's useless," Klaba told The Associated Press after Le Roux's speech. "I come from tech. I know how it works."

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com

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French Internet Censorship Rose Sharply in 2016 - ABC News - ABC News

Mashable

Trump nominee pledges to shield NOAA climate scientists from intimidation, censorship Mashable SEATTLE Climate scientists throughout the federal government are fearing an onslaught of budget cuts and censorship policies from the President Donald Trump administration, with sweeping changes expected governing how climate science is funded ... and more »

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Trump nominee pledges to shield NOAA climate scientists from intimidation, censorship - Mashable

Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 12:45 p.m.

Details from Mythological Time by Sun Xun (2016)

Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Censorship can look at lot different depending on your vantage point. To observers in the West, the policies of the Chinese government the routine harassment of journalists and activists, the suppression of internet access, the wholesale erasure of certain words and events from the nation's history are abhorrent. The fact that the country's most internationally celebrated contemporary artist is Ai Weiwei, whose years-long house arrest galvanized the art world, is a case in point. But within China's borders, life continues, if not flourishes: Facebook can be accessed with simple VPN software, and political discourse carries on, with prohibited words replaced by puns to circumvent the restrictive firewall.

The nine newly commissioned works featured in "Tales of Our Time" at the Guggenheim highlight this contradiction of context. The Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese artists in the show all set out to redraw and complicate the narrative of China, which, in the case of Guggenheim's audience, is one that has been perceived from the West. The title of the show comes from a book by Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese writer whose work can be read as a symbol for China's fast-changing political landscape at the turn of the twentieth century: ancient myths and fables recast for a modern audience. Perhaps inspired by Lu, the China on display in the Guggenheim is one that emerges through history, however revisionist, and what we make of it.

Taxi, by Taiwanese artist Chia-En Jao, illustrates this strategy. The video installation follows Jao's conversations with Taipei cabbies as they drive him to historically fraught sites in the city: the Presidential Office; the Grand Hotel; the former home of Lin Yi-hsiung, a leader of the democratization movement whose mother and daughters were murdered while under 24-hour police surveillance. As one driver regales his passenger with details from the incident, his conversation drifts to his own loose recollections from 1980. None of the segments show the destination or much else of the route, and conversations are interrupted by a phone call from a mistress or chatter about weekend hobbies. What's important is not the real historical site, but the personal narratives it has spawned and intersected.

Kan Xuan, a Chinese artist who has studied in the Netherlands, also uses the personal to frame the historical. For Ku? L Er, which means "to circle the land" in Northern Chinese colloquial speech, Kan documented sites of 1,010 ancient cities. Many settlements have been eroded beyond recognition, with the frame of Kan's camera being the only visible border left. Kan's hand-drawn maps of the sites are projected nearby, blurring the lines between the real and remembered and highlighting the disorienting quality one's personal narratives bring to experience.

Not all works in the show are as nuanced. At the time of my visit, packs of visitors were swarming around Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's installation, trying to take photos of an industrial machine engaged in the Sisyphean task of squeegeeing up a blood-like substance that is constantly seeping back to its original place. Sun and Peng's beautiful, dancing machine and its senseless task is thought-provoking, though the "blood" can't help but remind of the painful yet familiar tale of the Chinese lives that have been sacrificed for the country's breakneck pace of progress.

Zhou Taos Land of the Throat (2016)

Courtesy the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Collection

In recent years, the Guggenheim has been expanding and diversifying its offerings of Chinese art. Its 2014 exhibition "Wang Jianwei: Time Temple," for example, was the Beijing-based artist's first solo show in America. Though Wang's work has been part of the Chinese avant-garde since the 1980s, his performances, installations, and new-media pieces have never chimed with the commercialism that lifted much Chinese art to fame on the international circuit. The driving force behind this effort is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, whose $10 million donation sponsored a series of shows including "Tales of Our Time" and a forthcoming exhibition in 2017 titled "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World." One can't help but wonder how a Hong Kong foundation understands the notion of Chinese territory, or whether this reimagining of Chinese history is more readily staged in an American museum than a Chinese one.

Xiaoyu Weng, the Robert H.N. Ho associate curator who organized the show, tells me that Chinese censorship of artists is an "urban myth": "It's a very voyeuristic perception from the West, that artists in China would not have freedom to say what they want to say." For Weng, the exact aim of this exhibition is to challenge these established perceptions of Chinese art. In putting the show together, she looked for artists who are not simply market-driven, nor producing work that is only dominated by politics, despite their addressing of sociopolitical issues. The fact that many of them have spent time abroad helps to unmask a myth of another kind: that Chinese art develops in isolation from international discourses.

According to Weng, "Tales" offers only a glimpse at the deeper debates taking place in China. "There's actually a constant discussion ongoing among Chinese intellectuals about what defines modern China," she explains. "If you really go into China, you can go much deeper into the topics brought up in this exhibition." In its best moments, the show presents voices from the inside without resorting to over-translation. The joy, and challenge, of this exhibition seems to lie precisely in the tension between what is experienced inside China and what is seen from the West. In that respect, the show's success is twofold: how its international stage can shape the artists' place in Chinese discourse, and how its stories can challenge what the American audience thinks it has seen.

Tales of Our Time Through March 10 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Avenue guggenheim.org

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Chinese Artists Confront Censorship, Memory, and History at the Guggenheim - Village Voice