Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryCensorship

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smartphone coiled metal wire in the hands of a man, gray-green background, censorship of social networks. cancel cultural ban, erase

Yes, TikTok is Bad. But is a Ban the Answer?

This might be the way censorship sneakily invades.

TikTok is addictive, and could be a national security threat, but should the government ban it? Or might doing so set dangerous precedent to ban other social media platforms with less rationale? A TikTok ban could lead to a domino effect of other bans. A new bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives that would effectively ban TikTok, unless the platform is sold, but the terms and conditions of the bills are vague and could be easily leveraged to justify further bans. Maxwell Zeff explains, Outside of banning TikTok, this bill is anything but clear. An app or website must meet two qualifications to be banned. First, the app must be a large platform that allows users to create profiles for sharing Read More ›

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Violation of law, law-breaking concept. Metal handcuffs on Canadian flag on black background top view

Canada Prepares Harsh New Online Harms Bill to Fight “Hate”

Canada is a comparatively peaceful country, so onlookers might puzzle over the assumption that draconian measures are needed to fight poorly defined “hate.”

Yesterday, I discussed the way in which Canadian government efforts to manage the news industry led to Canadians being restricted by Facebook from posting links to news media. Undeterred, the government now seeks to stamp out “hate”/“hate speech” in online media. The Online Harms bill, C-63, if enacted as proposed, according to a veteran free speech journalist, provides that “victims of ‘hate speech’ could be compensated up to $20,000.” Also, “a new stand-alone hate crime offence would be added to the criminal code allowing for penalties of up to life imprisonment.” It also provides for house arrest for people who, it is feared, “may commit a hate crime in future.” Related 2023 legislation (C-11) requires that all podcasters and streamers, Read More ›

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Ottawa Parliament Buildings Center Block with Peace Tower and Canadian flag

When Government Manages the News Business: Canada Tried That…

Any comprehensive censorship regime requires that the government begin by managing the news business
Canadians lost the right to post news links to Facebook and Instagram. And, amid media layoffs, Google did not give media the sum they hoped for. Read More ›
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journalist, reporter, dedicated storytellers of world, news and information, era of rapid media evolution, well-informed, microphone TV television press communication role online.

Why Mainstream Media Can No Longer Really Fight Censorship

Whether they realize it or not, by accepting funds in order to survive, the MSM will gradually become agencies of government

TV personalities — ones you might not have expected — have begun to notice the way mainstream media now drop the ball on news coverage. The usually apolitical TV psychologist Dr. Phil, for example, was recently holding forth to podcaster Joe Rogan on their inability to report honestly on many sensitive political subjects. Medical doctor Drew Pinsky, who has offered relationship advice in a number of media venues, is saying similar things. News about every cultural flashpoint now seems to be managed in the way that facts about COVID-19 were at the height of the pandemic scare. Why fight censorship if you can just censor yourself? An inevitable outcome of the strategic lack of curiosity among journalists is a marked Read More ›

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A man puts wooden blocks with the words Fact and fake. Concept of news and false information. Yellow press.

So Who Are Today’s Disinformation Police?

Social scientists are striving to develop ways to blunt the force of information that governments would rather the public did not know or heed
The disinformation experts claim to be defending democracy — and yet their principal weapon is indoctrination. Read More ›
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Locked padlock on network cables connected to white Wi-Fi wireless router on a desk. Prohibit and restrict access to the internet, limit internet connection and internet censorship concepts.

When Censorship Parades Itself as a Science…

A House Subcommittee discovered that the National Science Foundation — which is supposed to support science and engineering — is readying censorship tools
The bee in the bonnets of the researchers who received the funding for the internet censorship program is that Americans can’t tell fact from fiction. Read More ›
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Anonymous call

Book Banning Today: Silently … Not Like in the Old Days

Traditional anti-book banning groups are simply not where the action is and maybe don’t want to be

Last week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›

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Censorship on freedom of speech. Restriction of public opinion, right to protest and activism. Undemocratic practices and governments.

