Category: social media

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

The Defi(l)ers of the First Amendment

free speech, censorship, corporations

Early on, we carefully phrased our objections to the suppressions of dissident opinion on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. 

We knew (because we had been making the distinction for years) that when companies and private parties engaged in discrimination on the basis of opinion, including “de-platforming” of opinion-mongers, these weren’t, at least on the face of it, First Amendment violations. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech apply to the federal government and, by the stretch of the 14th Amendment, to state and local governments.

These were corporations.

Sure, corporations thriving under government liability rules, and with sometimes-cushy contracts with government.

And social media companies’ actions were clearly partisan, obviously opposing Donald Trump. The dreaded Orange Man had used social media to get elected in 2016, running rings around the gatekeepers of Accepted Opinion; the ultra-partisan censorship a reaction.

Only with the release of the Twitter Files, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, did we get the crucial facts in the case: Agents of the U.S. government (many of them eerily in the Deep State nexus) pushed the censorship.

Now, with Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent and very public pulling back from the excesses of DEI as well as government-coerced content moderation, we’ve learned more of the manner of the duress in which his companies caved to censorship demands. Government agents called up Facebook managers and content moderators and screamed at them to suppress certain stories and “memes.”

The sharing of visual memes really, really bugged the Deep State, which was hell bent on delivering to everybody a jab in the muscle with gene therapeutics allegedly to “vaccinate” us against a disease that . . . well, their buddies in the Deep State helped China, it just so happened, create. 

Worldwide, millions died in a pandemic whose origin was actively covered up through violations of the First Amendment in America. 

Defend free speech to defend life itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies social media

Morbid Meme Mania

insurance, healthcare, laugh emoji, assassination

Last week’s murder — assassination — of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan has inspired something more than a mere resurgence of gallows humor. The proliferation, online, of laughter emoji reactions to the story is unsettling, to say the least. 

Then there are the hardcore “memes” scorning Mr. Thompson’s medical insurance company and mocking his death — what are we supposed to make of it all?

Well, the virtuous response is to condemn the schadenfreude and mean-spiritedness.

But some of the jesting is indeed pointedly funny. 

“All jokes aside,” runs the best of them (from BlueSky, the left’s alternative to X), “it’s really fucked up to see so many people on here celebrating murder. No one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health and no one else.”

Which brings us to the nib of it. 

As the prospective Trump Administration puts its ducks in a row to hit the ground running in January, the “health issue” that RFKj and others have pointed to is the heavily regulated and subsidized food and drug industries, which are making us sick. The question of paying for medical care was supposed to have been solved by “Obamacare” a decade ago, but prices have only risen . . . and resentments along with them. 

The author of that BlueSky tweet and virtually all Democrats today, think the answer to the insanity of our government-regulated “private” health insurance system is full-bore socialized medicine.

Our money-grubbing leaders know that would be a disaster, but they have only kicked the chaos we’ve inherited from the terrible policy choices of yesteryear down the road.

I’m left with nothing funny to say about that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: As this episode was put to bed, the biggest update to the story was the announcement of a suspect, or “person of interest”: Luigi Mangione. Make of that what you will.

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crime and punishment property rights social media too much government

The Squirrel vs. The State

squirrel, government, regulations

“Squirrel!”

In an age of short attention spans and viral memecraft, the latest cultural moment regarding a squirrel could influence more minds about politics than all the quips, speeches and gaffes of Trump and Harris combined.

The news is not hard to understand. “Wild squirrel that was taken in by Mark Longo seven years ago was confiscated after conservation officials received reports of ‘potentially unsafe housing of wildlife,’” is how The Guardian put it on Halloween. 

“An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut was euthanized after New York authorities seized the beloved pet after a raid on his caretaker’s home, authorities said,” was Saturday’s Guardian update.

After the six- (or ten-) officer raid and after the execution, the deluge: ire and satire flooded the meme-o-sphere.

Not a few governments enforce laws against taming wild animals. One concern is rabies, though the rabies danger of a squirrel rescued as a baby and raised indoors must be preciously close to ZERO. When individuals own tigers and other predators, the danger is obvious — but certainly P’nut was not such a concern.

This is just the way the modern State operates: bureaucratically, with lumbering indifference to property rights (the squirrel was indeed owned, and housed privately), liberty (sans harm, the case to leave well enough alone is pretty clear), and common sense (Andy Griffith would not have put down the squirrel; he would have told Barney Fife to put down the revolver). 

How ridiculous and cruel government can be!

Maybe the last half dozen of undecided Americans will pull the lever, Tuesday, for less nonsensical government intrusion because of it.

