EU Censorship News

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.