Tag Archives: Social media censorship

Post-Decency Politics: House Democrats Use Hearing to Attack Both Free Speech and a Free Press, by Jonathan Turley

When you got nothing else, you go ad hominem. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

Below is my column in The Hill on continued scorched earth tactics of Democrats in attacking any witnesses raising free speech concerns over government censorship.

Here is the column:

“At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Those words were first asked by lawyer Joseph Welch in his confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) during the Senate’s infamous Army-McCarthy hearings. This week, nearly 70 years later, Welch’s words seem more relevant than ever after House Democrats savaged two journalists who attempted to explain a government effort to censor citizens.

It was only the latest of a series of hearings in which FBI agents and other whistleblowers, experts and journalists have been personally attacked for raising free-speech concerns. Last week’s hearing showed definitively that we live in a post-decency era.

The latest attacks came as journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified about breaking the “Twitter Files” story, detailing how the FBI and other agencies secretly sought to censor or ban citizens from social media. In her opening statement, Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee, attacked them as “so-called journalists” and said they were “a direct threat” to the safety of others by reporting the censorship story.

Taibbi pushed back, saying that “I’m not a ‘so-called’ journalist” and giving a brief description of his award-winning career at Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. Yet other committee members also attacked the honesty of the two journalists. And after failed efforts to claim they were Elon Musk’s corrupt “scribes,” or limited by him in their investigations, the committee members attacked their ethics.

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How Social Networks Became a ‘Subsidiary’ of the FBI and CIA, by Jonathan Cook

The social networks did become a subsidiary of intelligence, and in the process threw away all their First Amendment protections. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

The Twitter Files have lifted the lid on a secret alliance between Silicon Valley, intelligence agencies and the political establishment

The US Congress last tried to grapple with what the country’s ballooning security services were up to nearly half a century ago.

In 1975, the Church Committee managed to take a fleeting, if far from complete, snapshot of the netherworld in which agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and National Security Agency (NSA) operate.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had sweeping surveillance powers and were involved in a raft of illegal or unconstitutional acts.

They were covertly subverting and assassinating foreign leaders. They had co-opted hundreds of journalists and many media outlets around the world to promote false narratives. They spied on and infiltrated political and civil rights groups. And they manipulated the public discourse to protect and expand their powers.

Senator Frank Church himself warned that the might of the intelligence community could at any moment “be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything… There would be no place to hide.”

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When the Private Sector Is the Enemy, by Ryan McMaken

Large corporations are fully on board with statism. From Ryan McMaken at lewrockwell.com:

Last Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee meeting provided some much-needed insight into how corporate personnel at Twitter (before Elon Musk’s takeover) had essentially turned the company into an adjunct of the federal government and its intelligence agencies.

Present to testify were high-ranking company personnel who oversaw Twitter during the covid panic and in the early days of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Specifically, they were former employees Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and Vijaya Gadde. All three had titles with words like “trust” and “safety” in them. There was also James Baker, a former Twitter attorney and a former FBI agent who promoted the now-disproven “Russiagate” theory. It was clear from their testimony that all four saw themselves as righteous arbiters of truth and that anyone who disagreed with their views was guilty of “misinformation.” Conveniently, this “misinformation” overwhelmingly tended to coincide with these employees’ personal political views.

In practice, however, these keepers of “trust” and “safety” did not function as disinterested fact-checkers, journalists, or stewards of any kind. They certainly weren’t entrepreneurs focused on delivering the highest value for their owners. Rather, they were acting as extensions of the US administrative state, the FBI, and the Democratic Party.

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Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech, by Caitlin Johnstone

Tyrannical governments and a free and open Internet cannot coexist. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”

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VP Harris Demands Social Media Companies “Cooperate And Work With Us” On “Protecting Our Democracy”, by Katabella Roberts

Notice the inherent contradiction between the words “demands” and “cooperate.” Harris is bent on extracting the same “cooperation” at the man who holds you at gunpoint and demands your money or you life. From Katabella Roberts at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Monday that she expects and “would require” social media companies to work with the Biden administration to prevent so-called misinformation and disinformation, and to “protect democracy.”

During an interview with NPR that aired on Monday, Harris was asked for her thoughts regarding the changes made at Twitter since Elon Musk took over the platform.

“I think about this issue a bit differently, which is my deep and profound concern about how misinformation and disinformation have infiltrated information streams in our country,” Harris said.

The vice president pointed to her four years as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during which she was actively involved in the investigation into alleged Russian interference with the 2016 elections.

Harris said that reports on the matter, both classified and public, showed that there was a “profound amount of intentional disinformation and misinformation targeting specific demographics to take advantage of what might be preexisting disparities and skepticism about the role and importance of government.”

She added that this was allegedly done to weaken American democracy.

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Why The Censors Fear Information Freedom, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

They fear information because the information is often true and it often puts the censors and those behind them in a bad light. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

This is the age of censorship, pushed by government and interests and enacted by wholly captured Big Tech firms.

If you doubt it, look through the hundred or so pages of emails dug up in court discovery between government agencies and social media firms during the COVID crisis. The relationship is warm and wholly normalized.

If, for three years, you had a sense that you were being fed a canned line through all major media platforms, that the science was being filtered, that the talking heads were merely telling you what they were told to tell you, that dissent was being crushed, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly what was happening.

