Contents – Unsung heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression
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Book censorship is rife on Amazon.com, according to a report from The Citizen Lab
What do rainbow-coloured hair extensions, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Sex Addiction: A Survival Guide have in common? They have all allegedly been swept up in broad censorship measures by retail giant Amazon, according to a new report by The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto.
The Citizen Lab, which studies openness and transparency on the internet, analysed the US storefront Amazon.com to uncover restrictions on certain products being ordered from specific regions. They found that the most common product category that is restricted is books, often with themes of LGBTQ+ lives, the occult, erotica, Christianity or health and wellness. These are censored in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, as well as Brunei Darussalam, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles and Zambia.
But it isn’t just products actually banned in these countries that are restricted. The Citizen Lab uncovered a raft of “collateral censorship” where items were miscategorised (for example, because they contained the word “gay” in their title or description), hence the banning of rainbow-coloured hair extensions due to the word “rainbow”.
When potential consumers from these regions try to purchase various products from Amazon.com, they are given various error messages, such as an announcement that a product is out of stock. But, according to The Citizen Lab’s methodology, these items are not out of stock. The organisation’s research can distinguish between products being genuinely unavailable for delivery in a region, and being restricted.
Noura Al-Jizawi, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab and co-author of the report, told Index that this sheds light on a potential broader strategy around censorship.
“Rather than taking responsibility or openly acknowledging its role in restricting certain content, Amazon masks these decisions as stock or availability issues,” she said. “This tactic allows the company to evade accountability and makes it difficult for stakeholders — customers, authors and publishers — to challenge or appeal such practices.”
She claimed that this helps Amazon to maintain its reputation and avoid accusations of censorship, as restrictions are framed as logistical problems rather than deliberate decisions. But transparency, she explained, is crucial.
“If a book has been miscategorised or unfairly censored, users have the right to appeal such decisions,” she said. “Similarly, authors and publishers deserve the opportunity to request Amazon to reconsider its decision to restrict their work. Without transparency, these stakeholders are left in the dark, unable to understand or address the reasons behind such restrictions.”
Jeffrey Knockel, senior research associate at The Citizen Lab and another of the report’s co-authors, told Index that his organisation had previously identified censorship on the Saudi Arabia and UAE Amazon storefronts, and were trying to systematically measure which products were blocked when they realised that the same censorship existed on Amazon.com.
The Citizen Lab has written to Amazon to inquire about the pressure the conglomerate might be under from various governments. They have also made recommendations, including that Amazon should “provide transparent and accurate notifications to customers when products are unavailable due to legal restrictions of the destination region” along with details on the relevant law and a mechanism for customers to flag improperly classified items. At the time of publishing, Amazon has not replied to The Citizen Lab.
Yuri Guaiana, senior campaigns manager at All Out, a global movement campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights, spoke to Index in response to the report. He believes Amazon should implement The Citizen Lab’s recommendations as a first step, but should then go even further.
“As a global leader, Amazon has the power to influence norms. It should take a stand against oppressive laws that force censorship, actively working with human rights organisations to advocate for change in restrictive regions,” he said.
All Out has launched a petition demanding that Amazon stops censoring LGBTQ+ books. “For businesses like Amazon, complying with oppressive local demands may seem like a pragmatic choice, but it risks reinforcing systemic discrimination,” he said.
He echoes The Citizen Lab’s concerns around lack of transparency around censorship, which he says shields “both Amazon and oppressive governments from scrutiny”.
If there was better transparency, he explained, customers and human rights campaigners would be more equipped to push back against unjust restrictions and oppressive laws.
He also shared concerns about the issue of “collateral censorship”. “We’ve seen this pattern escalate in places like Russia,” he said. “After Putin’s regime implemented laws censoring so-called ‘LGBT+ propaganda’, enforcement spiralled beyond media and literature. People have been arrested for as little as wearing rainbow [earrings], showing how quickly such policies can expand into every facet of life,” he said.
Index approached Amazon for a right of reply but Amazon did not respond to Index’s request for comment.
Can academic freedom survive Donald Trump’s plans for thought control?
In the name of “free speech”, Donald Trump has laid out an authoritarian plan for his new administration to radically defund and gag universities. Now with a Republican Congress, he might just achieve it all and that spells disaster for freedom of thought, critical inquiry and an informed citizenry in the USA.
Trump’s plan is based on the education chapter within the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s 900-page political roadmap Project 2025, a set of policy proposals that lay out a long-term ultra conservative vision. The chapter is written by Lindsey Burke, director of the organisation’s Center for Education for Policy.
