UPDATE: After just one bury, this article too was deleted from Digg's upcoming category.
The self-proclaimed 'digital democracy' Digg.com has been caught red-handed artificially suppressing and censoring Ron Paul stories by expunging them from the website with just one bury, despite the fact that thousands of other Digg users are voting the stories up.
Digg allows users to vote stories up (digg them) or vote them down (bury them). The content of Digg's main page, which receives millions of readers a day, is decided upon this apparently democratic system.
For months allegations have been flying around concerning how stories about Ron Paul, which routinely receive well over a thousand diggs, rarely make it to the main page on Digg as a "popular" item.
Shut out of a GOP presidential candidate forum sponsored by Fox News, Ron Paul staged his own televised town hall meeting today in which he fielded questions from undecided voters two days before the key primary election here.
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.
Online civil libertarians have warned the freedom of the internet is at stake, but Senator Conroy says that is nonsense.
He says the scheme will better protect children from pornography and violent websites.
"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road," he said.
"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree."
Senator Conroy says anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.
He says the Government will work with the industry to ensure the filters do not affect the speed of the internet.
"There are people who are going to make all sorts of statements about the impact on the [internet] speed," he said.
"The internet hasn't ground to a halt in the UK, it hasn't ground to a halt in Scandinavian countries and it's not grinding the internet to a halt in Europe.
"But that is why we are engaged constructively with the sector, engaging in trials to find a way to implement this in the best possible way and to work with the sector."
UPDATE - December 28, 2007. 6:44 pm: I noticed today that his account has been restored by YouTube. It can be seen at: http://youtube.com/user/waelabbas
The video-sharing website YouTube has suspended the account of a prominent Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of what he said was brutal behaviour by some Egyptian policemen, the activist said.
Wael Abbas said close to 100 images he had sent to YouTube were no longer accessible, including clips depicting purported police brutality, voting irregularities and anti-government demonstrations.
YouTube, owned by search engine giant Google, did not respond to a written request for comment. A message on Abbas's YouTube user page, http://youtube.com/user/waelabbas, read: "This account is suspended."
"They closed it (the account) and they sent me an email saying that it will be suspended because there were lots of complaints about the content, especially the content of torture," Abbas told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Abbas, who won an international journalism award for his work this year, said that of the images he had posted to YouTube, 12 or 13 depicted violence in Egyptian police stations.
Abbas was a key player last year in distributing a clip of an Egyptian bus driver, his hands bound, being sodomised with a stick by a police officer - imagery that sparked an uproar in a country where rights groups say torture is commonplace.
That tape prompted an investigation that led to a rare conviction of two policemen, who were sentenced to three years in prison for torture. Egypt says it opposes torture and prosecutes police against whom it has evidence of misconduct.
YouTube regulations state that "graphic or gratuitous violence" is not allowed and warn users not to post such videos. Repeat violators of YouTube guidelines may have their accounts terminated, according to rules posted on the site.
Rights activists said by shutting down Abbas's account, YouTube was closing a significant portal for information on human rights abuses in Egypt just as Cairo was escalating a crackdown on opposition and independent journalists.
The internet has emerged in Egypt as a major forum for critics of the Egyptian government.
"The goal is not showing the violence, it is showing police brutality. If his goal was just to focus on violence without any goal, that is a problem. But Wael is showing police brutality in Egypt," said Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.
This year, for the first time, an Egyptian court convicted and jailed a blogger over his internet writings.
A string of court rulings since September has seen at least 12 Egyptian journalists ordered jailed on charges from defaming President Hosni Mubarak to misquoting the minister of justice.
Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.
"I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish," he said. "But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable."
Police detained hundreds of Pakistani opposition figures and lawyers on Sunday as military ruler President Pervez Musharraf tried to stifle the outcry over his imposition of a state of emergency.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said national elections, due in January, might be rescheduled because of General Musharraf's decision on Saturday to announce emergency rule, which was condemned by the United States and other Western allies.
The proclamation of emergency in Pakistan has made one big difference. All the nearly 30 TV news channels have gone off the air. And with them has gone all the cacophony about the political, judicial and military crisis in the country.
Pakistan's military ruler, Gen Pervez Musharraf, suspended the constitution and proclaimed emergency rule in a televised address on Saturday evening.
Soon afterwards, TV cable operators said they were asked by the government to stop beaming all local and foreign news channels, except the official Pakistan Television Corp (PTV).
Meanwhile, resentment is brewing among the judges of the higher judiciary. More than 60 judges, out of a total of 97, have declined to take oath under the new Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO).
Their homes have been placed under strict security, presumably to prevent them from going to the courts on Monday, as some of them plan to do.
In a hurriedly-called sitting on Saturday evening, seven Supreme Court judges issued an order barring the government from proclaiming emergency rule, and advising the state functionaries not to carry out emergency orders, if issued.
Police and soldiers emboldened by state of emergency powers swept up hundreds of activists and opposition members on Sunday, dragged away protesters shouting "Shame on you!", and turned government buildings into barbed-wire compounds.
As Burma's military government attempts to suppress the largest pro-democracy protests by Buddhist monks and civilians in decades, there are numerous reports on Friday that it has also cut off its citizens' Internet access and cell phone lines.
Burma--officially the Union of Myanmar--is already labeled by watchdog groups as one of the most restrictive locales in the world when it comes to blocking Internet content. But like in China and other censorship-happy countries, dissidents have come up with technological work-arounds such as proxies that connect them directly to computers outside the prohibitive country.
