Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has released human rights activist Mazen Darwish “in a rare goodwill gesture” after holding him for three years. A verdict for his case should be released later this month.
The U.S. pledged $500,000 to the Baltics in order to combat Russian propaganda. The 12-month project will help train beginning and established Russian-language journalists.
SITE Intelligence Group reported that the Ansar al-Islam, the Bangladesh branch of the al-Qaeda in Indian Sub-Continent (AQIS), claimed responsibility for the death of secular blogger Niloy Chakrabartu, who used the pen name Niloy Neel.
A play about the “treatment of homegrown radicalisation” and British Islamic State (IS) recruits has been pulled a week before it’s debut. The director claims to have been “silenced” and the left-wing press has made allegations of censorship. A petition has
YouTube personalities have reacted angrily to an aggressive series of copyright claims made by the Fullscreen network against H3H3 productions, a popular comedy channel that mocked one of the network’s partner channels.
AFP News reports that a paper called the 9th Dey Weekly has been shut down by Iran’s “Press Supervisory Board,” which also issued warning notices to the Kayhan Daily and a news website called Raja–all critics of the nuclear deal Iran brokered during the P5+1 talks.
How can Twitter improve its sluggish growth? The company’s stock plummeted after interim chief executive Jack Dorsey said he was “not satisfied” with current user growth figures following the release of Twitter’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday.
As James T. Areddy at the Wall Street Journal tells it, the Chinese military was deeply troubled by the role a supposedly U.S.-dominated Internet played in destabilizing other despotic governments and warned Beijing could be next. The warning described the Internet as “a new form of global control” and the United States as a “shadow” hovering behind various uprisings.
In a recent interview, anti-violence video game crusader Jack Thompson addressed censorship, how youth respond differently to video game violence than adults, and how he varies from Feminist Frequency critic Anita Sarkeesian.
At the San Diego Comic-Con, Daniel Radcliffe expressed disbelief in video game critics’ assertion that violent games make violent people. The Harry Potter star was also confused as to why Rockstar Games, developer of Grand Theft Auto, was suing the BBC over the production of Game Changer, a film that explores a censorship crisis surrounding the game.
While Sony and Microsoft debuted their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in China within the past year, only 9 million out of China’s 515 million gamers use a console. Due to content censorship, prices, and pirating, Sony and Microsoft are expected to sell less than 550,000 consoles, combined, this year, with online PC and mobile games expected to haul in $16.8 and 4 billion, respectively.
Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman has outlined a new content policy that many users fear marks a new era of censorship on the platform.
The Turkish government has developed an international reputation for wasting no time in censoring websites and social media users inconvenient to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or in any way offensive to Islam. It appears to take significantly more time to determine whether websites disseminating Islamic State propaganda deserve to be taken offline, too, with about seven of these websites blocked in Turkey on Sunday.
A car dealer in West Palm Beach, Florida, is defiant in the face of threats from city officials to fine him for placing American flag banners on his car lot in violation, they say, of a city ordinance.
In the last four months, Australia outlawed over four times as many PC games as it did from 1994 to 2014. Around 220 computer games were denied classification since March 2014, rendering them illegal to sell or display, compared with only about 50 banned games from 1994 to 2014.
Fellow parents, you have at some time seen our precious children seduced and corrupted by video games. But one heinous market product, in particular, has been rated “E” for Everyone by the ESRB and was ranked one of the top video games for children in 2014. This devilry is none other than Mario Kart, a reckless driving simulator that conflates fun with danger and encourages pollution, violence with explosives, and unconditional drug abuse.
Censorship on the internet is unpopular and difficult. Information banned on one hosting platform usually surfaces on another, often helped along by the ever reliable Streisand Effect. But that doesn’t mean that some people aren’t trying.
Maroc Hebdo (Morocco Weekly) pulled its latest issue off shelves after the cover story asked if gays and lesbians should be burned to death. Homosexuality is illegal in the North African country.
A new poll has found that Russian public opinion towards mass murderer Josef Stalin has turn alarmingly positive during the tenures of President Vladimir Putin, a leader who has publicly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and invaded and reconquered multiple regions of various post-Soviet states.
“PAO GET OUT NOW” shouts a post on the first page of the front page of Reddit. It links to a picture of Adolf Hitler with the face of CEO Ellen Pao superimposed upon it. This is now a common sight on Reddit, the influential “Front Page of the Internet”, a website whose users are in full-scale revolt against their administrators.
The Pakistani government ordered the Save the Children NGO to leave the country in 15 days. Officials claim the group participated in “anti state” activities. “Save the Children was not served any notice to this effect,” stated the organization. “We strongly object to this action and are raising our serious concerns at the highest levels.”
A high school principal in Miami was removed because of short, civil comments he made on the website of a newspaper discussing the McKinney “pool party” video, after his comments became the focus of criticism from others, including a gay, Obama supporting ex-cop.
When failed discrimination plaintiff Ellen Pao was appointed CEO of Reddit last January, many predicted that it would herald a new age of censorship on the link-sharing and discussion site. Those predictions appear to have come true, as a number of communities on the site (known as “subreddits”) have just been unilaterally shut down.
An Iranian court sentenced artist-activist Atena Farghadani, 28, to 12 years in prison for insulting the government, after publishing a cartoon portraying Parliament members with animal heads.
Twitter has recently removed the ability of a political watchdog group to archive the embarrassing and incriminating tweets of U.S. congressmen automatically. The Sunlight Foundation’s much-beloved “politwoops” website was famous for revealing the regrettable tweets that members of Congress tried to erase from the history books.