First on the list is dismantling the Department of Education, a realistic threat now Republicans have both the House and Senate. Trump has put a wrestling magnate in charge of the department, Linda McMahon. She was formerly head of the US Small Business Administration and is currently chair of the America First Policy Institute, McMahon financed Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden with its notoriously bigoted speakers, according to Forbes. She will play a key role in rolling out plans that will profoundly shift power to reinforce historical social inequities in universities. These could include reversing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, privatising student loans and halting loan forgiveness.
Trump’s radical overhaul includes defunding universities that he considers to be “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathisers of many, many different dimensions” by taxing, fining and suing private university endowments (funds or assets donated to universities to provide long-term financial support).
Trump sees Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that such schools have engaged in as “unlawful discrimination” and he is seeking “restitution” through the law. He plans to “pursue federal civil rights cases” and increase the tax against these schools. During his first presidency, Trump signed a new plan that introduced a 1.4% on endowments of private universities with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets for every full-time student.
America’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard (which rely greatly on federal funds) will be prime targets. Following a wave of pro-Palestine protests – which were already subdued with arrests and brutality – there was conservative backlash. This prepared the ground for the coming lawfare aimed at punishing higher education institutions for wrong-think. For example, according to The Guardian, Steve Scalise, House majority leader, has discussed plans to punish universities that allow pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation.
With the spoils raised by stripping these educational institutions, Trump will fund a new American Academy. While he describes it as “non-political”, Trump’s ideological agenda is clear: “no wokeness or jihadism allowed”. Trump explains that American Academy will “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free”.
In what sounds troublingly like generative AI driven education, delivery of “content” will be through “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing”. There is no mention of professors or teachers.
There is little detail on the curriculum – so what kind of “content” will be considered “human knowledge” worth teaching? Trump’s scientific beliefs raise concerns. For example, he has previously said: “One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.”
The role of “industry partners” is left vague but we should be asking whether companies delivering content through “breakthrough” technology could gain access to students’ behavioral data for training AI. Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, forewarns of the dismantling of recent AI oversight efforts and an incoming merger of tech and state power where “the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy”.
With Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), my fear is that we could see emerging education policy influenced by the view that AI is a neutral tool for “free speech”, which can replace “unnecessary” educators.
Trump’s own past forays into the education sector don’t inspire confidence in his motives. In 2004, he set up “Trump University” as a for-profit initiative and real estate training programme, which claimed to share the secrets to being a successful entrepreneur. It faced several lawsuits, including allegations that Trump University defrauded its students through misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Despite the organisation never admitting wrongdoing, Trump settled the lawsuits, paying 6,000 defrauded victims a $25 million settlement in 2016 shortly after being elected president.
American Academy appears to be designed to extract power from the academe and weaken education, rather than strengthen it. It will compete with universities while its free online courses will be “equivalent” to a bachelor’s degree, accredited, and recognised for federal employment – which will itself further degrade government by hollowing out expertise.
Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Trump has said he will use executive orders to rescind or rewrite regulations, which could be used to undo stronger Biden-era Title IX protections against sexual harassment in universities and colleges. Executive orders are a powerful presidential tool enabling swift changes to federal policies and priorities without the approval of Congress – but they also have the potential for abuse of power. All this accompanies recent efforts to casualise the employment of professors, and weaken the tenure system, which ensures they cannot be removed easily and protects unpopular research, teaching and speech.
As university endowments are purged and their federal resources become contingent on pleasing ideological gatekeepers, it is hard to imagine brave or rigorous research can survive in the hollowed-out husks that remain. Once universities begin losing students to AI-delivered “free degrees” this will of course accelerate the roll-out of EdTech across the sector, resulting in declining educational standards and heightened surveillance in the name of “efficiency”. And should dissenters rise up, student protests will be stifled or exploited to legitimate further attacks on their institutions.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently stated that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
This “revolution” is not without casualties, however: many of America’s more privileged intellectuals will flee this war to financial stability or intellectual freedom overseas, but minority, dissident and refugee academics will be most vulnerable to harassment, insecurity and displacement. It will polarise inequality in an existing two-tier education system: community colleges and non-elite universities won’t survive.
Universities specialising in specific subjects, such as disinformation, will also continue to be uniquely targeted. In 2022 Trump threatened that “within hours” of his inauguration, he would sign an executive order “banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information’.
The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling may disrupt these plans somewhat, as it reaffirmed that technology researchers are independent and have First Amendment rights to carry out their work, and communicate it with the public, companies and the government. Yet, while some rights can be defended in the courts, legal battles take time, and great damage can be done in the meantime. Technology and disinformation researchers continue to face relentless political pressure, harassment, obstruction and lawfare.
The USA was once considered one of the world’s strongest defenders of academic freedom and free expression. While this was always a romanticised perception in an unequal system, Trumpism over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in US academic freedom. Attacks on US higher education have already begun, and the USA has fallen below more than 70 other countries in the Academic Freedom Index Update. Universities are pre-emptively ditching inclusivity practices in anticipation of Trump’s policies – but they must not “obey in advance”, as historian Timothy Snyder would say.
