censorship

Hall of Shame: Star Trek After Dark

There are certain parts of the internet where Star Trek and adult content overlap harmoniously in expected ways, but Tumblr was recently a platform where that overlap was remarkably unexpected.  Our latest entry into Automattic’s Hall of Shame tells the story of a Star Trek starship, an overambitious copyright monitoring company, one off-base DMCA (Digital […]

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Error 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons

Internet Service Providers and online platforms like WordPress.com are increasingly facing demands to block access to URLs in different countries. These orders can come as the result of court decisions (in the case of the UK and Turkey), or directly from governmental authorities (in the case of Russia or Georgia) and are usually directed at content […]

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Trouble in Turkey

Earlier this week, nearly all of the more than 77 million websites hosted by WordPress.com were inaccessible to the people of Turkey, due to broad and arbitrary censorship by the Turkish government. We began to hear reports of service outages during the evening of Monday, July 27, Istanbul time. The blocks were apparently removed by midday […]

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