censors, – Radio Free

Israel censors foreign press coverage of Iranian strike sites

CPJ Staff — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 12:43:13 +0000

New York, June 23, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply alarmed by Israeli authorities’ orders that international media obtain prior approval from the military censor before broadcasting news from combat zones or missile impact areas in the country.

Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced Friday that broadcasting from those locations without advance, written permission, would be a criminal offense, as Israel seeks to control reporting about its week-old conflict with Iran.

“We are deeply concerned by the Israeli authorities’ escalating efforts to suppress press freedom through censorship and intimidation,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Journalists must be allowed to report on the Iran-Israel conflict without obstruction or fear of retaliation. Silencing the press deprives the world of a clear, unfiltered view of the reality unfolding in the region.”

On Thursday, Israeli police said they stopped international media transmitting live broadcasts from missile landing sites, which revealed their exact locations, including “news agencies through which Al Jazeera was illegally broadcasting.” That same day, the Government Press Office banned live broadcasts from crash sites.

The Union of Journalists in Israel denounced the move and said there were no teams filming in Israel for Al Jazeera, which purchases live broadcasts from other international networks operating legally in Israel. Israel banned Al Jazeera’s operations in the country in May, citing security concerns.

On June 18, IDF military censors issued an order, which CPJ reviewed, requiring anyone seeking to broadcast, including via social media, the aftermath of Iranian rocket and drone attacks on Israel’s military sites to obtain prior approval from the army.

On June 16, Israeli police raided a hotel in the northern port city of Haifa where Palestinian journalists were covering the attacks, confiscated their equipment, and launched an investigation.

CPJ emailed the police, the IDF’s North America Media Desk, and the government spokesperson requesting comment but did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

‘Chilling and dangerous’: Grassroots groups sue over Louisiana law that censors air quality data

Joseph Winters — Thu, 29 May 2025 08:30:00 +0000

For several years, Amy Stelly has been partnering with the Louisiana State University School of Public Health in New Orleans to monitor air quality next to the Claiborne Expressway, a busy highway that runs northwest of the city’s iconic French Quarter.

At a community meeting in April, Stelly, who runs an organization called the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio, was excited to unveil some of this data in a new interactive tool on the alliance’s website. People would be able to see hot spots for particulate matter — a pollutant generated by heavy traffic and associated with health risks like heart attacks and aggravated asthma — near their homes, schools, and workplaces. The data would support her push for the expressway’s removal and could be used by other neighborhood groups to advocate against highway expansion.

But the data on her website was short-lived. Stelly had her webmaster remove it soon after the community meeting. She had gotten wind of a 2024 state law that made it illegal to share air pollution data generated from technologies not approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. Violations could incur hefty fines of up to $32,500 a day, with violations done “intentionally, willfully, or knowingly” racking up an additional $1 million.

“It just didn’t make sense to do a big push, given the fact that we were violating the law by even having a meeting,” Stelly said. “I can’t afford $32,500 a day. I don’t have that, nor do I have the million dollars. So it just seemed more prudent to remain quiet for a while.”

The Claiborne Avenue Alliance is part of a coalition of neighborhood and environmental groups that sued Louisiana regulators last week over the state’s Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act, or CAMRA. The 2024 law was ostensibly meant to standardize community-based air monitoring programs throughout Louisiana, many of which had recently expanded thanks to funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. But the community groups — including The Concerned Citizens of St. John; The Descendants Project; Jefferson, Orleans, Irish Channel Neighbors for Clean Air; Micah 6:8 Mission; and Rise St. James; along with the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio — said the law is a de facto ban on the dissemination of their research and a violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech.

“It’s pretty mind-boggling,” Stelly said.

CAMRA was backed by petrochemical industry trade associations. It essentially says that if community groups want to monitor air pollution and share their data with the public, they have to use “an [EPA]-approved or promulgated emission test or monitoring method,” based on the pollutant being monitored. CAMRA’s requirements only apply to monitoring “for the purpose of alleging violations or noncompliance” with federal, state, or local air quality laws. In other words, they only kick in for community groups trying to identify illegal levels of air pollution.

" data-credit="Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images"/>

An air monitor attached to a fence in Houston.
Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Pollutants covered by CAMRA include six federally regulated “criteria air pollutants” (carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide), 188 federally regulated “hazardous air pollutants,” and 14 “toxic air pollutants” regulated by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

According to a Louisiana DEQ study from earlier this year, regulatory-grade monitors for these pollutants costs more than $791,000 each, plus up to $200,000 more for annual maintenance and operations. Those prohibitive costs are, in a way, the reason community air monitoring programs exist in the first place. By using less expensive equipment, they’re able to deploy air monitors in places that would otherwise not be covered by the EPA’s reference monitors and the 27 air monitoring sites within the National Air Toxics Trends Station Network.

“There is no need for these groups to spend $60,000, $80,000, $100,000 on equipment when in fact there is equipment that, for $200 or less, will give you perfectly adequate results for you to be able to tell your community, your family, whether or not the air they’re breathing is safe,” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, at a press conference last week.

Cynthia Roberts, executive director of the nonprofit Micah 6:8 Mission — one of the groups that brought the lawsuit — told reporters that CAMRA “is not about protecting public health or ensuring good science. It’s about silencing communities like mine.” She said her organization’s air monitors near a Westlake Chemical complex in Sulphur, Louisiana, have frequently shown particulate matter concentrations higher than what the EPA considers unhealthy. Roberts used to post this information on Facebook. But now, she said, “simply posting that kind of data could cost us $32,500 per day.”

“That’s not just chilling,” she added. “That’s censorship, and it’s dangerous.”

None of the community groups that brought the lawsuit has been fined since CAMRA was enacted last year, but their leaders say the law has obstructed their work. Caitlion Hunter, research and policy coordinator for Rise St. James, said community air monitoring has been critical along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to its density of petrochemical facilities and elevated cancer rate. People rely on her organization’s data, she said, because federal regulators have failed to monitor for ethylene oxide, a human carcinogen. Joy Banner, who co-directs The Descendants Project, said she “put a pause” on a planned program to publicize data from her nonprofit’s air quality monitors in St. John the Baptist Parish, in the heart of Cancer Alley.

CAMRA is “scaring us away from being able to share the data with our community members who need it the most,” Banner said at the press conference.

Trump admin even censors govt scientists on Palestine

The Grayzone — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 05:40:23 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

Chinese censors target writers in nationwide crackdown on online erotic fiction

Zhu Liye for RFA Mandarin — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 16:38:07 +0000

Chinese internet censors have targeted dozens of writers of online erotic fiction across the country since June, in a bid to crack down on “pornographic” content, according to multiple mainstream and social media reports.

A “special task force” arrested the writers after they published on the Taiwan-based adult fiction website Haitang Literature, Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily News and Taiwan’s Pacific Daily newspapers reported.

The task force started with distributors of online erotic fiction, then moved on to target writers who had earned at least 300,000 yuan (US$41,000) from their work, according to posts to the gaming bulletin board NGA cited by the AO3 fan-fiction site on Reddit.

Online fiction, including fan fiction and erotic fiction, has mushroomed in China in recent years, according to a survey by government-backed news outlet The Paper in March.

By the end of 2023, readers in China could choose from among nearly 35 million works of online fiction, with some work already adapted into movies and TV shows, the report said.

Last year, the Chinese online fiction market was worth around 40 billion yuan (US$5.48 billion), according to Statistica.com, with daily life, science fiction, fantasy and history topping the list of most popular genres.

“One of my friends is an author, who was released on bail, called me from a new phone and told us to be prepared,” the NGA user wrote in a post dating back to June, before the story appeared in the newspapers.

“Later, others also reported that their friends had been affected,” the post said. “We compared details and confirmed that this is a nationwide crackdown. Moreover, the website’s [Chinese] distributor is indeed in trouble and can’t be reached.”

Haitang writers

In the months that followed this post, social media reports have been emerging of authors arrested for publishing erotic fiction.

Top Haitang Literature author Yuan Shang Bai Yun Jian, a pen-name, was sentenced to four years and six months' imprisonment, according to a Dec. 17 post on the WeChat account Age of Aquarius, Singapore’s Lianhua Zaobao reported.

Another Haitang author with the pen name Yi Xie was handed a one-year, five-month suspended sentence, while a writer with the pen name Ci Xi was jailed for five years and six months.

The reports said some writers had been given harsher sentences because they had been unable to return the money they had earned from their writings.

A Chinese man reads a book as another walks between shelves at the 'Utopia' bookshop in central Beijing in this March 25, 2009 file picture.

(David Gray/Reuters)

While details of the charges haven’t been made public in every case, many of the writers were contributors to Haitang Literature, and were widely assumed to be targeted for “disseminating obscene electronic messages,” which carries harsher penalties, the more a person is judged to have earned from their online activities.

China’s state-controlled media haven’t reported on the arrests, and details have mostly emerged in social media posts, sometimes from family members of those detained, or from the authors themselves who have taken to Weibo to try to crowd-fund the money to pay their fines to avoid a harsher penalty.

Chinese online fiction platform Jinjiang Literature City recently also reported that it had been summoned by consumer protection officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang, but said it had refused to turn up, accusing the authorities of “fishing,” the Lianhua Zaobao reported.

‘Profiting from obscene material’

Celebrity lawyers have been warning their followers via livestream that “profiting from the distribution of obscene material” is a crime that can extend even to writers who share their work for no fee.

The crackdown has prompted online writers to rush to delete or hide their work from other online fiction platforms, including Feiwen and PO18, according to the Reddit post.

Chinese mourn death of Taiwanese romance author

Taiwan ‘determined’ to protect its democratic way of life

“Online literature has become hugely popular because the barrier to entry is low,” Si Yueshu, who has been writing fan fiction in Chinese since high school, told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “Anyone could do it. All they needed was to want to.”

Si has had her own battle with censorship over the years, including having her work suddenly deleted without warning.

One of the biggest difficulties is that the lines keep shifting.

“You can’t actually know what you’re allowed to write and what you’re not allowed to write,” she said, adding that she only publishes on overseas platforms now, to try to evade censorship. “And something that was allowed before could stop being permissible at any time.”

A long-time online fiction fan who gave only the pseudonym Li Hua for fear of reprisals told RFA that many authors write erotic content because that’s what drives traffic, and gets them into a highly competitive industry.

“Authors who make a living from online writing are very hard-working,” Li said. “Very successful authors usually upload three chapters a day, or more than 10,000 words, and the most they can make is around 20,000 yuan (US$2,740) a month.”

And for many writers, it’s more of a labor of love.

“A huge number of authors don’t actually make much at all -- I’ve seen some authors who make 0.10 yuan (US$0.13) a day,” she said.

Nothing ‘below the neck’

Nowadays, it’s even harder to get traffic, as explicitly erotic content is banned.

“You used to be able to get away with [euphemisms like] ‘they went 100 rounds,’ or ‘they found perfect harmony’, but even that’s not allowed these day,” Li said. “You can’t write about anything below the neck.”

That’s why the authorities are arresting writers who post on Haiting Literature, which is based in democratic Taiwan.

The Chinese equivalent, Jinjiang Literature, has been reduced to censoring anything considered remotely erotic or even politically sensitive with AI-generated blank boxes in lieu of Chinese characters, with often hilarious results, according to Li.

For example, a sentence containing the words “down” or “lower” and “body” will generate blanks even if the overall meaning is very far from erotic.

Likewise, phrases referencing love and nature will be censored because the two words mean “sex” when combined a certain way.

The censorship is also spilling over into other forms of fiction.

Chinese novelist Mo Yan (given name Guan Moye), 2012 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, who is also a delegate of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), is seen surrounded by journalists after a group discussion of CPPCC in Beijing, March 4, 2014.

