How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies
October 3, 20184:24 PM ET https://www.npr.org/2018/10/03/636299830/how-the-chinese-government-works-to-censor-debate-in-western-democracies
Last year, the Durham University students’ union organized a debate on whether China was a threat to the West. Tom Harwood, then president of the union, said the school’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association complained about the topic and pressed him to drop one of the speakers, Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada. Lin is also a human rights activist and a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation group banned by the Chinese government.
In March, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union, a giant market of more than 500 million consumers. British officials are desperate to ink new free trade deals with major economies, including China. Harwood was stunned that a Chinese diplomat would suggest that the United Kingdom might pay a financial price for something as small as a college debate.
lash-forward to 2012 when then-British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in public in London. China’s economy was now more than three times the size of the United Kingdom’s. Beijing responded by canceling meetings and freezing out British officials. In 2015, Cameron refused to meet the Dalai Lama, who told The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, “Money, money, money. That’s what this is about. Where is morality?”
The Chinese government no longer just tries to punish the West for straying from the Communist Party line. In the past year, Chinese President Xi Jinping has gone further, arguing that China’s authoritarian system can serve as a model for others, an alternative to liberal democracy.
Clumsy attempts to censor people — as in the case of the Durham University debate — have backfired, but China has had success pressuring businesses, as the apologies by Marriott and Mercedes-Benz show.
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more on China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china
Germany to implement law of editorial responsibility for Social Media
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/germany-implement-law-editorial-responsibility-social-media/
The law has been criticized as encouraging censorship.
The companies will also be forced to introduce an official complaint structure, obliging platforms to monitor their content and improve their real-time reporting protocols.
Platforms failing to react within 24-hours face €50 million fines. The challenge to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, VK, Vimeo, Flickr and the like are facing a major technological challenge which could come with significant costs.
The law adopted in June 2017, went into force in October 2017 and will be enforced from January 2018. The new law implies hiring hundreds of more employees.
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
two articles of interest regarding freedom of speech on the Internet
New heights in digital activism
As governments around the world impose new restrictions on internet freedom, it is worth remembering what is at stake. The present crackdown comes as digital platforms are being used in new and creative ways to advocate for change and, in many cases, save lives. Internet advocacy had real-world results in both democracies and authoritarian settings over the past year, and its impact was often most pronounced in countries where the information environment was more open online than off. In over two-thirds of the countries examined in this study, there was at least one significant example of individuals producing a tangible outcome by using online tools to fight for internet freedom, demand political accountability, advance women’s rights, support victims of unjust prosecution, or provide relief to those affected by natural disasters.
Fighting for internet freedom and digital rights
Social media were used effectively to fight for internet freedom in a variety of countries over the past year. In Thailand, over 150,000 people signed a Change.org petition against a government plan to centralize the country’s internet gateways, which would strengthen the authorities’ ability to monitor and censor online activity. As a result, the government announced that it had scrapped the plan, though skeptical internet users remain vigilant.
Using the hashtag #NoToSocialMediaBill, Nigerian digital rights organizations launched a multifaceted campaign to defeat a “Frivolous Petitions Prohibition Bill” that threatened to constrain speech on social media. Alongside significant digital media activism, civil society groups organized a march on the National Assembly, gathered signatures for a petition presented during a public hearing on the bill, and filed a lawsuit at the Federal High Court in Lagos, all of which contributed to the bill’s withdrawal in May 2016. India’s telecommunications regulator banned differential pricing schemes in February after more than a million comments were submitted online to protest companies that charge consumers different prices for select content or applications.
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more on Internet freedom in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=freedom
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=civil
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Researchers: Forget Internet Abstinence; Teens Need some Online Risk
By Dian Schaffhauser 05/16/16
https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/05/16/researchers-forget-internet-abstinence-teens-need-to-face-some-amount-of-online-risk.aspx
My note: after years of imposing Internet filters at schools, “cap” students’ natural curiosity by denying open access to the Internet, etc., this is the first article, which openly defies the bureaucratic / technocratic approach to regulation of the acquisition of knowledge at American schools.
the conclusion from a Pennsylvania State University research project that examined adolescent online safety. This approach includes an important role for teachers as “trusted confidantes” and “educated advisors.”
The results, “Dear Diary: Teens Reflect on Their Weekly Online Risk Experiences,” were published by the Association for Computing Machinery and presented at the organization’s recent Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
“Teens have a strong sense of cost vs. reward, so if we can educate them more clearly on the costs associated with their actions, they may make better decisions on their own,”
http://www.ibtimes.com/facebooks-internal-dislike-button-protecting-brand-rejecting-unflattering-posts-1813120
Facebook was in the headlines last summer about their algorithm, when it came out that Twitter algorithm suggested the riots in Missouri in a very different way.
Facebook has been in the headline numerous times regarding their privacy issues
Who is holding a private company responsible about acts like this?Should it be hold responsible?