COVID was a major test case, but the model has been rolled out to cover a whole range of other topics, including election fraud, vaccine safety, and climate change. If an issue is important to a powerful interest and prevailing government priorities, the censors are tasked to get to work. The platform you have today could be gone tomorrow, no matter how much of a personal investment you have in it. In fact, large accounts seem more likely to be attacked than small ones.

We now know about a series of emails between former FDA commissioner and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb (now at the American Enterprise Institute) and tech firms concerning the writings of Alex Berenson. Berenson was an early critic of COVID policies and among the first to sound the alarm about vaccine efficacy and safety. Gottlieb targeted Berenson by name and told Twitter and others precisely what needed to happen as soon as possible. Berenson had to be silenced.

It’s true that Gottlieb wasn’t a government employee at the time, but these things can get murky. We know from many reports inside the White House that Jared Kushner consulted him directly in the days when they were twisting Trump’s arm to approve a lockdown of society. Gottlieb’s connections in and out of government regulatory agencies are vast.

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Illegal Collusion Between Government and Big Tech Exposed, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Government telling a communications company what it can and cannot communicate definitely violates the First Amendment and moves us that much closer to a totalitarian police state. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

government and big tech collusion

Story at-a-glance

  • Federal officials in the Biden administration have held secret and illegal censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and to ban or deplatform those who share unauthorized views about COVID and vaccines
  • The evidence for this comes out of a lawsuit brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) against President Biden, filed in May 2022
  • Monthly, a Unified Strategies Group (USG) meeting took place — and may still be taking place — between a wide variety of government agencies and Big Tech companies, during which topics to be censored and suppressed were/are discussed
  • Censored topics included stories involving COVID jab refusal, especially those involving military refusals and consequences thereof, criticism against COVID restrictions and their effects on mental health, posts talking about testing positive for COVID after getting the jab, personal stories of COVID jab side effects, including menstrual irregularities, and worries about vaccine passports becoming mandatory
  • Discovery documents obtained so far have identified more than 50 federal employees across 15 federal agencies, engaged in illegal censorship activities. Emails from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold also reveals outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to violate Americans’ Constitutional free speech rights

In a September 1, 2022, article,1 the Post Millennial reveals how federal officials in the Biden administration have held secret censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and to ban or deplatform those who share unauthorized views about COVID and vaccines.

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Document dump in Biden-Tech collusion suit reveals ‘massive, sprawling’ censorship: plaintiffs, by Greg Piper

Documents being revealed  now verify what many of us have long suspected: Big Tech is an arm of the government. From Greg Piper at justhenews.com:

Justice Department fights demand for Anthony Fauci testimony, including “nature and content” of phone conversations with Mark Zuckerberg. Several White House staff among 50-plus federal officials tied to misinformation removal efforts.

Even as President Biden warns the nation of the “extremist threat to our democracy” from Republicans in this fall’s elections, new evidence suggests a much wider campaign by his administration to sic Big Tech on critics than previously thought, going so far as removing a parody of Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci.

The First Amendment lawsuit by Republican attorneys general and a civil liberties group against Biden, Fauci and several other high-level officials has revealed a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise'” related to COVID-19 and elections, the plaintiffs said in a 711-page “joint statement on discovery disputes.”

“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased” by what the defendants have already turned over, New Civil Liberties Alliance lawyer Jenin Younes said.

The Justice Department cited its 15,000-page document production to oppose the “anything but reasonably tailored” discovery requests by Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and NCLA, which DOJ called “grossly disproportionate” to this stage of litigation. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, Google’s YouTube and LinkedIn provided information separately.

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Twitter, Facebook Regularly Coordinated With Biden Admin To Censor Users, by Tyler Durden

How much do ostensibly private companies have to be in bed with the government before they’re covered by the First Amendment? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Newly released internal emails from Facebook and Twitter show an extensive effort to coordinate with the Biden administration to censor users, according to a Thursday release of information by GOP Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

Throughout the emails, officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS) emailed Facebook and Twitter employees with instructions on flagging instances of alleged misinformation, and guided them with talking points to counter allegedly false narratives on the platforms.

In one instance, a CDC official asked Facebook for monthly meetings to plan “debunking” strategies, while in another case a White House official requested the removal of an Anthony Fauci parody account.

“We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” said Schmitt in a joint statement. ” The Department of Justice is cowering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies. That’s why, yesterday, we asked the Court to compel the Department of Justice to produce those records. We’re just getting started – stay tuned.”

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EU, U.K. Join U.S. in Launching Online ‘Disinformation’ Policies, Prompting Concerns About ‘One-World Governance’ of Social Media, by Michael Nevradikis, M.D.

More global advances in Properspeak, Properwrite, and Properact, leading, inevitably, to Properthought. From Michael Nevradikis, M.D., at childrenshealthdefense.org:

The EU’s Digital Services Act and the U.K.’s proposed Online Safety Bill are among the latest government policies designed to hold social media companies responsible for hate speech and “disinformation” posted by users, a move experts suggested could bring us closer to global government.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the U.K.’s proposed Online Safety Bill are among the latest government policies designed to hold social media companies responsible for hate speech and “disinformation” posted by users.

Experts interviewed by The Defender expressed concerns about the potential slippery slope of regulations — in the U.S. and overseas — which, under the guise of “combating disinformation,” stifle the spread of information deemed inconvenient for governments and other powerful actors.

As reported by The Defender, in the U.S., these proposals include a government “disinformation board” and a bill pending before Congress, the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act.

The EU’s new regulations, experts said, may have far-reaching impacts beyond Europe.

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