Librarians in several states can now be jailed for years for making “pornography” available. Let’s be clear about intent here - it is to limit descriptions of the lives of LGBTQ people, where possible down to the level that we even exist. @bookstodon#bookstodon#lgbtq#books#censorship#libraries#librarians
"X issued a statement accusing the watchdog of pursuing global censorship and vowing the company will 'robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court'."
Can anyone find a link to this statement on the web? It's not linked in the Guardian piece, and all web searches are giving me is news media articles, many of which don't even mention it.
In a democracy, it's not the role of government to decide for the public what's information and what's "misinformation" or "disinformation". That's for a free press and public debate to determine.
In this context, Xitter is a printing company serving millions of one-person newsletters. Printing companies should not be censoring the newsletters they print on a government's behalf.
What Xitter's recommendation algorithms are amplifying is a separate issue.
"what bothers me about Bluesky. There is implicitly a censorship regime being implemented here, and it must necessarily be centralised. There must be a single set of decisions affecting everyone in the world. Those decisions are being made by an American company bound by American laws, which in turn are decided by the American people participating in American democracy."
Love when Instagram refreshes right after I post yet again about the seething hypocrisy, #sexism, #misogyny and #transphobia of all the mainstream social media platforms and US legislation banning "female nipples" as "sexually explicit nudity" while "male nipples" aren't and LITERALLY THE FIRST POST TO SHOW is some YouTube dude I follow posting a topless "fitness update" 🙃 Fuck the #patriarchy, and if you consider yourself #progressive, please notice and speak the fuck up about the insanity of #gender based #censorship. I'm tired of feeling so alone.
Here's a photo of my p*ssy to please encourage everyone to speak out more about the blatant hypocrisy of #genderDiscrimination in how the #patriarchy categorizes the chests of "people who look female" as "seggsually ekspleeseet newdeetay" while placing no such restrictions against "people who look male."
6 Badass Librarians Who Changed History
They will not be shushed.
by April White April 5, 2024
"Librarians have never been a quiet bunch: Information, after all, is power. To mark National Library Week—typically celebrated the second full week of April—Atlas Obscura, fittingly, went into the archives to find our favorite stories of librarians who have fostered cultural movements, protected national secrets, and fought criminals..."
…The bill in CT, pending before an #education cmte, is 1 of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit #BookBans or forbid the #harassment of school & public librarians…. Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, & 2 have become #law….
But the #library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly #RedStates that aim to restrict which #books#libraries can offer & #threaten#librarians w/ #prison or thousands in #fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, 3 of which have become #law…. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last 3 yrs across 10 states.
"The Intercept analysis showed that the major newspapers reserved terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks"
Even words the UN uses regularly in its resolutions, like “occupied territory” “Palestine” “refugee camps” are censored
#EU#Neoliberalism#Neoiliberalism#Censorship#Surveillance#DSA: "Despite the significance of digitalisation in mediating these political-economic shifts, mainstream platform regulation scholarship remains largely disconnected from these wider trends. EU laws are predominantly analysed using normative framings aligned with ‘progressive neoliberalism’, as efforts to balance growth and innovation against fundamental rights and ‘public values’. Schematically, EU regulation is distinguished on this basis from a free-market US approach and authoritarian, state-capitalist Chinese approach.
Against this, the paper makes two key claims. First, EU platform regulation can more helpfully be framed as manifesting an ongoing shift away from progressive neoliberalism and towards neo-illiberalism. Fundamental rights and liberal-democratic norms which previously legitimised EU policy are increasingly sacrificed in favour of unrestrained state surveillance and private-sector-led innovation. Second, methodologically, researchers should not only consider how these laws are being implemented currently, but also look ahead to an increasingly-plausible ‘far-right Europe’.
To demonstrate this framework’s analytical value, the paper examines the 2022 Digital Services Act, arguing that its overall regulatory approach is characteristically neo-illiberal: economically, it embraces marketised media governance and corporate power, while politically, it creates extensive possibilities for state censorship. Broadly, it seeks to strengthen platforms’ accountability in three main ways: individual consumer rights; empowering civil society via transparency and consultation; and technocratic risk management procedures."
Varoufakis was not travelling to Germany nor attending the conference in person btw, but Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah was and got also banned from entering #Germany.
Germany moreover seems to believe that their internal #censorship, from their Interior Ministry (right?), should somehow apply outside of their borders, as they threaten people with fines or even jail time if they connect via Zoom from abroad!
Under international law, the Palestinian territories are occupied. Under international law, Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 from their villages and towns and fled to Gaza are refugees and what they set up to live in are refugee camps.