Censorship

Censorship  (propaganda technique)
Interest of	• 7th floor group • Josep Borrell • Karen Kornbluh • Project Censored • Nathalie Van Raemdonck • Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis • Andrew Vallance • Henry Wales
The organised suppression of information, increasingly being resorted to by large hierarchical organisations such as the nation states intent on preserving public credulity in their official narratives, many of which are at ever greater variance with reality.

Censorship is the removal of particular pieces of information. It is an age old propaganda technique.

Official Narrative

US President John F. Kennedy elegantly articulated the official narrative of the time when he stated "The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings."

An official (albeit contentious, and still openly debated) addendum to this narrative suggests that nation states are justified in using increasing censorship to protect their citizens against terrorists. Since the launching of the "war on terror" the concept of "national security" is being ever more widely used to prevent both the publishing of information by individuals and the withholding of information gathered at public expense by government bodies.

Problems

In the time of the cold war, the censorship of information by the governments east of the iron curtain was widely understood. Censorship in Western nations was more subtle. Often, a public system of censorship existed, but was rarely used. Since 1912, for example, UK has operated a system of censorship called the D Notice system to muzzle the commercially-controlled media. While officially optional, this is nevertheless fairly effective in practice allows the government to censor material. Australia started a similar system in 1952. This has provided a first line of cover for more extensive, clandestine, systems of censorship - such as the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, active since the 1950's.

The internet in general has proved a problems for old censorship models. Its non hierarchical nature, together with the fact that information flows so freely, have presented an unsurmountable challenge to those seeking to censor information. Wikileaks, for example, has published material which governments have tried to censor with D Notices.

Freedom of speech

Full article: Freedom of speech

Left (legal), a Charlie Hebdo cover of July 2013, released after Egyptian protestors were killed after the military coup.
Right (illegal "defense of terrorism") posted on the net after the Charlie Hebdo shooting.

There is a fundamental contradiction between freedom of speech and censorship. If people should be free to express whatever ideas they wish, then others should not be free to censor them. The commercially-controlled media has failed to face up to this. In January 2015, less that a week after freedom of speech was celebrated in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, dozens of people were arrested in an act of mass censorship by the French government.

By medium

Internet Censorship

Full article: Internet/Censorship

Concern about mass surveillance by intelligence agencies such as the NSA will undoubtedly encourage some people to self-censor what they post online, an effort which is supplemented by many nation states that have sought to explicitly curtail free self-expression on the internet.

While the commercially-controlled media emphasises the internet censorship carried out by China, censorship is perhaps just as common in Western "democracies" and in the US and the UK it is rampant - Scotland Yard reported in 2014 that they were removing thousands of posts a week. Commercially-controlled media regularly remove comments which breech "guidelines" - such as seriously questioning the official narratives that big media seeks to promulgate.

Censorship by search engines is less obvious than removal of social media posts, but some engage in subject-specific blocking of particular websites. As of January 2018, a page from ISGP was in the top 10 results of Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Gigablast and DuckDuckGo] for the search term "Dutroux affair". By contrast, the page was not in Google's top 100 hits, and was not mentioned in the 81 results of StartPage for this phrase — although other searches revealed that StartPage had indexed that page.

T.V. Censorship

Some UK T.V. series have been bought but never broadcast (for example, the episode of Secret Society about Margaret Thatcher's arms secret committees of the film Conspiracy Of Silence about the Franklin child prostitution ring). Others were broadcast but have been subject to attempts to suppress them ever since. Central TV's archive of Roger Cook's investigative documentary series, The Cook Report, was destroyed in a fire at a warehouse run by 'secure storage' firm Iron Mountain.

Image Censorship

In 2013, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester chose the iconic 2005 anti-war collage Photo-Op (right) for a poster campaign to promote a new exhibition about modern art and war. However, two of the UK's biggest advertising companies (who together controlled about 60% of the UK outdoor advertising market in 2011) refused to carry the image. CBS Outdoor, one of companies, told the BBC that the poster was refused after consultation with the Committee of Advertising Practice, which advises firms on whether ads may breach its code of conduct, which forbids adverts likely to cause "serious or widespread offence", while it told the authors that they could not use images involving explosions on public transport.

