Category: Internet controversy

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy public opinion social media

The Mockingbird Shuttle

Twitter, Elon Musk, censorship, surveillance

“After weeks of ‘Twitter Files’ reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday,” journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted on Christmas Eve. “It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried ‘conspiracy theorists’ publishing ‘misinformation,’ whose ‘sole aim’ is to ‘discredit the agency.’”

Taibbi offered a droll retort: “They must think us unambitious, if our ‘sole aim’ is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?”

Indeed. The federal government is full of rogue, anti-constitutional cabals.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Files release of behind-the-scenes Twitter deliberations over which political news stories and Twitter accounts to trounce upon, and what medical information to declare as “misinformation” and which to allow, yielded more than just the influence of J. Edgar Hoover’s legacy outfit.

“The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

Twitter employees referred to these other outfits as “OGA” — for “Other Government Agenies.”

There were so many that Twitter “executives lost track.”

The vastness of the operation boggles the mind. “The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.”

It is worth remembering that the lore of the Deep State includes the controversial but rarely-mentioned “Operation Mockingbird,” whereby the CIA fostered paid mouthpieces (disinformation agents) throughout the media, back in the Sixties.

Now we have uncovered an operation that dwarfs this by several orders of magnitude.

Certainly, the behavior of the FBI and these OGAs has had an effect: they directed public opinion during the pandemic and in the lead-up to the 2020 election. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jack’s Right — Mostly to Blame

Jack Dorsey, Twitter, free speech

The latest Twitter revelation has the same “feel of the truth” about it as the Elon Musk-instigated reporting of Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. 

What is it?

“Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has taken full responsibility for the social media platform’s many failings — admitting he ‘completely gave up’ pushing back against powerful activists in the company,” explains Lee Brown in The New York Post.

It is refreshing for someone at the commanding heights of the culture to accept blame, not spread it liberally onto others.

And to clear up loose ends of the mystery.

“The site’s former CEO took full ‘blame’ in a blog giving his ‘take’ on the ‘Twitter Files,’ which have exposed a series of extraordinary behind-the-scenes maneuvers buckling to political pressure, starting with censoring The Post’s exclusive exposes on Hunter Biden’s laptop.” Brown’s report goes on to say that Dorsey “now believes that Twitter should have stuck to three core principles, including keeping the company out of controlling posts and algorithms spreading them — and being “resilient to corporate and government control.”

Well, yes.

Dorsey was overwhelmed by a new investor bloc. “‘I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company,’ he wrote of his resignation just over a year ago.”

The eagerness of the new investors and personnel to manipulate the system for their political causes — the covidian response and the Democratic Party — must have sure seemed insurmountable. And the legacy media’s full-court press, on top of fine-tuned interests of multiple agencies of the federal government, could only have made it worse.

But it’s not an excuse for cowardice, is it?

Still, it is more difficult to stand up against your side’s tyranny — especially when it’s making you rich in the process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Medium Is the Messenger

In all the talk of the “stolen election” of 2020, perhaps too much has been made of accusations of specific and vague acts of vote fraud, and not enough of the chief dirty trick: The suppression of the news about the Hunter Biden laptop, a story about Biden Family corruption that was banned from Twitter and more subtly underplayed algorithmically by other Internet services. 

Deleting this one cache of information from voters made a huge election difference.

Then, in the inglorious post-election debacle, a sitting president of the United States was removed from the Twitter platform.

It was, in a sense, a coup d’media. 

In a democracy, freedom of the press and independence of the press is crucial. The fact that Twitter had been captured by partisans, and that the “social media platform” became a sub rosa partisan political media platform was an epochal shift.

But when Elon Musk took over, changes started happening. And chaos ensued.

What was not chaotic, though, was the reinstatement of @RealDonaldJTrump to the platform.

Musk took an informal Twitter poll, and reinstated the former president.

There has of course been much wailing and gnashing of teeth since then, but, also since then, another poll by Mr. Musk: “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” 

The result was a 74.4 percent YES plebiscite.

“The people have spoken,” tweeted the current Twitterer-in-Chief, Mr. Musk. (Trump not having resumed his activity on the platform, still limited his e-bursts to Truth Social). Amnesty begins next week.”

And then: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” just for a classic touch. 

That Latin phrase translates as “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” It is not. I want a Twitter with the freedom to speak, for myself and others, not determined democratically, but by right — as customers. 

That’s the way to ensure people have access to information.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Collusion!

censorship, mind control, news media

Yes. Active collaboration every step of the way.

Material produced during the discovery phase of a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of censorship is confirming what was already obvious: Big Tech’s ongoing censorship of social-media opinion about the pandemic has been undertaken largely at the behest of government.

