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Todays quote of the day comes from a CDT Chinese faux Dragon Seal visual about acclaimed sixth-generation filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuais battle to get his latest film Above the Dust (Wt, fertile soil) past the censors at Chinas National Film Bureau. The film will make its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, minus the censors seal of approval:

Large text: This film was submitted to the censors in October 2022. Fifteen months later, despite 50 alterations and deletions, censors have yet to approve this film. Small text, at bottom: According to Variety, director Wang Xiaoshuais new film Above the Dust will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival without the Dragon Seal of approval from Chinas National Film Bureau. Chinese authorities have contacted the director and ordered him to withdraw from the festival or risk punishment.

Varietys Patrick Frater explored the films historical subject matter and the directors commitment to having his film screened in Berlin:

With a young teen boy as the protagonist, the film depicts a hardscrabble family in a village in northwest China in 2009. While their neighbors slowly migrate to the city, the boys parents dig up the arid land in search of family heirlooms. Communicating with the ghost of his grandfather, the boy learns about the 1950s reforms that transferred peasant-owned land to the government and about the disastrous Great Leap Forward.

[] Wang will go ahead with the screening of Above the Dust in Berlin without the Dragon Seal of approval from Chinas National Film Bureau. Without that pre-credits signifier, no film from China may legally play in Chinese theaters or show in an overseas festival.

[] Chinese authorities have contacted Wang and ordered him to withdraw the film from the festival or risk severe consequences for both Wang and its Chinese production company. The movie is an unofficial co-production with the Netherlands Lemming Film.

Theres pressure on the production company and myself. A lot of pressure. It is forbidden to show the film without a Dragon Seal in Berlin. But Berlin selected it. Im happy about that, Wang tells Variety. This is the film that I wanted to make. About China. About our lives. About Chinese history and reality. [Source]

In other film censorship news, documentary filmmaker Chen Pinlin has been arrested for making a documentary about the White Paper Protests that occurred in late 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) provided more detail:

On February 18, Chinese authorities charged Chen, who published a documentary on anti-COVID restriction protests in late 2023, with picking quarrels and provoking trouble, according to Chinese human rights news websites Minsheng Guancha and Weiquanwang. On January 5, Shanghai police arrested Chen, who published work under the pseudonym Plato, and detained the filmmaker at the Baoshan Detention Center [in Shanghai].

[] The protests, also known as the White Paper Movement, started when a deadly apartment fire in the northwest region of Xinjiang killed at least 10 people in November 2022, and questions were raised about whether the governments stringent lockdown measures prevented the victims from escaping.

Chen posted the documentary Not the Foreign Force on the first anniversary of the White Paper Movement on YouTube and X, formerly Twitter, in late November 2023, according to those reports. The documentary compiled extensive protest footage, translated social media posts demanding freedom of expression, and reported that some protesters remained detained. Chens X account and YouTube channel were deleted within that week. [Source]

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Quote of the Day: Fifteen Months Later, Despite 50 Alterations and Deletions, Censors Have Yet to Approve This Film. - China Digital Times

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By Carolina Are, Northumbria University, Newcastle |

Imagine you share an Instagram post about an upcoming protest, but none of your hundreds of followers like it. Are none of your friends interested in it? Or have you been shadow banned?

Social media can be useful for political activists hoping to share information, calls to action and messages of solidarity. But throughout Israels war on Gaza, social media users have suspected they are being censored through shadow banning for sharing content about Palestine.

Shadow banning describes loss of visibility, low engagement and poor account growth on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Users who believe they are shadow banned suspect platforms may be demoting or not recommending their content and profiles to the main discovery feeds. People are not notified of shadow banning: all they see is the poor engagement they are getting.

Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy non-governmental organisation, has recently documented what it calls systemic censorship of Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram. After several accusations of shadow banning, Meta (Facebook and Instagrams parent company) argued the issue was due to a bug and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content.

I have been observing shadow bans both as a researcher and social media user since 2019. In addition to my work as an academic, I am a pole dancer and pole dance instructor. Instagram directly apologised to me and other pole dancers in 2019, saying they blocked a number of the hashtags we use in error. Based on my own experience, I conducted and published one of the very first academic studies on this practice.

Content moderation is usually automated carried out by algorithms and artificial intelligence. These systems may also, inadvertently or by design, pick up borderline controversial content when moderating at scale.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Most platforms are based in the US and govern even global content according to US law and values. Shadow banning is a case in point, typically targeting sex work, nudity and sexual expression prohibited by platforms community guidelines.