How Censorship Has Changed and Why That Matters So Much

The way censorship works now, you don’t even know about it. So it is much more difficult to protest.
Today’s censorship depends in part on the fact that failing mainstream media don’t want to know. Stories are increasingly broken by independent writers. Read More ›
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male and female gender symbols on blackboard

The Cancel Culture Mob Comes For the Evolutionary Biologists

In an earlier post, I asked whether scientists might soon be forced to consider the occult as science. Perhaps some readers think the concern far-fetched. But consider: Science is as dependent on the concept of public truth as the great religions are. In an age when private truth is rapidly gaining in power, it is just as vulnerable as religion. For example, last October, the joint annual conference of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society canceled an all-female panel that was trying to defend biological sex as a “necessary category” in anthropology. They were accused of potentially causing “harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at Read More ›

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Archaeological excavations and finds (bones of a skeleton in a human burial),   a detail of ancient research, prehistory.

Scientists Spar Over What a Netflix Science Documentary Should Be

Should “Ancient Apocalypse” be relabeled “science fiction” if archeologists don’t think the documentary writer’s claims are valid?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal raises the question, should some Netflix documentaries be labeled science fiction? Two are currently targeted by researchers in paleontology and archeology respectively. One is Unknown: Cave of Bones (2023) in which paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team attempt to show that the world’s oldest graveyard was created by homo Naledi, who flourished in the Rising Star cave system from 335,000–236,000 years ago. The site contains 1,550 bone specimens from 15 individuals. The other is Ancient Apocalypse (2023), in which journalist Graham Hancock argues that an advanced ancient civilization existed 12,000 years ago and spurred many developments in human technology before disappearing. At the Wall Street Journal, Aylin Woodward tells us that the Read More ›

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Woman gesticulating during interview with media, press conference, close-up

As Legacy Media Continues in Decline, It Espouses Censorship More

Even as late as the turn of the millennium, media people tended to be reflexively against censorship, but then courage failed along with relevance

Amid the continuing layoffs and plummeting public trust, traditional mainstream media have tended to favor censorship far more than they used to. As John Lloyd, co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, put it recently at Quillette, The US media enjoys the world’s strongest protections of speech and publication, so it might have been counted on to oppose this movement in the name of those freedoms. But instances of journalists being fired or forced to resign for writing or saying the wrong thing have been growing, and these cases tend to follow a similar pattern. First, a writer or editor publishes a piece that is deemed offensive to one or more groups of “marginalised” individuals. Second, activists, Read More ›

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Why Don’t We Hear So Much About “False Information” Any More?

The new censorship target, “disinformation,” means something profoundly different, and the difference is scary

In a long and most informative post from last March, Tablet news editor Jacob Siegel takes a hard look at the suddenly popular concept of disinformation. “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century” is essential reading for understanding key ways the concept affects our information world. I’ll touch on just three take-home points here. But first, a reflection. Have you ever wondered why we so seldom hear the term “false information” today? Instead, we hear about misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, etc. These concepts suddenly loomed into public prominence during the COVID lockdowns. All of these alleged information vices amount to deviations from whatever government is saying at any given time. Many public figures and organizations have jumped into the Read More ›

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press and media camera ,video photographer on duty in public new

How Bottom Up Media Now Threaten the Traditional Top Tier

New media resources like subscription-based Substack are rapidly becoming the venue of choice for whistleblowers with stories to break

Earlier this week I noted the way bottom up media are slowly replacing top down media. A story breaking just then provides, in its way, a perfect vignette. Former Timesman James Bennet has written a memoir in The Economist of the revealing incident in which he was forced to resign in 2020. He concludes that the New York Times has “lost its way.” The uproar centered on his allowing Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton to pen an op-ed which urged that troops be called in to deal with the massive George Floyd riots. As Bennet points out, Cotton’s perspective was widely shared among Americans; thus it merited discussion on principle. But his preference for open discussion resulted in a newsroom Read More ›

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Young freelancer working with laptop at home. Side view of male working on freelance at home office.

