Category: First Amendment rights

Rewriting Amendment Number One

Post author By Editor
Post date February 24, 2021
5 Comments on Rewriting Amendment Number One

People once wondered — perhaps not very seriously — whether falsely shouting “Fire!” in a theater and telling hit men “Here’s $50,000; you will get the rest when you finish the job” count as speech that should be protected as a matter of right.

They do not.

And it’s not so puzzling that freedom to exercise a legitimate right does not entail license to violate the rights of others.

But some people are eager to prohibit us from uttering statements that don’t come within twenty parsecs of such alleged quandaries. These censorious ones include big-tech firms and big DC politicians like, for example, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a bully urging social-media firms to crack down harder on the speech of “‘antivax’ groups.”

Such persons seem to think that the First Amendment as presently worded, at least the part protecting freedom of speech, is a big dumb mistake. What would they like it to say instead?

Maybe:

“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, unless a would-be speaker wishes to dispute government-endorsed or Google-Twitter-Facebook-Amazon-endorsed conclusions about medicine, vaccines, pandemics, masks, lockdowns, transgenderism, euthanasia, abortion, or election fraud; to spend ‘too much’ money on campaign speech; to utter ‘hate speech’ about chess pieces; to speak freely; etc.”

But then the First Amendment would be about as valuable as yesterday’s toilet paper as a bulwark against tyranny.

Don’t flush our freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 1st Amendment, censorship, first amendment, free speech

First Amendment rights media and media people

Misinformed … or Worse?

Google, Twitter, Facebook, Congress, censorship, free speech

“For the third time in less than five months,” journalist Glenn Greenwald writes at Substack, “the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing …”

A joint statement by Democrat committee and subcommittee chairs declares: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

Wait — the constitutional authority of Congress does not stretch to holding social media “accountable” for political speech. The First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no [such] law …”

And what Congress is forbidden to do, it cannot threaten and intimidate private companies into doing, instead.

“For the same reasons that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can see and read … ‚” Greenwald points out, “it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf.”

Consider longtime Hillary Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri’s response to President Trump’s banning by Twitter and Facebook: “It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump’s destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them.”

Many on the left — and even some libertarians — continue to argue that Congress plays no role in the censorship being carried out by these private Tech Giants.

They are mistaken — whether because misinformed or disinformed, we can leave to another day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, Congress, Facebook, free speech, Google, Twitter

First Amendment rights social media

Tracking Big-Tech Attacks

Instagram is further restricting what users may say in direct messages, and the company will eject any user who utters hate speech. Instagram will also provide information about account holders to UK police.

But what is hate speech?

Nasty utterances that we’d all agree are hateful. Sure. But it also appears to be disagreeing with someone about “gender identity” or supporting Melania Trump. In other words, “hate speech” is whatever offends the authoritarian sensibilities of whoever operates the delete-account button at the social-media giants.

A lot of this has been happening lately.

YouTube has deleted the YouTube channel of LifeSiteNews, a Christian news outlet.

YouTube and Facebook have banned a documentary about pandemic policies called “Planet Lockdown,” and GoFundMe has cancelled a fundraising campaign for the film.

China will start accrediting reporters based on their social media histories, and it will penalize companies who employ unaccredited reporters. “Citizen journalists” (people with cell phones) will also have to be accredited.

Every day, tyrannical governments and their private-sector allies — the big-tech hall monitors now dropping all pretense of providing neutral forums — act to smother discussion and dissent on the net. In self-defense, we need to know about these anti-speech efforts. But keeping track is a big job.

Fortunately, ReclaimTheNet is doing this big job for us. Its regular e‑letter (subscribe here) reprints the latest stories published on their website.

This job has to be outsourced, as far as I am concerned. Were I to report on all of it here, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags blacklisting, cancel culture, censorship, hate speech

First Amendment rights too much government

I See a Bill

“See something, say something.” Reasonable enough advice, most times. But what if the scary thing you are supposed to report is someone’s heated political opinion?

A bill called the “See Something, Say Something Online Act of 2020” — just reintroduced last week — would require websites and interactive service providers to report “suspicious” activity that may later be connected with “terrorism, serious drug offenses, and violent crimes.”

