Nancy Pearl, badass Seattle librarian, has something to say about banned books: Read them.
The festival, and filmmakers like Zhu Rikun, finds a new home amidst intense crackdowns in China.
It's a few million Facebook likes behind BBC World News, but still, the question is how — or what percentage comes from robots. Or zombies. Or the "abstract patriotism" of Chinese who live overseas.
As the market for movies and entertainment grows in China, both American and Chinese productions face difficult questions when it comes to Chinese government censorship. But figuring out if things are getting better or worse is harder than it appears.
China is sending a chilling message to citizens who might dare to question government policies with the prosecution of a well-known human rights lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang. But just try mentioning his name in a place like Davos.
There's something missing from most of the media coverage about the murderous attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo: the very cartoons that may have provoked the attack. And the decision to hold them back has sparked a fierce debate in the media world.
Beijing-based Tsering Woeser has been documenting Tibetan self-immolation protests online for the past few years. But she says Facebook has now deleted one of her posts, and not for the reasons of graphic content that they've given her.
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" has earned awful reviews from Western critics, but it got even worse treatment in Egypt: an outright ban thanks to "historical inaccuracies." It's far from the first film to be banned on those grounds, and that applies to European nations as well.
Grab your popcorn: "The Interview" will be showing in select theaters on Christmas Day after Sony decided to reverse its decision to show the movie in the wake of threats and a hacking scandal. But even brief success may give countries like North Korea a blueprint for future attacks.
Washington has taken an increasingly harder line with China on the issues of computer hacking and online censorship. But when the country’s top official for Internet policy – Mr. Lu Wei – visited the office of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, he got a warm reception.
We all know about the so-called ‘Great Firewall of China,” the half-joking term for the barrier set up to prevent Western media from being consumed in China. And most of us assume there is a great deal of additional censorship with China itself. But until Gary King of Harvard University found a way to peer directly at the inner workings of Chinese censorship, no one knew exactly how it was done or what the Chinese were most serious about censoring.