Censorship

Remember Judith Miller? She is the former New York Times reporter who in 2005 spent almost three months in jail because she refused to identify the government source who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Attorney General Jeff Sessions raised the prospect that more journalists will have to make the same decision Miller did — out the source or go to jail — when he said the Justice Department is “reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas” as part of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on leaks.

Miller, now a Fox News contributor, wrote in 2016 about how Mike Pence, then a Republican congressman from Indiana, invited her to his office upon her release from jail and promised to push for a shield law. She said, "True to his word, Mr. Pence introduced the 'Free Flow of Information Act' with Rep Rick Boucher (D-VA). 'As a conservative who believes in limited government,' he said after reintroducing the legislation, which failed the first time he proposed it, 'I believe the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press.'" In 2007, the Columbia Journalism Review called Mike Pence “journalism’s best ally in the fight to protect anonymous sources.” In the end, however, Pence failed to secure passage of his shield law, and there is still none in place. That is one reason that Sessions now has the power to subpoena journalists.

President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, on Aug 4 accused Twitter of censoring one of his tweets. In a tweet, the president's son tweeted out a screenshot of a tweet posted earlier on Aug 4 that read “Jobs Jobs Jobs!!!” followed by several American flag emojis. The tweet also retweeted another user's tweet that included a Drudge Report link about Aug 4's jobs report. Eric Trump's tweet was hidden for some viewers behind a standard Twitter warning, which was depicted in the screenshot. The grey warning box reads: “This tweet is not available because it includes potentially sensitive content.” “Why are my tweets about jobs and the economy being censored? #Interesting” Eric Trump tweeted in response.

China has embarked on an internet campaign that signals a profound shift in the way it thinks of online censorship.

For years, the China government appeared content to use methods that kept the majority of people from reading or using material it did not like, such as foreign news outlets, Facebook and Google. For the tech savvy or truly determined, experts say, China often tolerated a bit of wiggle room, leading to online users’ playing a cat-and-mouse game with censors for more than a decade. Now the authorities are targeting the very tools many people use to vault the Great Firewall. In recent days, Apple has pulled apps that offer access to such tools — called virtual private networks, or VPNs — off its China app store, while Amazon’s Chinese partner warned customers on its cloud computing service against hosting those tools on their sites.

Over the past two months a number of the most popular Chinese VPNs have been shut down, while two popular sites hosting foreign television shows and movies were wiped clean. The shift — which could affect a swath of users from researchers to businesses — suggests that China is increasingly worried about the power of the internet, experts said.

In making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to protect. The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month. In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building. The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month. But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the ­social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. “Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

Columbia Journalism Review is partnering with the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation to launch a website that documents press freedom incidents around the country. The site, US Press Freedom Tracker, is nonpartisan and captures incidents involving journalists such as arrests, border stops, equipment searches and seizures, leak prosecutions, physical attacks or threats, and subpoenas.

US Press Freedom Tracker, which launches Aug 2, gathers those data points from news stories and tips, and it’s free for all to use—journalists and news consumers alike. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is running the tracker’s day-to-day operations, with Peter Sterne, its senior reporter, serving as managing editor. The Committee to Protect Journalists provided the initial funding. CJR is among 20-some journalism and press freedom organizations supporting the tracker. Other supporters include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, Free Press, Investigative Reporters & Editors, Poynter, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

[Commentary] Legislation or regulations requiring companies to remove content pose a range of risks, including potentially legitimizing repressive measures from authoritarian regimes. Hate speech, political propaganda, and extremist content are subjective, and interpretations vary widely among different governments. Relying on governments to create and enforce regulations online affords them the opportunity to define these terms as they see fit. Placing the power in the hands of governments also increases the likelihood that authoritarian regimes that lack Germany's liberal democratic tradition will criminalize online content critical of those governments and, ultimately, create another mechanism for oppressing their own citizens.

Instead of government intervention, civil society should recognize and build upon the efforts of platforms that address these issues, while also pressing companies to step up to do even more.

[Tara Wadhwa is the associate director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Gabriel Ng is a fellow at the Center]

Software made by foreign companies to help Chinese users skirt the country’s system of internet filters has vanished from Apple’s app store on the mainland. One company, ExpressVPN, posted a letter it received from Apple saying that its app had been taken down “because it includes content that is illegal in China.” Another posted a message on its official account that its app had been removed. A search showed that some of the most popular foreign virtual-private networks, also known as VPNs, which give users access to the unfiltered internet in China, were no longer accessible on Apple’s app store there. ExpressVPN wrote that the removal was “surprising and unfortunate.” It added, “We’re disappointed in this development, as it represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts.”

[Commentary] President Donald Trump and his loyalists potentially find the release of nearly any information about what they’re doing to be offensive, no matter how mundane. Often this is couched in the use of the word “leaks.” There are real leaks in the White House, and information has been provided to the news media that is unusually sensitive in nature. There are also more anodyne leaks of the palace-intrigue variety. And then there are things that are called leaks but which aren’t. President Trump and his core allies want you to know only what President Trump wants you to know. Everything else is leaks or “fake news.” Or, somehow, both.

China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength—the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them. The ability is part of a broader technology push by Beijing’s censors to step up surveillance and get ahead of activists and others communicating online in China. Displays of this new image-filtering capability kicked into high gear recently as Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo lay dying from liver cancer and politically minded Chinese tried to pay tribute to him, according to activists and a new research report.

Wu Yangwei, a friend of the long-jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said he used popular messaging app WeChat to send friends a photo of a haggard Liu embracing his wife. Wu believed the transmissions were successful, but he said his friends never saw them. “Sometimes you can get around censors by rotating the photo,” said Wu, a writer better known by his pen name, Ye Du. “But that doesn’t always work."

Apparently, China’s government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to virtual private networks by Feb. 1, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet. Beijing has ordered state-run telecommunications firms, which include China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, to bar people from using VPNs, services that skirt censorship restrictions by routing web traffic abroad. The clampdown will shutter one of the main ways in which people both local and foreign still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis.

In keeping with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “cyber sovereignty” campaign, the government now appears to be cracking down on loopholes around the Great Firewall, a system that blocks information sources from Twitter and Facebook to news websites such as the New York Times and others.