Pakistan: Online music video banned by Telecommunication Authority
“They are helping us by making this video controversial,” Beygairat Brigade’s lead singer Ali Aftab Saeed said to Pakistan’s The Express Tribune, after the band’s online music video ‘Dhinak Dhinak’ was banned by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. Beygairat Brigade put out their new song, ‘Dhinak Dhinak’, on Vimeo on 20 April 2013. First Post wrote: “The song, [...]
China: Apple censors Tibet book app
The app, ‘Jingdian Shucheng’, which offers access to ten books via the iPhone and iPad, has been removed from the App Store in China. Hao Peiqiang, the Beijing-based developer of the app, said Apple told him it had taken the step to censor it because it “includes content that is illegal in China”. According to [...]
France: Art museum censored by Facebook for nude photograph
On 1 March 2013, the Jeu de Paume art museum’s Facebook account was blocked for 24 hours, following a decision by Facebook to remove a photograph the Parisian museum posted on its page and which the social network ruled was a violation of its Rights and Responsibilities guidelines. Facebook warned that next time it happens, [...]
Facebook: “Worse than the censorship in the middle of the Dark Ages”
Facebook’s zealous banning of nude images is “worse than the censorship in the middle of the Dark Ages”, according to the Institute of Contemporary Arts’s former chairman Ivan Massow. The British financial services entrepreneur and political activist Ivan Massow has been repeatedly blocked from using his Facebook account after posting nude or semi-nude paintings by [...]
Denmark: Apple’s puritanical censorship creates a movement
“An international protest movement is under way that has had enough of Apple’s new-puritamism and negative cultural domination,” wrote journalist Morten Løkkegaard in Politiken on 8 February 2013. After a second Danish author, Michael Næsted Nielsen, was informed by Apple that his new book, ‘Slaven’ (‘The Slave’) is going to be censored from iBookstore because [...]
iTunes: Apple troubled by women’s bodies
Salwa Al Neimi’s erotic novel ‘The Proof of the Honey’ was removed from the iTunes store because of its cover which features part of a woman’s naked back and bottom, said the publisher, Europa Editions, in a statement on its Facebook page on 9 November 2012. The book has already been banned in some Arab [...]
Apple’s iBookstore censorship case: The distinction between porn and art
The distinction between porn and art is often in the eye of the beholder, wrote John Brownlee, cultofmac.com, in his comment on the latest censorship case of Apple’s iBookstore: When Danish author Peter Øvig Knudsen submitted his latest work of non-fiction, ‘Hippie 2’, to the iBookstore, the e-book was rejected based upon the fact that [...]
Ai Weiwei: Chinese censorship of the internet will fail
In April 2012 Ai Weiwei turned his attention to China’s censorship of the internet, in a comment piece penned for The Guardian where concluded that the Chinese government will ultimately fail to control the internet as the web is “uncontrollable”. Ai Weiwei writes: “China may seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only [...]
