EU Censorship News

Curiosa is a 2019 France historical drama by Lou Jeunet.
Starring Noémie Merlant, Niels Schneider and Benjamin Lavernhe.

Paris 1895; Pierre is a Parisian dandy and poet on the verge of fame. He and his poet friend Henri are both madly in love with Marie, the cheeky daughter of their mentor, Franco-Cuban poet José-Maria de Heredia. They start a cat-and-mouse game with people who involve their lives and breaking the codes set by society which will will make them one of the best-known writers and poets of 19th-century France.

On December 13, the French film Curious, directed by Lou Jeunet was released. Now the film is making a name for itself in Spanish cinemas.

However, the controversy lies in that in the original poster you see a woman sitting exposing her back, she is naked from the waist upwards and wearing a semitransparent petticoat. In the censored poster in Spain, half of the protagonist's body has been removed, omitting the back and buttocks, and only half of the leg is visible.

A change that did not go unnoticed by commentators who considered the edit to be censorship.

The image went viral since both versions were tweeted by the director of the XS Puçol Short Film Festival, Javier Nav3do.

Social media users noted that it's shocking that Spain still lives under the shadow of Franco's censorship as one twitter user stated: We go back to the dark days of censorship

On the pro-censorship side of the debate: it's a disgrace that a film needs to be promoted using the image of a semi-naked woman.

Poland has became the latest country to propose a national age verification law for porn.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, of the country's center-right Law and Justice Party, claimed that 60% of Polish boys between ages 13 and 16 had been exposed to pornography.

Morawiecki made the remarks to a meeting of the Family Council, a group of parliamentarians, policy experts and leaders of non-governmental organizations whose mission is to support, initiate and promote actions that will benefit traditional families.

Morawiecki did not specify what method might be used to check the ages of Polish people attempting to view online porn.

Albania's parliament has passed an internet censorship package criticised by journalists and the Council of Europe as an attempt to muzzle the media.

The parliament amended existing laws to empower the Albanian Media Authority (AMA) to censor news websites. The package was initially targeted at 700 to 800 online news sites but the scope was broadened to include TV stations.

Prime Minister Edi Rama claimed the move intended to stop fake news or slander from causing loss of life or pressing businesses for bribes by shaming the quality of their products.

Dunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, said the laws were in urgent need of improvement:

The powers given to AMA, the possibility of excessive fines and the blocking of media websites without a court order may deal a strong blow to freedom of expression and media.

Several provisions are indeed not compatible with international and European human rights standards which protect freedom of expression and freedom of the media

A civil court in Rome has ruled that Facebook must immediately reactivate the account of the Italian neo-fascist party CasaPound Italia and pay the group 800 euro for each day the account has been closed/

Facebook shut the party's account, which had 240,000 followers, along with its Instagram page in early September. A Facebook spokesperson told the Ansa news agency at the time: Persons or organisations that spread hatred or attack others on the basis of who they are will not have a place on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook must also pay 15,000 euro in legal costs. The judge reportedly ruled that without Facebook, the party was excluded (or extremely limited) from the Italian political debate.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company was aware of the court's decision and we are reviewing it carefully.

It seems that Netfllix has been stealing a march on the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) by using a joint BBFC/Netflix rating system for Netflix users in Ireland.

Back in March 2019 the BBFC agreed on rating system with Netflix such that Netflix would determine age rating for the programmes and films using the BBFC guidelines. The BBFC has just a quality control role to ensure that Netflix is following the guidelines.

It is reported that these age ratings are now being reused for Netflix users in Ireland. And Newstalk has beein inquiring if the IFCO is happy with this arrangement.

The IFCO responded saying it has no legal remit on non physical product in Ireland. However Ger Connolly, the director of film classification, said:

I do intend to engage with Apple TV and other providers to examine if there is a mechanism to cooperate for the benefit of Republic of Ireland residents.

A Dutch broadcaster has banned seduction-based reality shows after claiming the programmes encourage sexual harassment

New episodes of Love Island and The Villa have been cancelled by RTL after male contestants were accused of ignoring refusals to their sexual advances.

RTL have temporarily pulled the plug on any shows in which sexual seduction plays the main role, the broadcaster said.

