Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Will Elon Liberate Tweeting?

Elon Musk

Persons who skip social media or who spend their time on Twitter and Facebook discussing lunch or the weather may not realize how anti-speech such big-tech forums have become.

If you disagree about what’s better for breakfast, eggs or oatmeal, no problem.

But despite their putative pretense of providing open forums, the dominant social-media companies routinely ban discussion of touchy subjects like Hunter Biden laptops, pandemics, and and the politics of race and gender. As the satire site Babylon Bee discovered, even calling a man a man, apparently quite a controversial observation, can get you in hot water with Twitter censors.

We have ways of combatting the censorship. One is using alternative platforms that do regard open discussion as a value. Another is becoming a major stockholder and disrupting the anti-speech agenda from within.

Is this what Elon Musk is up to? Bee CEO Seth Dillon says that after Twitter suspended Babylon Bee for calling a man a man, Musk called him about the suspension and said that “he might need to buy Twitter.” 

Presumably in order to put a stop to such censorious shenanigans.

Now Elon Musk, who has 80.6 million followers on Twitter, has bought the company. Or rather, he has acquired a big stake in it, a 9.2 percent stake. This apparently makes him Twitter’s largest stockholder. Maybe we can dare to hope that he will eventually become the majority stockholder.

Good first step, Mr. Musk. 

Next? Get Twitter to remove the gags.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Our Uncivil War

speech, 1st Amendment, freedom, censorship

The New York Times admits it: “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” But the March 18 editorial, while trying carefully to distinguish one kind of speech issue from another, fails to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. 

The trouble, you guessed it, is partly a left versus right issue: “Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” which strikes me as a fairly accurate account. But the Times cannot help itself — the right must be made to seem worse. “Many on the right,” the editorial goes on, “for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

Sans persuasive examples — the Times provides none — I reject this claim as a grave misunderstanding of current trends. What has been happening is not the banning of books, but the mere removal of them from public school libraries and/or curricula. 

“Stifling teachers” is not a thing, really. Taxpayer-funded teachers have no more right to teach anything they want than taxpayer-funded police have the right to enforce whatever laws they want.

The multi-racial backlash against the left, most recently in Virginia, was a movement of parents upset over cultural Marxist indoctrination on racial issues . . . taking the place of quality education. 

Something else the Times missed: the extent to which cancel culture has worked hand-in-hand with social media companies under the influence of partisans in Congress and the Deep State.

That being said, the Times does get something right: “When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.”

Yes, it’s a problem.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights social media

Chirp Meets Buzz

twitter, Babylon Bee, censorship

The Babylon Bee won’t cooperate with Twitter’s censorship of the Babylon Bee.

When instructed to remove tweets in order to recover account access, people tend to comply.

Not always, but often.

Hard to blame them. But it does mean that Twitter gets away with all kinds of egregious censorship that the social media “platform” shouldn’t get away with.

The Bee’s latest sin? Bestowing upon HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine — who had just been dubbed a Woman of the Year by USA Today because Levine “identifies as” a woman — the title Man of the Year.

Twitter has locked the Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account.The platform literally “can’t take a joke.” And Twitter demands the Bee must delete the tweet to regain access.

“We’re not deleting anything,” says Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

Dillon notes that account holders are not only expected to remove offending tweets but also to repentantly check a box to renounce the censored viewpoint. “You have to deny that you meant it. . . . They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold.”

The Babylon Bee is routinely assailed by Internet censors. Satire, parody, pastiche, lampoon, spoof, sarcasm, irony, etc. are all allegedly forms of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” thwarting of which is the rationalization du decade for stopping people from talking to each other.

In response, the Babylon Bee is thankfully taking a stand and, let’s hope and trust, won’t back down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights

A Guide for the Surveilled 

cyber security, web, internet, crime

If you’re hounded — or merely have reason to suspect you are about to be hounded — by censors and spies, there are things you can do to protect yourself.

Self-defense often starts with your communication devices, the kind of things that Big Brother and Big Corporate Overlords tend to target. Reclaim the Net has put together a fairly comprehensive overview and explanation of ways to reduce your risk.

For example:

● Use a strong passkey.

● Turn off fingerprint unlock and face unlock.

