Showing posts with label government censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government censorship. Show all posts

Friday, August 1, 2025

What Happened When Their Art Was Banned; The New York Times, July 31, 2025

Kate GuadagninoNick Haramis and 

, The New York Times ; What Happened When Their Art Was Banned

"Of the 26 executive orders President Donald Trump signed on the first day of his second term, one was billed as “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” barring the government from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” In his address to Congress a few weeks later, Trump reiterated this point: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”

Free speech has long been, as NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik put it, “an article of faith” for conservative politicians and especially, recently, for the MAGA right, which has argued that their views have been suppressed by left-leaning social media platforms and misconstrued in the mainstream press. (Some on the left have expressed similar concerns about their views.) Yet what’s transpired since late January wouldn’t meet a free speech absolutist’s definition of unfettered discourse. Federal mandates targeting diversity or racial and gender equality have resulted in bans or attempted bans on words, ideas, books and people. Employees at NASA and other agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures. The Department of Defense briefly excised a tribute to Jackie Robinson’s army service from the Pentagon website and instructed West Point to adjust its curriculum, in an attempt to purge U.S. military institutions of “divisive concepts and gender ideology.” In March, a Turkish grad student in Massachusetts was taken off the street by plainclothes officers in masks and held without charges for weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention center, seemingly for the crime of having co-authored an opinion essay in the Tufts University student newspaper critical of the school’s response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

American artists have long seen their creative freedom attacked by governments of all political persuasions. They’ve also been the ones to speak out when others are too frightened to do so. We spoke with several seasoned artists in various fields about their own experience with having been censored. In some cases, that censorship, decades old, feels like a relic of another political moment, of other culture wars, even as it resonates with what’s happening now: same wars, new battles. It almost always affected careers and artists’ tolerance for risk — but not always negatively. For censorship can also be a rallying cry, a reminder of why artists make art in the first place. — M.H. Miller"

Sunday, March 15, 2020

This Minecraft Library Provides a Platform for Censored Journalists; Gizmodo, March 12, 2020

Joanna Nelius, Gizmodo; This Minecraft Library Provides a Platform for Censored Journalists

"Today is World Day Against Cyber Censorship. Launched by Reporters Without Borders in 2008, its goal is to raise awareness of how various governments around the world are censoring free speech online, whether it’s by blocking keywords on social media, removing individual articles and blogs, or in extreme cases, jailing and executing those individuals. With the WHO officially declaring the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, perhaps now is more important than ever to fight against government censorship—and one of the ways to do that is with Minecraft.

Spearheaded by Reporters Without Borders and built by BlockWorks and DDB Berlin, The Uncensored Library is a place you can visit within Minecraft to read the works of censored journalists from Russia, Mexico, Egypt, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Unlike news websites or personal blogs, Minecraft is still accessible in countries that tightly control what is reported about their governments, and Reporters Without Borders is now using this loophole to bypass internet censorship."