“Don’t point with your finger. God is everywhere, and with your finger you could be poking Him in His butt.” This dialogue from the Turkish version of the French television comedy Ah Biz Kadınlar (“Ah We Women”) just garnered its television station a fine from the Turkish state– not for its reference to an unsavory body part in a religious context, but for the use of the Turkish word for “God” rather than “Allah.”
Journalists in post-Gaddafi Libya are being threatened and even murdered “with impunity” for doing their job, according to a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The easy joke to make, upon learning that China’s authoritarian rulers are trying to ban Western ideas (other than communism, of course) from college campuses, is to say that they are only trying to accomplish what American universities already did forty years ago.
The social media website Twitter published a report on Monday that showed Turkey and Russia submitted the most frequent content removal requests of any state.
I noticed it first when a person said to me, “I used to like your work, until you said X.” The “X” could have been a joke or comment about pets or musicians — but for the offended, it was enough for them to disown their previous opinions of me forever.
A smartphone app that permits users to post messages anonymously is causing some colleges to ban it from their schools’ wireless networks because some racist comments have been posted.
London’s world famous Victoria and Albert museum, which houses a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects of decorative art and design, has bowed to pressure from extremists by removing a depiction of Mohamed from its website. The move comes
A week after WE tv announced the upcoming release of Sex Box, a censorship advocacy group is petitioning to have the channel removed from cable subscription bundles.
Only two weeks after Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg made a show of support for freedom of speech following a terror attack by radical Muslims in France, Facebook began censoring images of Muhammad in Turkey–including the very Charlie Hebdo images Zuckerberg claimed to support.
In a new piece on political correctness, Jonathan Chait does something that few progressive writers dare to do: admit critics have a point about the far left’s apparent desire to censor speech. Yet he fails to note that the problem is far older and more pervasive than it seems.
If there were ever really a bright moment in the sun for Charlie Hebdo magazine’s slain writers and editors to be hailed as free speech martyrs, it’s just about over. The Left is very uneasy with the notion of celebrating people who delighted in trampling on sacred narratives about power and victimization. To be brutally frank, modern “liberals” aren’t all that wild about free speech, either.
Shanghai authorities came under heavy criticism after a stampede killed thirty-six people on New Year’s Eve. Family members of the deceased slammed the government for skimping on security at an event that attracts thousands of people. But now these family members claim the Chinese government is censoring and monitoring their moves.
