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Censorship

Twitter Bans Sharing Photos, Videos 'Without Consent' on CEO Parag Agrawal's First Day

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Just one day after Jack Dorsey was replaced as the CEO of Twitter by the company’s former CTO, Parag Agrawal, the platform has banned the sharing of any images or videos of people without their explicit consent. The far-left company stated:  “The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”

Twitter has banned the sharing of photos and videos of people without their consent, stating that: “The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”

The company added that it would try to “assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service.”

Twitter previously banned the sharing of certain types of private information without permission, such as a person’s home address, identity documents such as government-issued IDs and social security numbers, financial account information, etc.

But now it has added to this banned list, “NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.”
Twitter ended its statement saying:

Feeling safe on Twitter is different for everyone, and our teams are constantly working to understand and address these needs. We know our work will never be done, and we will continue to invest in making our product and policies more robust and transparent to continue to earn the trust of the people using our service.

The move comes just one day after Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of the company and was replaced by the firm’s CTO Parag Agrawal as CEO. Dorsey stated at the time: “I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.”

It appears that the company is ready to move on, in an even more heavy-handed speech limiting and censorship-focused direction.

Read more at Twitter’s official blog here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address [email protected]

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal: 'Our Role Is Not to Be Bound by the First Amendment'

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In an interview last year, the incoming CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, made it clear that free speech is not a priority for the company, and that his platform would not be “bound” by the First Amendment. Agrawal said: “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

Agrawal, formerly Chief Technology Officer of the social media company, was announced as the successor to Jack Dorsey earlier today, following the latter’s decision to step down as CEO.

In an interview with the MIT Technology Review last year, Agrawal said that Twitter no longer considered free speech to be an area of focus.

“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” said Agrawal. “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

Agrawal said that the priority of the company was “directing” people’s attention to tweets that served “healthy” conversations.

“One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

“The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

As Breitbart News previously reported, Agrawal has also repeated statements on race attacking white people.

“If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists,” tweeted Agrawal in 2010.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

'Simpsons' Episode with Tiananmen Massacre Joke Disappears from Disney+ Hong Kong

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Viewers of the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong noticed on Friday that an episode of the long-running animated series The Simpsons disappeared from the lineup without notice or explanation.

The episode includes two references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an event the communist Chinese government is attempting to erase from history.

In Season 16, Episode 12 of The Simpsons, titled “Goo Goo Gai Pan” and originally broadcast in 2005, the family goes on a trip to China. During their visit, the Simpsons stroll past a line of tanks that echoes the iconic “Tank Man” photo and see a plaque that reads: “Tiananmen Square: On This Site, In 1989, Nothing Happened.”

The Simpsons also check out the embalmed corpse of dictator Mao Zedong, memorialized by Homer Simpson as “a little angel that killed 50 million people.”

Watch below: 

S16, E12 is simply missing from the list of episodes available to Disney+ viewers in Hong Kong. The Season 16 lineup jumps from Episode 11 to 13 without explanation. 

The Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) noted Monday that Hong Kong viewers who employ Virtual Private Network (VPN) tools to access Disney+ online – essentially masking their location by creating an anonymous Internet connection – are able to view Episode 12.

HKFP and many major media organizations – including CNN, the UK Guardian, the New York Times, Bloomberg News, Variety, and the Hollywood Reporter – asked Disney for comment on the censored episode, but none of them received a reply from the company as of press time on Monday.

Most of those organizations also attempted to contact Hong Kong officials to ask if Disney was ordered to black out the episode or if it did so on its own initiative. The officials did not respond to these inquiries.

“It appears the episode has suffered precisely the kind of the censorship it was written to ridicule,” the Hollywood Reporter noted.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been relentlessly tightening controls on speech and political activity in Hong Kong over the past year, ever since China bypassed the Hong Kong legislature in June 2020 to impose a “national security law” that criminalized every activity the CCP considers threatening to its power. 

The national security law was quickly employed to crush the remains of the massive 2019 pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and purge pro-democracy city officials. It also spawned a series of increasingly heavy-handed censorship laws, cracking down on books, films, and movies the Communist Party considers “subversive.”

International human rights organizations are pulling out of the city because the environment has become so repressive that any statement critical of the government could be labeled subversive and prosecuted under the national security law. The law is especially militant about punishing “collusion” between Chinese nationals and foreign governments or international organizations.

In October, the Hong Kong legislature – now firmly controlled by Beijing – passed a bill that gave local officials enhanced powers to censor media they deemed “contrary to the interests of national security.” 

The law was notably slack about punishing Internet streamers, but HKFP speculated big streamers such as Disney might still be growing nervous about testing the patience of CCP censors. 

“The apparently voluntary removal of the episode in Hong Kong – especially when done by a major U.S. media company – is a relatively new feature of civic life there,” the Hollywood Reporter said of the Simpsons episode blackout in Hong Kong.

Chinese University of Hong Kong media expert Grace Leung told the New York Times that Disney “obviously sent out a clear signal to the local audience that it will remove controversial programs in order to please” CCP censors.

Leung speculated Hong Kongers would grow more interested in using VPNs and other techniques to bypass censorship and view banned material like the Simpsons episode.

“If they didn’t do anything, then people may not be aware of the existence of that episode. But if you do it so obviously, then it arouses people’s interest,” she said.

The growing influence of the CCP over American media corporations is a major topic of Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s bestselling book Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. 

Marlow noted U.S. corporations are well aware the Chinese government will punish them for violating its speech codes, and some of them have developed business models that depend on revenue from China to make up for losses elsewhere. Disney and some other big media companies own both news and entertainment divisions, so there is a constant danger that journalism will be compromised to ensure entertainment media can be sold profitably in the Chinese market.