Radio Censorship

Bonnie Faulkner's Guns And Butter was summarily removed from KPFA in 2018 after an interview with Alan Sabrosky.

Photography restrictions

Several government facilities are subject to permanent photography bans (such as, for example, passport control). In US, a temporary "order of protection" was used to jail a peaceful protester, Mary Anne Grady Flores, for a year after she photographed an anti-drone protest outside a military base near her home.

Word prohibition

In December 2017, officials of the CDC were prohibited from using 7 words in official documents being prepared for 2018. The prohibited words were: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

See Also

• category:Censorship
• List of radio shows on censorship
• Project Censored

 

Examples

Page name	Description
9-11/Censorship
COVID-19/Censorship	Dissident thought about COVID-19 is being heavily censored, particularly online, as as discussed at Event 201
Corporate media/Censorship
DSMA-Notice
Document:WikiLeaks D Notice
File:WikiLeaks-Australian-suppression-order.pdf	Australian Supreme Court secret super-injunction preventing the publication of information about a corruption case involving 17 named individuals including senior Malaysian, Indonesian, Vietnamese politicians and Reserve Bank of Australia directors
Internet/Censorship
Missing documents
Shadow banning
Surveillance and censorship program	The UK government's 'Surveillance and censorship' (SAC) program is alleged by Kevin Galalae to be a part of the their CONTEST 'war on terror' strategy. He describes it as a project to 'brainwash the young and the impressionable to hold skewed and hypocritical views in line with the British Government’s foreign and domestic policy objectives'.
Third rail topic
Wikipedia/Protection

 

A Censorship victim on Wikispooks

Title	Description
Brian Berletic	researcher, writer, commentator

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Josep Borrell	“Disinformation in times of the coronavirus can kill. We have a duty to protect our citizens by making them aware of false information, and expose the actors responsible for engaging in such practices. In today's technology-driven world, where warriors wield keyboards rather than swords and targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns are a recognised weapon of state and non-state actors, the European Union is increasing its activities and capacities in this fight.”	Josep Borrell	10 June 2020
Daily Mail	“The headline should read "Sussex University examines claims made by professor etc", not just "investigate professor" without certifying if the claim he made is valid or not. Another case of guilty before case proven!”	'Fizzelle'	7 November 2018
Freedom of speech	“Being right doesn’t entitle you to censor everyone who is wrong. That’s the central safeguard against tyranny, because even truth would be a tyranny if it didn’t allow opposition. Free speech – real free speech – has to include the right to be wrong, rude, stupid, offensive and a lying jerk. Because once you outlaw any of that – you’ve effectively ended free speech for all of us forever.”	'Catte'	26 February 2017
Věra Jourová	“Disinformation waves have hit Europe during the Coronavirus pandemic. They originated from within as well as outside the EU. To fight disinformation, we need to mobilise all relevant players from online platforms to public authorities, and support independent fact checkers and media. While online platforms have taken positive steps during the pandemic, they need to step up their efforts. Our actions are strongly embedded in fundamental rights, in particular freedom of expression and information.”	Věra Jourová	10 June 2020

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Britain Bans Press TV	article	22 January 2012	Ashfin Rattansi	The story of the banning of Press TV from the UK Sky Platform channel 515 that you will not see covered in the commercially controlled media.
Document:Censorship and Freedom of Speech	blog post	1 October 2008	Craig Murray
Document:Discernment: Why information statecraft matters	strategy document	26 December 2018	Integrity Initiative Chris Donnelly	Musings on how to keep media dominance and control young minds
Document:Jews Boast of Owning Hollywood - But Slam Gentiles Who Say the Same Thing	article	6 July 2014	Editorial staff	Jewish control of Hollywood, Censorship by Google and the taboo on mentioning it by Gentiles
Document:My contribution	self-assessment	26 December 2018	Chris Hernon	A self assessment by Chris Hernon of how he can help the the Integrity Initiative
Document:The Move to Muzzle Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala	article	1 January 2014	Diana Johnstone	How a French Cameroonian Comedian has the Judaic-dominated French establishment so worried they are making embarrassing fools of themselves.
File:2014DIN03-024.pdf	legal document	September 2014	Directorate of Defence Communications	The authorisation procedures that all members of the Armed Forces and MOD civilians must follow before making or responding to contact with the media or communicating in public

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