Tag Archives: Corporate censorship

Clinton-Linked Dark Money Group Targets Advertisers to Stop Musk From Restoring Free Speech Protections, by Jonathan Turley

Hillary Clinton despises free speech to the core of her being. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who feel the same way. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

In the shift of the left against free speech principles, there is no figure more actively or openly pushing for censorship than Hillary Clinton. Now, reports indicate that Clinton has unleashed her allies in the corporate world to coerce Musk to restore censorship policies or face bankruptcy. The effort of the Clinton-linked “Accountable Tech” reveals the level of panic in Democratic circles that free speech could be restored on one social media platform. The group was open about how losing control over Twitter could result in a loss of control over social media generally. For Clinton, it is an “all-hands on deck” call for censorship. She previously called upon foreign governments to crackdown on the free speech of Americans on Twitter.

We have been discussing how Clinton and others have called on foreign countries to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter. It seems that, after years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

Accountable Tech led an effort to send a letter to top Twitter advertisers to force Musk to accept “non-negotiable” requirements for censorship.

General Motors was one of the first to pull its advertising funds to stop free speech restoration on the site.

Of course, the company had no problem with supporting Twitter when it was running one of the largest censorship systems in history — or supporting TikTok (which is Chinese owned and has been denounced for state control and access to data). Twitter has been denounced for years for its bias against conservative and dissenting voices, including presumably many GM customers on the right. None of that was a concern for GM but the pledge to restore free speech to Twitter warrants a suspension.

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Pure Excrement, by Robert Gore

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Let’s call a turd a turd.

America’s largest corporations are run by unprincipled, gutless cowards. They are publicly embracing an ideology that holds that they and everything they do are evil and which would turn them into, at best, state functionaries whose work and existence are at the sufferance of arbitrary masters. After decades of compromise to creeping, now galloping collectivism, they have nothing left to compromise. They’ve become willing accomplices to mindless malice that will obliterate them and their businesses. Full partners in their own destruction, they’ll deserve it.

There are three ways to obtain goods and services: production, trade, or theft (including theft by fraud). The first two are the domain of capitalism, the last is the province of various ideologies asserting a collective’s right to the lives and everything else of the individual. Yes, political philosophy is that simple. It serves the interests of intellectual con artists to make it more complex, the diversion while they steal your money and your life. Humanity’s steps forward have been the fruits of production and trade; its steps backward the toxic weeds of its rulers’ theft and violence.

Businesses produce and trade. Consequently, it’s in the long-term interest of business people to defend the principles necessary for production and exchange: freedom and its economic expression—capitalism—and a political system that fully protects individual rights and strictly limits the power and scope of government. Unfortunately, that ship sailed long ago in this country, the occasional protest from a business person drowned out by the chorus cheering the latest accretion of government power and diminution of liberty, hoping to profit or at least shelter from it.

We’ve reached the point where approval of government polices, no matter how insane, has become a condition for doing business. Any executive who publicly disapproves risks incurring the wrath of the government and could be dismissed by the board of directors as acting contrary to the best interests of the corporation.

That’s strictly in the short-term, though. What government compels is usually contrary to logic and opposed to sound and ethical business. It was clear before and it’s even clearer with the Covid response: business must challenge government if it’s to be anything but the subservient junior partner in a fascist, totalitarian regime.

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No executive of a major corporation has challenged the assumption of emergency powers, the suspension of federal and state constitutions, and the president’s, bureaucrats’ and governors’ rule by decree. They have supported power grabs that make those constitutions—the only legal documents purporting to limit the power of governments—dead letters.

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The US Ministry of Woke Propaganda Wants to Cancel You, Me, Fox, and Anyone Else Who Disagrees, by Daisy Luther

They’re not even feigning fealty to free expression any more. From Daisy Luther at theorganicprepper.com:

There’s a saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But I think that there are people who learned from history and want to repeat it.

Don’t get me wrong. If you walked up and asked someone like the little short guy from Facebook who sat on some books at his congressional hearing so he could see over the table or that dude with the dirty looking beard from Twitter or all those so-called journalists frothing at the mouth on CNN whether they wanted to turn our nation into a carbon copy of Hitler’s Germany, they’d be positively aghast at the very notion.

Yet every day on social media, people like me try to share innocuous things, like an article about taco seasoning, I kid you not, and we’re told we aren’t following “community standards.”

For the record, I had waited 15 minutes between posting that article on my personal timeline and was then trying to share it on my frugal living Facebook page. If I’m in trouble for taco seasoning, it probably won’t be long until they kick me off entirely, so if you found this post on social media and want to make sure you see all of our articles, please go here and subscribe  – you’ll get a free, full-length copy of The Prepper’s Workbook when you do. You can also find me on Gab, MeWe, and Twitter (for the moment).

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Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor, by Glenn Greenwald

If Facebook and Twitter are private companies and can allow whatever they want on their sites, then they are not content neutral platforms, they are publishers, and must be subject to defamation and other laws to which publishers must comply. From Glenn Greenwald at theintercept.com:

Just weeks before the election, the tech giants unite to block access to incriminating reporting about their preferred candidate.