“How about ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Disney’s business interests in China are vast, including billions of dollars in revenue from movies and theme parks. Recall that the end credits of the recent live-action remake of Mulan featured a thank you to a Chinese government security bureau linked to Uyghur concentration camps. Now you know why,” Marlow wrote in a June editorial for Breitbart News based on his book.

Marlow presciently noted in a conversation with radio host Laura Ingraham that no Hollywood studio would dare to make a film about Mao Zedong’s brutal “Great Leap Forward” – and now Disney has evidently decided that Hong Kong audiences are not allowed to watch Homer Simpson make a sarcastic comment about Mao’s 50 million victims.

Nolte: HBO Max Censors 'Birds of Prey' — Buy Hard Copies, America

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HBO Max censored the R-rated box office flop Birds of Prey, which serves as a reminder as to why you should buy hard copies of movies you love.

HBO says the censorship was accidental, that the version posted on its streaming site is the PG version with the cuts necessary to play on commercial television. And that’s probably true. HBO has all kinds of sex and violence on its streaming service. So why would it edit the comparably tame violence and language in something as dumb as Birds of Prey?

Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Warner Bros. 2020)

But this does serve as another reminder of the power these massive corporations hold with these centralized streaming services — which is the power to disappear these titles altogether or censor them.

Already we’ve seen Disney disappear Song of the South (1946), a title that offends the Woke Gestapo but also includes a performance from James Baskett, a black actor who so moved audiences at the time he was given an honorary Academy Award.

Baskett is the first black male performer ever to receive an Oscar, and the Walt McCarthy company won’t allow us to watch that historic performance.

Because the truth offended the Clintons, Disney/ABC also disappeared its own $40 million Path to 9/11 miniseries.

The Simpsons blacklisted an episode starring Michael Jackson, even though a jury acquitted Jackson of child molestation charges. And even if he had been found guilty, there’s no reason to disappear his work.

You can’t stream Gone with the Wind now without being assaulted by a fascist Black Lives Matter lecture that tells you how you’re supposed to feel about one of the most significant pieces of art ever produced.

For a whole host of reasons, I had intended to move to digital. One of those reasons is that some of my DVDs are more than 20 years old and have gotten a tad brittle. Well, I’m being much more circumspect about those choices now. There’s just no way I’m going to trust these increasingly fascist corporations with stuff like Blazing Saddles, Married with Children, Seinfeld, etc. And heaven only knows what these neo-Joe McCarthys are disappearing without telling us, what they are quietly pulling from distribution in the hopes we won’t notice.

These are no longer American companies. These multinationals now see themselves as international companies, which means priority number one is appeasing the Communist Nazis in China. These greedy, corporate sellouts are willing to sell their artistic souls to appease those monsters, something we again discovered over the weekend.

So, if there’s a movie or television show that means something to you, keep a hard copy.

And don’t forget that hard copies are disappearing. As more consumers move to digital, the DVD/Bluray sections of your local Walmarts and Best Buys are shrinking. And this is a development that thrills these corporations. Without hard copies, they not only have complete control over the content, over what we can and cannot see, but we don’t own anything other than a license. There is no secondary market for used digital copies.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

Tiananmen Square Episode of The Simpsons 'Missing' on Hong Kong Disney Plus

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(AFP) — An episode of The Simpsons in which the cartoon American family visit Tiananmen Square is missing from the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong, adding to concerns about mainland China-style censorship in the city.

It comes at a time when authorities are clamping down on dissent, with curbs on speech becoming a norm in the international business hub and ensnaring global media and tech giants.

Disney+ has made rapid advances since it was launched 18 months ago, reaching more than 116 million worldwide subscribers.

The Hong Kong version started streaming earlier this month and eagle-eyed customers soon noticed the conspicuous absence of The Simpsons episode 12 of season 16.

First airing in 2005, the episode features the family’s trip to China in which matriarch Marge Simpson’s sister tries to adopt a baby.

In one scene, the Simpsons are at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the site of a deadly 1989 crackdown against democracy protesters. The cartoon shows a sign there that reads “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened” — a satirical nod to China’s campaign to purge memories of what happened.

It then shows Marge’s sister standing before a tank, referencing the famous photo from the Tiananmen crackdown of a lone man standing in front of a tank.

The episode also contains pointed comments about Tibet — where Beijing has been accused of religious oppression — and the Cultural Revolution, a devastating period of upheaval in the last decade of Mao Zedong’s rule.

It is not clear whether Disney+ removed the episode, was ordered to by authorities or if it was offered in Hong Kong to begin with.

The entertainment giant has not responded to requests for comment, nor has Hong Kong’s government.

When AFP checked Disney+’s Hong Kong channel on Monday episodes 11 and 13 of season 16 were available but not 12.

Censorship worries 

Until recently, semi-autonomous Hong Kong boasted significant artistic and political freedoms compared with mainland China. But authorities are currently transforming the city in the wake of huge and often violent democracy protests two years ago.

Among the slew of measures are new censorship laws introduced this summer that forbid any broadcasts that might breach a broad national security law that China imposed on the city last year.

Censors have since ordered directors to make cuts and refused permission for some films to be shown to the public.

Those rules do not currently cover streaming services but authorities have warned that online platforms fall under other rules, including the new national security law.

Last week, Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leader Carrie Lam vowed to “proactively plug loopholes” in the city’s internet and introduce “fake news” regulations.

Her comments added to concerns that China’s “Great Firewall” — a sprawling internet and news censorship regime — could be extended to Hong Kong.

Content that satirises China is still available on other streaming platforms in Hong Kong.

Netflix’s Hong Kong channel is still showing “Band in China”, an episode of the cartoon series “South Park”.

In that episode, one of the characters ends up in a Chinese labour camp and much of the show lampoons the willingness of American brands to adhere to Chinese censorship rules to make money.

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