Also on today’s menu:
‘Vienna Laid Bare’ Campaign Against Censorship
Apple, Google Cave To Russian Pressure?
The Biden administration has blacklisted Israeli firm NSO Group, accusing the technology company of developing and supplying spyware to foreign governments “that used these tools to maliciously” target a range of actors, including journalists and activists.
The U.S. Department of Commerce said Wednesday that NSO Group was among four firms added to its Entity List of companies considered to be operating contrary to U.S. foreign policy and national security interests.
Rights groups announced earlier this year that an investigation by international media outlets discovered NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware had been used by security forces and authoritarian governments in several countries.
‘Vienna Laid Bare’ Campaign Against Censorship
Vienna’s tourism board has launched a “Vienna laid bare” campaign in protest of Facebook’s removal of a post showing the “Venus of Willendorf,” a roughly 30,000-year-old statue that is a famous as a depiction of women and fertility. “An archaeological object, especially such an iconic one, should not be banned from Facebook because of ‘nudity,’ as no artwork should be,” the Vienna Natural History Museum said in a statement.
The Vienna tourism board said museums and their artwork “are among the casualties of this new wave of prudishness — with nude statues and famous artworks blacklisted under social media guidelines.” The artists “pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in art at the time,” the tourism board said.
In response the tourism board has taken the audacious step of showcasing museums’ art on OnlyFans, a subscription-based website closely associated with sex work. For $4.99 a month, subscribers to the tourism board’s page can check out “explicit” works at four of the Austrian capital’s famous museums. The campaign was devised after some of Vienna’s museums, including the Leopold Museum and the Albertina, ran into problems posting artwork containing nudity to social media.
Apple, Google Cave To Russian Pressure?
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s party was able to maintain its majority in the State Duma in the three-day parliamentary elections ending on September 19, partly through suppression of a voting app created by a team associated with jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the Russian government pressured Apple and Google to remove the app, and they obliged, making the app inaccessible on their platforms. Google restored access on October 9, but Apple has yet to do so.
Natalia Krapiva writes in Al Jazeera that, “given their public commitments to respect human rights and freedom of expression, and the fact that their employees were essentially held hostage over a single app, some kind of a reaction would have made sense.” Yet neither company has made any public statement about the pressure from the Russian government.
“To curb the growing threat of internet censorship, we need transparency from Big Tech companies on how such political demands are being dealt with and how they will ensure they will not cave in to them each time, to the detriment of their users,” Krapiva wrote. “Commitments to human rights and freedom of expression need to be translated from PR rhetoric to actual corporate policies. Otherwise, it would mean that users are left on their own to fend for their internet rights against the growing power of censors.”
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