(China Stringer Network/Reuters)

As online commentator Xiao Wu points out, plenty of Chinese contemporary and classic literary fiction gets sexy at times.

“Romance novels will inevitably involve some kind of erotic content,” he said, citing explicit content in Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan’s Big Breasts, Wide Hips, Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain and the novels of Jia Pingwa.

Meanwhile, demand for even erotic-adjacent (known as “borderline” content) continues to rise, said Xiao Wu, who has been approached by editors luring him with the prospect of writing something that pays much better than op-ed pieces.

“There’s a pretty low barrier to entry for reading this stuff for ordinary Chinese people who just want to relax,” he said. “Anyone with a cellphone and internet connection can enjoy it for a few yuan (around a dollar), while going out to sing karaoke with their friends could cost them hundreds of yuan (tens of U.S. dollars).”

“There aren’t many ways to let off steam in this highly repressive society, so this is a fairly low-cost route to happiness,” Xiao Wu said.

Li Hua agreed.

“Sometimes all I want is pure, sensory stimulation, and it’s only around 100 yuan (US$13) a year,” she said. “I think it’s just human nature.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zhu Liye for RFA Mandarin.

‘Lone Soldiers’ – new Australian IDF recruits due to arrive in Israel in January

APR editor — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 01:52:10 +0000

Despite it being illegal in Australia to recruit soldiers for foreign armies, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) recruiters are hard at work enticing young Australians to join Israel’s army. Michael West Media investigates.

INVESTIGATION: By Yaakov Aharon

The Israeli war machine is in hyperdrive, and it needs new bodies to throw into the fire. In July, The Department of Home Affairs stated that there were only four Australians who had booked flights to Israel and whom it suspected of intending to join the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

The Australian Border Force intervened with three of the four but clarified that they did not “necessarily prevent them from leaving”.

MWM understands a batch of Australian recruits is due to arrive in Israel in January, and this is not the first batch of recruits to receive assistance as IDF soldiers through this Australian programme.

Many countries encourage certain categories of immigrants and discourage others. However, Israel doesn’t just want Palestinians out and Jews in — they want Jews of fighting age, who will be conscripted shortly after arrival.

The IDF’s “Lone Soldiers” are soldiers who do not have parents living in Israel. Usually, this means 18-year-old immigrants with basic Hebrew who may never have spent longer than a school camp away from home.

There are a range of Israeli government programmes, charities, and community centres that support the Lone Soldiers’ integration into society prior to basic training.

The most robust of these programs is Garin Tzabar, where there are only 90 days between hugging mum and dad goodbye at Sydney Airport and the drill sergeant belting orders in a foreign language.

The Garin Tzabar website. Image: MWM

Garin Tzabar
In 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked Minister for Aliyah [Immigration] and Integration, Tzipi Livni, to significantly increase the number of people in the Garin Tzabar programme.

The IDF website states that Garin Tzabar “is a unique project, a collaborative venture of the Meitav Unit in the IDF, the Scout movement, the security-social wing of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, which began in 1991”. (Translated from Hebrew via Google Translate.)

The Meitav Unit is divided into many different branches, most of which are responsible for overseeing new recruits.

Powerful and unique journalism by @yaakov_aharon on a story that receives shamefully little coverage in Australia; the recruitment of Australians to serve in the Israeli military: https://t.co/OdNVzzMEbx

— Antony Loewenstein (@antloewenstein) December 2, 2024

However, the pride of the Meitav Unit is the branch dedicated to recruiting all the unique population groups that are not subject to the draft (eg. Ultra-Orthodox Jews). This branch is then divided into three further Departments.

In a 2020 interview, the Head of Meitav’s Tzabar Department, Lieutenant Noam Delgo, referred to herself as someone who “recruits olim chadishim (new immigrants).” She stated:

“Our main job in the army is to help Garin Tzabar members to recruit . . . The best thing about Garin Tzabar is the mashakyot (commanders). Every time you wake up in the morning you have two amazing soldiers — really intelligent — with pretty high skills, just managing your whole life, teaching you Hebrew, helping you with all the bureaucratic systems in Israel, getting profiles, seeing doctors and getting those documents, and finishing the whole process.”

The Garin Tzabar programme specifically advertises for Australian recruits.

The contact point for Australian recruits is Shoval Magal, the executive director of Garin Tzabar Australia. The registered address is a building shared by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Council of NSW, the community’s peak bodies in the state.

A post from April 2020 on the IDF website states:

“Until three months ago, Tali [REDACTED], from Sydney, Australia, and Moises [REDACTED], from Mexico City, were ordinary teenagers. But on December 25, they arrived at their new family here in Israel — the “Garin Tzabar” family, and in a moment, they will become soldiers. In a special project, we accompanied them from the day of admission (to the program) until just before the recruitment.“ (Translated from Hebrew via Google Translate).

Michael Manhaim was the executive director of Garin Tzabar Australia from 2018 to 2023. He wrote an article, “Becoming a Lone Soldier”,’ for the 2021 annual newsletter of Betar Australia, a Zionist youth group for children. In the article, Manhaim writes:

“The programme starts with the unique preparation process in Australia.

. . . It only takes one step; you just need to choose which foot will lead the way. We will be there for the rest.”

A criminal activity
MWM is not alleging that any of the parties mentioned in this article have broken the law. It is not a crime if a person chooses to join a foreign army.

However, S119.7 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 states:

A person commits an offence if the person recruits, in Australia, another person to serve in any capacity in or with an armed force in a foreign country.

It is a further offence to facilitate or promote recruitment for a foreign army and to publish recruitment materials. This includes advertising information relating to how a person may serve in a foreign army.

The maximum penalty for each offence is 10 years.

Rawan Arraf, executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, said:

“Unless there has been a specific declaration stating it is not an offence to recruit for the Israel Defence Force, recruitment to a foreign armed force is a criminal offence under Australian law, and the Australian Federal Police should be investigating anyone allegedly involved in recruitment for a foreign armed force.”

Army needing ‘new flesh’
If the IDF are to keep the war on Gaza going, they need to fill old suits of body armour with new grunts.

Reports indicate the death toll within IDF’s ranks is unprecedented — a suicide epidemic is claiming further lives on the home front, and reservists are refusing in droves to return to active duty.

In October, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid accused Bibi Netanyahu of obscuring the facts of Israel’s casualty rate. Any national security story published in Israel must first be approved by the intelligence unit at the Military Censor.

“11,000 soldiers were injured and 890 others killed,” Lapid said, without warning and live on air. There are limits to how much we accept the alternative facts”.

In November 2023, Shoval Magal shared a photo in which she is posing alongside six young Australians, saying, “The participants are eager to have Aliya (immigrate) to Israel, start the programme and join the army”.

These six recruits are the attendees of just one of several seminars that Magal has organised in Melbourne for the summer 2023 cycle, having also organised separate events across cities in Australia.

Magal’s June 2024 newsletter said she was “in the advanced stages of the preparation phase in Australia for the August 2024 Garin”. Most recently, in October 2024, she was “getting ready for Garin Tzabar’s 2024 December cycle.”

Magal’s newsletter for Israeli Scouts in Australia ‘Aliyah Events – November 2024’. Image: MWM

There are five “Aliyah (Immigration) Events” in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The sponsoring organisations are Garin Tzabar, the Israeli Ministry for Aliyah (Immigration) and Integration, and a who’s who of the Jewish-Australian community.

The star speaker at each event is Alon Katz, an Australian who joined Garin Tzabar in 2018 and is today a reserve IDF soldier. The second speaker, Colonel Golan Vach, was the subject of two Electronic Intifada investigations alleging that he had invented the 40 burned babies lie on October 7 to create a motive for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

If any Australian signed the papers to become an IDF recruit at these events, is someone liable for the offence of recruiting them to a foreign army?

MWM reached out for comment to Garin Tzabar Australia and the Zionist Federation of Australia to clarify whether the IDF is recruiting in Australia but did not receive a reply.

Yaakov Aharon is a Jewish-Australian journalist living in Wollongong. He enjoys long walks on Wollongong Beach, unimpeded by Port Kembla smoke fumes and AUKUS submarines. First published by Michael West Media and republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Chinese censors delete fried rice gags linked to death of Mao’s son

RFA Cantonese — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 16:06:58 +0000

Chinese internet censors have deleted a social media post about egg fried rice that could have been read as a reference to the death of late supreme leader Mao Zedong’s son in the 1950-1953 Korean War, the anniversary of which is jokingly referred to as “China’s Thanksgiving.”

Fried rice in China is often seen as a reference to an apocryphal story told in China that Mao Anying, a Korean War military officer, was trying to cook egg fried rice instead of taking shelter when he was killed by U.S. bombers on Nov. 25, 1950.

Mao Anying supposedly died after his location was discovered by the U.S. military because he broke blackout rules by kindling a cooking fire to make the dish.

Censors removed a Weibo post from the official account of MTR Shenzhen, a subsidiary of Hong Kong people-mover MTR Corp that runs Line 4 of the Shenzhen Metro, that read: “Which would you pick — curry fried rice or egg fried rice?”

The account typically focuses on developments on its trains and stations and local culture, food and drink, and the post was ostensibly intended to highlight some of the food options available in and around Guanlan Metro Station.

“Today’s a good day for egg fried rice,” commented a Weibo user from the southeastern province of Fujian.

“You must use firewood, otherwise there won’t be enough smoke,” quipped another from the southern province of Guangdong, in comments posted by the X citizen journalist account “Mr Li is not your teacher.”

China's Communist Party politburo member Li Hongzhong (3rd from R) pays his respects at a memorial to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong's son, Mao Anying, in South Pyongan province, North Korea.

MTR Shenzhen wasn’t the only account to reference the popular dish, with food blogger Wang Gang being slammed by nationalists as a “traitor” after a recent post.

Wang eventually issued a public apology, pledging: “I won’t make any more egg fried rice posts from now on.”

Accusations

Wang’s fried rice posts have become a regular feature of social media over the past five years, sparking accusations that he insulted the memory of Mao Zedong’s son with his online video tutorials.

Wang, who has several million followers, released similar videos in late November of 2023, 2018 and 2020, sparking a backlash on social media.

The anniversary of Mao Anying’s death, falling as it does in late November, has been jokingly referred to in China as “China’s Thanksgiving.”

The joke runs that the death of Mao’s son saved China from following a hereditary leadership model similar to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, something for which all Chinese nationals should remain thankful to this day.

Man detained in China’s Jiangxi over ‘fried rice’ comment

China shutters China Unicom branch account after fried rice gag about Mao’s son

In 2021, Chinese internet censors shut down the social media account of a branch of the telecommunications giant China Unicom after it posted a recipe for egg fried rice to mark the Oct. 24 birthday of Mao Anying.

The official Weibo account of the Jiangsu division of China Unicom was shut down after complaints that it had “insulted the People’s Volunteers” who fought on the side of the North Korean communists against the United States.

“Little Pink” supporters of the ruling Chinese Communist Party called on each other to file complaints with the ministry of industry and information technology over the matter.

Earlier in the same month, authorities in the eastern province of Jiangxi have detained a man for allegedly “impeaching the reputation of heroes and martyrs” after he made comments about the Chinese Communist Party-backed Korean War propaganda blockbuster “The Battle of Changjin Lake.”

The man, who was identified only his surname Zuo, was jailed for a 10-day administrative sentence by police in Nanchang city after he posted an irreverent comment on the Sina Weibo social media platform under the username @yuediyouyou.

“That fried rice was the best thing to come out of the whole Korean War,” the user quipped in a post dated Oct. 8, 2021.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Cantonese.

