Results tagged “censorship”

Conspiracy theorists freaked the holy hell out this morning over a piece penned by Phil Bronstein -- one that was critical of Gavin Newsom as California's next governor -- which was pulled. Or so it seemed. What happened was, local-politics fanboy types, like the anonymous ILoveGavinNewsom and journo Josh Wolf, accused SFGate of censoring the anti-Newsom bit. (While Wolf, a journalist by fame, didn't balls out accuse them of censorship, he retweeted the anonymous blog's assertion without consideration of the source.)

Ever since "hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets" in Iran, accusing the government of holding a fraudulent presidential election, social sites like Facebook and Twitter have played a wildly significant part in getting information out. (An aside: Do you see, you foolish and stubborn book / print fetishists, what the point of typing out silly little words is all about? That, in the end, it is just about communicating information? Communicated to as many sets of eyeballs as possible? Free of any arrogant literary stank? That your dusty 'zines stacked at Dog-Eared Books and your elite writers compounds speak to no one but you?) It seems the Iranian government found out about the world wide web, and then started blocking those sites in their country. As the Slog posted yesterday, proxies came to the rescue. That is to say, you could allow a n Iranian protester to connect to your computer instead, then they could use Twitter or whatever. (The protesters really could use it.)

When Unite The Fight, a homosexual blog, discovered that Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's wifi was blocking gay-themed sites, they were not thrilled. Because blocking access to gay site is, at the very least, creepy. See, a UTF contributor tried accessing such queer sites as Towleroad and Pam's House Blend, but both were blocked for "sexuality." (Neither site, by the way, is erotically charged.)

Natalie Jones, a sixth-grader in Ramona, California, created a Powerpoint presentation about Harvey Milk's life and activism, for which she received a near-perfect score. The day before the presentation, Jones' principal said that although her project was as good as a high school student's, because of the "sensitive material," she might be unable to show it.

Over the weekend, much of the GLBT community sent itself into hysterics after Amazon seemingly removed sales rankings from a large amount of LGBT books for deemed "adult" in content. That is to say, books like James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, and feminist/general sexuality were considered too hot for Amazon viewers' eyes.

Remember the other day, we told you about a bunch of new TV ads about how gay families can actually be pleasant and likable? Well, you'll be glad to hear that the spots aired all over California during Tuesday's inauguration, which is great -- except in Los Angeles on ABC-TV. According to the folks who produced the ads, they were told they were "too controversial to air during the Inauguration, since 'many families will be watching.'"

Sarah Palin, according to yesterday's New York Times, tried to get some morally bankrupt books removed from library shelves when she took office in Alaska as the mayor of Wasilla. Palin, it seems, went so far as to try firing Mary Ellen Emmons, a librarian in Wasilla who dared to resist Palin's vile censoring efforts.

Things are getting prickly over in the anonymous tips section -- which, as you all well know, should be reserved for delicious tidbits of info only -- so we moved the discussion over here.

Remember the great Youtube outage of 2006? Horribly, it seems to have returned. Can you access the site? We can't. Multiple theories are popping up -- generally, hackers or incompetent cyber-Mohammedans are getting the blame -- or perhaps Google itself is at fault?

Over at The Snitch, we came across this fury-inducing commercial conceived by heart-warming conservative group Move America Forward. (You know, the one chaired by KSFO 560 AM's Melanie Morgan?)