Moderation of nudity and sexuality has become more stringent since 2018, after the introduction of two US laws, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta), that aimed to crack down on online sex trafficking.

The laws followed campaigns by anti-pornography coalitions and made online platforms legally liable for enabling sex trafficking (a crime) and sex work (a job). Fearing legal action, platforms began over-censoring any content featuring nudity and sexuality around the world, including of legal sex work, to avoid breaching Fosta-Sesta.

Although censorship of nudity and sex work is heralded as a means to protect children and victims of non-consensual image sharing, it can have serious consequences for the livelihoods and wellbeing of sex workers and adult content creators, as well as for freedom of expression.

Platforms responses to these laws should have been a warning about what was to come for political speech.

Social media users reported conversations and information about Black Lives Matter protests were shadowbanned in 2020. Now journalistic, activist and fact-checking content about Palestine also appears to be affected by this censorship technique.

Platforms are unlikely to admit to a shadow ban or bias in their content moderation. But their stringent moderation of terrorism and violent content may be leading to posts about Palestine that is neither incitement to violence nor terror-related getting caught in censorships net.

For most social media users, shadow banning is difficult to prove. But as a researcher and a former social media manager, I was able to show it was happening to me.

As my passion for pole dancing (and posts about it) grew, I kept a record of my reach and follower numbers over several years. While my skills were improving and my follower count was growing, I noticed my posts were receiving fewer views. This decline came shortly after Fosta-Sesta was approved.

It wasnt just me. Other pole dancers noticed that content from our favourite dancers was no longer appearing in our Instagram discovery feeds. Shadowbanning appeared to also apply to swathes of pole-dancing-related hashtags.

I was also able to show that when content surrounding one hashtag is censored, algorithms restrict similar content and words. This is one reason why some creators use algospeak editing content to trick the algorithm into not picking up words it would normally censor, as seen in anti-vaccine content throughout the pandemic.

TikTok and Twitter do not notify users that their account is shadow banned, but, as of 2022, Instagram does. By checking your account status in the apps settings, you can see if your content has been marked as non-recommendable due to potential violations of Instagrams content rules. This is also noticeable if other users have to type your full profile name for you to appear in search. In short, you are harder to find. In August 2023, X owner Elon Musk said that the company was working on a way for users to see if they had been affected by shadow bans, but no such function has been introduced. (The Conversation has contacted X for comment.)

The ability to see and appeal a shadow ban are positive changes, but mainly a cosmetic tweak to a freedom of expression problem that mostly targets marginalised groups. While Instagram may now be disclosing their decisions, the effect is the same: users posting about nudity, LGBTQ+ expression, protests and Palestine are often the ones to claim they are shadow banned.

Social media platforms are not just for fun, theyre a source of work and political organising, and a way to spread important information to a large audience. When these companies censor content, it can affect the mental health and the livelihoods of people who use it.

These latest instances of shadow banning show that platforms can pick a side in active crises, and may affect public opinion by hiding or showing certain content. This power over what is visible and what is not should concern us all.

Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow, Northumbria University, Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Social Media Users say their Palestine Content is being Shadow-Banned -- How to Know if it's Happening to You - Informed Comment

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Kailey Krantz| Staff Writer

Its no secret social media has a ubiquitous presence in our 21st century lives. Banning it is a redundant, knee-jerk decision that only promotes censorship rather than encourages safety.

Floridas SB 1788 states that anyone under 16 years old is prohibited from creating new social media accounts. It will also terminate existing accounts and implore social media platforms such as Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube and TikTok to use age verification without a parental permission exemption.

The problem with this bill is so many social media users are under the age of 16 that theres no feasible way for the Florida government to kick out every single user in that demographic.

Currently, there are an estimated 834 million users on TikTok and 25% are aged 10-19. Those 208 million users are registered minors which eclipses Floridas population of 22 million people.

Even the federal government has tried to ban TikTok numerous times and the app is still being used in the U.S. Thats a testament to the staying power of social media in the 21st century.

I understand the concerns of parents wanting their kids to have a safe digital experience and not subject them to advertisers without their consent. Especially to avoid another Elsagate event where innocent fictional characters from Disney and Marvel were utilized to depict inappropriate scenarios through child-friendly videos.