Would-Be Censors Peddle Yet Another Election Meddle

Thomas Knapp — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 05:55:01 +0000

Photograph Source: The United States Department of Justice – Public Domain

In early September, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against two employees of RT (formerly Russia Today), alleging that the state media outlet “orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil.”

Separately, DOJ announced its theft (“seizure”) of 32 Internet domains supposedly used to “covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. ”

The victims, per US Attorney Damian Williams? “[T]he American people, who received Russian messaging without knowing it.”

US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland weighed in as well: “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”

Oh, really?

Garland, once nominated to serve on the US Supreme Court, surely knows better. There is no “unless the ideas originate with parties I happen to dislike, or include content I disagree with” exception to the First Amendment’s free speech and free press guarantees.

DOJ doesn’t even enjoy the fig leaf of an “in extremis” excuse, such as a state of war existing between the US and Russia or an imminent threat of attack which the indictments and domain thefts might have thwarted.

Does the Russian regime “meddle” in US elections? Of course it does. All powerful regimes meddle in other countries’ elections.

The US regime has a long record of doing so, up to and including sponsoring coup attempts when other countries’ elections don’t go its preferred way.

Even smaller regimes get in on the election meddling game. The Israeli regime, acting through unregistered foreign agents, has openly and unashamedly meddled in US elections for decades, and to the tune of more than $100 million this year alone.

It’s not the Russian regime that Merrick Garland and friends mistrust. It’s you, the American voter.

Part of that mistrust may be simple paternalism: You’re too naive, perhaps too stupid, to sort matters out for yourself. If anyone not aligned with Merrick Garland and friends is permitted to talk to you, they’ll fill your head with nonsense and you’ll vote “the wrong way” in November.

Another part of it is raw, undalderated fear: If you hear things that might be true but that don’t line up with the goals, purposes, and desires of the US regime, you might make up your mind for yourself instead of just doing as you’re told.

The “Russian election interference” narrative is now into its third consecutive presidential election cycle. It slices! It dices! It juliennes!

It was Hillary Clinton’s excuse for running a poor campaign in 2016.

It was the mainstream media’s excuse for burying disclosures from Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.

This year it provides cover for the bipartisan US military misadventure in Ukraine.

Garland and Co. fear your opinion … if it’s formed without censorship on their part.

Ask yourself why.

The post Would-Be Censors Peddle Yet Another Election Meddle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Chinese censors clamp down on posts about grisly body-snatching case

By Chen Zifei and Huang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:01:47 +0000

Chinese censors are cracking down on social media posts referring to allegations of a grisly trade in dead bodies by a medical supplies company that is being investigated by authorities in several provinces.

Investigators from the Ministry of Public Security are investigating reports that Shanxi Aurui Biomaterials had been involved in trading thousands of dead bodies or body parts, on suspicion that the company engaged in "theft of, insult to, or intentional destruction of human remains," according to multiple news reports that followed up on a whistleblowing Aug. 7 social media post by lawyer Yi Shenghua.

Yi, who is president of the Beijing Yongzhe Law Firm, alleged that bodies were being sent to the company from funeral homes across Shanxi, Sichuan and Guangxi provinces, with thousands of bodies in Sichuan alone, and more than 70 families seeking redress.

Their bones were being used to create dental bone implants, according to media reports.

"After the remains are sent to the funeral homes, the ashes the relatives receive may not be those of their relatives, or their remains may be incomplete," Yi cited an unnamed fellow lawyer working on the case as saying.

Mourners stand outside crematorium as white smoke pours out of chimneys used for cremation in Beijing, Dec. 31, 2022. (Ng Han Guan/AP)

Yi later posted additional reports that came in after other lawyers contacted him with similar stories from different parts of the country. None of the posts is now available.

But his posts, and the subsequent media reports following up on them, have sparked a storm of horrified reaction on Chinese social media, prompting government censors to intervene, according to Yi Shenghua.

"I can still see my Weibo post but nobody else can," Yi posted on Aug. 9. "It seems that moves are afoot from higher up."

Grilled by officials

Yi later reported that the topic had disappeared from the Weibo list of "hot searches," and that he had been hauled in for a grilling by his local bureau of judicial affairs, which regulates lawyers and their activities.

In another post, he said he wouldn't be giving interviews to foreign media organizations.

None of Yi's posts are visible any more on Weibo, although some users thanked him, while others said they had archived his original posts.

A woman walks past empty coffins stacked up outside a funeral services shop in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, March 17, 2022. (Issac Lawrence/AFP)

While media reports about the allegations were still visible, keywords and hashtags relating to the story returned an error message when clicked on: "Sorry, but content related to this topic cannot be displayed."

Links to a Caixin.com article on the case posted to Weibo resulted in a 404 deletion notice on Aug. 9.

Official media outlet The Paper quoted an announcement from the Taiyuan Public Security Bureau in the northern province of Shanxi from May 23, saying that cases in that province had been sent to the state prosecutor for review and prosecution.

"The case hasn't yet been concluded, and police are still investigating the suspects," the bureau was quoted as saying. However, a link to the article returned a 404 error message when clicked by RFA on Monday.

Dismembered bodies

Shanxi Aorui stands accused of "illegally purchasing human remains and body parts from Sichuan, Guangxi, Shandong and other places for processing into bone grafts worth 380 million yuan (US$53 million) between January 2015 and July 2023, The Paper said.

It said police had seized "more than 18 tonnes of human bones" and more than 34,000 articles of finished product from the company, and that one suspect identified only by his surname Su had arranged for more than 4,000 human remains to be stolen from four funeral homes in Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Sichuan between 2017 and 2019.

An elderly woman places flowers on a tomb during Qingming festival also known as Tomb Sweeping Day when family members visit their ancestral graves to clean up and burn offerings in Beijing, April 5, 2023. (Andy Wong/AP)

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported that crematorium staff in Shuifu in Yunnan province, Banan district in Chongqing, Shiqian county in Guizhou and Daying county in Sichuan, had "roughly dismembered the bodies so they could be transported to Su’s company for further processing," citing case documents and Chinese media reports.

The documents also said a further 75 suspects had been detained during the investigation, which is also looking into claims that the Liver Center at Qingdao University Hospital in Shandong illegally sold corpses to the company, the paper said.

Qingdao liver center director Li Baoxing was named in the documents as a suspect, it said.

Li has previously been repeatedly praised by the state for his contribution to medical science, and in 2005 was listed among hundreds of China’s “Model Workers” that year as determined by the State Council, it quoted The Paper as saying.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei and Huang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin.

Facebook reportedly censors posts by Solomon Islands news outlet

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 06:36:01 +0000

Facebook has reportedly temporarily blocked posts published by an independent online news outlet in Solomon Islands after incorrectly labelling its content as “spam”.

In-Depth Solomons, a member centre of the non-profit OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), was informed by the platform that more than 80 posts had been removed from its official page.

According to OCCRP, the outlet believes opponents of independent journalism in the country could behind the “coordinated campaign”.

“The reporters in Solomon Islands became aware of the problem on Thursday afternoon, when the platform informed them it had hidden at least 86 posts, including stories and photos,” OCCRP reported yesterday.

“Defining its posts as spam resulted in the removal for several hours of what appeared to be everything the news organisation had posted on Facebook since March last year.”

It said the platform also blocked its users from posting content from the outlet’s website, indepthsolomons.com.sb, saying that such links went against the platform’s “community standards”.

In-Depth Solomons has received criticism for its reporting by the Solomon Islands government and its supporters, both online and in local media, OCCRP said.

Expose on PM’s unexplained wealth
In April, it published an expose into the unexplained wealth of the nation’s former prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare.

In-depth Solomons editor Ofani Eremae said the content removal “may have been the result of a coordinated campaign by critics of his newsroom to file false complaints to Facebook en masse”.

“We firmly believe we’ve been targeted for the journalism we are doing here in Solomon Islands,” he was quoted as saying.

One of the Meta post removal alerts for Asia Pacific Report editor Dr David Robie over a human rights story on on 24 June 2024. Image: APR screenshot

“We don’t have any evidence at this stage on who did this to us, but we think people or organisations who do not want to see independent reporting in this country may be behind this.”

A spokesman for Meta, Ben Cheong, told OCCRP they needed more time to examine the issue.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and permission from ABC.

Pacific Media Watch reports that in other cases of Facebook and Meta blocked posts, Asia Pacific Reports the removal of Kanaky, Palestine and West Papua decolonisation stories and human rights reports over claimed violation of “community standards”.

APR has challenged this removal of posts, including in the case of its editor Dr David Robie. Some have been restored while others have remained “blocked”.

Other journalists have also reported the removal of news posts.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Chinese censors delete, hide links to Trump shooting T-shirts

By Jing Wei for RFA Mandarin — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 20:48:50 +0000

Authorities in China appear to have moved to take down T-shirts bearing images of the attempted assassination of former U.S. president and Republican candidate Donald Trump from the country’s major e-commerce platforms after the items started to sell fast online in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson on Sunday extended President Xi Jinping’s “sympathies” to Trump in the wake of the attack at a July 13 Republican campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

Yet no sooner had Trump been declared “safe,” after escaping with an injury to his ear, factories in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong started churning out T-shirts bearing news photos from the immediate aftermath of the shooting, including the iconic shot from Evan Vucci of the Associated Press.

Owner of Paxinico, a clothing merchant on Douyin, Zhong Jiachi, in a T-shirt with an image of Donald Trump during his assassination attempt, in Jieyang, Guangdong province, China, July 15, 2024. (Reuters/Paxinico)

Some bore slogans as well as the photo, including “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” the words mouthed by Trump in his defiant gesture following the attack.

Others called to “Make America Great Again,” others omitted a word, rendering the Trump campaign slogan as “Make America Again,” according to Reuters news footage and photos of the garments pulled from Chinese e-commerce platforms JD.com and Taobao.

“Shooting Makes Me Stronger,” read another shirt, according to the Associated Press.

Reuters quoted clothing merchant Zhong Jiachi, as saying via Douyin, China’s TikTok, that he had sold around 40 T-shirts with the image of Trump just after he was shot, within 24 hours.

“(The sales) exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect that Trump would have so many fans,” Zhong said via his channel.

A news program about the assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump is seen on a giant screen at a shopping mall in Beijing on July 14, 2024. (Greg Baker/AFP)

Most of the shirt designs depicted Trump as bloodied and defiant, and the first presses started rolling shortly after U.S. President Joe Biden spoke about the shooting at around 8 p.m. Washington time on Saturday, according to media reports.

Copyright concerns

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted a Taobao vendor called Li Jinwei as saying that it was the work of just over an hour to download the photos and print out the T-shirts.

“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US,” she told the paper, which is owned by Taobao parent company Alibaba.

But Chinese government censors appeared to be moving to shut down the online boom in Trump-related sales, with keyword searches for “Trump T-shirt” on Monday yielding no results on JD.com and unrelated Trump T-shirts on Taobao, the agency reported.

However, shooting-related Trump T-shirts were still visible on the Chinese-language version of auction site eBay on Tuesday, making the garments still available to buyers with an overseas bank card or a U.S.-based friend willing to mail them to China.

An advertisement for a Trump T-shirt is shown on an X account, July 14, 2024. (@whyyoutouzhele via X)

According to the AP, it’s possible that vendors in China were being blocked or hidden due to copyright concerns around the images.

“The Associated Press is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact,” the agency quoted Lauren Easton, AP’s vice president of corporate communications, as saying. “In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful image.”

However, an AP journalist was able to order a shirt with an image of the moment for 61 yuan (US$8), even though the original link said the shirt was no longer available, it said.

“A customer service representative said it violated regulations, without elaborating, but then provided a link to order the shirt,” the report said, adding that Alibaba, which owns Taobao and JD.com did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The online T-shirt sales came as Trump’s designated running mate JD Vance echoed the former president’s tough line on China.