● Be alert to phishing attempts.

● Delete unused apps and data.

● Delete photo metadata before sending or posting photos.

● Disable location services.

● Use airplane mode when preventing access to you is more important than having access yourself.

● Usea VPN to evade censorship and tracking.

● Be careful what kind of information about yourself you make public.

● Take steps to recover a confiscated or stolen device, or at least to make its data unrecoverable.

● Use anonymous accounts.

● Use encrypted text messengers.

● Switch to more privacy-conscious browsers, search engines, and ISPs.

Depending on your circumstances, some of these tips will be more relevant than others, of course. But it’s worth perusing the whole list.

Of course, to go to all this trouble, you’d have to believe that big governments and mega-corporations are trying to surveil you. As if we lived in one of those dystopian futures they talk about in scary science fiction stories.

And who could ever believe that?

Well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

What Is and Is Not Censorship

CRT, critical race theory, censorship

For days on end, outside of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, antifa protesters hounded book buyers and bookstore workers. These activists were on a mission: to get the store to expunge Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, from its website offerings.

“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f—king book,” one activist said, comparing her effort to “stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

As the story in FEE makes clear, the store had already banished it from the block-sized building itself. But management has so far refused to de-list it from its website. 

Meanwhile, Democrats (or at least the leftists at Salon) have been dubbing attempts by legislators and school boards to get rid of Critical Race Theory and similar woke nonsense from their curricula as “censorship.”

Here’s the muddle: as mobs play censor to a privately owned book company, leftists pretend that public input into the revision of curricula in taxpayer-funded, government-run schools is worse.

There are Jewish, Christian and Muslim schools near where I live. I have absolutely no say about what they teach their students; if I demanded that they conform to my standards, my demand would (depending on threat level) constitute censorship. 

But if I’m taxed to support a school, and the school is constitutionally run as democratically controlled, my “voice” on the matter of curriculum is not in any way censorship — even if educators “professionally” disagree with my position.

Forcing someone else’s reading decisions is censorship; determining your own (or your children’s) is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Virtual Private Communist

Eileen Gu, Olympics, China, censorship

“China censors Olympic gold medalist’s defense of China’s internet censorship . . .” informed Mashable.com’s ironic headline. 

The medalist in question? Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old phenom who just became the youngest ever Olympic freestyle skiing champion. Born in San Francisco to an American father and a Chinese mother, Gu is an American citizen, but chose to ski on the Chinese national team at the Beijing Olympics, which means she is also a Chinese citizen. (Which is completely against Chinese law. But ssshhh.*)

Miss Gu’s now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t Instagram post of February 7th garnered a reply from a Chinese netizen, who inquired, “Why can you use Instagram and millions of Chinese people from mainland cannot, why you got such special treatment as a Chinese citizen?” The commenter added, “That’s not fair,” noting that “millions of Chinese . . . don’t have internet freedom.”

Gu quickly replied, “Anyone can download a vpn its literally free on the App Store.”

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are indeed easily available outside of China, but “it is illegal to use them to get around China’s Great Firewall,” Mashable explained. 

“And, as the Weibo post featuring Gu’s Instagram comment started to gain traction on the social network, it was subsequently censored.”

“Let them have VPNs,” mocked a column in the Taiwan News, dubbing it Gu’s “‘Marie Antoinette’ moment.”

The reality of VPNs in China? Not so easy, and the laws against VPN usage are increasingly enforced.

Gu’s ignorance about the reality of living under Chinese rule may be caused by the wealth showering over her. “Eileen Gu’s China choice pays off for now,” says Yahoo News, noting she has made over $30 million since the beginning of 2021 and is poised to make far more.

This makes her a Communist Party asset, and thus a danger to herself and the rest us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “China does not allow for dual citizenship,” Mashable informs, “and there is no record that Gu has given up her American citizenship.” It appears we can add “looking the other way” and “duplicitousness” to the Chinazis’ long rap sheet of crimes against humanity.

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First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders nannyism

The Next-Worst Thing

New York City, big apple, mayor, censorship

New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.

Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.

“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.

“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”

 “Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?

Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.

