Tag: censorship

The censorship-industrial complex

In a sign of the times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that in 2029 the annual Oscars ceremony will move from ABC to YouTube, where it will be viewable worldwide for free. At Variety, Clayton Davis speculates how advertising will work – perhaps mid-roll? The obvious answer is to place the ads between the list of nominees and opening the envelope to announce the winner. Cliff-hanger!

The move is notable. Ratings for the awards show have been declining for decades. In 1960, 45.8 million people in the US watched the Oscars – live, before home video recording. In 1998, the peak, 55.2 million, after VCRs, but before YouTube. In 2024: 19.5 million. This year, the Oscars drew under 18.1 million viewers.

On top of that, broadcast TV itself is in decline. One of the biggest audiences ever gathered for a single episode of a scripted show was in 1983: 100 million, for the series finale of M*A*S*H. In 2004, the Friends finale drew 52.5 million. In 2019, the Big Bang Theory finale drew just 17.9 million. YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users a month. Whatever ABC was paying for the Oscars, reach may matter more than money, especially in an industry that is also threatened by shrinking theater audiences. In the UK, YouTube is second most-watched TV service ($), after only the BBC.

The move suggests that the US audience itself may also not be as uniquely important as it was historically. The Academy’s move fits into many other similar trends.

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During this week’s San Francisco power outage, an apparently unexpected consequence was that non-functioning traffic lights paralyzed many of the city’s driverless Waymo taxis. In its blog posting, the company says, “While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”

Friends in San Francisco note that the California Driver’s Handbook (under “Traffic Control”) is specific about what to do in such situations: treat the intersection as if it had all-way stop signs. It’s a great example of trusting human social cooperation.

Robocars are, of course, not in on this game. In an uncertain situation they can’t read us. So the volume of requests overwhelmed the remote human controllers and the cars froze, blocking intersections and even sidewalks. Waymo suspended the service temporarily, and says it is updating the cars’ software to make them act “more decisively” in such situations in future.

Of course, all these companies want to do away with the human safety drivers and remote controllers as they improve cars’ programming to incorporate more edge cases. I suspect, however, that we’ll never really reach the point where humans aren’t needed; there will always be new unforeseen issues. Driving a car is a technical challenge. Sharing the roads with others is a social effort requiring the kind of fuzzy flexibility computers are bad at. Getting rid of the humans will mean deciding what level of dysfunction we’re willing to accept from the cars.

Self-driving taxis are coming to London in 2026, and I’m struggling to imagine it. It’s a vastly more complex city to navigate than San Francisco, and has many narrow, twisty little streets to flummox programmers used to newer urban grids.

***

The US State Department has announced sanctions barring five people and potentially their families from obtaining visas to enter or stay in the US, labeling them radical activists and weaponized NGOs. They are: Imran Ahmed, an ex-Labour advisor and founder and CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, founder of the Global Disinformation Index; Thierry Breton, a former member of the European Commission, whom under secretary of state for public diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, called “a mastermind” of the Digital Services Act; and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, managing directors of the independent German organization HateAid, which supports people affected by digital violence. Ahmed, who lived in Washington, DC, has filed suit to block his deportation; a judge has issued a temporary restraining order.

It’s an odd collection as a “censorship-industrial complex”. Breton is no longer in a position to make laws calling US Big Tech to account; his inclusion is presumably a warning shot to anyone seeking to promote further regulation of this type. GDI’s site’s last “news” posting was in 2022. HateAid has helped a client file suit against Google in August 2025, and sued X in July for failing to remove criminal antisemitic content. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has also been in court to oppose antisemitic content on X and Instagram; in 2024 Elon Musk called it a ‘criminal organization’. There was more logic to”the three people in hell” taught to an Irish friend as a child (Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth I, and Martin Luther).

Whatever the Trump administration’s intention, the result is likely to simply add more fuel to initiatives to lessen European dependence on US technology.