In a Monday interview with Fox News, Vance called China the “biggest threat” to the United States, and said that Washington’s continued support for Ukraine had distracted from the “real issue, which is China.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jing Wei for RFA Mandarin.

China’s censors deleted a video of children performing in Sichuan| Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 21 May 2024 18:25:40 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

China censors clip of children dancing to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’

By Yitong Wu and Kit Sung for RFA Cantonese — Tue, 21 May 2024 17:48:00 +0000

China's internet censors have deleted a video in which children at a private performing arts school in the southwestern province of Sichuan dance to British rock band Pink Floyd's 1979 hit "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" which featured a choir of schoolchildren protesting overbearing authority and "thought control" in education.

In the video posted by the Let’s Music arts school in Sichuan's Leshan city, a line of children in matching black T-shirts march robotically in front of hundreds of spectators on a busy shopping street, singing "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control," before breaking into a tightly choreographed dance to the Pink Floyd track.

"No dark sarcasm in the classroom -- hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone," the song goes. "All in all, you're just another brick in the wall."

The clip, posted to X by current affairs tweeter Byron Wan on May 16, is still visible outside the Great Firewall of Chinese internet censorship, but was no longer available on the video-sharing platforms Douyin and Bilibili on Tuesday.

The Douyin link to the clip returned the message "That video does not exist," while the Let's Music channel on Bilibili showed links to other songs performed in the same location, but not "Another Brick in the Wall."

Let’s Music said in a statement on May 7 that the performance was deliberately intended to be a comment on "the current situation," without giving further details.

Patriotic education

The ruling Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is currently stepping up its program of "patriotic education" in schools and universities across the country, in a move that many outside China have criticized as "brainwashing," a term first used in English by U.S. journalist Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government got people to support China’s efforts during the Korean War.

Last October, China passed the Patriotic Education Law with the aim of "enhancing identification with our great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture and the Communist Party," amid an ongoing nationwide campaign under Xi to boost ruling party involvement in cultural output at every level, in a manner some have likened to Mao Zedong's 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

A Young Pioneer salutes during the weekly flag-raising ceremony at the East Experimental School in Shanghai November 5, 2012. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Pink Floyd’s original song sold more than four million copies worldwide and topped singles charts, making Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It was penned by Pink Floyd's bass player Roger Waters as a protest over rigid and abusive schooling, particularly in British boarding schools.

According to Wan, the video disappeared from Douyin and Bilibili more than a week after being posted there.

"Censors in China have been keeping an eye on X," he commented after followers reported that the clip was no longer available.

Artistic resistance

France-based film director Hu Xueyang said he was happy to see some form of artistic resistance still alive in China.

"When politics is uptight, then there's a lot of political satire," Hu said. "In dark times, all we have left is artistic ridicule and black humor."

"China's younger generation is making its voice heard, and using various forms of resistance," he said.

Paris-based artist Jiang Bu agreed, saying the song epitomized saying "no" to totalitarian control.

"There was a kind of resistance or opposition to totalitarianism in a lot of the music from that time, including Pink Floyd's stuff," Jiang said. "It was about saying no."

"Let’s Music may not have intended direct resistance, but it still chose this song ... that has resistance at its core, so there was a point to it."

Students attend a flag raising ceremony during the morning assembly, ahead of National Security Education Day at a secondary school, in Hong Kong, China, April 12, 2021. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

He said the removal of the track had attracted more views to the Let’s Music channel than it would normally have gotten, ironically alerting more people to the song's meaning.

He likened the backlash to the authorities pulling the plug on a live stream by beauty influencer Austin Li on the eve of the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre because it showed an ice-cream cake in the shape of a tank.

That piece of censorship had ensured that more people found out what happened on the night of June 4, 1989 -- something that has been largely erased from the public record in China -- than might otherwise have done, Jiang said.

Roger Waters, co-founder of the British rock band Pink Floyd performs during his The Wall Live show in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013, with graffiti reading "Fear builds walls". (Vadim Ghirda/AP)

When Pink Floyd went to record children from London’s Islington Green School singing the refrain of the song, they hid the lyrics from the headteacher for fear she would pull the plug on the project, according to the band's Wikipedia page, citing media reports.

Late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was said to have "hated" the song, according to the school's former director of music, while the Inner London Education Authority criticized it as "scandalous." The song was banned by the South African government of the time.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yitong Wu and Kit Sung for RFA Cantonese.

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:15:59 +0000

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

— Harry S. Truman

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

The post Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Chinese censors ban protest anthem lauding decades of dissent

By Xiao An for RFA Mandarin — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:44:38 +0000

Chinese censors have blocked access to a Mandarin protest anthem lauding political activists, protesters and dissidents who have pushed for freedom, justice and democracy over the past three decades, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and during last years "white paper" protests, according the singer-songwriter who published it from London.

Titled "It's my Duty" in a reference to a young man's reply when asked by a journalist why he was cycling off to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the song's lyrics read like a list of "forbidden words" used by censors to limit access to the darker parts of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's recent history to those behind the Great Firewall.

"We are the orphans in the square. We are the new shoots after the wildfire," run the lyrics to the song, penned and performed by film music student Yinfi on YouTube.

"We sank to the bottom of the Yangtze River. We were buried under the Harmony train," Yinfi sings, referencing recent transportation disasters.

"We destabilized the fire in Urumqi," the song runs, referencing a fatal lockdown fire that inspired mass protests, known as the "white paper" or "A4" revolution, across the country in November 2022.

"We are the low-end population wandering in an age of prosperity," it says, in an ironic reference to mass evictions of "low-end" migrant workers from Beijing.

"We are the foreign forces shouting in a dark room," it says, in a sarcastic nod to the ruling Chinese Communist Party's claims that political opposition and dissent in the country are fueled and instigated by "hostile foreign forces."

"We are Hong Kong people who have lost our home," Yinfi sings. "We are the Uyghurs who have lost our freedom."

Remembering names

Yinfi said in a statement in the song's YouTube description that he was deeply moved by a speech delivered by a Chinese student at Columbia University in New York in the wake of the “white paper” protests.”

"This song I've created is inspired by the poignant words from that speech,” he said. "My aspiration is that through this song, the names that have been expunged may be resurrected in memory."

Yinfi said he wanted to help win recognition "far and wide" for China's "champions of freedom."

In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Yinfi said the song has been widely circulated outside of China since he released it on June 23.

"The phrase 'it's my duty' seems to be representative of the spirit of young people today, and may represent ordinary people ... [and the desire to] actively participate in social movements," he said, adding that he has taken part in protests in the U.K.

He said the names of jailed Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, late jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and late rights activist Cao Shunli, along with dozens of other high-profile dissidents and activists should continue to be spoken and remembered.

People protest with blank sheets of paper on a street in Shanghai, Nov. 27, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

"In an environment like China, it feels as if a lot of people, including myself, live in a parallel reality, with a kind of invisible wall ... that kept us unaware that these people even existed," Yinfi said.

"They may have spoken out for democracy, freedom and human rights in the most moderate way ... yet eventually they are suppressed very severely," he said. "I think we need to know their stories."

"Putting them into the lyrics had a very powerful impact for me."

‘We are Jimmy Lai’

He said the song lasted around NetEase Cloud Music for around a week before being deleted, largely because no lyrics were posted, but never made it onto any other Chinese music platform in the first place.

"It was never going to be possible [to publish] this song [in China]," Yinfi said. "Names like Liu Xiaobo and political prisoners in Hong Kong can't be circulated in China."

The song includes the lyric "We are Jimmy Lai, we are Joshua Wong, we are Gwyneth Ho, we are Chow Hang-tung," in a reference to the ongoing crackdown on pro-democracy media and activists in the city since the 2019 protest movement.

It goes on to name-check whistleblowing doctors Gao Yaojie, Jiang Yanyong and Li Wenliang, while ending with the pen name Peng Zaizhou used by Peng Lifa, who hung banners from Beijing's Sitong Bridge calling for Xi Jinping's resignation ahead of the 20th party congress in October 2022.

"We are the deleted voices," Yinfi sings. "Today we keep the glimmer of freedom alive."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xiao An for RFA Mandarin.

Chinese censors delete news report probing return of COVID tracking

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 20:42:25 +0000

Chinese censors have deleted a news report investigating claims that local governments had brought back a hated disease-tracking app that was used during the “zero-COVID” era to confine people to their homes, amid an ongoing wave of respiratory infections across the country, according to local media reports and residents.

The Dec. 1 Top News article cited social media posts across China as saying that local governments in Sichuan and Guangdong had both brought the app back online after retiring it following the lifting of three years of harsh COVID restrictions in December 2022, with users posting screenshots of their "green" health code from the app.

While the article remained visible in syndicated form on Sohu.com’s mobile website on Monday, it had disappeared from the Top News website.

Guangzhou officials told the news service that some aspects of the app had never been retired, but that the app's ability to impose travel restrictions on individuals had been shut down in February and never reactivated.

The article also reported that the Tianfu Health Pass app in the southwestern province of Sichuan was once more showing a green code, according to residents who checked the government app.

‘Physiological nausea’

The deletion of the article, which was also picked up by several media organizations outside mainland China, comes as hospitals in China struggle to cope with a wave of respiratory disease, much of it among children.

The reports highlight public concerns that restrictive measures may make a comeback, as some suspect that the current pneumonia wave is being driven in the background by COVID-19, which affects people's ability to fight off opportunistic infections like mycoplasma pneumonia, and which has been associated with waves of other respiratory infections in children.

Parents and children wait in a crowded holding room at a children's hospital in Beijing on Oct. 30, 2023. Hospitals in China have struggled to cope with a wave of respiratory disease, much of it among children. (Andy Wong/AP)

"I hope this will never happen again in my lifetime," commented Weibo user @uuk20_fca from Guangdong, while blogger Lao Xiaoza commented in a post to the China Digital Times that "there is no smoke without a fire."

"When I saw this, my first reaction was physiological nausea," the blogger wrote. "Don’t tell me how this great invention of digital governance has protected everyone’s health. I will never accept this account, no thanks."

Another blogger on the same site, Qinghui Youmo, posted a number of screenshots of reappearing health codes from social media users across China, including Zhejiang, Tianjin, Hebei, Guangxi and Shaanxi.

"Don't scare me like that – I'm close to tears," commented @YipingXuzijiang in a screenshot posted in the blog post.

Wave of sickness

The concerns come as a wave of respiratory disease sweeps across the country, prompting reported class closures amid official warnings of growing cases of influenza, mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19.

The World Health Organization called on Beijing to share its data on an outbreak in Beijing and Tianjin that made international headlines last week.

Later media reports dismissed people’s concerns about the return of the Health Code app, citing officials as saying that the app had never entirely been taken offline, because it offers other health data services in addition to COVID-19 tracking and tracing.

However, sporadic reports of compulsory COVID-19 testing have also emerged on social media in recent days, including at a conference in Guangzhou, according to Qinghui Youmo’s blog post.

A staff member at Shanghai Pudong International Airport who gave only the surname Ma for fear of reprisals said incoming passengers are being tested for COVID-19 on arrival.

"They say incoming passengers are being randomly tested, but I actually saw an entire flight being tested for COVID," the person said. "A friend of mine flew to Australia yesterday, and they were spraying the plane with disinfectant."

"Health codes have already started coming back online in various places," they said.

A man looks through a gap in a barrier in a residential area that was locked down to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Shanghai, China, June 7, 2022. Reports about the revival of the health-code app have sparked concern that lockdown measures also may return. (Aly Song/Reuters)

A nurse at a hospital in the central city of Wuhan, who gave only the surname Sun, said health codes are being reactivated in some parts of the country, including Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi and Sichuan.