These kind of programmes no longer fit in the era of #MeToo, said Tina Nijkamp, a former director of Dutch broadcaster SBS6. I was already surprised that RTL had ordered even more of such programmes.

The European Commission is struggling to agree how to extend internet censorship and control to US messaging apps such as Facebook's WhatsApp and Microsoft's Skype.

These services are run from the US and it is not so easy for European police to obtain say tracking or user information as it is for more traditional telecoms services.

The Commission has been angling towards applying the rules controlling national telecoms companies to these US 'OTT' messaging services. Extended ePrivacy regulation was the chosen vehicle for new censorship laws.

But now it is reported that the EU countries have yet to find agreement on such issues as tracking users' online activities, provisions on detecting and deleting child pornography and of course how to further the EU's silly game of trying to see how many times a day EU internet users are willing to click consent boxes without reading reams of terms and conditions.

EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels on Friday again reached an impasse, EU officials said. Tech companies and some EU countries have criticized the ePrivacy proposal for being too restrictive, putting them at loggerheads with privacy activists who back the plan.

Now doubt the censorship plans will be resuming soon.

A Galway MP to bring forward a bill in the Irish Parliament to prevent children accessing pornography on phones.

Fianna Fáil spokesperson on Youth Affairs, Anne Rabbitte, is hoping to bring a bill before the Dáil in January.

The proposed legislation would mean under 18s using pre-pay mobile phones would have to prove their age when accessing certain content.  She says the bill means companies would have an automatic adult filter that will need age verification before being removed.

Swiss police say are finding more and more illegal videos on teenagers' smartphones. They decided to warn against such behaviour using what appeared to be footage of a man having sex with an animal.

The city police of Winterthur, raised a few eyebrows with their campaign. They released several videos that were supposed to show the dangers and consequences of possessing footage of crimes or bestiality porn.

One of the clips began with a scene featuring a man who ran up to a donkey, pulled his pants down, and appeared to have sex with the animal. The video then cut to a shot with prison bars over a smartphone with the donkey sex on it and a caption that said Animal porn is punished!

Pornography Police spokesman Adrian Feubli explained that earlier materials with dry information on the subject had reached the target group less effectively, while this clip is a door opener.

Wolfenstein 3D is a 1992 US first person shooter by id Software

Wolfenstein 3D is considered one of the grandfathers of the genre. The game was a hit from 1992, building on other popular PC shooters at the time such as DOOM .

However the game was banned in Germany in 1992 for its Nazi symbology. Until now. Wolfenstein 3D has now officially been removed from the German Ban list, more than 25 years after the game was released.

The change of heart is based on a court ruling made in 2018, involving a web-based parody game Bundesfighter 2 Turbo . The game, which is a parody of politicians, featured right-wing leader Alexander Gauland who transformed into a Swastika as one of his special moves. The developers appealed the symbology censorship applied to the game with Germany's attorney general, who ruled that the exemption of art applies to video games. This then overrules games censorship rules previously applying to Nazi symbology in German games releases.

The Spanish government has quietly begun censoring the entirety of GitHub in response to mounting Catalan protests, causing problems for those developers that use the Microsoft-owned service for their work projects.

While the issue is easily remedied by using a VPN, the fact that the Spanish government has been quick to try to censor such a valuable tool speaks volumes for the increasingly prominent but authoritarian idea that mass censorship is the best way to crush dissent.

One new pro-independence group, Tsunami Democratic, organizes digitally online and is known for the mass occupation of Barcelona's El Prat airport by an estimated 10,000 protesters. In addition to other social media it has a website hosted on Github as well as an encrypted communication app that's also available on Github.

The Android app uses geolocation and end-to-end protocols to make sure that only trusted and verified users have access. Verification takes place through the scanning of a QR code of an already-verified member. The app isn't available via Playstore so the APK file containing the app needs to be downloaded and manually installed on a phone.

It's for this reason that the Spanish government has begun to block GitHub in the country, cutting off access to all users. Over the last week, several Spanish internet service providers have blocked access to the service.

Facebook and other social media can be ordered to censor posts worldwide after a ruling from the EU's highest court.

Platforms may also have to seek out similar examples of the illegal content and remove them, instead of waiting for each to be reported.

Facebook said the judgement raised critical questions around freedom of expression. What was the case about?