How Bottom Up Media Are Slowly Replacing Top Down Media

The decline and death of legacy media organizations is speeding up and the media replacing them are much smaller, more numerous and more independent

The recent news that Popular Science has shut down — after 151 years — highlights the increasingly rapid decline of traditional, top-down media. Matthew Yglesias summarizes: The media industry saw several waves of high-profile layoffs in 2023. We had layoffs in January, Gawker shut down in February, Buzzfeed cut 15 percent of its staff in April, Condé Nast laid off staff (including at the New Yorker), NPR cut ten percent of its workforce, and Vox Media laid off four percent of its staff on November 30, after a prior round of layoffs. Last year also closed with a bunch of media layoffs, which came on the heels of pandemic layoffs, so it’s been a brutal few years. Matthew Yglesias, “Another Read More ›

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Big brother electronic eye concept, technologies for the global surveillance, security of computer systems and networks

This is Digital McCarthyism

Far from being liberated by these technologies, we have been plunged back into the worst abuses of surveillance and privacy violation.

The notion that we’re getting somewhere, making progress, is remarkably durable. It survives wars, financial collapse, riots, scandals, stagnating wages, and climate change (to name a few). Though techno-futurists are also fond of AI apocalypse scenarios, where artificial intelligence somehow “comes alive,” or at any rate uses its superior intelligence to make an autonomous decision to wipe out humanity, much more ink has been spilled this century prognosticating indomitable technical progress, which somehow stands in for human progress generally. But sanguine belief in progress is belied by the actual events of the twenty-first century. Computers have gotten faster and AI more powerful, but digital technology has also been used to spread misinformation, make deep fakes, and conduct relentless cyberwarfare. Financial Read More ›

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Chinese flags on barbed wire wall in Kashgar (Kashi), Xinjiang, China.

China: An inside look at Neo-Totalitarianism

Writing in the journal Dignitas, Heather Zeiger outlines the Chinese government’s attempt at total control of the everyday life of residents of XinJiang province

Bioethicist Heather Zeiger, a frequent contributor to Mind Matters News, published a longform piece in academic journal Dignitas on the way that China uses total surveillance to keep the restive far western province of Xinjiang obediently in the fold. Briefly, most Xinjiang residents are Uyghurs — Turkic-speaking Muslims — in a country dominated by Chinese-speaking Han people. It is somewhat like the relationship between mostly English-speaking Canada and mostly French-speaking Quebec — except for one really important thing. In Canada, conflicts are almost entirely a paper war. In Xinjiang, totalitarian China appears to be trying to simply assimilate the Uyghurs by force. It is using the full panopticon of modern technology to do so. Zeiger writes, The Chinese government uses Read More ›

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A sharp pencil between two erasers on a blue background.Unfree creativity and censorship, concept

Attempt To Tackle Censorship in Science Begins Well, Falls Flat

Scientists, we are told, censor “for the greater good.” Well yes, but ALL censors say that. Has anyone ever censored explicitly “for the greater harm”?

A just-published open-access paper on censorship in science has an fairly readable abstract so let me quote most of it: … Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration Read More ›

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megaphone wrapped in barbed wire. the concept of banning freedom of speech. censorship barbed wire megaphone

World Famous Psychologist Loses Appeal to Avoid “Social Media Training”

Does this decision legitimately restrict free speech?

Clinical psychologist, world-renowned speaker, and author Jordan B. Peterson, who rose to international fame in 2017 after speaking out against an impending Canadian speech law involving mandatory gender pronoun use, may be compelled to take in “social media training.” (RELATED: Three More Key Takeaways From the Twitter Files and Their Fallout | Mind Matters) Several complaints regarding Peterson’s online rhetoric were sent to the College of Psychologists of Ontario in 2022, and the organization decided to have him undergo a professionalism training in order to address his online tone. Peterson appealed the decision, but lost, according to CBC: Three Ontario Divisional Court judges unanimously dismissed Peterson’s application, ruling that the college’s decision falls within its mandate to regulate the profession in Read More ›

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Video player app on phone's screen and wireless earphones on dark background

“Deeply Unsettling:” Popular YouTube Host Concerned Over Online Censorship

After one of his videos was removed from YouTube, economist and talk show host Glenn Loury had questions.
Loury noted that he doesn't share Goldblatt's opinions, but that it's important to be able to debate different views freely. Read More ›
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pig farm industry farming hog barn pork

A Warning From the Unpublished Preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm

Only discovered in 1971, the Preface offers George Orwell’s critical but neglected insights into the nature of censorship in a free society
Orwell noted that the intellectual censorship he encountered was spontaneous — not a campaign or conspiracy — just a sense that people shouldn’t read his work. Read More ›