It certainly doesn’t make the meddler class look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: We also mourn the passing of Fred the Raccoon, a fellow rescuee at P’Nut’s Freedom Farm, also confiscated and executed by the State of New York for the same trivial infraction of his owner: not licensed by the State.

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media and media people social media

TikTok Astroturf

Tik Tok, propaganda, payment

According to sociologist Jacques Ellul, propaganda is not rhetoric; it’s not you and me expressing our opinions and trying to persuade others; it’s not our letters to editors of newspapers or the “memes” we share online. Propaganda is the coordination of many forms of social influence, of many media. States are usually involved, or political parties (wannabe states) or huge interest groups (which can be bigger than many states).

If, however, you secretly get paid to push a message in a specific way, you may be a propagandist.

Take TikTok.

This is the video-sharing social media site so popular with young people. It’s been controversial; I’ve discussed it before. But I’m no expert. Still, I was not surprised to learn that Democrats have been paying “social influencers” on that platform to serve up the Democratic Party line.

A TikToker named Madeline Pendleton made a video about how the Democrats offered “nearly $15,000” to talk about “how awesome the Democratic Party is.” She found the idea ridiculous, characterizing the offer as a way to distract attention from the party’s “genocide.” But she recognizes that it can be effective. Many of her “mutuals” on TikTok are indeed spouting the same lines that she was “pitched” by Democrats, and they did so within 48 hours of her receiving the offer.

She went on to say that she received two offers: one to make ongoing videos up to the election, and the other to scarify Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which she is no fan of, but thinks is not that big a deal.

“You guys should be aware that that when you see videos like that, the Democrats are actively paying people to talk about how awesome the Democrats are.”

Awesome propagandists, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House . . . to censor certain COVID-19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-pressured social-media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Banned in Brazil

Brazil, censorship, authoritarianism, mind control

Twitter is being banned in Brazil by a “Supreme Court justice” who seems to be the de facto ruler of the country. Who is also threatening Brazilians with massive fines, $8,900 USD daily, if they try to reach Twitter through a VPN.

A VPN or virtual private network hides your IP address and encrypts your web traffic. VPNs protect privacy and let you visit sites otherwise inaccessible. Sites that purvey “disinformation,” i.e., criticism of the government, and other verboten content. VPNs combat censorship and surveillance.

The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, issued an edict to ban Twitter after Twitter owner Elon Musk refused to obey censorship orders.

Twitter had told users that it expected to be shut down by Justice de Moraes “because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

Now Musk declares that an “unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying [free speech] for political purposes.”

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino adds that according to Brazil’s own constitution, “censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden. . . . Until there is change in Brazil, X [Twitter] will be shut down.”

Dictatorships often issue “illegal orders” in the sense that these contradict constitutional provisions whose force has faded . . . or that were never intended to do anything but fool people to begin with. Such political systems are not truly constitutional.

Nor would the situation be any better were the “constitution” more honest, simply announcing that whatever the dictator says goes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Give Mr. Bean Another Hearing

Mr. Bean, UK, Great Britain, censorship, mind control, authoritarianism

Twelve years ago, Rowan Atkinson of “Mr. Bean” fame took a stand against a law that criminalizes “insulting” speech. He was participating in a campaign to reform Section 5 of the Public Order Act of 1986.

In his remarks launching the campaign, recently resurrected on Twitter, Atkinson said that his concern was less for himself as a person with a high public profile than “for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult. Or the café owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.”

And what about the thousands of cases that “weren’t quite ludicrous enough to attract media attention? Even for those actions that were withdrawn, people were arrested, questioned, taken to court and then released. . . . That is censoriousness of the most intimidating kind. . . .”

And he said more than this. Luckily it’s recorded.

This effectively delivered argument, forceful and often funny, by a well-known personality, had its effect. The Reform Section 5 campaign succeeded. The law was amended.

But the victory, though important, was narrow. And, since that win, sweeping assaults on speech that offends somebody or other continue in Britain, the United States, and other Western countries where people should know better than to emulate the censorship of authoritarian governments to which we aspire to provide an alternative. We’re going to need a lot more funny speeches.

Because this threat to freedom is so serious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Google’s Evil AI

Google, image AI, racism

It’s not just about the images, but let’s start and end there.

Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence was launched to fanfare, received with raspberries. It was the scandal of the week, last week. The problem? It’s racist.

By which I mean woke therefore racist.

Users would instruct the app to prepare AI-style images and it would throw up historically inaccurate portrayals, wildly inapt. Ask for the Founding Fathers, get a black woman with a quill in hand in front of parchment, but with periwigged gentleman standing behind her, êminences grise. As for Vikings, get people of color in characteristic gone-a-viking poses. Ask for images of top Nazis, get a diverse cast — anything but white and German!