The case stemmed from an insulting comment posted on Facebook about Austrian politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, which the country's courts claimed damaged her reputation.

Under EU law, Facebook and other platforms are not held responsible for illegal content posted by users, until they have been made aware of it - at which point, they must remove it quickly. But it was unclear whether an EU directive, saying platforms cannot be made to monitor all posts or actively seek out illegal activity, could be overridden by a court order.

Austria's Supreme Court asked Europe's highest court to clarify this. The EU curt duly obliged and ruled:

• If an EU country finds a post illegal in its courts, it can order websites and apps to take down identical copies of the post
• Platforms can be ordered to take down equivalent versions of an illegal post, if the message conveyed is essentially unchanged
• Platforms can be ordered to take down illegal posts worldwide, if there is a relevant international law or treaty

Facebook has said countries would have to set out very clear definitions on what 'identical' and 'equivalent' means in practice.  It said the ruling undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country.

Facebook is unable to appeal against this ruling.

White Rabbit: The EU Council is now in session. Dormouse: Anyone for a magic cookie. If you accept it you will be devoured by evil giants, if you decline, your community will be visited by pestilence and famine. Alice: That is an impossible choice. Mad Hatter: Only if you believe it is. Everyone wants some magical solution for their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic. Alice: Sometimes I've believed in as many as 6 impossible things before breakfast. Mad Hatter: And we've legislated them into EU law by lunch

European lawmakers (including judges) seem to live in an Alice in Wonderland world where laws are made up on the spur of the moment by either the Mad Hatter, or the Dormouse. No thought is given to how they are supposed to work in practice or how they will pan out in reality.

For some reason EU lawmakers decided that the technology of internet cookies personified all that was bad about the internet, particularly that it is largely offered for 'free' whilst in reality being funded by the invasive extraction and exploitation of people's personal data.

Justifiably there is something to be legislated against here. But why not follow the time honoured, and effective, route of directing laws against the large companies doing the exploiting. It would have been straightforward to legislate that internet companies must not retain user data that defines their behaviour and personal information. The authorities could back this up by putting people in prison, or wiping out companies that don't comply with the law. 

But no, the EU came up with some bizarre nonsensical requirement that does little but train people to tick consent boxes without ever reading what they are consenting to. How can they call this data protection? It's data endangerment.

And unsurprisingly the first wave of implementation by internet companies was to try and make the gaining of consent for tracking cookies a one sided question, with a default answer of yes and no mechanism to say no.

Well it didn't take long to see through this silly slice of chicanery, but that doesn't matter...it takes ages for the EU legal system to gear up and put a stop to such a ploy.

So several years on, the European Court of Justice has now ruled that companies should give real options and should not lead people down the garden path towards the option required by the companies.

In an excellent summary of this weeks court judgement, the main court findings are:

• pre-ticked boxes do not amount to valid consent,

• expiration date of cookies and third party sharing should be disclosed to users when obtaining consent,

• different purposes should not be bundled under the same consent ask,

• in order for consent to be valid 'an active behaviour with a clear view' (which I  read as 'intention') of consenting should be obtained (so claiming in notices that consent is obtained by having users continuing to use the website very likely does not meet this threshold) and,

• these rules apply to cookies regardless of whether the data accessed is personal or not.

pdpecho.com commented on what the court carefully decided was the elephant in the room, that would be better not mentioned. ie what will happen next.

The latest court judgement really says that websites should present the cookie consent question something like this.

Website cookie consent
☐ YES	I consent to this website building a detailed profile of my browsing history, personal information & preferences, financial standing and political leaning, to be used to monetise this website in whatever way this website sees fit.
☑ NO	No I  do not consent

Now it does not need an AI system the size of a planet to guess which way internet users will then vote given a clearly specified choice.

There is already a bit of discussion around the EU tea party table worrying about the very obvious outcome that websites will smply block out users who refuse to sign up for tracking cookies. The EU refers to this as a cookie wall, and there are rumblings that this approach will be banned by law.

This would lead to an Alice in Wonderland type of tea shop where customers have the right to decline consent to be charged the price of a chocolate chip cookie, and so can enjoy it for free.

Perfect in Wonderland, but in the real world, European internet businesses would soon be following in the footsteps of declining European high street businesses.