However, banning minors altogether isnt going to stop this kind of content from appearing again, nor is it going to stop them from engaging with sensitive content.

Minors can easily lie about their age when signing up for social media platforms, so whats going to stop them from figuring out new ways to get into these platforms, especially since theyre digitally proficient?

This bill will only further highlight the dangers of censorship on social media.

Social media is often used by students to connect with others on and off campus, whether that be with professors, friends or family members.

There are already social media apps that are banned on campus, but allowing this bill to pass on a state level will continue to sever the connections between students, especially international students who talk to their families through social media such as WhatsApp.

Censoring content on social media may also prove to hinder students abilities to do research for their studies. The bill is willing to censor anything, thus eliminating any factual, research-based information that could aid students in their academic projects.

How do students plan to do effective research for their studies if half of their information is banned from social media? It will make their research more biased and more dystopian by only spewing information the government wants them to believe instead of the facts.

Through this lens, it undermines the efforts of students, professors and researchers who have studied their subjects for years and want their research to be as accurate and unbiased as possible.

The inappropriate content that can be found on social media isnt going to disappear, nor will it scare away minors from looking into said content. Banning them altogether is a solution that is going to promote another problem: censorship.

DISCLAIMER:

The opinions presented on this page do not represent the views of the PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.

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Censorship for minors is not the solution | Opinion - PantherNOW

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China could be doing better at censorship, think tank finds  The Register

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China could be doing better at censorship, think tank finds - The Register

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The Hugo Award is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, recognizing outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy. The awards are presented each year at the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, which in 2023 was held in Chengdu, China.

In January last year, questions began to swirl about the nomination process for the 2023 awards. Several authors were deemed not eligible,including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang and Paul Weimer, even though they had received enough nominations to be considered as finalists for the award.

Why, then, were these authors ineligible? The works that received the nominations were widely praised and considered the best of the year, including season one of the television adaptation of Gaimans The Sandman and Kuangs historical speculative fiction novel Babel. There was nothing specific in common between the works of any of the ineligible authors. No explanation was given for their disqualification.

A reportreleased on Feb. 15 by Chris M. Barkley, winner of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, and Jason Sanford, a finalist for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, revealed the truth behind the disqualifications: self-censorship.

Leaked emails included in the report show members of the Hugo Awards committee compiling dossiers on several would-be finalists, debating themes in the nominated works that could be offensive to the Peoples Republic of China and even flagging the authors for criteria unrelated to the awards themselves. Weimer, nominated for the Best Fan Writer category, was flagged for travel[ing] to Tibet outside of the year of eligibility. He had, in fact, traveled to Nepal.

Novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, another author who received enough nominations for the Astounding Award but was considered ineligible, is well-known within the literary community for their TikTok, where theyve posted several videos discussing the controversy and giving their perspective. In the leaked emails, their presence on TikTok was flagged as part of their potential disqualification. Their four-letter last name was also misspelled twice within the email, and the title of their debut novel The Iron Widow was confused with The Iron Giant, the 1999 animated science fiction film.

Although the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards were selected and announced months ago, questions still linger regarding the entire controversy. Why did no one on the committee refuse to compile the dossiers on these authors or otherwise internally protest the censorship? For how long has the Hugo Awards committee allowed ballot manipulation to occur? How legitimate are the finalists and winners of the Hugo Awards not just for 2023, but going back several years, maybe even decades?

Thats not to fault any of the winners themselves, of course. The works that received recognition deserved that recognition. But its an awful look for one of the premier awards in the literary world to have such a deep-rooted breach of ethical responsibility.

The actions of the 2023 Hugo Awards committee are blatantly unjust to every disqualified author, but particularly to authors like Kuang and Zhao English-language writers of Chinese heritage, whose works feature distinctly Chinese narratives and subjects. The sensitive political themes that 2023 Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty asked to be flagged in the inciting email seemed to specifically target Western Chinese diaspora.

The conclusion is simple. If hosting the awards in any given location would necessitate censorship, the awards should not be hosted in that location. This issue is especially prevalent in literature, where censorship has dominated the conversation for the past several years as U.S. governments and schools continue to institute book bans.

The integrity of the worlds most prestigious science fiction and fantasy award has been compromised, and though several members of the 2023 Hugo Awards committee have come forward to apologize, its hard to say how exactly this controversy will affect the upcoming 2024 awards hosted in Glasgow.

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The blatant censorship of the 2023 Hugo Awards - Observer Online

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