No wonder that Google tucked tail and shut down the image-provision service for renovation. Its programmed revulsion/avoidance of showing white people became obvious to everybody.

Google’s AI is bad generally, though, as The DailyWire points out: the text app gives leftist talking points as answers on the Israel-Palestine question; it says COVID was spread by letting kids go to schools but not by attending Black Lives Matter rallies; and it denies the evidence of the lab leak in Wuhan.

And a whole lot more.

But what really struck me was one failed request, reported by Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze).

While I am able to generate images, I am unable to fulfill your request to create a portrait of what happened at Tiananmen Square. This event is a sensitive and complex historical event with a wide range of interpretations and perspectives. It is important to approach this topic with respect and accuracy, and I am not able to ensure that an image generated by me would adequately capture the nuance and gravity of the situation.

Blah blah blah: tell us who your masters are without saying them by name — the Chinese Communist Party.

Google prided itself, early on, with its motto: Don’t Be Evil.

Epic fail. Evil fully embraced.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Die, Disney, Die!

Musk, Zombie Slayer

Disney is taking big financial losses, after a series of bombs on the silver screen and on its own channel, including a billion on last year’s four film fiascos.

Why?

The company went super-woke. And could, therefore, go broke.

Or, says Patrick Ben David, become a “zombie company,” unable to make profits, kept alive only by low interest rates and the hope that Apple will buy it.

Nevertheless, Disney joined a group of major players pulling their advertising off Twitter, er, X.

Why?

Because X’s new owner, Elon Musk, favorably forwarded a tweet about anti-white racism that was said, by many, to be antisemitic.

It’s the rage, now, not only to support Hamas’s terrorism but to excoriate Israel, Zionism, and even Jews in general, yet it was Musk’s forwarded tweet about how Jewish intellectuals and organizations too often support anti-white rhetoric that panicked the big companies, including Bob Iger-headed Disney.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in an on-stage New York Times interview, asked Mr. Musk to respond to all this. “I hope they stop,” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.”

Musk went on: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me, with advertising — blackmail me with money? — ‘go f**k yourself.’”

Then Musk repeated that command, using hand signals. 

“Is that clear? I hope it is.” Smiling, he added, “Hey Bob . . . if you’re in the audience.”

Mr. Sorkin pressed X’s owner on the consequences.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” said Musk, amidst his usual stutters. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company — and we will document it in great detail.”

“But those advertisers are going to say, ‘we didn’t kill the company.’”

“Oh, yeah? Tell it to Earth.”

Musk explained that both he and the boycotters will make their cases, “and we’ll see what the outcome is.”

The idea is to take the culture war outside educational institutions, the news media, and government bodies, and to shove it into boardrooms everywhere. It’s a great game of chicken, buck buck buck. And, unlike Gale Wynand in The Fountainhead, Musk appears more than willing to lose his investment in X just to prove the point.

An interesting place we’ve come to. The insider elites, and the ideological left, seek to advance woke ideology even if it ruins their own companies, such as Disney, and squelch free speech, even if it means betraying every last principle of American liberty.

So, in this war with other people’s fortunes, take sides: die, Disney, die — before X, let’s hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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One for the Memory Hole?

Osama, letter, censorshiip, Tik Tok

An important historical document. Though published all over the Internet, it was most linked-to where it was housed by The Guardian, the British newspaper.

But it has been taken down by The Guardian. This is what it says on the page where it formerly resided:

Removed: document

This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, which was reported on in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.

Just like the news media, claiming their coverage provides full context, but deprecating the primary source document itself!

Orwellian.

In an article on Thursday, “TikTok ‘aggressively’ taking down videos promoting Bin Laden ‘letter to America,’” The Guardian explains some of the background of the current fracas. Youngsters on TikTok and elsewhere had recently discovered Osama bin Laden’s letter — which Representative Ron Paul has often famously referenced — and were expressing their surprise, interest, and judgments on social media. Many of them were awful takes, of course, as is common among the young . . . and others. 

But remember the keywords: free speech.

Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, Jewish activist groups, and conservative influencers, the free speech of users of Tik Tok and X (to name just two) were abridged, disallowed from expressing their opinions of — or even quoting — the late terrorist.

TikTok explained itself on X: “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

Discussing the letter is not, of course, “supporting” “terrorism.”

Yet Osama’s letter has been scrubbed from most websites that had published it. It can nevertheless be found, by paying subscribers, at scribd.com — at least it could as of Sunday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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