If a provider fails to exercise “due care” in reporting major crimes and “suspicious transmission activity,” the company’s liability protections would be at risk.

Suspicious transmissions would have to be reported to the Justice Department within 30 days. Though, reporting at the end of that window wouldn’t do much to stop an imminent crime committed, say, five days after a dubious text message.

What the legislation would do, notes Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Brown, is “set up a massive new system of intense user monitoring and reporting that would lead to more perfectly innocent people getting booted from internet platforms” and give government another way to clobber “disfavored tech companies.”

Of course, neither hyperbolic opinions nor gleeful snitching are rarities on the Internet. So if such legislation leads to instituting easy and anonymous ways to complain to the government about somebody’s online opining, we can expect false positives to skyrocket. Time and energy wasted harassing innocent people would not be used to catch actual thugs and terrorists.

And we’d have yet another chilling effect on our freedom of expression.

Back to the drawing board, Senators Manchin and Cornyn. On second thought, please step away from that drawing board.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people

Stelter in a Time of Storm

Post author By Redactor
Post date February 4, 2021
2 Comments on Stelter in a Time of Storm

Reliable Sources, CNN’s media watchdog program, is hard to watch. It should be retitled Pot Calls Kettle to match host Brian Stelter’s teapot head, so often skirling from a full steam. To avoid all that, I read the transcript of his Sunday episode to take in his much-quoted tear defending Big Tech’s deplatforming of alternative media and attacking the three news channels he hates so much — OAN, Newsmax, and, especially and always, Fox.

You see, they’re liars!

He’s not, of course; CNN’s not, he says — without ever managing to acknowledge his job at CNN, deliverer of the Official Spin.

And ignorer of the laundry list of whoppers espoused by his own network.

Which Glenn Greenwald made clear in his response: “CNN lies and spreads conspiracy theories constantly. They’re a pro-Democratic Party outlet that barely airs any dissent from the DNC line. If @brianstelter’s standards for banishing Fox were applied equally, it’d affect all cable news outlets, not just one.”

Asserting that “disinformation” about the pandemic is “harmful” — while CNN’s slavish towing of the government’s incoherent, shifting line on COVID has not been??? — Stelter offers a “harm reduction” model. Deplatforming people he disagrees with? Why, that’s not an abridgment of “freedom of speech.”

All he itches for is to cripple his competitors’ “freedom of reach.”

But take a breath: extending the reach of one’s speech is why we have “the press.” This freedom of the press (“reach”) is also protected from government, to be valued even when we disagree with our opponents.

The idea that a few CNN hosts get to determine The Official Truth for everybody else, and that this should be institutionalized in some broad, society-wide way, would toll the death knell of America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Gun Group Deplatformed

Mailchimp is an “all-in-one integrated marketing platform” that helps businesses send newsletters and other email to customers, prospects, and supporters. In January it blocked the Virginia Citizens Defense League from sending email to members about an annual rally in defense of gun rights and told the organization to get lost.

Some help.

According to the president of the Defense League, Philip Van Cleave, “There was no justification. They provided nothing. Basically, they just said we need to get our stuff and be prepared to move on.”

Well, Mailchimp’s boilerplate letter did also state that its “automated abuse-prevention system, Omnivore, detected serious risks associated with [your] account. . . . This risk is too great for us to continue to support the account.”

What risk? Oh, why bother to specify. The point is, the automated system detected it. I’m guessing that certain scary words were flagged, like “gun,” “Second Amendment,” “Constitution,” “rights.”

It seems that any kind of assembling on behalf of certain constitutionally protected rights or to petition for redress of grievances is to be regarded as a rationale for summarily ejecting politically right-leaning customers — at least by firms going along with this accelerating strategy to abet repression.

Mailchimp has violated the terms of service upheld by those who respect freedom of speech and do not respect arbitrary assaults on costumers. If you’re using it, look for an alternative.

The Defense League’s “Lobby Day” rally was peaceful again this year — as the group’s website informs, “just a lot of patriots sending a strong message to the General Assembly to keep their hands off our gun rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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