Tag: censorship

A humbling experience in Humble

A sign of just how far behind I’ve gotten: this one was posted two weeks ago. But censorship never really goes away, so this will remain just as timely until at least the Teen Lit Fest after next (in 2013).

Pete Hautman recently blogged a nice little piece entitled “The Nasty Thing in the Corner.” It’s about censorship, particularly of works aimed at the teen/young adult segment. This one centers around Ellen Hopkins, who was invited to the Teen Lit Fest in Humble, TX (a suburb of Houston which, I might add, I’ve visited many times).

And then some parents read some of Ellen’s books. To say the least, they didn’t like what they read. Quoting Pete’s post:

“[S]everal” parents… objected to having her at the festival. They brought their concerns to the festival organizers, and one (one!) school librarian agreed with their concerns, and recommended to the school superintendent that Ellen be asked not to come. The superintendent went along with the one (one!) librarian’s recommendation. I believe that virtually every other librarian in the Humble ISD was embarrassed and furious over this decision.

… [A] handful of people — the superintendent, the one (one!) librarian, and “several” (three? five?) parents — took it upon themselves to overrule the vast majority of teachers and librarians and students who had chosen one of the most popular YA authors in America to be their headliner.

That is a form of censorship as damaging and inexcusable as setting fire to a library.

Indeed, popularity does not come without its price. It’s a lesson we should all take to heart.

Pete concluded the post by noting his own withdrawal from the festival, as well as that of Melissa de la Cruz, then updates in the following days to note the withdrawals of Tara Lynn Childs and Matt de la Pena.

And then finally just yesterday, this story hit the UPI newswire:

HUMBLE, Texas, Aug. 28 (UPI) — A teen literary festival in Humble, Texas, was canceled after writers protested the removal of best-selling author Ellen Hopkins from the event.

So here’s the lesson to be learned: if you deal in censorship, don’t expect those you are censoring to stick around. Authors are a more tightly-knit group than one might otherwise expect.

I do regret that the rest of Humble, the majority who anxiously awaited the appearance of Ellen Hopkins, have now lost their chance, and in fact, won’t even have a festival to go to. But one should not blame Ellen or the other authors for that. Blame the parents, the librarian (!), and the superintendent (!!) who partook of the vile, censorious acts that led to the withdrawal of Ellen’s invitation. And by all means, let the students learn about censorship from this experience as well.

UPDATE: I’ve just been made aware of Ellen’s own blog containing several entries about the situation, in particular this entry on August 10 and two later entries on August 18 addressing censorship.

Taking the “artistic” out of “artistic nudity”

The LA Times Culture Monster blog recently posted an article on YouTube’s censorship of videos containing nudity. At issue here is a 1973 video called Dressing Up by Susan Mogul. The video shows Susan putting on underwear and clothing in a casual fashion and discussing each piece as she puts it on, sort of a strip tease turned around.

Tom Jancar, owner of the Jancar Gallery in LA, posted the video in 2009 and it had received “hundreds of hits” during the time it was up, and also notes Susan is “doing everything posible not to be sexy.”

While I understand Google (who now own YouTube) not wanting the site to become a haven for pornographic short films, there is a difference between obvious pornography and artistic nudity. I saw the clip of Dressing Up on Susan’s website and while Susan is definitely fully naked in the beginning of the clip, I would call this artistic nudity. (It’s still almost certainly NSFW though.) Hopefully, some other site can host this video since apparently it’s too hot for YouTube.

Seriously, how can Google allow this Australian news clip with a straight face at the same time they mercilessly take down Dressing Up?

Retaliation, Australian style

As reported by TG Daily, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had his passport taken from him upon arrival in Melbourne, Australia, and was later told his passport would be cancelled. I have verified this story with other sources and none of them cite an official reason.

Thus, we are then left to assume that this is direct and wanton retaliation for Julian’s activities related to Wikileaks, specifically (quoting the article):

Last year, Wikileaks published a list of websites which were to be banned under the government’s proposed internet filter. While the aim of the filter is to block extreme pornography and the like, the blacklist included a number of more prosaic sites such as those of a travel company and a dentist.