Scholars, students, journalists, businesses and civil society must be united to defend against and communicate this threat to ordinary Americans. Given that the changes could also result in a long-term decline in the US economy, business leaders and economists should condemn these regressive plans. US academia must mobilise itself within and between sectors to defend academic freedom issues, and communicate the importance of human interaction and interpersonal communication in education.
The conservatives’ success here spells disaster for the world. Successful authoritarian capture of academia in such a powerful liberal democracy could inspire right-wing political attacks on education globally. The American moral panic over “critical race theory”, for example, became a political weapon that destabilised education policy development in Australia, and we have also seen the authoritarian takeover of education in Hungary. As Trump’s changes unfurl, the UN and its member states must take the lead in condemning measures which unpick the education system and threaten free expression globally. More broadly, we need an international movement of those who embrace low-tech alternatives and who are willing to disrupt “the machine” in sectors where lives, jobs and critical human knowledge are threatened by technofascism.
Hanna Komar explores the trauma of oppression through her new play
Last month, Body in Progress, an autobiographical play written and performed by Belarusian poet Hanna Komar, debuted in London at Theatre Deli.
Set against the backdrop of the fraudulent 2020 Belarus elections and the brutal crackdown that followed, Body in Progress tells the story of Komar’s ongoing experience with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she fled her country and settled in the UK. The play explores how trauma manifests in Komar’s body, leading her to dissociate from the world around her.
“In September 2020, I was jailed for nine days for a peaceful demonstration in Minsk,” Komar told Index. “That experience and a lot of police violence that I witnessed or lived through in 2020 triggered the violence I experienced in my family, and all together it made my body and mind dissociate, in order to keep me sane and functional.”
The play features Komar and the Belarusian actor and movement practitioner Sophie Vallee, who together personify Komar’s experience of dissociation between body and mind. Throughout the performance, they physically come together and become entangled then drift apart, echoing Komar’s inner turmoil and illustrating how she is repeatedly triggered by memories of Belarus. We see her attempt to ground herself in the present by following a daily routine and wandering the streets of London.
Photo by Tania Naiden
In a particularly poignant scene, feeling lonely and isolated in a new city, Komar shares a Facebook post asking friends back in Belarus to name the places in London they’d like to visit. She then visits these locations, including the Tate Modern, tube stations, and the River Thames, updating her friends along the way as a means of rooting herself in London while remaining connected to her home country. However, even the smallest trips sometimes become overwhelming as she is flooded with flashbacks.
“I wanted to convey an embodied experience of trauma, which I did through the descriptions of tiny details of my routine and my walks in London,” she said. “How it makes one’s everyday existence difficult, how simple things become hard work.”
In her play, she refers to the works of Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and other mental health professionals, who explain how our brain and nervous system cope with trauma and PTSD, and “how healing is a long-term, complex process,” she said.
Vallee powerfully expresses Komar’s inner trauma through movement, elevating the play into a piece of performance art. This allows the audience to grasp Komar’s intense distress from experiences such as her imprisonment in Belarus.
It is also through Vallee’s movements that the audience witnesses Komar’s journey of healing and self-recovery.
“I was grateful that Sophie agreed to work with this emotionally intense and heavy text. Unlike me, whose character was clear, she represents a number of voices, and it needs professionalism and dedication to present them in the way she does during the performance. I think being Belarusian helps with that,” Komar said.
Given that Body in Progress is Komar’s first play and her acting debut, she delivers an incredibly moving performance that left many in the audience in tears. Through a brilliant display of theatre physicality, Komar embodies the image of a woman in exile – vulnerable yet resilient, traumatised yet determined to rebuild and find a sense of home in a new country.
Hanna Komar starred in the play with Belarusian actor and movement practitioner Sophie Vallee. Photo by Tania Naiden
The play also serves as Komar’s tribute to the fundamental role of women in the historical fight for human rights. Through her perspective, which draws connections between dictatorship and patriarchy, Komar unpacks how a woman’s body can both absorb oppression and foster resistance.
“I use a quote in my play: ‘Kafka was the first to comprehend a body as a battlefield for freedom…’. Our bodies are a site of violence and a site of resistance. Being caring and considerate is a good way to resist violence. Collective care is a good way to resist it too. And I believe that when we gather to experience work like Body in Progress, we give ourselves a chance for collective processing, releasing of and resisting to violence,” said Komar.
Body in Progress showed for two days as part of Voila Festival. Komar plans to eventually take it elsewhere. Ultimately, the play is a powerful tribute to the lasting impact of oppression on the self and a crucial reminder that exile is just the beginning of one’s journey to recovery.