A few of the emails confirming this:

  • April 16, 2021. Twitter emails White House officials about briefing them on “vaccine misinformation.”
  • July 16, 2021. Facebook emails the surgeon general that “our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”
  • July 23, 2021. The Facebook official tells HHS how Facebook will be “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content that third party fact-checkers rate as ‘partly false’ or ‘missing context.’ ”

There’s mucho mas where that came from.

The public does not yet possess the requested documents from the Department of Justice of communications between DOJ officials and social-media officials. Getting those has been like pulling teeth. Why? Chances are 99.999 percent that they’ll only further confirm our thesis that over the last few years (at least) the federal government has been routinely violating the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. 

To do so, it delegates the job of gagging people to private firms in order to pretend that the coercive power of government is not itself being used to gag people. 

But marching orders are marching orders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Child Corpses Pile Up

fake news, Hunter Biden, laptop, propaganda, legacy media

Two podcast conversations recently went viral, capturing the attention of millions. 

The first was on Triggonometry, where New Atheist luminary Sam Harris let his Trump Derangement Syndrome swing free, sans rational hinges. The second was on The Joe Rogan Experience, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question regarding the same story — Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Mr. Harris called the Internet’s suppression of the Hunter laptop news “an eleventh-hour” way to rid America of a completely selfish, utterly unpredictable president — Donald Trump. “At that point,” Harris elaborated, talking about the run-up to the 2020 elections, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement: I would not have cared.”

The linkage between Hunter’s racket and Joe Biden himself did not seem to concern him, either.

The suppression of the laptop story by Twitter was also echoed on Facebook. The week after Harris’s unhinged rant, Joe Rogan queried Mark Zuckerberg, who calmly explained that the FBI warned Facebook against “Russian disinformation” and how his social media company then algorithmically suppressed the story without ever actually censoring the story as such.

While Zuckerberg absolved the FBI of specifying “Hunter Biden” as the keywords, and the FBI denies any ability to direct a company to suppress any “disinformation,” that’s hardly pertinent: apparently it’s easy for Leviathan Government to get Behemoth internet companies to play along.

This is an important issue upon which to stake future reputations. Comedian Bill Maher sided with principle and (yes) liberalism against leftoid-insiderish conspiracy on his show, while talking to Rob “Meathead” Reiner. The former All in the Family star professed ignorance of any of the pertinent facts.

Which is precisely what social media’s censorship and algorithmic suppression aimed to accomplish. But for more voters than just Meathead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Random Malefactor

Matt Walsh, free speech, doxxing, violence

I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the term “stochastic terrorism” until last week; now it’s everywhere.

What does it mean?

It sounds redundant, as if the first word didn’t modify the second so much as define it, but I could be wrong, so I . . . freespoke . . . it.

Freespoke is the new search engine I’m trying out, now that all the old ones seem compromised in weird ways.

Matt Walsh, of his Daily Wire podcast and his documentary film What Is a Woman?, appears to be one of the term’s current honorees. He is said to commit “stochastic terrorism” by calling attention (in one case) to the child abuse going on in hospitals in the form of “gender affirmation” treatments and surgeries. Merely by identifying something that is actually happening and judging it as bad qualifies because it has some unmeasurable likelihood of eliciting violence against those who are thus fingered — not ineluctably or directly or certainly or anything like that. 

Just randomly. 

Stochastic means random.

Of course, the charge against Walsh (or say, Trump, or anyone else) is that by identifying specific people in specific institutions he’s inviting random followers to engage in violence. But what Walsh is doing specifically is inviting his followers to protest and take political action against the malefactors he identifies.  

In familiar terminology, Walsh’s naming of names is similar to doxxing, and can be judged on that basis.

Yet, that hardly justifies calling non-violent speech “violence.”

Furthermore, back to my opening concern, isn’t all terrorism random? Terroristic acts differ from insurrection and assassination in their randomness, the better to elicit a culture of fear in the populace. The randomness in “stochastic terrorism” is not in the targets but the terrorists.

In a heavily polarized political climate, all specific charges by one side against specific people on the other side could be seen as “stochastic terrorism.”

Better to tread carefully. And drop the term.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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China Leads the Way

China, social credit, censorship

A novelist lost access to the novel she was working on. Though almost finished, she had placed her draft in “the cloud” . . . and her Internet service decided to lock her out.

Suddenly, her million words were no longer hers. 

That should be a lesson to us all about cloud storage (keep local, off-line back-ups of precious data!), but it’s especially a lesson about China.

While other governments and companies have already begun to emulate China’s censorship of social media and social credit scores, China’s remains at the cutting edge. Chinese writers are losing access to their work because a cloud-based software, WPS, is censoring at the behest of the Chinazi government. 

The first to report the development was the novelist with the pen name of Mitu, mentioned above. Writers are being locked out of their manuscripts because the technology has spied illegal content.

Technology Review observes that the ensuing controversy has “highlighted the tension between Chinese users’ increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies’ obligation to censor on behalf of the government.”

