Phone hacking censorship at FOX
Rupert Murdoch's Fox network cut a joke by Alec Baldwin about the company's phone hacking scandal out of a skit for Sunday's Emmy Awards, causing Baldwin to pull out of the ceremony.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox network cut a joke by Alec Baldwin about the company's phone hacking scandal out of a skit for Sunday's Emmy Awards, causing Baldwin to pull out of the ceremony.
On Friday, August 12, 2011, about 50 members of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment ("MORE") protested the activities of Bank of America at the downtown branch of the bank in St. Louis , Missouri. Many of the protesters have been longtime customers of Bank of America, and they intended…
The results of Digg are unfairly skewed. We're not seeing what the general population votes. Rather at least one highly organized block of users is engaging in censorship.
The Center for Inquiry has just announced a new campaign to help defend free speech--particularly speech critical of religion--from suppression. The Campaign for Free Expression includes a website designed as a forum to report and monitor censorship. The site also publishes the kind of religious (and political) criticism likely to find itself censored. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_launches_campaign_for_free_expression/
Well, it will if the Australian government gets its way on its internet censorship bill. That's right. The ACMA seems to have placed Wikileaks on its potential web blacklist and seems set on throwing fines of up to $11,000 at anyone who links to it. I'd happily go all out on this one, but a fellow Antipodean has already got this one in his sights:
I'm posting this on my American blog because the Australian government, through the Australian Communications and Media Authority is fining people on Australian sites who give the links below the fold $11,000/day. Pretty well everything I feared about censorship by the internet filter and heavy handed government action is coming true. First of all, it transpires that only one bureaucrat at ACMA is required to block and ban a site, with no further oversight or redress. Second, it turns out that yes, ordinary and popular pornography sites are being blocked, so that if the filter becomes mandatory, these legal sites will effectively become censored for no apparent reason (other than political whim or special privileges). Thirdly, the whistleblower site Wikileaks is blocked by the ACMA blacklist.John follows with the excerpt from a Crikey article:
Like New Labour in the UK, the ALP has now abandoned that [civil liberties movement], for a number of reasons. Once it committed itself to neoliberal economics ("social capitalism") Labo(u)r became freaked about the social dissolution and rupture, the desocialisation created by turning the polis into a giant market of winners and losers. The tough answer to this is genuine social democracy, in which people have a social being not entirely defined by whether they're a "winner" or a "loser". The easy answer is to let the market rip, allow it to change the culture, and then seek to control and reshape people's behaviour, selling it to them as "protecting the many against the few".