Category: social media

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

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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general freedom international affairs Regulating Protest social media

Rotten Apple

rotten apple, China

Apple Inc. has a good side and a bad side.

A strong work ethic, oodles of innovativeness, much neat technology.

But a taste for censorship and a willingness to abet the censorious efforts of China’s totalitarians.

One manifestation of Apple’s contempt for unfettered discourse? Its apparent threat to kick the Twitter app off the iOS platform now that Twitter is run by someone friendlier to freedom of speech than the previous management.

Obnoxious though this would be, it’s not half as horrible as knowingly facilitating Chinazi repression. Yet Apple has recently crippled the iPhone AirDrop feature that protestors in China have used to share files like videos of the surging protests against the government’s insane zero-COVID mega-lockdown policies.

Because of a new iOS update, iPhone users in China — and only in China — can now only send files to persons not on their contact list for just ten minutes, hampering the ability of protesters and others to evade Chinese government censorship.

The company’s officers read the news. If Apple really didn’t intend to do this, all it has to do is roll out another update pronto to restore full AirDrop functionality.

Reclaim the Net notes, however, that Apple has often helped the Chinese Communist Party conduct its censorship: for one thing, by removing thousands of apps from its Chinese store at their behest. The deleted apps include VPN apps that helped users evade China’s wide-ranging and determined censorship of the Internet.

Think Different, Apple, not in lockstep with tyrants.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Rumble Resists

Rumble, free speech, France

In a world of almost universal assaults on freedom of speech, it is heartening when an avowed defender of it refuses to relent under pressure.

Rumble’s reason for being is to help people “control the value of their own creations.” The company creates “technologies that are immune to cancel culture.” Their mission is “to protect a free and open internet.”

A mission statement is one thing. Abiding by it in the face of major opposition is another. But Rumble has just told the French government to get lost for demanding that it deplatform certain sources of Russian news.

Stressing its policy that users with unpopular views “are free to access our platform on the same terms as our millions of other users,” Rumble has disabled access for users in France rather than acquiesce to the government’s censorship demands. Rumble will go back online there if it wins a lawsuit challenging the legality of the demands.

Like Elon Musk, who said that he wouldn’t block Russian news sources at the behest of governments “unless at gunpoint,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski says “I won’t move our goal posts for any foreign government.”

Rumble started out in 2013. By late 2021, Rumble.com was being visited by an average of 36 million active users per month.

If Rumble loses France, it loses less than 1 percent of its current users — but also an opportunity for substantial growth. 

On the other hand, it holds on to what it is.

And what its customers value. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: This Week in Common Sense, the weekend wrap-up of this program, is published on Rumble as a video nearly every week. Last weekend’s episode is “It’s a Funny World.”

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Accountability defense & war general freedom social media

Pentagon Personae

social media, PSYOP, spying, CIA, FBI, NSA, China

We think of Facebook and Twitter as platforms for you and me and our fellow citizens to share information and opinions and photos and just plain fun.

But our government agencies are also on those platforms, secretly as well as openly.

And not just for fun and games.

It’s a serious information war out there — with mis- and dis- elements, too — and Facebook and Twitter may be in over their heads.

“The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States,” wrote Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post in mid-September, “was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny.”

Ms. Nakashima’s report begins with the big news: “Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month,” and we are told of a “sweeping audit” to probe how the Pentagon “conducts clandestine information warfare.”

This is largely in response to Facebook and Twitter identifying and removing “fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.”

Social media companies took down actual U.S. military psy-op accounts. But it is worth noting that the report does not mention Facebook or Twitter taking down foreign equivalents, though that has happened in the past.

It might be time to reconsider all government activity in social media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Facebook, the FBI’s Snitch

Facebook, FBI, spying

All we have is the word of Department of Justice whistleblowers.

They told the New York Post that over the last 19 months, Facebook has been cooperating with the FBI to spy on “private” messages of users “outside the legal process and without probable cause.”

The targets were gun enthusiasts and those who questioned 2020’s election results.

“They [Facebook and the FBI] were looking for conservative right-wing individuals. None were Antifa types.”

According to the whistleblowers, Facebook flagged allegedly subversive private messages and sent them to the FBI to be studied by agents specializing in domestic terrorism.

Facebook provided the FBI “with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.” Subpoenas were then issued to obtain the conversations that Facebook had already revealed to the FBI.

According to one DOJ source: “As soon as a subpoena was requested, within an hour, Facebook sent back gigabytes of data and photos. It was ready to go. They were just waiting for that legal process so they could send it.”

Facebook has issued a denial. The FBI has issued a non-denial denial.

The allegations might seem very implausible but for the fact that as the November election approaches, the DOJ has been openly targeting Trump allies for claiming “that the vice president and/or president of the Senate had the authority to reject or choose not to count presidential electors.”

In short, for talking out of turn.

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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insider corruption Internet controversy media and media people social media

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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Receding From the Facts

fact check, media, truth, lie

Thesis: we’re entering recession, but the Biden administration disagrees.

For political reasons.

May we discuss?

Sure, here in Common Sense. (We’ve yet to censor or flag ourselves.) Big Tech social media is a different story.

Loath to preside over an officially designated recession, the Biden administration suggests that when you look at all the data in just the right light, it’s “unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year — even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter — indicates a recession.”

Others disagree, saying the familiar definition cannot be so summarily dispatched. On Instagram, poster Graham Allen cheekily asked Siri how we know it’s a recession. Her reply: “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

Not a sacrosanct indicator, but standard.

Enter the Guardians of Discourse. 

Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) has flagged Allen’s post as “false information” and in some cases prevented viewers from seeing it.

The “independent” fact checker on duty was Politifact, which warned Web surfers it just ain’t so that “the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession.”

This is where we’re at. Discussion of political motives at the White House has become so hazardous that the People of the Fact Check must rush to repudiate any intimation that any assiduous politics is going on. It’s all just assiduous data comparison.

Well, reality check: “fact checks” can be biased too.

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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All a-Twitter

Elon Musk, Twitter, deal, bargaining, woke

On Friday, Elon Musk bowed out of his attempt to take over Twitter.

And Twitter stock plummeted over 10 percent in trading on Monday.

Citing the woke corporate social media company’s non-disclosure of information that he had been requesting for many, many weeks, Mr.Musk withdrew his offer.

The big issue, here, is the possibility that Twitter is over-valued because the company has allowed “bots” to proliferate. That is, accounts run by computers and AIs and scammers who create accounts and then just crank out content that have no value for advertising — which is how the company makes most of its money.

“Twitter claims that only 5 percent of its monetizable daily active user (mDAU) base consists of bots,” explains Nicholas Dolinger at The Epoch Times, “but Musk has argued that the number is much higher, and that Twitter, in misrepresenting the total number of bots, has misled him in such a way as to void the agreement.”

The best part of the story may be the “meme” Musk shared about it, “implying that Twitter would face embarrassment at having to disclose information about the prevalence of bots on the platform in court.”

Twitter user @ZanderfromNOLA offers an image that shows that bot problem: multiple accounts for healthcare professionals all saying the exact same thing, word for word, pushing the COVID vaxxes. It could be a propaganda campaign from Big Pharma. Or it could be the CIA. Or China. Or even Russia! Who knows? But the wealth of duplicate and obviously suspect content on the platform suggests that Musk’s initial offering of $44 billion was way too generous.

The humiliation that Twitter has suffered may be well-deserved.

But will humiliation nudge along any decent reforms?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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