Now there are widespread reports that public Internet cafes have been shut down, most of the country's cell phone lines have been disconnected, and the remaining Internet access has made uploading photos and video of scenes on the ground a snail-like process. Some groups are exploring buying expensive but less easily restricted satellite phones to continue their dispatches, according to a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal.
Some news agencies have reported being told that the Internet connection has been brought down by a damaged undersea cable, but diplomats and citizens said they suspect the government is involved. The shutdown apparently did nothing to keep at least 10,000 protesters from assembling Friday.
My other posts about what is going on over there can be seen here.
A bill introduced this week by Australia's Parliament would give the Australian federal police the power to control which sites can and cannot be viewed by Australian Web surfers.
Introduced on Thursday, the bill--titled the Communications Legislation Amendment (Crime or Terrorism Related Internet Content) Bill 2007--would empower the federal police to alter the "blacklist" of sites that are currently prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The list currently includes pornography and "offensive material." However, under the amendment, federal police would be able to add other sites to the list, including content that the AFP Commissioner "has reason to believe...is crime- or terrorism-related content."
The definition of material that may be liable for censorship includes Internet content that "encourages, incites or induces," "facilitate(s)" or "has, or is likely to have, the effect of facilitating" a crime.
Producers of Sunday's Emmy telecast bleeped drama actress winner Sally Field in the midst of a controversial acceptance speech attacking U.S. involvement in Iraq.
"If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any god -" she said when the sound went dead and the camera suddenly turned away from the stage so viewers would be distracted. Chopped off were the words "goddamn wars in the first place." (The phrase was not censored in the Canadian telecast.)
A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday.
The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims".
An investigation was launched by Chinese authorities to find out how the advertisement slipped its way past censors.
Public discussion of the massacre is still taboo in Beijing and the government has rejected calls to overturn the verdict that the student-led demonstrations were "counter-revolutionary", or subversive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when the army crushed the pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she'd never heard of the June 4 crackdown.
A man gave the advertisement to the clerk, who had recently graduated and worked for an advertising company responsible for receiving content for the ads section, the Post reported.
"She called the man back two days later to check what June 4 meant and the man said it was (a date on which) a mining disaster took place," the Post quoted a source at the paper as saying.
"This highlights (the fact) that the government needs to face up to history," the paper quoted the source as saying.
References to the massacre are barred in state media, the Internet and printed works, meaning many of China's younger generation are ignorant of the events.
Amnesty International has warned that the internet "could change beyond all recognition" unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms.
The warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.
The "virus of internet repression" has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.
Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.
Iraq's interior ministry has decided to bar news photographers and cameramen from the scenes of bomb attacks, operations director Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said Sunday.
His announcement was the latest in a series of attempts to curtail press coverage of the ongoing conflict, which has already attracted criticism from international human rights bodies.
2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul seems to be getting censored by abcnews.com. On May 5th, he was not included in a poll which can be seen here. He was eventually added.
ABC now seems to have once again “forgotten” to add him to their chart of candidates. (A program that opens .pdf files is required to view the chart. I would recommend Foxit Reader.)
Looks like digg.com deleted posts/users that posted about the key and then deleted posts/users who talked about the censoring. The censoring did eventually stop.
The power of Web 2.0 is in full effect over at Digg, where users are revolting over Digg's decision to pull a story (that netted over 15,000 diggs) and reportedly boot a user for posting the HD-DVD AACS Processing Key number, which would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD.
Russia’s biggest private radio networks journalist said they had been told to keep Kremlin critics off the air by new managers brought in from state-run television, Reuters news agency reported April 19.
Managers at the Russian News Service, which provides news to Russia’s most listened-to radio station and its sister stations, denied they were imposing censorship. But staff members said their new bosses had blocked live reports from anti-Kremlin protests over the weekend and blacklisted the chess champion and opposition activist Garry Kasparov from being mentioned.
New managers at the service were also urging journalists to give more airtime to representatives of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, staff said.
Books and films deemed to glorify terrorism will be removed from shelves and barred from entering the country.
Present laws restrict the publication or dissemination of materials which promote, incite or instruct people to carry out terrorist acts.
The amended law would mark a significant extension of censorship powers, outlawing books and films deemed to speak out in favour of terrorist violence.
I was going to post about this sooner but at first, YouTube and Google Video were straight up censoring videos and then some things seemed questionable to me so I held off on posting about this whole thing.
As today is my last day setting the homepage for The Santa Fe New Mexican I thought I would bid you all farewell. I resigned two weeks ago to better pursue my personal interests. It is to my great amusement however that this day coincides with an astonishing story to share in this blog. There is an uproar rising across the Internet over what is being called yet another blatant, 9/11 smoking gun.
Early this week an independent researcher, reviewing video archives of the BBC's 9/11 coverage, divulged the discovery of an earth shaking incongruence. BBC reporters announced the collapse of the 47 story Salomon Brothers Building 23 minutes BEFORE the actual sudden collapse. This building, also known as WTC 7, is clearly visible, standing tall, as a reporter gestures to the live view through the window behind her.
Putfile - time stamped BBC (UPDATE - November 28, 2007. 10:21 pm: This video was on YouTube for several months but I see it has now been removed. It use to be at this link and was titled “BBC 24 TELLS OF COLLAPSE OF BUILDING 7 WITH TIME STAMP!”)
