Censorship

[Commentary] The greatest concern today for our communications industry might simply be this: Are we prepared to learn from history? Do we want to break the pattern of the past and disrupt the political bargains of yesterday that have lessened free speech (for example, the fairness doctrine) and shielded incumbents from competitive entry (for example, the long-standing power of television broadcasters)? If so, the answer is to stop the intrusive government control that favors some companies over others. It is time to stop “mother may I” regulations.
[Babette Boliek is an associate professor of law and the associate dean of Faculty Research and Development at Pepperdine University School of Law]

China has built a new wall, in cyberspace — the largest system of Internet censorship, control and surveillance in the world, nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. Thirty years on, it is extending those controls even further.

Since passing its broad new Cybersecurity Law in June 2017, the Communist Party has rolled out new regulations — and steps to enforce existing ones — that reflect its desire to control and exploit every inch of the digital world, experts say. Today, the Great Firewall is being built not just around the country, to keep foreign ideas and uncomfortable truths out, but around every individual, computer and smartphone, in a society that has become the most digitally connected in the world. The Cyberspace Administration of China effectively ended online anonymity here by making Internet companies responsible for ensuring that anyone who posts anything is registered with their real name. It has cracked down on the VPN (virtual private network) systems that netizens have used to jump the firewall and evade censorship, with Apple agreeing to remove VPN providers from its Chinese App Store in July and authorities detaining a local software developer for three days last month for selling similar services. And authorities dramatically expanded their controls over what people say in private online chat groups, making anyone who sets up a chat group legally responsible for its content and requiring Internet companies to establish systems to rate and score the online conduct of users — to ensure they follow the Communist Party line and promote “socialist core values.”

China has largely blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of a big Communist Party gathering in Oct. The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company’s main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable. In mid-July, Chinese censors began blocking video chats and the sending of photographs and other files using WhatsApp, and they stopped many voice chats, as well. But most text messages on the app continued to go through normally. The restrictions on video, audio chats and file sharing were at least temporarily lifted after a few weeks. WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages. The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp.

How can news outlets improve their standing in the eyes of the public? If a study published by Northwestern University in Qatar is any indication, then the key to a higher level of trust might be a lower level of free speech.

Northwestern surveyed seven Middle Eastern countries and found that citizens in six of them ascribe more credibility to their press than Americans do to theirs — by wide margins, in some cases. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, 85 percent of citizens say the media is credible; the rates are 62 percent in Qatar and 59 percent in Saudi Arabia. Only 32 percent of Americans trust the media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately, according to Gallup. While these Middle Eastern credibility ratings sound great, they are attended by brutal restrictions on journalists. Reporters Without Borders rates countries' press freedoms, using such criteria as access to public records, censorship and safety. Out of 180 countries, the United Arab Emirates ranks 119, Qatar ranks 123 and Saudi Arabia ranks 168.

The internet is Balkanizing, and the world’s largest tech companies have had to dispatch envoys to, in effect, contain the damage such divisions pose to their ambitions.

The internet has long had a reputation of being an anything-goes place that only a few nations have tried to tame — China in particular. But in recent years, events as varied as the Arab Spring, elections in France and confusion in Indonesia over the religion of the country’s president have awakened governments to how they have lost some control over online speech, commerce and politics on their home turf. Even in the United States, tech giants are facing heightened scrutiny from the government. Facebook recently cooperated with investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the American presidential election. In recent weeks, politicians on the left and the right have also spoken out about the excess power of America’s largest tech companies. As nations try to grab back power online, a clash is brewing between governments and companies.

Some of the biggest companies in the world — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba among them — are finding they need to play by an entirely new set of rules on the once-anarchic internet. And it’s not just one new set of rules. According to a review by The New York Times, more than 50 countries have passed laws over the last five years to gain greater control over how their people use the web.

Today, when we talk about universal service, we have in mind bringing high-speed Internet access, or “broadband,” to any American who wants it. Broadband is important for many reasons: it can help you get a job, start a company, get health care, educate your kids, and the like. But it’s also vital for free speech and political engagement. Fewer today seem to be willing to defend to the death others’ right to say things with which they might disagree. The situation on many college campuses is especially distressing.

A strong platform that allows the people to share their ideas and inform themselves about current affairs forestalls that fate. And in a remarkably short time, the Internet has become one such platform. The FCC’s charge and our cultural traditions remind us that we need to extend that online megaphone to all Americans. I look forward to working with you to do that—and to fulfilling this timeless vision for the digital age.

The country of Azerbaijan is suing two French journalists for defamation in France for describing the oil-rich state as a “dictatorship.” The move could set an important precedent, in France at least, for foreign governments seeking to curb freedom of the press beyond their shores. The targets of the lawsuit, which critics have decried as an attempt to “export censorship,” are investigative filmmaker Laurent Richard and TV presenter and reporter Elise Lucet.

After Charlottesville, Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right have become a lot less welcome on the web. So they’re building their own.

“Enough is enough,” read the Gab-makers’ Medium post from Aug. 10, two days before the Unite the Right rally. “The time is now for patriots and free thinkers inside and outside of Silicon Valley to organize, communicate in a safe way, and start building,” the post read, calling for the formation of a new group called the “Free Speech Tech Alliance,” which would build an alternative infrastructure where the alt-right wouldn’t be burdened by the social-justice priorities and liberal values of Silicon Valley—nor by the arguably monopolistic powers of the major nodes of the information economy, like Facebook, Google, Apple, and their peers. Gab, and a growing number of its compatriots in the “alt-tech” movement, want to build their own internet, one that can be a haven for hate.

An effort in Congress aimed at cutting down on repeat comments to the Federal Communications Commission’s consumer complaint database could end up limiting legitimate public input, lawmakers and allies say. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has drafted legislation to reauthorize the FCC, with the measure aimed at increasing transparency at the agency. But while the draft would officially require the agency to keep a database of consumer complaints — something the FCC is already doing and made publicly available last May — it specifically notes that the FCC would not be required to include “duplicative complaints.”

The draft legislation language about “duplicative complaints” in the consumer complaint database set off alarm bells for Gigi Sohn, who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University. “That’s not transparent at all,” she said. “If there are 1,000 complaints about something that Verizon or Comcast did, I as a consumer should have a right to see that there are 1,000 complaints.”

The United Nations human rights chief said Aug 30 that President Donald Trump’s repeated denunciations of some media outlets as “fake news” could amount to incitement to violence and had potentially dangerous consequences outside the United States.

The rebuke by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, at a news conference in Geneva was an unusually forceful criticism of a head of state by a United Nations official. al-Hussein was reacting to President Trump’s recent comments at a rally in Phoenix (AZ) during which he spoke of “crooked media deceptions” in reports of the violent clashes at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. In Phoenix, the president’s words also appeared to whip up audience hostility toward journalists. “It’s really quite amazing when you think that freedom of the press, not only a cornerstone of the Constitution but very much something the United States defended over the years, is now itself under attack from the president himself,” al-Hussein said. “It’s a stunning turnaround.”