I received an emailed press release today from Dr. Terry Jones, who I’ve interviewed in the past about his anti-Muslim sentiments.  For those who don’t know him, he is the controversial pastor from the U.S. state of Florida who helped promote the anti-Islamic video, Innocence of Muslims, which was posted on YouTube and caused a wave of angry protests across the Muslim world and death threats for the actors who claimed not to know what kind of film they were acting.

Dr. Jones is fuming; it seems that a California appeals court ordered that YouTube remove the video.  A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a lawsuit filed against YouTube by Cindy Lee Garcia (pictured above), an actress who appeared briefly in the 2012 video.  She says she thought she was appearing in a film called “Desert Warrior,” and had she known it was a propaganda film that portrayed Muslims in a derogatory light, she would never have taken the job.

Pastor Terry Jones, Friday, Sept. 10, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

YouTube has until now refused to remove the video from its website, arguing that it would violate the company’s rights and protections of free speech.  YouTube also argued that because the makers of the film — not Ms. Garcia — own the rights to the film, they should be the ones to take down the video.

In his press release today, Dr. Jones exercised his own right to free speech:

“This is another example of the long arm of Islam and our spineless society that continues to bow to it,” he said.

He says his rights are being violated, calling the court’s decision “a gross violation of our First Amendment rights.”

Google Inc., which owns YouTube, removed the video, but the company isn’t happy about having been forced to do so.  It says it will appeal the ruling to a bigger court–and if all else fails, will go as high as the U.S. Supreme Court to try the case.

It’s official:  Turkey’s president has signed a controversial new internet law which will enable the government to block select websites and require web hosts to turn over individual browser histories.

President Abdullah Gül used Twitter to announce the news Tuesday, and this sparked an immediate Twitter drive by angry Turkish internet users using the hashtag #UnfollowAbdullahGül.

Associated Press says more than 80,000 Twitter users stopped following Gül as a result–but he still has, at the moment of this writing, 4.28 million Twitter followers.

The legislation has the potential to sorely restrict freedom of expression in Turkey and thus has been widely slammed by media groups, the European Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups.

In an earlier post, RePRESSed spoke with Turkish analyst Thomas Sorlie, who predicted that Gül’s signature would be a signal of support for the AKP Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of Turkey’s first direct presidential elections in August.

GreatFire.org, an online advocacy group that monitors internet censorship in China, this week accused the Microsoft search engine Bing of censoring both English and Chinese web searches to omit content offensive to the Chinese government.

Reuters reporters say that Bing search results omitted results that did show up in Google searches, such as “Dalai Lama.”  The Guardian reports similar findings for internet searches such as “Falun Gong” and “Bo Xilai,” the former high-ranking official now serving a lifetime in prison on corruption charges.

GreatFire, Reuters and the Guardian all say results were the same whether they searched in Chinese from Singapore or in English from the U.S.

We can also now trace complicit Bing Chinese censorship back to 2009…It looks like Microsoft has indeed changed its censorship mechanism after our research made headlines this week. But Bing is still seriously flawed on two fronts: its algorithm favors pro-Chinese government websites by default on all search terms in simplified Chinese and their front end mistakenly delivers explicit censorship of search results on some search terms for users from all over the world. – GreatFire.org

Microsoft denies the accusations.  In a statement to Microsoft’s TheNextWeb, senior Bing director Stefan Weitz said Bing had conducted a thorough review of the problem, and “The removal of certain search results has been credited to a technical error in the system.”

First, Bing does not apply China’s legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China.  Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.

Second, with regard to the freeweibo.com homepage being absent from Bing search results, our investigation indicates that at some time in the past the page was marked as inappropriate due to low quality or adult.  After review, we have determined the page is acceptable for inclusion in global search results…Stefan Weitz, quoted in TNW.

Western tech companies operating in China have often been accused of putting economic interests ahead of ethics, giving into China’s strict internet rules.  Back in 2004, Yahoo! was blamed for providing e-mail account information on Chinese journalist Shi Tao after he used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a New York-based rights group, the Democracy Forum.

IT companies argue that in order to continue operating in China as in other countries, they are compelled to abide by the laws in those countries, and insist that they aren’t actively collaborating with governments.

For a look at the issue–and how the U.S., including the Broadcasting Board of Governors, are working to promote internet freedom in China, see the July 2012 Congressional Research Service report, China, Internet Freedom, and U.S. Policy, available online.

A student participates in a free-speech rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington March 19, 2007. The U.S. Supreme Court considers on Monday its first major dispute on student free-speech rights in nearly 20 years, a case about the power of school authorities to censor what they viewed as a pro-drug message at a school-sponsored event. REUTERS/Molly Riley

1)  Freedom of Expression: The Gray Areas

This month, the online arts and politics magazine Guernica, in collaboration with Free Word, Article 19 and English PEN, have published their first of five themed issues, commissioning writers and artists from across the globe to submit articles on freedom of expression.  Among the contributions, Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman reflects on the ways by which technology enables governments to spy on their citizens and ultimately silence them.  And in light of the NSA scandal, Dorfman tells us, “A warning for those who bask in the glow of that self-congratulatory phrase, ‘It can’t happen here’…it can always happen here, it can happen anywhere.”

Surveillance, in any land where it is ubiquitous and inescapable, generates distrust and divisions among its citizens, curbs their readiness to speak freely to each other, and diminishes their willingness to even dare to think freely. – Ariel Dorfman, Repression by Any Other Name

In the same issue, Chinese-born, London-based writer Xiaolu Guo tells Guernica about the difficulties she faced getting her novels published,    the pervasiveness of what she calls “commercial censorship” in American publishing houses.

There’s an abortion section in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary. In the beginning my U.S. editor wanted to take it out. She said the Bush government had just issued some policies and that middle-class readers wouldn’t like it, which would reduce the market. – Xiaolu Guo, Why Do We Still Pretend We Are Free?

2) The People Have Lost Their Voice

In an article for the February 2014 issue of Chatham House’s The World Today, London Times special correspondent Anthony Loyd describes the risks faced by correspondents inside war-torn Syria and his decision not to return:

The ascendancy of Islamic radicalism and the terrible rate of abduction among the small cadre of reporters who ventured into the rebel zones meant that I could no longer justify the risks. The aim of any war correspondent is to survive and report. In Syria after my Friday 13th encounter with ISIS, I no longer saw that aim as achievable. – Anthony Loyd, The World Today.

Kidnappings, killings and imprisonment of journalists in Syria mean that few reporters are willing to take the risk of going there anymore.  And that means few reporters are able to tell the story of what’s really going on in Syria, says Loyd.

“…the absence of journalists from opposition areas in Syria has not only resulted in the ossification of our perception of the war, but also handed a golden card to the regime.” – Anthony Loyd, The People Have Lost Their Voice.

3.  Free Speech Isn’t Free

We Americans love our free speech, which is a tenet of our constitution.  In the latest issue of the Atlantic online, novelist and legal scholar Garrett Epps considers the pros and cons of free speech, which he argues isn’t always risk-free.

Specifically, Epps looks at the case of hate speech, which research shows can sometimes inflict emotional hard as painful and lasting as any harm inflicted on the physical body.  If that is the case, then, why do we promote it so?

Epps offers an interesting answer.  The freedom to speak out offers us a healthy outlet for anger—and it certainly beats turning on one another with bombs and bullets.