Assange said that shortly after his passport was returned he was questioned about a hacking offence committed when he was a teenager.

(I’ll get to the second part in a bit.)

From the looks of things, it appears the Australian government has serious issues with the freedom of information. It is a safe assumption that Australia’s own citizens will be paying for this filtering system through government taxes. As such, they have the right to know what exactly this filter is blocking, and I would also argue the right to opt out of it should they so choose. The blocking of a travel company and dentist, among other obviously non-pornographic sites, falls well within what Australia’s citizens have a right to know. In fact, depending on exactly how the filtering works, it’s something the rest of the world has a right to know as well.

This is an egregious case of censorship by the Australian government and to say the least, it really burns me up. My question: since it is obvious Julian does not like Australia, what is the point in not letting him leave (the obvious consequence of a cancelled passport)?

Now, about the second part. I am quite disturbed that the government of Australia would bring into play an offense Julian committed nearly two decades ago (and an obvious misdemeanor at that), and imply that it is somehow relevant to who he is today. It isn’t, really. If a misdemeanor from 19 years ago is being worked into the reason his passport is being cancelled, we have even more reason to despise and distrust the Australian government.

Interesting sidenote: Until reading about him on Wikipedia, I didn’t know Julian was the author of the Strobe portscanner. In my early years learning about network security, I used Strobe for many portscans prior to learning of the existence of Nmap (I did not begin using GNU/Linux until 1998).

The case of the disappearing Facebook accounts

The DigitalBeat column on VentureBeat recently reported on a case where three critics of Facebook had their accounts mysteriously deactivated.

Juan Faerman, an author in Argentina who wrote a book called Faceboom, the cover of which has the title rendered in a font which easily could be mistaken for Facebook’s official logo, had his profile deactivating shortly after releasing the book, along with two others involved in the book and its marketing.

More troubling than that is Facebook shut down a group for fans of the book, which the trio claims had 30,000 fans at the time of shutdown. This smacks of censorship. It is one thing to claim trademark infringement due to similarities between the book’s cover and the official Facebook logo, but I feel Facebook crossed way over the line here.

Most troubling is that it took VentureBeat’s inquiry as well as an uproar in Latin American media in order for Juan to get his account back. This is unacceptable. Shame on you, Facebook.

At one time I wrote, but did not publish, a no-nonsense parody of one of Facebook’s help files. Which one, you ask? Okay, I’ll come clean. I parodied the one about the block function after someone blocked me. I was hesitant to publish it, if for no other reason because I’m not sure where it should go. It’s too good, and unfortunately, also a bit too no-nonsense and too profane to put in a blog post.

I’d like to think Facebook wouldn’t deactivate my account over it, though. The case for a distributed social network that cannot be arbitrarily censored by any one party is a lot closer to being made if Facebook were to do so, however.

Too hot for the iPhone: Apple censors sex apps

The Unofficial Apple Weblog writes on what appears to be the imminent removal of some or maybe even all sexual content from the iPhone’s App Store. Now, on any other smartphone, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But this is the iPhone we’re talking about, and the App Store is the only Apple-approved channel for iPhone applications. So in essence, this is Apple playing “nanny” and censoring content they don’t like.

The particular app in question may well set a relative low in taste. I’m not going to judge that. What I am going to judge, is Apple’s utterly senseless and arbitrary censorship of iPhone content, specifically applications.

I was asked by my mom recently what I thought of the iPad (which will have similar restrictions to the iPhone and iPod). I’m not including the full text of my response here, but regular readers should have some idea how it went. (You may want to do some catch-up reading if you are new to this blog.)

When it comes down to it, I’d really rather not have anything bad to say about companies like Apple or their products. But dubious and arbitrary decisions like this do not sit well with me as a sworn opponent of censorship. And as long as Apple and other companies continue to make dumb moves like this, I’ll likely keep calling them out as I find them. I’d let TUAW do it instead, but it appears its author(s) will more than happily cave and essentially pat Apple on the back for a clearly censorious move.