FSNN | Free Speech News Network https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html The Metric Is Not The Mission: When They Still Understood Us Anthropic’s “Supply Chain Risk” Designation Stemmed from Its Refusing to Agree to Contract Terms, Not Its Speech Another appeals court rules against prediction market provider Kalshi, says sports contracts are subject to state regulations Ex-CFTC Leader to Leave Blockchain Association after CLARITY Vote Fails US Prosecutors Want $84.2 Million From a Bank Tied to Tether EFF to Court: Trump’s Use of Truth Social’s Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans’ 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights Border Agents Search Phones Without Warrants. This Case Asks the Supreme Court if That’s Constitutional Blockchain Association sees leadership shift shortly after crypto Clarity Act fizzles OG.com Joins US Push for Single-Stock Perpetual Futures Google Built an AI That Hunts Its Own Security Bugs College Founded by ‘Christian Nationalist’ Pastor Claims Religious Discrimination by Zoning Officials Journalist Henry Constantín detained in Cuba on ‘disobedience’ charge Tether says it had ‘limited’ exposure to bank linked to $84M US seizure AI Agents Hacked Their Own Test Environment to Cheat, Cybersecurity Firm Finds Daily Deal: Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball I Will Not Stand for Being Jerked Around … by Any Lawyer Who Practices Before Me Crypto and TradFi Converge on Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets Circle and Tether Freeze Stablecoins Tied to Bitget Hack—But Most Funds Slip Away OpenAI Accuses Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Of Paying For, Hiding, And Then Laundering Sketchy Key Evidence In AI Copyright Case Texas Court Refuses to Enforce Pakistan Court’s Divorce Judgment, in $100M-Marital-Community-Asset Case Strategy (MSTR) turns to daily dividends in push to restore STRC to $100 Bitget Clarifies $388M in Assets Affected by Security Breach OpenAI Is Building a $500 per Month ChatGPT Pro Max Plan, Leaks Suggest Renée Good’s Mom Wanted Trump to Protect Her Family. Her Daughter Was Killed by ICE. Tether downplays impact of US seizure at banking partner EQIBank Strategy Proposes Daily Dividends for STRC, Preferred Stocks Magic Eden Warns Old Ethereum NFT Listings Are Exposed to Payment Processor Exploit The Toxicology Report on 2 Dead Students Isn’t Back. But the Kratom Panic Is Already Here. The BBC clearly sees the value of television series That Mitchell and Webb Look. Marking the 20th anniversary of its original screening, the Beeb has re-released the series on iPlayer. But – and there is very often a “but” with these things – they’ve removed around 11 sketches from the BAFTA award-winning show. The official word is that these sketches don’t “work today”, which is polite speak for “they may cause offence”. The episodes singled out include scenes featuring a battle reenactment with characters in blackface, a contestant on a show wearing a burka and a lost tribe” in a garden centre. These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them; but 20 years on, this distinction seems to have been lost along the way. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. I find it infantilising, to say the least. Can’t we trust audiences to make up their own minds, to switch off if they find the sketches in question unpalatable? Does the BBC think that we are just passive consumers, unable to disaggregate the mocking of racism from racism itself? These sketches set out to challenge stereotypes, not to reinforce them This act of censorship is distorting – of the shows, whose narratives and rhythms were built to include these sketches, and more broadly too. Conversations we were having 20 years ago have been erased, as if to suggest that they never happened. But they did! And with this erasure, the opportunity for thoughtful engagement and learning from our past is gone. “Let’s just pretend we were all lovely 20 years ago. It’s better that way” seems to be the message. Speaking as a minority myself, I find that knowing the nasty stuff that people said before – and indeed, still say today – is much more useful than pretending it never happened. This approach, I think, is also inconsistent. What it reveals is a cherry-picking (intended or not) of the groups that we can mock, and those that we can’t. Let’s face it, gender stereotypes are rarely deemed to have aged beyond the pale – if that were the case, we would have to wave goodbye to half the television made before the mid-2010s. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists, namely that what they’re creating today may hold less value tomorrow. Or, even worse, that future audiences may deem them bigots – that Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of any creative paying attention to the discourse of the moment. Suppression like this sends a bad message to artists The BBC’s decision reaffirms a broader trend. In 2020, Little Britain was removed from the iPlayer platform for similar reasons. It has since been reinstated – minus some sketches. Meanwhile, the UK’s arts space more broadly is seeing a retreat to the land of “safe”, as Index recently revealed in a year-long investigation into self-censorship in UK theatre. The BBC, it must be said, does remarkable stuff. The ongoing podcast investigation into the disappearance of US journalist Austin Tice is just one example. But this does not mean, however, that they don’t sometimes get it wrong. Chopping at That Mitchell and Webb Look is one example. Sure, the removal of the material isn’t the life-or-death story that Index often works on. Sure, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the faces of persecuted artists – they have huge platforms and agreed to the changes themselves. Still, one can’t help but think that the decision came from a place of conservatism, perhaps even fear. This is weak and dispiriting, indeed the very opposite of what enables creativity in the arts. We shouldn’t be encouraging this cultural timidity. Rather, we should harness culture and creativity as the starting points of a conversation about our here and now. That’s what the arts are for, after all. 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