An odd way of putting it. But yes, there’s often tension between persons who want to be free to act and others eager to repress.

Could it happen here?

We’re past the point of regarding any form of Big Tech-enabled censorship on behalf of the American state as unthinkably beyond the pale. When they’re routinely gagging scientists for discussing research inconsistent with government-approved doctrines about COVID-19, that’s a strong clue about how far they’re willing to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Democrats Protest a “Dangerous Path”

Hulu, Disney, censorship, political ads

“Hulu’s censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country.”

While social media’s partisanship and Big Brotherish thought control have been on all our minds in recent years, the current Internet controversy has a slightly different slant:

  1. This time it is Democrats complaining. We’re used to having Republicans and other non-Democrats grumbling about having their accounts shadow-banned, frozen or closed, their posts taken down, and worse.
  2. This time it’s Hulu — a video entertainment streaming service, not a social media company or banking service — taking “the wrong side.”
  3. And now it’s not about the standards for regular services, but about accepting, or not, advertising.

“The Disney-backed streaming service Hulu is refusing to run political ads on central themes of Democratic midterm campaigns,” writes Michael Scherer for The Washington Post, “including abortion and guns, prompting fury from the party’s candidates and leaders.”

The ads are almost innocuous. Tame stuff. So what is Hulu up to?

Suraj Patel, a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York City, protested the service’s refusal to run his ads. Then, after some back-and-forth — and editing — his ad was allowed to run: he had to replace the “climate change” with “democracy” and, The Post relates, swap “the footage of violence at the U.S. Capitol with footage of former president Donald Trump.”

This is irksome. Hardly a matter of The Truth, as “three executive directors of Democratic committees” put it, quoted at top. It shows how normal business advertising (on an unregulated entertainment service, not a normal news network) is a tricky biz, considering the unwillingness of the programmers to tick off viewers, who probably turn to Hulu for a respite from politics.

Yet, it would be better if Hulu didn’t allow any political advertising rather than some . . . and then only after editing. Who do the folks at Hulu think they are? Twitter executives? Zuckerberg?

I wonder if my Democratic friends will remind me that Hulu is a private company that can do as it wishes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Two Shooters in a Gun-Free Zone

Indiana Mall Shooting

In Indianapolis, a 20-year-old man opened fire in Greenwood Park Mall and killed three people.

The Sunday shooter might have killed many others, his apparent plan, but another young man shot and killed him early in his rampage.

“The real hero of the day,” said Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison, “is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began.”

The 22-year-old man with a gun is Elisjsha Dicken. Careful observation that Dicken was carrying a firearm lawfully was perhaps necessary to preempt concern about any legal jeopardy for him. 

Indiana’s concealed carry law had only recently been liberalized.

But if I’d been there that day, perhaps spared by Dicken’s quick action, I suspect that my only thought would have been: “Thank God he was there, had a gun, and knew how to use it.” And if it turned out that my savior was carrying unlawfully, well, so what? 

Alive is alive.

This sentiment, however, is not universally shared. Folks who support citizen disarmament are unsurprisingly uncomfortable with honoring someone who does precisely what those of us who support citizen armament expect armed citizens to do: save lives when needed.

Leah Barkoukis, writing at Townhall, notes that some leftist Twitterati objected to Dicken’s carrying a gun into a mall that declares itself to be “a gun free zone.” A few even demanded prosecuting Mr. Dicken!

Understandably, mall spokespeople have evaded discussion of using their creaky legal grounds to do anything so preposterous. 

As anyone with sense knows, making a large public venue “gun free” is not an effective way to keep people safe. As Mr. Dicken demonstrated.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Welcome Discovery

Joe Biden, censorship, Twitter, Facebook, 1st Amendment, free speech

In recent years, several lawsuits have been launched alleging collusion between the Biden administration and big social media companies to violate our First Amendment rights.

Unfortunately, most of these suits have been dismissed.

Journalist Alex Berenson did obtain some satisfaction after suing Twitter for suspending his account last year because he questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.

The suit accused Twitter of acting “on behalf of the federal government in censoring and barring him.” Berenson’s account was finally reinstated as part of the settlement. But only Twitter was required to take any remedial action; the government was required to do nothing.

Still ongoing is a lawsuit launched by the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for urging social media giants to suppress speech about things like COVID-19 and elections “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation.’ ”

Now a judge has granted the states’ motion for discovery, enabling the attorneys general to make document requests and issue subpoenas to social media platforms. The AGs hope to learn which federal officials have been urging censorship and what exactly they said.

In a certain respect, these actions seem almost superfluous, since administration officials, including Biden, have repeatedly and publicly called on social media to censor harder.

But the more evidence we can get on how the federal government has been urging firms to censor on its behalf and in violation of the First Amendment, the better. 

That brings us closer to getting it to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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