Wired [read free]: “…WIRED requested internet censorship records from 17 public school districts around the US, painting a picture of the widespread digital censorship taking place across the country. Our investigation focuses on Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), one of the largest school districts in the US, which provided the most complete look at its web-filtering… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Censorship
EU Fundamental Rights Report 2023
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights Report 2023 reflects on the developments and shortfalls of human rights protection in the EU in 2022. Its focus section covers the fundamental rights implications of the aggression in Ukraine for the EU and the challenges that arose. For example, the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive provided welcome access to… Continue Reading
Texas board rejects many science textbooks over climate change messaging
The Texas Tribune: “A Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education on Friday rejected seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for eighth graders that for the first time will require them to include information on climate change. The 15-member board largely rejected the books either because they included policy solutions for climate change or because they… Continue Reading
Virtual Cloud Portals
Dark Clouds: Can Government Agencies Evade Public-Records Laws by Storing Documents in Privately Owned Digital Portals? Frank D. LoMonte, Adjunct Instructor, University of Georgia School of Law. Newsroom Legal Counsel, Cable News Network, Inc. J.D., University of Georgia School of Law, 2000. B.A., Georgia State University, 1992. “Laws enabling the public to inspect government records… Continue Reading
Human Rights Declined in 3 out of 4 Countries since Global Rule of Law Recession Began in 2016
“The rule of law has once again eroded in a majority of countries this year, according to the World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index 2023. More than 6 billion people live in a country where the rule of law weakened between 2022 and 2023. Since authoritarian trends pushed the world into a rule… Continue Reading
The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore
Washington Post [read free]: “She loved books. And in a time of spreading book bans in public schools, that’s why this Florida librarian had to quit. It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the… Continue Reading
Reading Between the Bars
PEN America Experts Report – Senior Manager, The Freewrite Project; Juliana Luna, Intern, The Freewrite Project. Published October 25, 2023. “…Carceral censorship is the most pervasive form of censorship in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the departments of corrections (DOCs) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia censor… Continue Reading
Meet ‘New Elites’ Who Control Twitter’s Israel-Hamas News
The ‘new elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse. Oct 20, 2023 RAPID RESEARCH REPORT University of Washington Center for an Informed Public: “Since the first news of the attack on Israel by Hamas, we have seen anecdotal reports from users of X (formerly Twitter) that the platform has become… Continue Reading
What Went Wrong with a Highly Publicized COVID Mask Analysis?
Scientific America [read free]: “The COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing, but in May officials ended its designation as a public health emergency. So it’s now fair to ask if all our efforts to slow the spread of the disease—from masking, to hand washing, to working from home—were worth it. One group of scientists has seriously muddied… Continue Reading
AI’s Threats to Election Security
Brennan Center for Justice: “Increasing awareness of the power of artificial intelligence coincides with growing public anxiety about the future of democracy, with significant concern about AI’s potential to harm elections. A new series from the Brennan Center and Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology explores how AI could impact various parts of… Continue Reading
Using AI to Comply With Book Bans Makes Those Laws More Dangerous
Brennan Center for Justice: “In August, a public school district in Iowa reportedly used ChatGPT to help it comply with the state’s controversial book ban law. That law—like counterparts passed in Florida, Texas, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina—seeks to limit discussion of gender identity and sexuality in schools by barring school libraries from carrying books that… Continue Reading
The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X
Bloomberg Opinion, David Lee: “The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users. “…X is now an app that forcibly puts abhorrent content into users’ feeds and then rewards financially the people who were the most successful in producing it, egging them on to do it again… Continue Reading
