EU Censorship News

A French court on Friday, has rejected a claim brought by two children's campaigns calling for the blocking of major porn websites in France.

The judge rejected the claim because the court facing time pressures had not been able to hear arguments from the sites' publishers.

The anti-porn campaigners had hoped for the blocking of nine top porn sites, including PornHub and Xvideos.

One of the ISPs being asked to censor the porn, Orange, noted that it already offered tools such as parental controls to limit children's access to online pornography.

Samuel Comblez of e-Enfance, one of the children's campaigners, said: It's not a completely lost battle, adding that it was now examining other ways to restrict access to the sites.

French president Emmanuel Macron has been slammed after he set up a commission to fight conspiracy theories which critics have labelled the thought police. He said he believes conspiracy theories are a poison to French society. Members will include 15 academics, as well as journalists, teachers and lawyers.

Macron has asked them to produce a report on topics including how to prevent internet algorithms enslaving society, how advertisers exploit fake news and how to prevent foreign rival powers from spreading information.

Macron said in a TV interview that conspiracy theories are a key problem for France which is battling the perspective that all views are equal, that those of someone who is not a specialist but who has an opinion on the coronavirus are just as valid as those of a scientist.

But Francois-Bernard Huyghe, a political scientist at the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs in Paris, has slammed Mr Macron's new commission. He said:

I don't think that multiplying laws, censoring social media accounts or treating people as cretins is the solution. It provokes the opposite effect to the one desired and the feeling that something is being hidden.

The Lithuanian government has recommended that its citizens throw away Chinese smartphones , singling out devices from Xiaomi Corp for their censorship capabilities.

Last week, a report by the Lithuanian defence ministry's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) alleged that Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G smartphone, which is widely sold in Europe, has a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as Free Tibet, Long live Taiwan independence or democracy movement.

The function at the centre of that report is supposedly advertising management software, which is used to shield users from ontent including pornography, violence and hate speech. According to a Xiaomi spokesman, such censorship tools are common in the smartphone and internet industry worldwide.

  The Hungarian Government has ordered shops to wrap children's books that depict homosexuality in a positive light in closed packaging as the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban fights against gay rights.

Under a government decree, stores will also be banned from selling books seen as containing explicit depictions of sexuality or narratives around gender change within a 200 meter radius of schools or churches. The rules similarly outlaw displays of products that depict gender roles that are different from an individual's gender at birth.

The latest steps come a month after Hungary introduced a law banning the dissemination of LGBTQ+ content in schools.

The European Commission has filed legal proceedings against Hungary claiming the rules violate the right to freedom of expression and information.