The New York Post is one of the country’s oldest and largest newspapers. Founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, only three U.S. newspapers are more widely circulated. Ever since it was purchased in 1976 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, it has been known — like most Murdoch-owned papers — for right-wing tabloid sensationalism, albeit one that has some real reporters and editors and is capable of reliable journalism.

On Wednesday morning, the paper published on its cover what it heralded as a “blockbuster” scoop: “smoking gun” evidence, in its words, in the form of emails purportedly showing that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, traded on his father’s position by securing favors from the then-Vice President to benefit the Ukranian energy company Burisma, which paid the supremely unqualified Hunter $50,000 each month to sit on its Board. While the Biden campaign denies that any such meetings or favors ever occurred, neither the campaign nor Hunter, at least as of now, has denied the authenticity of the emails.

The Post’s hyping of the story as some cataclysmic bombshell was overblown. While these emails, if authenticated, provide some new details and corroboration, the broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the U.S. Government to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs.

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France’s Determination to End Free Speech, by Judith Bergman

The noose tightens on whatever remains of free speech in France. From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Private companies will now be obliged to act as thought police on behalf of the French state or face heavy fines.
  • “Under the pretext of fighting ‘hateful’ content on the Internet, it [the Avia law] is setting up a system of censorship that is as effective as it is dangerous… ‘hate’ is the pretext systematically used by those who want to silence dissenting opinions…. A democracy worthy of its name should accept freedom of expression.” — Guillaume Roquette, editorial director of Le Figaro Magazine, May 22, 2020.
  • “What is hate? You have the right not to love… you have the right to love, you have the right to hate. It’s a feeling… It cannot be judicialized, legislated.” — Éric Zemmour, CNews, May 13, 2020.
  • Asking private companies — or the government — to act as thought police does not belong in a state that claims to follow a democratic rule of law. Unfortunately, the question is not whether France will be the last European country to introduce such censorship laws, but what other countries are next in line.

With a new law, the French government has decided to delegate the task of state censorship to online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. Private companies will now be obliged to act as thought police on behalf of the French state or face heavy fines. (Images source: iStock)

On May 13, the French parliament adopted a law that requires online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat[1] to remove reported “hateful content” within 24 hours and “terrorist content” within one hour. Failure to do so could result in exorbitant fines of up to €1.25 million or 4% of the platform’s global revenue in cases of repeated failure to remove the content.

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Against Silicon Valley. by Ian Miles Cheong

Silicon Valley has become a bastion of left-wing politics and politically correct ideology. From Ian Miles Cheong at humanevents.com:

Big Tech amplified the culture war: now it is putting its thumb on the scale.

The early days of the internet were rife with optimism about the future of the technological society. Techno-utopians naively hoped that a society running on the so-called “Information SuperHighway” would be armed with facts, and civic life would evolve past the tired dialectic of partisan politics.

Of course what they predicted, and what ended up happening, are two very different things. Far from enlightenment, we’re confronting a world of conspiracy theories and alternative narratives produced within echo chambers and widely disseminated through social media—some of which are downright dangerous.

Before we can understand why things are the way they are, it is necessary to recall what happened in the first two decades of the 21st century. That’s likely what motivated Joe Bernstein’s recent retrospective on BuzzFeed. For all the utopianism and hope that defined the end of the 20th century, we still haven’t ended starvation and inequality, accomplished world peace, or established a colony on Mars. Instead, we have the culture war and a myriad of trivialities that threaten to ensconce the human race in low-stakes concerns like preferred pronouns and microaggressions.

Bernstein, who’s very much a “normie,” laments the ways in which the new age of enlightenment, driven by technological progress, failed to deliver. But the utopia he grieves for is very much a product of Big Tech’s monocultural hegemony. Big Tech, which has engineered the current state of political discourse, has been subsumed by leftist beliefs—both from within and without.

Mark Zuckerberg.

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Social Media Censorship Reaches New Heights as Twitter Permanently Bans Dissent, by Mnar Muhawesh

The big social media companies have become arms of the government, and they keep tightening the noose on what’s left of free expression. From Mnar Muhawesh at mintpressnews.com:

It’s an open secret. The deep state is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google to control the flow of information. That includes suppressing, censoring and sometimes outright purging dissenting voices – all under the guise of fighting fake news and Russian propaganda.

Most recently, it was revealed that Twitter’s senior editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa is an active officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations.

In other words: he specializes in disseminating propaganda.

The news left many wondering how a member of the British Armed Forces secured such an influential job in the media.

The bombshell that one of the world’s most influential social networks is controlled in part by an active psychological warfare officer was not covered at all in the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC or Fox News, who appear to have found the news unremarkable.

But for those paying attention and for those who have been following ’MintPress News’ extensive coverage of social media censorship, this revelation was merely another example of the increasing closeness between the deep state and the fourth estate.

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The Purge, by Eric Peters

I just discovered this morning that the short video I made the other day discussing the absence of the latestsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety features in the 2019 VW Beetle I test drove recently has been pulled – apparently for “dangerous and derogatory” content. Which amounts to me criticizing the latest pushy-parenting-nudging “assistance” tech such as Lane Keep Assist/Steering Assist and ASS.

See here.

You’d think I’d put on a Hitler outfit and been ranting about “the Jews” – which by the way one ought to be able to do in a “free” country – whether “hateful” or not.

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