He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-worst thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom social media

#GoPoundSand

Give Send Go, crowd funding, Canada, truckers, GoFundMe

The exact words of GiveSendGo, on Twitter:

“Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo. All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”

Just the attitude one would hope for.

This wonderful statement is in response to assertions by the government of Ontario that they’re preventing the Freedom Convoy from getting the funds via GiveSendGo that truckers need to eat, gas up after police steal their gas, etc. All the standard expenses involved in being a national (and now international) trucker convey fighting tyranny.

Compare the inspiring policies of the folks at GiveSendGo with the dreary interventionism of the pinch-mouthed overlords at GoFundMe.

In addition to shutting down the Freedom Convoy campaign, GoFundMe briefly but seriously planned to steal some of the donations that had already been made.

GoFundMe has also shut down other fundraising campaigns to oppose mask and vaccine mandates, campaigns to help Kyle Rittenhouse and to help conservative students harassed at Arizona State University, a campaign to investigate voter fraud, etc.

We have to think long and hard. If we need to raise money for a purpose the tyrannical left would disapprove, are we better off going with new-kid-on-the-block GiveSendGo or better-established GoFundMe?

I hope that you ponder this question for the same full millisecond that I did.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Anti-Free Speech Boycott

Neil Young, Spotify, censorship, free speech, freedom

Now that The Atlantic — a once- or twice- or thrice-upon-a-time great magazine — toes a statist line relentlessly, it is most valuable for its hints at the exact opposite of the truth. 

While Spencer Kornhaber’s article, “Spotify Isn’t Really About the Music Anymore,” may be mostly correct regarding the facts presented in Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s boycotts of Spotify — pulling their music off the Internet platform — the whole angle is off. 

Spotify, we learn, rarely turns a profit in its long tail music biz. By making an exclusive podcasting contract with The Joe Rogan Experience, the company seeks to entice users to pay up to listen to talk-show audio, and thereby become more profitable. 

But is the service not really “about the music anymore”? 

Adding an allied genre does not negate the provision of entertainment to the core audience.

The article’s tagline gets it exactly backwards: “In choosing Joe Rogan over Neil Young, the company has made its new priorities clear to listeners.” Well, no. It was Neil Young (and then Joni Mitchell) who went the narrow, exclusionary route. Spotify had made a long-term contract with Rogan in a bid to attract listeners of podcasts and other spoken-word content. Young and Mitchell didn’t have the same kind of relationship with Spotify, so their attempt to cancel Rogan was doomed.

Unless they get other artists to do the same. Which could sink the company.

Then we would see the culture war ramp up another notch, with the artistic community segregating itself against those of differing (non-leftist*/non-statist/pro-freedom) opinions.

It’s something rich old rock-n-roller cranks can do. 

But a dangerous strategy for younger artists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Even leftists with differing opinions shall be shunned; back in 2020, Joe Rogan endorsed socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. 

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Google Shareholders vs. Google Censorship

Joe Biden, censorship, big tech

Some Google shareholders are pressing Google for records of its communications with the Biden administration. And not just any old records. They are specifically demanding those pertaining to the administration’s demands for censorship.

Per the First Amendment, it is unconstitutional for government to seek to muzzle people for saying things that government officials disapprove of.

Yet the Biden Administration and others, including members of Congress, have openly (and repeatedly) urged big-tech social media companies to more assiduously censor discussion of COVID-19 policy, COVID-19 vaccines, the nature of COVID-19. The president did this again just last week: “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets — please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

Everything we’ve seen adds up to a slam-dunk case against the government for violating the First Amendment. We know that government officials are asking social-media companies to censor. They’re not hiding it.

Suing the government’s big-tech lackeys — and government officials, when plausible — is one way to combat the evil.

The National Legal and Policy Center, a Google shareholder, is trying to secure a requirement that the company disclose the content of any communications between itself and the government related to the Biden Administrations calls for censorship. Last summer, the administration stated that it was “in regular touch” with the big-tech giants.

Will Google voluntarily produce documents showing that it acquiesced in specific Biden administration demands for censorship?

No. But as Charles Glasser has pointed out, there is precedent for a judicial finding that media are de facto “government agents” when they work “hand-in-hand with government in violating constitutional rights.”

The effort may not succeed, but it’s worth a shot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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