"Mycoplasma pneumonia is very serious now, and health codes have been resumed in some areas of Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi, and Sichuan," she said. "The wave of mycoplasma pneumonia started in children and then started to spread, just like COVID-19 did back then."

"Now you have to line up for seven or eight hours to get anti-inflammatory shots at the hospital," she said.

Sichuan hit hard

A resident of Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu, who gave only the surname Jiang, said Sichuan has been particularly hard hit.

"The outbreak in Sichuan is particularly serious – the hospital corridors are full of patients," he said. "A lot of people can't even get admitted to hospital."

But he was skeptical about the reports of the return of health codes, saying: "I don't think so."

The ongoing concern about health tracking came as authorities in Zhejiang's Yiwu city sent out a directive requiring urban and rural residents to stockpile grain, and maintain enough to feed everyone for 10 days.

"All departments and work canteens should maintain a large stock of grain in storage, equal to the average consumption over a 15-day period from the previous year," the directive, which was widely posted online, said.

The reports also sparked concern that the authorities are quietly readying themselves for a return to lockdown measures in a bid to stem the spread of infectious diseases.

The authorities on Dec. 1 also added several newly developed COVID-19 vaccines to their list of medicines approved for emergency use, according to the Associated Press.

National Health Commission spokesperson Mi Feng said on Sunday that the current outbreak is being caused by known pathogens, and called on people to wear masks and wash their hands.

Chinese health authorities are "actively monitoring and assessing winter respiratory diseases," and that outpatient clinics will start operating round the clock to meet demand for treatment, Mi said.

Measures are also being taken to ensure the supply of influenza and other vaccines, with a focus on early vaccination for key groups such as the elderly and children to reduce the risk of illness, Mi said in comments quoted by state news agency Xinhua.

A Guangzhou-based lawyer who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said public opinion in China is divided over the cause of the current wave of sickness, but few believe that the government is giving them the whole story.

"Privately, everyone believes that [these cases] are either sequelae from COVID-19 infections, or that they've been caused by [China’s homegrown] vaccines," the lawyer said, in a reference to public mistrust of vaccines following a number of public health scandals in which children died or were otherwise harmed by fake or incorrectly stored vaccines.

Some medical journals have reported coinfection with COVID-19 and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, while others have pointed to weakened immunity from infection and reinfection with COVID-19.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Chinese censors shut down key LGBTQ+ social media accounts

By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 19:43:11 +0000

Chinese government censors have shut down key LGBTQ+ social media accounts in a further crackdown on sexual minorities.

Public accounts for the Beijing Lala Salon, Wandouhuang, Transtory, Outstanding Partners, Ace and the Flying Cat Brotherhood were shuttered on the eve of Chinese Valentine's Day on Aug. 22, veteran activist Li Tingting said.

"Such accounts have been targeted once before two or three years ago," said Li, who is better known in feminist circles as Li Maizi. "The government departments in charge of internet management have always targeted accounts linked to sexual minorities, which aren't encouraged by the Chinese government."

She said not all of the accounts were linked to LGBTQ+ groups – some were more broadly feminist.

The move comes after Chinese officials removed an LGBTQ+ anthem titled "Rainbow" by Taiwanese pop star A-Mei from her setlist from a concert earlier this month in Beijing, while security guards forced fans turning up for the gig to remove clothing and other paraphernalia bearing the rainbow symbol before going in, according to media reports.

Sherry Zhang, who goes by the stage name A-Mei, wrote the song for all of her lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and questioning friends, and it is frequently heard at Pride events in Taiwan. Her fans among the LGBTQ+ community often turn up and wave rainbow flags or wear rainbow clothing in a show of solidarity, confident that the song will make an appearance.

Li, who was among five Chinese feminists detained ahead of International Women's Day in 2016 for planning a campaign against sexual harassment on public transport, added: "The accounts targeted included the Beijing queer women's center Lala Salon, Wandouhuang, which is a feminist platform."

Advocacy and Promotion

She said the Flying Cat Brotherhood was a gay men's group, while censors had also targeted the transgender account Transtory and Ace, a group representing asexuals.

The Wandouhuang artists' group was set up by Toni, Mengxia and Xiao Lufei, who all graduated from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2019, according to a bio that was still visible online on Wednesday.

Beijing Lala Salon was set up in November 2004 as a non-government organization offering social activities for lesbians, to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and to promote lesbian culture.

"The government departments in charge of internet management have always targeted accounts linked to sexual minorities, which aren't encouraged by the Chinese government," says activist Li Tingting, shown during an interview in Beijing, June 9, 2015. Credit: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Its account on the social media platform Weibo was still visible on Thursday, but displayed no content.

They had offered literary and social events, film and television screenings, forums, lectures and a drama group.

Li said she once volunteered for the group as a project manager around 10 years ago.

"I felt as if [the authorities] are ticking these tasks off a list," she said.

‘Orders from higher up’

A Shanghai-based lesbian who declined to give her name for fear of reprisals said she had been a member of Transtory and Ace.

"There must have been orders from higher up banning lesbians, gays and transgender folk," she said. "It's about awareness of one's own gender, and what gender you think you are."

LGBTQ+ and health rights activist Lu Jun, who now lives in New York, said that was likely.

"It may seem that it's Tencent shutting down these WeChat accounts, why would they do that?" Lu said. "It must be that the authorities issued an administrative order, which means that Tencent would break the law if it didn't block these accounts."

"This is the will of the authorities."

He said the move is a violation of the right to free speech, but also of LGBTQ+ rights.

In April, two LGBTQ+ students from Beijing's Tsinghua University lodged an administrative lawsuit against China's Ministry of Education after being harassed and threatened by the authorities for leaving rainbow flags out for people to take in a campus supermarket.

While homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and removed from official psychiatric diagnostic manuals in 2001, ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has ushered in a far more conservative attitude to sexuality than his predecessors.

Activists have said the crackdown stems in part from the government's fear of civil organizations as a threat to party rule.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

The Censors Down Under: The ACMA Gambit on Misinformation and Disinformation

Binoy Kampmark — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 05:50:58 +0000

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”

The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light. Information freedom is only to be lauded when it favours your side.

Who regulates, let alone should regulate, information disseminated across the Internet remains a critical question. Gone is the frontier utopianism of an open, untampered information environment, where bright and optimistic netizens could gather, digitally speaking, in the digital hall, the agora, the square, to debate, to ponder, to dispute every topic there was. Perhaps it never existed, but for a time, it was pleasant to even imagine it did.

The shift towards information control was bound to happen and was always going to be encouraged by the greatest censors of all: governments. Governments untrusting of the posting policies and tendencies of social media users and their facilitators have been, for some years, trying to rein in published content in a number of countries. Cyber-pessimism has replaced the cyber-utopians. “Social media,” remarked science writer Annalee Newitz in 2019, “has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.” The emergence of the terribly named “fake news” phenomenon adds to such efforts, all the more ironic given the fact that government sources are often its progenitors.

To make things even murkier, the social media behemoths have also taken liberties on what content they will permit on their forums, using their selective algorithms to disseminate information at speed even as they prevent other forms of it from reaching wider audiences. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, heeding the call of the very screams and bellows of their own creation, thought it appropriate to exclude or limit various users in favour of selected causes and more sanitised usage. In some jurisdictions, they have become the surrogates of government policy under threat: remove any offending material, or else.

Currently under review in Australia is another distinctly nasty example of such a tendency. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is a proposed instrument that risks enshrining censorship by stealth. Its exposure draft is receiving scrutiny from public submissions till August. Submissions are sought “on the proposed laws to hold digital platform services to account and create transparency around their efforts in responding to misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”

The Bill is a clumsily drafted, laboriously constructed document. It is outrageously open-ended on definitions and a condescending swipe to the intelligence of the broader citizenry. It defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.” Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”

The bill, should it become law, will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to monitor and regulate material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”. The Big Tech fraternity will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA, with the regulator even going so far as proposing to “create and enforce an industry standard”. Those in breach will be liable for up to A$7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.

What, then, is harm? Examples are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill. These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability. It can also include disruption to public order or society, the old grievance the State has when protestors dare differ in their opinions and do the foolish thing by expressing them. (The example provided here is the mind of the typical paranoid government official: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”)

John Steenhoff of the Human Rights Law Alliance has identified, correctly, the essential, dangerous consequence of the proposed instrument. It will grant the ACMA “a mechanism what counts as acceptable communication and what counts as misinformation and disinformation. This potentially gives the state the ability to control the availability of information for everyday Australians, granting it power beyond anything that a government should have in a free and democratic society.”

Interventions in such information ecosystems are risky matters, certainly for states purporting to be liberal democratic and supposedly happy with debate. A focus on firm, robust debate, one that drives out poor, absurd ideas in favour of richer and more profound ones, should be the order of the day. But we are being told that the quality of debate, and the strength of ideas, can no longer be sustained as an independent ecosystem. Your information source is to be curated for your own benefit, because the government class says it’s so. What you receive and how you receive, is to be controlled paternalistically.

The ACMA is wading into treacherous waters. The conservatives in opposition are worried, with Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman describing the draft as “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers. It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.” Not that the conservative coalition has any credibility in this field. Under the previous governments, a relentless campaign was waged against the publication of national security information. An enlightened populace is the last thing these characters, and their colleagues, want.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The Censors Down Under: The ACMA Gambit on Misinformation and Disinformation

Binoy Kampmark — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 04:20:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

New Zealand state media censors Ukraine truth

The Grayzone — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 05:35:42 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

Media Silence as Biden’s ‘Gag Order’ Censors Federal Scientists

Vins — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:46:51 +0000

The Biden administration implemented a “gag order” in January 2023 that restrains federal scientists from addressing controversial research topics to the public, the Guardian reported in February 2023. The White…

The post Media Silence as Biden’s ‘Gag Order’ Censors Federal Scientists appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

How media censors the left w/Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

The Real News Network — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 16:00:47 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

North Korean censors destroy more than half of soldiers’ Mother’s Day letters

By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 19:38:53 +0000

North Korea’s military ordered soldiers to write letters to their mothers ahead of the country’s Mother’s Day, which was on Wednesday, but military censors destroyed more than half of them for ideological reasons, sources in the country told Radio Free Asia.

To make matters worse, the censors even used the contents of some letters to identify and punish problematic soldiers, sources said.

“The letters from soldiers of each unit … are opened before they arrive at the regimental postal office, and the ones that contain complaints about the difficulties of military service are sorted out and destroyed,” a source from the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

The number of mothers who aren’t receiving letters is likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Every able-bodied North Korean must serve in the military. Until recently, male soldiers spent 10 years in the service, but since 2020, men serve eight years and women five as part of a fighting force estimated by the CIA World Factbook to be 1.15 million strong.

From the letters sorted out, the censors made a list of soldiers with “weak ideological wills” – in other words, those who complained about hunger or fatigue, the source said. Those soldiers will be sent to ideological training.

Letters written by a unit of soldiers guarding the border with China in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong had to pass through two rounds of censors, a source there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“The letters were first opened and censored by the company security officers, then they were all collected at the regiment and the military’s security authorities inspected them again,” the second source said.

Some of the soldiers on the weak ideology list did not even complain. Instead they made the mistake of asking about their mothers’ wellbeing, the second source said.

“A soldier sent his regards to his mother and asked her if the house had not collapsed in a recent flood and if the farming was going well,” the second source said. “However, the military security department pointed out that this shows that the soldier … does not trust the Party and speaks weakly instead of trusting that the Party takes care of the lives of all citizens.”

Because so many soldiers are now going to be sent to ideological reeducation, they are griping about the authorities’ duplicitous behavior, because they are the ones that ordered them to write the letters in the first place, the second source said.

