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And let's not forget covid... how the "truth" changed overnight and everyone else was literally censored on pretty much all social networks and comment sections.
Somehow we always point the fingers at others, china, russia, etc., whoever is not "our friend" at the moment, and forget the stuff that happens in our own countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of what the Church of Scientology did to USENET's alt.religion.scientology newsgroup[0]. More generally, I think the Internet is unusually useful for this kind of attack. The netheads that built it had a very specific political view - namely, that censorship is network interference with a political motive. "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it", and all that. Ergo, all we have to do…
Usenet was useful for this kind of attack, the internet allows you to create moderated forums that can withstand it.
Meanwhile, this censored post: How strange they focus on Russia or China, rather than the censorship and propaganda being done by the US, given they are a US university. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39121693 HN is ridiculous sometimes.
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I don't care what Putin/Xi/... censors, but I care strongly about what our "garden" of europe, the bastion of freedom of EU censors. Or my own small country... the whole 'rest of the world' can access something, but I have to set up a complete DNS setup to avoid local ones (luckily the bans are DNS based for now).
I did not read the article. I skimmed over the Chinese section. I am not Chinese nor do I ever intend to live in China. I skimmed over the Russian and Turkish sections for similiar reasons. I was expecting there to be a section about censorship in western countries: US, UK, Germany ...etc. Disappointing.
This article is a bit narrow in scope, e.g. > "Horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies." Orwell was equally 'horrified' by the British Empire's imperialist practices, which he documented in then-Burma. See "Shooting an Elephant" for example: George Orwell: "I had already made up my mind that imperialism…
That's a very irresponsible and dangerous comparison to make.
> Horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies. ...no. It was inspired by his observations during the Spanish Civil War: “Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the fact…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
> In his 1946 essay "Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism".[3][89] Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945), while Coming Up for Air (1939) celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
> In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have "first thought of [the book] in 1943", while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943's Tehran Conference as inspiration: "What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism".[13] Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.[14][15]
> In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel.
Keep on reading that wikipedia page, which explains in detail all the characters, agencies, events, etc in the book that are in many cases directly taken from elements of Stalinism.
Interesting, when I saw the title i thought it's an article about self censorship of entertainment in order to not offend any possible pressure group. Seems to be about present day dictatorships though.
I think the distinction is not as hard and fast as you make it out. I found "Tools for thinking about censorship"[1] to be extremely thought-provoking. There are many nuanced arguments, but a central one is that governments often leverage self-censorship in order to effect their control over the flow of information. [1]: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
I did not read the article. I skimmed over the Chinese section. I am not Chinese nor do I ever intend to live in China. I skimmed over the Russian and Turkish sections for similiar reasons. I was expecting there to be a section about censorship in western countries: US, UK, Germany ...etc. Disappointing.
I did not read the article. I skimmed over the Chinese section. I am not Chinese nor do I ever intend to live in China. I skimmed over the Russian and Turkish sections for similiar reasons. I was expecting there to be a section about censorship in western countries: US, UK, Germany ...etc. Disappointing.
> Horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Orwell spun a tale that continues to color how we picture state censorship in controlled societies. ...no. It was inspired by his observations during the Spanish Civil War: “Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the fact…
> I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.
[…]
But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was.
[…]
On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.