Illustrations: Christmas tree in front of the US Capitol in 2020 (via Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The safe place

For a long time, fear that technical decisions – new domain names ($), cooption of open standards or software, laws mandating data localization – would splinter the Internet. “Balkanize” was heard a lot.

A panel at the UK Internet Governance Forum a couple of weeks ago focused on this exact topic, and was mostly self-congratulatory. Which is when it occurred to me that the Internet may not *be* fragmented, but it *feels* fragmented. Almost every day I encounter some site I can’t reach: email goes into someone’s spam folder, the site or its content is off-limits because it’s been geofenced to conform with copyright or data protection laws, or the site mysteriously doesn’t load, with no explanation. The most likely explanation for the latter is censorship built into the Internet feed by the ISP or the establishment whose connection I’m using, but they don’t actually *say* that.

The ongoing attrition at Twitter is exacerbating this feeling, as the users I’ve followed for years continue to migrate elsewhere. At the moment, it takes accounts on several other services to keep track of everyone: definite fragmentation.

Here in the UK, this sense of fragmentation may be about to get a lot worse, as the long-heralded Online Safety bill – written and expanded until it’s become a “Frankenstein bill”, as Mark Scott and Annabelle Dickson report at Politico – hurtles toward passage. This week saw fruitless debates on amendments in the House of Lords, and it will presumably be back in the Commons shortly thereafter, where it could be passed into law by this fall.

A number of companies have warned that the bill, particularly if it passes with its provisions undermining end-to-end encryption intact, will drive them out of the country. I’m not sure British politicians are taking them seriously; so often such threats are idle. But in this case, I think they’re real, not least because post-Brexit Britain carries so much less global and commercial weight, a reality some politicians are in denial about. WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple have all said openly that they will not compromise the privacy of their masses of users elsewhere to suit the UK. Wikipedia has warned that including it in the requirement to age-verify its users will force it to withdraw rather than violate its principles about collecting as little information about users as possible. The irony is that the UK government itself runs on WhatsApp.

Wikipedia, Ian McRae, the director of market intelligence for prospective online safety regulator Ofcom, showed in a presentation at UKIGF, would be just one of the estimated 150,000 sites within the scope of the bill. Ofcom is ramping up to deal with the workload, an effort the agency expects to cost £169 million between now and 2025.

In a legal opinion commissioned by the Open Rights Group, barristers at Matrix Chambers find that clause 9(2) of the bill is unlawful. This, as Thomas Macaulay explains at The Next Web, is the clause that requires platforms to proactively remove illegal or “harmful” user-generated content. In fact: prior restraint. As ORG goes on to say, there is no requirement to tell users why their content has been blocked.

Until now, the impact of most badly-formulated British legislative proposals has been sort of abstract. Data retention, for example: you know that pervasive mass surveillance is a bad thing, but most of us don’t really expect to feel the impact personally. This is different. Some of my non-UK friends will only use Signal to communicate, and I doubt a day goes by that I don’t look something up on Wikipedia. I could use a VPN for that, but if the only way to use Signal is to have a non-UK phone? I can feel those losses already.

And if people think they dislike those ubiquitous cookie banners and consent clickthroughs, wait until they have to age-verify all over the place. Worst case: this bill will be an act of self-harm that one day will be as inexplicable to future generations as Brexit.

The UK is not the only one pursuing this path. Age verification in particular is catching on. The US states of Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, and Utah have all passed legislation requiring it; Pornhub now blocks users in Mississippi and Virginia. The likelihood is that many more countries will try to copy some or all of its provisions, just as Australia’s law requiring the big social media platforms to negotiate with news publishers is spawning copies in Canada and California.

This is where the real threat of the “splinternet” lies. Think of requiring 150,000 websites to implement age verification and proactively police content. Many of those sites, as the law firm Mischon de Reya writes may not even be based in the UK.

This means that any site located outside the UK – and perhaps even some that are based here – will be asking, “Is it worth it?” For a lot of them, it won’t be. Which means that however much the Internet retains its integrity, the British user experience will be the Internet as a sea of holes.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot in a Putney garden (by Simon Bisson; used by permission).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.