Though Mother’s Day is most commonly celebrated around the world on the second Sunday in May, it falls on other dates in many countries. It is a relatively new holiday in North Korea, introduced in 2012 during the first year of Kim Jong Un’s reign, and became a public holiday in 2015.

Authorities chose Nov. 16 in remembrance of an iconic speech about mothers delivered on that day in 1961 by Kim’s grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

North Korean censors destroy more than half of soldiers’ Mother’s Day letters

By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 19:38:53 +0000

To make matters worse, the censors even used the contents of some letters to identify and punish problematic soldiers, sources said.

The number of mothers who aren’t receiving letters is likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Some of the soldiers on the weak ideology list did not even complain. Instead they made the mistake of asking about their mothers’ wellbeing, the second source said.

Authorities chose Nov. 16 in remembrance of an iconic speech about mothers delivered on that day in 1961 by Kim’s grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

China censors searches for ‘Hu Jintao,’ the former president, removed from congress

By RFA Mandarin and Cantonese services — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:54:32 +0000

Chinese government censors on Monday limited keyword searches for former president Hu Jintao, who was unceremoniously removed from the ruling Chinese Communist Party congress over the weekend.

Seated at the leaders’ rostrum on Saturday, a confused-looking Hu was physically lifted from his seat by a security guard and firmly escorted past leader Xi Jinping, whom he tried to talk to, and out of the hall.

The incident prompted rampant speculation that Hu's removal was a political statement from Xi and to show the total destruction of Hu's political faction, which is closely linked to the Communist Party Youth League. Xi was later voted in for an unprecedented third five-year term in office, making him the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

No discussion of the incident was allowed on Chinese social media platforms after the event, while keyword searches for "Hu Jintao," "Granddad Hu" and "Xi Jinping" were blocked, or only showing very limited results.

A keyword search for "Hu Jintao" on the Weibo social media platform on Monday resulted in just a couple of generic posts from the party congress, which ran from Oct. 16-22 in Beijing, with comments turned off on both.

State news agency Xinhua later tweeted that Hu had turned up to the session despite feeling "unwell," and was escorted out due to his health.

Some messages managed to get around censors for a brief time by referring to Hu as a "former principal" who had been sent out by the current principal.

Clues from photos

Ming Chu-cheng, professor of political science at National Taiwan University, said important clues could be found in news photos of the incident, broadcast by the Spanish-language channel ABC Internacional.

"In the first photo, Hu Jintao is about to open the file [on the desk in front of him], but [outgoing Politburo standing committee member] Li Zhanshu stops him," Ming told a recent discussion forum in Taiwan.

"In the second photo, Li Zhanshu takes the file away from Hu Jintao, who tries to take it back, but Li won't let him."

In the third and fourth photos, party leader Xi Jinping indicates to the security guard that Hu should leave. Hu is escorted out, but tries to talk to Xi on his way out.

"Xi doesn't give him the time of day," Ming said, saying that Xi's behavior was rude according to Chinese culture's veneration of elders. "The leaders ... on either side stay expressionless throughout ... they didn't dare show any expression due to Xi's power."

But he added: "I think it was likely an emergency of some kind [rather than a premeditated gesture target the Youth League faction]."

Former Chinese president Hu Jintao leaves his seat next to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China October 22, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

Wu Guoguang, a senior research scholar at the Center for China Economics and Institutions at Stanford University, agreed that Xi's treatment of Hu was disrespectful.

"Regardless of why he was leaving, the least the leaders on the rostrum could do would be to at least get up, shake hands, and say goodbye," Wu said. "There was a total absence of that etiquette."

"Why do former leaders come at all? Generally, as a platform for them to show unity with the current leader, but ... the [treatment] of Hu Jintao shattered those illusions," he said.

U.S.-based popular science writer Fang Zhouzi said via Twitter that the man who escorted Hu outside the hall was Xi's personal bodyguard.

The man following along behind was named by the Associated Press's Beijing correspondent Dake Kang as Kong Shaoxun, deputy director of the Communist Party's general office, which is in charge of practical arrangements, housing and other services for leaders past and present.

Japanese journalist Akio Yaita, Taipei bureau chief for the Sankei Shimbun, said rumors of a coup attempt were far-fetched. "It's more likely that Hu Jintao had an opinion on the ... amendments to the party charter," he said. "Hu's departure showed that Xi Jinping rules over everything, but also made public contradictions within the party."

After Hu left, the party charter was amended to enshrine Xi Jinping as a "core" party leader.

Protests

Signs of anti-Xi protest were largely confined to overseas cities during the party congress, with 1,000 people turning out in London on Sunday to protest Xi's rule and the beating of a Hong Kong protester by Chinese consular officials in the northern city of Manchester.

A video clip circulating on social media on the evening of Oct. 23, after Xi announced a new leadership line-up packed with his most loyal allies, showed two young women walking through a Shanghai street carrying a banner that read, "We don't want," repeated several times.

The banner appeared to be a reference to the "Bridge Man" banner protest on the eve of the party congress, which called for elections, not leaders, and an end to COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as for Xi Jinping to step down.

As the young women walked past the camera on Xiangyang North Road in Shanghai's Jing'an and Xuhui districts, someone could be heard playing the Internationale -- a tune that played a prominent part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement -- on a kazoo.

One of their companions commented: "We've always wanted to do this."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Mandarin and Cantonese services.

Broadcaster Censors Hill TV Segment on Rashida Tlaib’s Description of Israel as “Apartheid Government”

Ryan Grim — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 01:44:16 +0000

Executives at a major broadcasting company stepped in this week to block the airing of a segment on Hill TV that defended Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., amid an ongoing controversy inside the Democratic Party.

Tlaib had been attacked by colleagues for saying, “I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.”

As a co-host of the Hill TV morning show “Rising,” presenter Katie Halper on Monday made the controversy the subject of her Radar: the name “Rising” uses to brand its monologues. Each show includes two Radars, one from a left perspective and one from a right perspective, and as a former co-host of the show, I’ve recorded more than 150 of them. There is no approval process: A co-host files a script, which is loaded into a teleprompter. The monologue is then recorded, with a back-and-forth discussion and debate with the other co-host following it. The segment is then uploaded to a variety of platforms along with the rest of the show.

But Halper — who spoke publicly about the censorship Thursday evening on her livestream — said that Monday’s process was different. After the taping of the segment, producers asked co-host Robby Soave to do what’s known as a “pick up,” a fairly standard editorial addition to a segment. In this case, Soave was asked to repeat something that had already been included, namely the perspective of Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that stood in opposition to Tlaib. Later, Halper was told the segment was being reviewed and held up. Later in the week, she was told it wouldn’t run. When she asked if she could discuss the subject in her next appearance on Hill TV, she was told her invitation had been rescinded, according to an email from an executive with Nexstar Media Group, which owns Hill TV, along with scores of local news channels and the cable channel NewsNation, which recently hired former CNN presenter Chris Cuomo.

Halper’s monologue examined Tlaib’s claim that Israel has the characteristics of an apartheid state by exploring the definition of apartheid and quoting from human rights organizations such as Israel-based B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. She quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak saying that Israel could become an apartheid state if it didn’t change course, and so on.

Halper also made reference to Israeli laws that bar Palestinians from traveling freely or living in Israel proper even if they are married to an Israeli, as well as to laws that grant or exclude entry into the country specifically on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

The decision of whether to post the segment was kicked from “Rising” producers to The Hill’s editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. In a call with Halper on Wednesday, he framed Halper’s segment as similar to an op-ed submission, telling her that The Hill accepts some submissions and rejects other submissions, and that this right extends to Hill TV journalism as well.

Producers told Halper that perhaps a standard segment would work, but when Halper proposed to a Nexstar executive that she use her next appearance for such a segment, she was told her services would no longer be needed.

“We wanted to let you know that we will not be needing you to appear on Rising tomorrow am,” a Nexstar executive told Halper Wednesday in an email she provided to The Intercept, asking for the executive’s name to be kept private. “Please feel free to submit any unpaid invoices for your work on Rising. We wish you all the best.”

Gary Weitman, the chief communications officer for Nexstar, declined to comment.

Her monologue is below:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been condemned by some over comments she made about Israel. Here’s CNN’s Jake Tapper reporting on what the Michigan Democrat said and the response it prompted.

I’m not a Jewish colleague of Tlaib, but I am a Jew and I am outraged. Not by Tlaib, but by the attacks on Tlaib. Rashida Tlaib is saying that Israel is an apartheid state and that people who claim to have progressive values cannot support an apartheid state. No matter how loose a definition of progressive we use, it certainly excludes supporting a racist apartheid system.

What’s outrageous is that Tlaib would be pilloried over her comments. What’s outrageous is that the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt would claim that Israel is not an apartheid government. What’s outrageous is that Jake Tapper would accept Greenblatt’s judgment as the truth and not propaganda that needed to be pushed back against.

I understand that Greenblatt and perhaps Tapper “feel” like Israel is not an apartheid state but unfortunately for them, apartheid isn’t about your feelings. It’s about facts.

So let’s look at the facts on the ground.

First of all, what is apartheid?

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means apartness. It was the official policy in South Africa from 1948 and 1994, allowing white South Africans, in the minority, to rule over and discriminate against the vast majority of Black South Africans.

But apartheid doesn’t just apply to South Africa. In 1973, the U.N. defined “the crime of apartheid” as including “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in Southern Africa,” as well as any “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined apartheid as “inhumane acts of a character” that are “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

These inhuman acts include, among others “infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups. … Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including … the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. … Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”

Israel’s own laws certainly fit this definition of apartheid.

Look at the Law of Return of 1950 and tell me it’s not apartheid. The law allows any Jew, which means anyone with one Jewish grandparent, the right to move to Israel and automatically become citizens of Israel. It gives their spouses that right too, even if they’re not Jewish. Palestinians, of course, lack that right.

Lest you had any doubts about that, the Israeli Citizenship Law of 1952 deprived Palestinian refugees and their descendants of legal status, the right to return and all other rights in their homeland. It also defined Palestinians present in Israel as “Israeli citizens” without a nationality and group rights.

These laws together obviously fit into the International Criminal Court’s apartheid criteria: The Israeli laws prohibit “members of a racial group” “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”

The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which was reauthorized in March of this year, makes people who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip ineligible for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits that are usually available through marriage to an Israeli citizen. Not only can non-Israeli Jews not get Israeli citizenship through their Israeli spouses, but in some cases they can’t live with them in Israel.

More recently, the controversial Nation State Law established that “The fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It also stipulated, “The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” It cancels the status of Arabic as an official language, and omits all mention of Israel as a democracy, the equality of its citizens, and the existence of the Palestinian population.

This legal obliteration of Palestinians clearly fulfills the U.N.’s definition of apartheid, dividing “the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups.”

These are just some of the reasons that human rights organizations have declared Israel an apartheid state. Of course it should come as no surprise that Palestinian human rights organizations have been calling Israel’s government an apartheid one for decades. Al Haq, Al Mezan’s Center for Human Rights, Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association have documented Israeli apartheid.

More recently, organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also conceded that Israel enacts apartheid policies.

Israel’s own human rights organization B’Tselem has declared, “The Israeli regime enacts … an apartheid regime. B’Tselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.” B’Tselem divides the way Israeli apartheid works into four areas:

“Land – Israel works to Judaize the entire area, treating land as a resource chiefly meant to benefit the Jewish population. Since 1948, Israel has taken over 90% of the land within the Green Line and built hundreds of communities for the Jewish population. Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the West Bank, building more than 280 settlements for some 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel has not built a single community for the Palestinian population in the entire area stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population after dispossessing them of most of their property rights).

