In the lead up to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China this month—a major changing of the guard which will see widespread retirements among senior leaders—the country’s censors have been cracking down on everything from an unnerving sex doll-sharing company to even milquetoast criticism of the…
On Wednesday, Facebook CEO and much-rumored presidential hopeful Mark Zuckerberg posted to his personal page explaining why the company would renew efforts to crack down on hate speech across the site, citing the terrible violence that transpired at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th.
Israel’s communications minister, Ayoub Kara, is moving forward with a plan to ban Qatari state-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera throughout the country.
Last week, consumer tech giant Apple removed all major VPN apps from the Chinese branch of its Apps Store, seemingly putting yet another barrier in place for millions of Chinese citizens who might desire to defy their government’s pervasive internet censorship system. On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained why Apple…
Today, YouTube clarified how it plans to handle videos that don’t violate any of its policies but still contain offensive religious and supremacist content: hide them and make sure they can’t make any money.
Apple Inc. appears to have complied with the wishes of Chinese censors and removed all major VPN apps from the China-based branch of its App Store, a move which will make it harder for consumers to dodge the country’s pervasive restrictions on internet freedom.
Malfunctioning Dalek and British Prime Minister Theresa May, fresh off of securing the support of the far-right Democratic Unionist Party, has reportedly set a timetable for her government’s plan to force all porn sites operating in the U.K. to check the ages of its users.
Winnie the Pooh, the adorable cartoon bear with an obsession for honey, has been censored in China. It’s all apparently due to a meme that makes fun of President Xi Jinping.
The Russian-owned blog community LiveJournal previously banned “political solicitation,” part of a decade-long effort to censor Russians who were using the platform to criticize the government. Now, LiveJournal’s former comic artist has returned from an eight-year absence... bringing back LiveJournal’s “Frank the…
A 30-year-old man in Pakistan has been sentenced to death for blasphemy in comments made on Facebook.
If you know about the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade association responsible for giving movies their letter ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17), you know it has its quirks when determining what is and isn’t family friendly.
LiveJournal, a blog community that’s hosted a lot of science fiction authors and fans (including George RR Martin), has officially banned “political solicitation”— which can mean anything that criticizes the Russian government, as well as pro-LGBTQ discussions. There are also concerns users can be subject to Russian…
Recently, we shared a clip from Ken Russell’s The Devils, a racy 1971 horror film that’s finally available for streaming on Shudder after years of obscurity. That got us thinking about other cult movies once deemed so scandalous they were either censored, banned, or taken out of circulation for years.
Twitter claimed in a blog post last week that it will be “introducing additional updates that leverage our technology to reduce abusive content.” Today, what appears to be a limited rollout of one such feature—the involuntary walling off of certain accounts behind an opt-in prompt—has the platform’s users angry and…
Cannabis.com, GayEgypt.com, Circumcision.org, WhitePower.com, and yes, HardSexTube.com are all sites that the Tor Project’s new app pointed my iPhone towards this morning. Don’t worry, it’s all for a good cause.
Patricia Kim, a History of Art PhD candidate studying Hellenistic Greece at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first to admit she’s probably not what comes to mind when you imagine an academic researcher scrambling to archive federal climate data that might be erased by the Trump administration. But for Kim,…
A censor is haunting Asia—the censor of superbigcocks.com.
For Amazon Prime users in India, The Grand Tour’s fourth episode reportedly wasn’t nearly as long as the rest of them—in fact, it was apparently less than half of the length it should have been due to censorship from Amazon for the Indian market.
Facebook is building a censorship tool so that the company can return to the Chinese market in a move that has angered employees and caused some to leave, The New York Times reports. Facebook was banned from China in 2009.
An attempt at silencing critics of North Korea instead showcased the adaptability of written Chinese when internet users in China found a clever workaround for a banned nickname for Kim Jong Un.