Citizenship – Jews living anywhere in the world, their children and grandchildren – and their spouses – are entitled to Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Palestinians cannot immigrate to Israeli-controlled areas, even if they, their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there. Israel makes it difficult for Palestinians who live in one of the units it controls to obtain status in another, and has enacted legislation that prohibits granting Palestinians who marry Israelis status within the Green Line.

Freedom of movement – Israeli citizens enjoy freedom of movement in the entire area controlled by Israel (with the exception of the Gaza Strip) and may enter and leave the country freely. Palestinian subjects, on the other hand, require a special Israeli-issued permit to travel between the units (and sometimes inside them), and exit abroad also requires Israeli approval.

Political participation – Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote and run for office, but leading politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. The roughly five million Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, cannot participate in the political system that governs their lives and determines their future. They are denied other political rights as well, including freedom of speech and association.”

Israeli officials and politicians, too, have described their own country as an apartheid state.

Former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair wrote in 2002, “we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”

Zehava Galon, former chair of Israel’s Meretz party, said in 2006, Israel was “relegated” to “the level of an apartheid state.”

In 2007, Israel’s former education minister Shulamit Aloni wrote, “the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”

In 2008, former environment minister Yossi Sarid said, “what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

Even Israel’s prime ministers have used the A word. In a recently published 1976 interview, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, “if we don’t want to get to apartheid … I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state.”

In 2007 yet another prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” Well, Israel isn’t finished, but they do face a “South African-style struggle.”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in 2010, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Surely South African leaders who suffered, struggled, and finally destroyed apartheid in their nation understood what apartheid is. And the great South African leaders Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu saw Israel policies as apartheid. In 1997 Mandela said, “The U.N. took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

In 2013, Desmond Tutu recalled being struck by the similarities between what he experienced in apartheid South Africa and what he observed in Israel.

To my friends in the Democratic Party who want to support Israel and who who want be progressives, it is important to listen to what international law, Israeli politicians and South Africans leaders and apartheid survivors say about the apartheid system in Israel. But we would all do well to look at what South Africa did with its apartheid system. Simply put, it left apartheid behind.

So the question we should be asking ourselves as progressives and Americans and some of us as Jews is not how to excoriate Rashida Tlaib for pointing out the obvious, or how to turn all criticisms of Israel as challenges to Israel’s right to exist or as expressions of anti-Semitism. Rather, the question to ask is how an apartheid-free Israel would look.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Palestine: Meta Censors Posts #shorts

Human Rights Watch — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:17:34 +0000

This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

Facebook Tells Moderators to Allow Graphic Images of Russian Air Strikes, But Censors Israeli Attacks

Sam Biddle — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 10:00:55 +0000

After a series of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

“This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation and the Palestinian narrative.”

“This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation and the Palestinian narrative,” said Mona Shtaya, an adviser with 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, a civil society group that formally collaborates with Meta on speech issues. During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, between August 5 and August 15, 7amleh tallied nearly 90 deletions of content relating to bombings, noting that reports of censored content are still coming in.

Marwa Fatafta, Middle East North Africa policy manager for Access Now, an international digital rights group, said, “Their censorship works almost like clockwork — whenever violence escalates on the ground, their takedown of Palestinian content soars.”

Instances of censored Palestinian content reviewed by The Intercept include the August 5 removal of a post mourning the death of Alaa Qaddoum, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in an Israeli missile strike, as well as an Instagram video showing Gazans pulling bodies from beneath rubble. Both posts were removed with a notice claiming that the imagery “goes against our guidelines on violence or dangerous organizations” — a reference to Meta’s company policy against violent content or information related to its vast roster of banned people and groups.

Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin told The Intercept that these two posts were removed according to the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, pointing to the company’s policy of censoring content promoting federally designated terrorist groups. Sackin did not respond to a follow-up question about how an image of a 5-year-old girl and a man buried in rubble promoted terrorism.

Palestinians in Gaza who post about Israeli assaults said their posts don’t contain political messages or indicate any affiliation with terror groups. “I’m just posting pure news about what’s happening,” said Issam Adwan, a Gaza-based freelance journalist. “I’m not even using a very biased Palestinian news language: I’m describing the Israeli planes as Israeli planes, I’m not saying that I’m a supporter of Hamas or things like these.”

Rights advocates told The Intercept that the exemptions made for the Russia-Ukraine war are the latest example of a double standard between Meta’s treatment of Western markets and the rest of the world — evidence of special treatment of the Ukrainian cause on Meta’s part since the beginning of the war and something that can be seen with media coverage of the war more broadly.

Though the majority of users on social platforms owned by Meta live outside the United States, critics charge that the company’s censorship policies, which affect billions worldwide, tidily align with U.S. foreign policy interests. Rights advocates emphasized the political nature of these moderation decisions. “Meta was capable to take very strict measures to protect Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion because it had the political will,” said Shtaya, “but we Palestinians haven’t witnessed anything of these measures.”

By taking its cues from U.S. government policy — including cribbing U.S. counterterrorism blacklists — Meta can end up censoring entirely nonviolent statements of support or sympathy for Palestinians, according to a 2021 statement by Human Rights Watch. “This is a pretty clear example of where that’s happening,” Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine director, told The Intercept of the most recent takedowns. While Human Rights Watch’s accounting of recent Gaza censorship was still ongoing, Shakir said what he’d seen already indicated that Meta was once again censoring Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech, including the documentation of human rights abuses.

It’s unclear which specific facet of Meta’s byzantine global censorship system was responsible for the spate of censorship of Gaza posts in August; many posters received no meaningful information as to why their posts were deleted. The Meta spokesperson declined to provide an accounting of which other policies were used. Past takedowns of Palestinian content have cited not only the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy but also company prohibitions against depictions of graphic violence, hate symbols, and hate speech. As is the case with Meta’s other content policies, the Violent and Graphic Content prohibition can at times swallow up posts that are clearly sharing the reality of global crises rather than glorifying them — something the company has taken unprecedented steps to prevent in Ukraine.

Meta’s public-facing Community Standards rulebook says: “We remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others because it may create an environment that discourages participation” — noting a vague exception for “graphic content (with some limitations) to help people raise awareness about these issues.” The Violent and Graphic Content policy places a blanket ban on gruesome videos of dead bodies and restricts the viewing of similar still images to adults 18 years and older.

In an expanded, internal version of the Community Standards guide obtained by The Intercept, the section dealing with graphic content includes a series of policy memos directing moderators to deviate from the standard rules or bring added scrutiny to bear on specific breaking news events. A review of these breaking news exceptions shows that Meta directed moderators to make sure that graphic imagery of Ukrainian civilians killed in Russian attacks was not deleted on seven different occasions, beginning at the immediate onset of the invasion. The whitelisted content includes acts of state violence akin to those routinely censored when conducted by the Israeli military, including multiple specific references to airstrikes.

According to the internal material, Meta began instructing its moderators to deviate from standard practices to preserve documentation of the Russian invasion the day after it began. A policy update on February 25 instructed moderators to not delete video of some of the war’s earliest civilian casualties. “This video shows the aftermath of airstrikes on the city of Uman, Ukraine,” the memo reads. “At 0.5 seconds, innards are visible. We are making an allowance to MAD this video” — a reference to the company practice “Mark As Disturbing,” or attaching a warning to an image or video rather than deleting it outright.

“It’s always been about geopolitics and profit for Meta.”

On March 5, moderators were told to “MAD Video Briefly Depicting Briefly Mutilated Persons Following Air Strikes in Chernigov”— again noting that moderators were to deviate from standard speech rules. “Though video depicting dismembered persons outside of a medical setting is prohibited by our Violent & Graphic Content policy,” the memo says, “the footage of the individuals is brief and appears to be in an awareness raising context posted by survivors of the rocket attack.”

The graphic violence exceptions are just a few of the many ways Meta has quickly adjusted its moderation practices to accommodate the Ukrainian resistance. At the outset of the invasion, the company took the rare step of lifting speech restrictions around the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian military previously banned under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. In March, Reuters reported that Meta temporarily permitted users to explicitly call for the death of Russian soldiers, speech that would also normally violate the company’s rules.

Rights advocates emphasized that their grievance is not with added protections for Ukrainians but the absence of similar special steps to shield besieged civilians from Meta’s erratic censorship apparatus nearly everywhere else in the world.

“Human rights is not a cherry-picking exercise,” said Fatafta. “It’s good they have taken such important measures for Ukraine, but their failure to do so for Palestine emphasizes further their discriminatory approach to content moderation. It’s always been about geopolitics and profit for Meta.”

How exactly Meta decides which posts are celebrating gruesome wartime death and which are raising awareness of it is never explained in the company’s public overview of its speech rules or the internal material reviewed by The Intercept.

A January 2022 blog post from Meta notes that the company uses a “balancing test that weighs the public interest against the risk of harm” for content that would normally violate company rules but provides no information as to what that test actually entails or who conducts it. Whether an attempt to document atrocities or mourn a neighbor killed in an airstrike is deemed glorification or in the public interest is left to the subjective judgment calls of Meta’s overworked and sometimes traumatized content contractors, tasked with making hundreds of such decisions every day.

Few would dispute that the images from Ukraine described in the Meta policy updates — documenting the Russian invasion — are newsworthy, but the documents obtained by The Intercept show that Meta’s whitelisting of material sympathetic to Ukraine has extended even to graphic state propaganda.

The internal materials show that it has on multiple instances whitelisted Ukrainian state propaganda videos that highlight Russian violence against civilians, including the emotionally charged “Close the Sky” film Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented to Congress in March. “Though the video depicting mutilated humans outside of a medical setting is prohibited by VGC policy the footage shared is in an awareness-raising context posted by the President of Ukraine,” said a March 24 update distributed to moderators.

On May 13, moderators were told not to delete a video posted by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry that included graphic depictions of burnt corpses. “The video very briefly depicts an unidentified charred body lying on the floor,” the update says. “Though video depicting charred or burning people is prohibited by our Violent & Graphic Content policy … the footage is brief and qualifies for a newsworthy exception as per OCP’s guidelines, as it documents an on-going armed conflict.”

“Meta is replicating online some of the same power imbalances and rights abuses we see in the real world.”

The internal materials reviewed by The Intercept show no such interventions for Palestinians — no whitelisting of propaganda designed to raise sympathies for civilians or directives to use warnings instead of removing content depicting harm to civilians.

Critics pointed to the disparity to question why online speech about war crimes and human rights offenses committed against Europeans seems to warrant special protections while speech referring to abuses committed against others do not.

“Meta should respect the right for people to speak out, whether in Ukraine or Palestine,” said Shakir, of Human Rights Watch. “By silencing many people arbitrarily and without explanation, Meta is replicating online some of the same power imbalances and rights abuses we see in the real world.”

While Meta seems to side against allowing Palestinian civilians to keep graphic content online, it has intervened in posting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to keep images live by siding with the occupying Israeli military. In one instance, Meta took steps to ensure that a depiction of an attack against a member of the Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank was kept up: “An Israeli Border Police officer was struck and lightly wounded by a Molotov cocktail during clashes with Palestinians in Hebron,” an undated memo distributed to moderators reads. “We are making an exception for this particular content to Mark this video as Disturbing.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

Chinese censors delete post hitting out at mass, high-tech pandemic surveillance

By Yitong Wu, Chingman and Qiao Long for RFA Mandarin — Thu, 26 May 2022 18:59:09 +0000

Chinese censors have deleted a social media post from a university professor who hit out at the blanket surveillance deployed against Chinese citizens as part of the zero-COVID policy.

The post from Tsinghua University law professor Lao Dongyan, who has long been a vocal critic of mass surveillance and facial recognition under the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was deleted from Weibo on Monday.

Undeterred, Lao posted further comments on Wednesday, calling on the highest judicial authorities in China to pay attention to the personal privacy risks posed by big data surveillance, and for laws to limit its scope.

Lao's initial post took issue with the widespread deployment of big data surveillance as part of the Beijing municipal government's attempts to deliver on CCP leader Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy.

Lao said government promises that citizens' data "won't be used for purposes other than disease control and prevention" weren't enough, and that legislation was needed, otherwise victims of big data leaks or theft would have no channel for redress.

"I'm human, not a zoo animal," Lao wrote on Monday. "If you want to live in captivity, that's your choice, but I don't."

"There should be some dignity to a human life, which should be more than just existence."

Workers wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) are seen at an entrance to an alley in a neighborhood under lockdown due to Covid-19 in Beijing, May 24, 2022. Credit: AFP

Limiting freedom

On Wednesday, Lao expressed concern in two fresh posts that technologies like facial recognition, voiceprint recognition, and even emotional recognition infringe on citizens' privacy, and called for legislation to limit their use.

In Beijing, a link had now been made between public transportation ticketing systems and the traffic light health code app that is mandatory for access to any public place under the zero-COVID policy.

She said the linkage gave the authorities instant access to individuals' identities, whereabouts and social connections, and that the health code app could be used indefinitely to limit citizens' freedom of movement.

She also warned that the move had greatly increased the risk of people's personal data being abused or leaked.

Lao tagged the Supreme People's Court and the highest-level state prosecutor, among other official accounts, in her post.

Tsinghua sociologist Li Zhen, who has campaigned for privacy in the face of big data, said such surveillance eventually gets used as a political tool to exert social control in China.

"Now, PCR-testing has been normalized in Beijing, with testing stations every mile, just like bus stops," Li told RFA. "The whole thing is controlled by the government, so it's totally about political control."

"This has totally destroyed the past 30 or 40 years of legal progress in China," he said. "We have moved forward, only to regress, because of technology."

Farmers targeted

The controls on people's movements aren't just limited to urban areas, either. Farmers in some areas now need to get a pass before they can work their own land.

"It's hard for me to imagine, as a farmer," Zhang Jianping told RFA. "When I was a kid in the Mao Zedong era, they would crack down on capitalism if we grew a cash crop on our private land."

"Fast forward several decades, and there are still restrictions on farmers wanting to work the land," he said. "I can't understand such disease control and prevention measures."

Beijing-based commentator Ji Feng agreed.

"Since the pandemic, our every action has been subject to government monitoring," Ji said. "The aim is simple: to bring everyone under government control."

"They are using the pandemic as a testing ground in the mass management of the population, the prevention of mass incidents [like protests], and the elimination of dissatisfaction and even resistance," he said.

U.S.-based legal scholar Teng Biao said it's entirely possible for the CCP to eliminate any public dissent through the use of high-tech surveillance.

"The high-tech system they have in China has exceeded the imaginations of political dystopia authors," Teng told RFA. "They can control every corner [of the country] and everyone in it."

"China is using the pandemic as a pretext to control the flow of information and the actions of its citizens, including the use of technologies mentioned by Lao Dongyan: voiceprint recognition; facial recognition and other biometric techniques," he said.

"This isn't just an infringement of people's right to privacy: the consequences will be far more serious than that, because people with different views [to the CCP line] will be unable to act and see no hope [for the future]," Teng said.

Teng said he is concerned for Lao's safety in the wake of her posts, and called on the international community to keep a close eye on her situation.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Yitong Wu, Chingman and Qiao Long for RFA Mandarin.

Chinese censors go after ‘last generation’ references on social media platforms

By Rita Cheng and Hsia Hsiao-hwa — Fri, 13 May 2022 20:08:58 +0000

Censors backed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have deleted references to a viral video that spawned the "last generation" meme, which emerged as a form of protest over ongoing lockdowns, mass incarcerations and compulsory testing under its zero-COVID policy.

In the video, PPE-clad police officials turn up outside someone's apartment and tries to force them to go to an isolation camp even though he had recently tested negative for coronovirus.

"We're negative. You have no right to take us away," the man says, before a police officer steps forward wagging a finger and says: "You know that we will punish you, right? And when that happens, it will have a bad effect on your family for three generations."

"Sorry. We're the last generation," the man replies in the video which began circulating on Chinese social media platforms from May 11, garnering huge numbers of views and comments.

Searches for the video or the keywords "last generation" yielded no results on Thursday.

The meme has apparently fed in to a culture of passive resistance begun with the "lying down" movement of 2021.

Some have joked online that the era from 1966 onwards was all about the innocence of revolution and justified rebellion, while the 1989 pro-democracy movement felt it was their "duty" to protest.

By contrast, the youth of 2022 are shutting up shop before their lives have properly begun, by referring to themselves as the "last generation."

A related meme talks about the study of "run," a Chinese character that echoes the English word "run," meaning finding ways to leave the country.

The memes come at a time when the CCP is hoping to get people to have more children amid concerns over a rapidly aging and dwindling population.

But even before the "last generation" meme emerged, Shanghai officials had announced that the city's birth rate fell below the rate of 1 needed for the population to replace itself, to just 0.73.

Anger over zero-COVID policies

Ye Yaoyuan, head of the Department of International Studies and Contemporary Linguistics at St. Thomas in the United States, said the phrase highlights huge popular anger over the zero-COVID policies, likening it to a pressure cooker.

"In the years between 1989 to 2022, the CCP has developed an incomparable array of tools for controlling the population," Ye told RFA. "They are now trying to monitor [public opinion] because they fear the emergence of collective action and resistance"

"Back in 1989 [before the mass pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square and across China], they didn't actually have that capability."

The stated refusal to toe the line and produce another generation is a deep and disturbing form of dissent for the CCP and leader Xi Jinping, who wants to project an image of self-confidence in China's authoritarian form of government, in a bid to show the world its superiority over Western-style liberal democracy.

Xi has also presided over a blanket ban on private tuition and other measures aimed at making child-rearing less stressful and expensive for parents, while his government has raised the maximum number of children per couple from two to three.

Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who follows China's population policy and family planning controls, said prosperity is a key driver of birth rates.

"What the government should do is create a better environment and lifestyle, so that people are willing to have children," Yi told RFA.

"This is the government's obligation and responsibility."

'You can't stop them at all'

A man who gave only the surname Chen said he understood the feelings of powerless engendered by the Shanghai lockdown, saying he too is fighting to remain in his hotel quarantine room, despite testing negative for COVID-19.

Chen said he wants to save his cat 14sky from being bludgeoned to death or poisoned by officials if he is forced to go to an isolation camp.

"These people who have power can do any crazy thing they want, and you can't stop them at all," Chen said, adding that he plans to stay single with his cat.

"No matter what you do, you will have a strong sense of powerlessness, because you have no control over anything," Chen said. "Sometimes you just want to be a person. It's very difficult, very desperate."

Ming Juzheng, an honorary professor of politics at National Taiwan University, said the CCP likely fears that if it relaxes restrictions now, there will be a resurgence of COVID-19 just in time for the 20th party congress later this year.

"This would be an unacceptable challenge [for Xi], whose entire ideological line would be thrown into question, and his regime overthrown," Ming said.

He added: "The CCP has a pathological attachment to power."

Taiwan political commentator Ren Sung-lin said the zero-COVID policy more of a political campaign than a public health policy, and the Shanghai lockdown is a part of Xi's need to show he can bring the city -- an internationally connected economic powerhouse -- to heel.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng and Hsia Hsiao-hwa.

Chinese censors, police go after list of Shanghai dead, zero-COVID critics

By RFA's Mandarin Service — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 20:15:53 +0000

Ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed censors have deleted an online list of people who died as a result of the Shanghai lockdown, and blocked the URL after internet users saved it to a blockchain-based site.

"They did not die of COVID-19, but because of it," the introduction to the list on the Airtable collaboration platform -- which uses blockchain technology -- said. "They should neither be ignored, nor forgotten."

The site showed "incomplete numbers" of more than 152 people whose deaths were believed to be directly linked to the CCP's zero-COVID policy and stringent lockdowns that have dragged on in Shanghai for weeks.

Searches for the list yielded no results on Weibo on Monday, with one repost of the Airtable URL to the social media platform yielding a notice that read: "This content cannot be viewed at this time."

Among dozens of others, the list names Qian Wenxiong, a former official at the Hongkou district maternal and child health center, as having committed suicide; Zhou Shengni, a nurse at the Dongfang Hospital, as having died of an asthma attack; Wei Guiguo, vice president of Netcom Securities, as having died of a cerebral hemorrhage; and "Captain Zhao," a security guard at the Changning Hongkang Phase III residential community, as having died of overwork.

Several suicides are recorded in the list, many as a result of people jumping from tall buildings.

"Someone put the list of the dead onto the blockchain now, because the authorities deleted the post titled 'Shanghai's Dead' yesterday," internet user Zhou Ni told RFA. "It can't be deleted, but the website has been blocked in China, so people there can no longer see it."

"Anyone in China will have to circumvent the Great Firewall to see it," Zhou said.

Meanwhile, Shanghai-based rapper Fang Lue, known by his stage name ASTRO, said he had taken down a video of a song he wrote about lockdown titled "New Slave."

"I am very grateful yet nervous that my song “New Slave” has been getting a lot of attention in recent days," Fang wrote in a statement posted to his YouTube channel.

"I had essentially hoped to use this song to call for more reflection and debate about the particular time we are living through and the problems we are having," he said. "It was never my intention to bring up unfounded criticisms."

"I was told that there have been some reposts and appropriations of my song on other social platforms, alongside messages that are a long way from what I wanted, so I have deleted my public video of New Slave on YouTube," Fang wrote.

The song's lyrics included the lines "When freedom of thought and will are imprisoned by power ... when people who aren't sick are locked up at home and treated as if they are sick, yet those who are truly sick can't get into a hospital ... it stinks; the stench of rotting souls fills the air."

"Open your mind, just open your mind," Fang sings. "How much guilt and pain does the prosperity of skyscrapers cover up?"

Before it was deleted, "New Slave" had gone viral on China's tightly controlled internet, with commentators saying this kind of social commentary was exactly what rap should be doing, and supporting Fang to carry on writing and performing.

The CCP has banned hip-hop from social media since the beginning of the year, and its propaganda and cultural officials have ordered entertainment platforms to avoid any "non-mainstream" cultural performances characterized as "decadent" by its directives.

Protest slogans have also been popping up on the streets of Shanghai in recent days, according to photos posted to Twitter, one of which riffs on a common notice left in place of deleted content by censors: "This content can't be viewed due to violations [of relevant laws and regulations]."

Others have simply complained that "People are dying," or referenced the "list of the dead."

Meanwhile, vice premier Sun Chunlan was found to have filmed some of her reported "visit" to Shanghai on the roof of the headquarters of a state-owned enterprise, rather than in Menghua Street, as claimed in the official footage.

And rights activist Liu Feiyue was summoned by local police for questioning after he criticized COVID-19 restrictions in Suizhou.

Liu was suspected of "violating supervision and management regulations," according to the Zengdu branch of the Suizhou municipal police department, according to a copy of the summons uploaded to Twitter.

He was ordered to go to the Dongcheng police station at 9.00 a.m. Monday local time for questioning.

Liu Feiyue, who founded the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch website, was convicted of "incitement to subvert state power" on Jan. 29, 2017 after giving interviews to foreign media. He was sentenced to five years in prison, deprived of political rights for three years, and had 1.01 million yuan of personal assets confiscated. He was awarded the 9th Liu Xiaobo Writers of Courage Award in November of the same year, as well as the 13th Writers in Prison Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Association.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA's Mandarin Service.

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