Category: social media

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Accountability ideological culture social media

Stossel Sues Facebook

John Stossel, Facebook, slander, law

“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”

“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”

What needs fixing?

Facebook’s fact-checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”

Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”

The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.

I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that. 

It is as liars and promise-breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.

What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights social media

The Colluder-in-Chief

Joe Biden, censorship, social media

When government pressures private companies to censor people, the government is itself acting to censor people.

That the Biden administration is acting to censor unapproved discussion of COVID-19 isn’t a guess. It has publicly urged social-media companies to prohibit “misinformation.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, for example, has said that Biden’s administration is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing. . . . You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

The Liberty Justice Center is now suing the administration and firms like Facebook and Twitter for violating the First Amendment rights of people like Justin Hart, a plaintiff in the case.

Hart is a data analyst who questions the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. For his fielding and repeating those questions, he was booted from social media accounts.

Explaining its litigation, the Liberty Justice Center observes that “dominant social media platforms and the White House are openly collaborating to eliminate social media posts about COVID-19 that the administration finds objectionable, and to cancel or suspend the Facebook and Twitter accounts of people who raise issues about COVID they don’t want the public to see.”

I tend to agree with Hart’s conclusion, but that is not the point.

More fundamentally, I am inclined to discover what we might learn from unfettered discussion of the facts. Which is one of the many reasons we need that First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people social media

Ingested Invective Rejected

Covid, Ivermectin, propaganda

“There is a bizarre propaganda underway in the United States of America to brand Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer,’” mused OpIndia, in its coverage of Joe Rogan’s recent brief bout of COVID and Alex Jones’s on-air Ivermectin ingestion stunt, “despite the fact that a version of the drug is known to be used for human treatment.”

The origin story is instructive. “The propaganda appears to have been triggered by an ambiguously worded tweet by the US Food and Drugs Administration.” 

Well, ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This FDA tweet led to virality of invectives against Ivermectin users. 

Then Katelyn Ogle, of KFOR in Oklahoma, upped the hysteria ante, claiming that a “rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the horse de-wormer medication, ivermectin, to fight COVID-19 are causing emergency room and ambulance back ups.”

This then went stampede, with Rolling Stone taking it up.

Apparently without a fact check.

In hardly any time at all, the hospital in question issued a statement repudiating the whole brouhaha.

It was Fake News — capital F and capital N — and Rolling Stone had to issue a . . . well, it wasn’t a retraction. 

Journalist Glen Greewald offered his take: “The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don’t care at all if they publish fake news as long as it’s done with the right political motives and goals.”

Dismissing Ivermectin as any kind of “de-wormer” is fraudulent. That this strain of invective against its COVID-suffering users was started by the government is especially galling.

Lots of people swallowed the meme. 

Will they develop immunity to future, similar spin?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people social media

Hidden Dissuader

Rumble, Dan Bongino

“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”

As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”

After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.

Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.

Who is he?

Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”

Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”

But let us consult one of those right-wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”

Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube. 

And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.

The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.

You know, cuz Journalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people social media too much government

Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

Covid, fascism, vaccination

A recent Reason article on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made . . .” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made. 

What case is it?

Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.” 

Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.

The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-to-spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.

Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.

“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S-based’ Covid-19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of . . . the rate of vaccine coverage.”

Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.

Is he right? I don’t know. 

But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-approved “scientific” opinion.

Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Ineffective because suppressed on major social media, in part. You can find their discussion on Rumble, Brighteon, Bitchute and other upstart sites.

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government transparency media and media people social media

Conspirators versus Conspiracists

conspiracy, tin foil

“Conspiracy theories circulated online over social media contribute to a shift in public discourse away from facts and analysis,” proclaims a new study by the Rand Corporation think tank, “and can contribute to direct public harm.”

Titled “Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media,” the study, paid for by Google’s Jigsaw unit, proposes to “improve machine-learning technology for detecting conspiracy theory language by using linguistic and rhetorical theory to boost performance.”

All very fascinating, but . . . do conspiracy theories shift public discourse away from “facts and analysis”?

They do challenge accepted facts, and are themselves examples of extended analyses. 

Often off track? Sure. 

But their problematic nature is not as stated.

The assumption throughout is that conspiracy theories are always in error. But when the report goes on to say that “conspiracists also distrust authority and believe that those who produce the news are lying to them,” there’s no fact check — why do the Rand authors believe we are not being routinely lied to?  

This becomes almost funny with the COVID origination debate. The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory is one of four current popular conspiracy notions the report looks at. And when the report was being written, the lab leak theory was marginalized on social media and pooh-poohed amongst most public health experts. Now we know that there was an actual conspiracy to bury evidence for it.

Truth is: conspiracies happen. Most bandied-about theories may be cuckoo, but a few turn out rock solid.

The honest way to deal with suspicions of a conspiratorial nature is pointed inquiry into relevant facts . . . with careful analysis.

The Rand Corporation and Google are more interested in defending the authorities.

Who often lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies social media

Rand on Rumble

Rand Paul, 2016 Presidential Race, Common Sense

“Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, has been suspended from YouTube for seven days,” CNN Business reports, “over a video claiming that masks are ineffective in fighting Covid-19, according to a YouTube spokesperson.”

He is not alone. Videos of other doctors, too, have been taken off YouTube for doing precisely what Dr. Paul has done: quote scientific papers, relate common knowledge, and draw reasonable conclusions … of which, quite apparently, governments, social media companies, and Dr. Fauci don’t approve.

CNN went on to explain: “YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: ‘Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.’” And this line too: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”

How anyone at YouTube could take issue with these statements, in a free country, sort of boggles the mind. No wonder Rand Paul called his suspension a “badge of honor” and referred to his censors as “Leftwing cretins.”

The senator expanded his thoughts regarding YouTube’s left-induced/state-supported cretinism on an alternative video sharing site, Rumble — which you can easily access from the Summit News report on Paul’s suspension. “Saying cloth masks work, when they don’t, actually risks lives,” the senator pointed out, in what seems to me as common sense a point as possible. 

We aren’t saved by wishing upon a star, but by helping ourselves and each other. 

Bad means don’t achieve good ends, they hinder.

YouTube increasingly is an enemy of the truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Sen. Paul told libertytree.com, “As a libertarian-leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, but I think it is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth.”

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international affairs social media

Good-bye, Google

China, Google, censorship

Is Google working for the Chinese government?

The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.

On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.

On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.

“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”

LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.

The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies social media

Authoritative!

Daszak, Covid, censorship

Just when you thought you knew all the ways our “authoritative” institutions have blocked information from us regarding the origin of COVID-19, another shoe drops.

Early in this pandemic, we learned that the World Health Organization (WHO) lacked any credibility, as their “scientists” shamelessly peddled the dishonest Chinese government line of no human-to-human transmission. 

Still, Big Tech was there to help shut down dissenting opinions in America. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” declared YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and be banned.

We now know that Dr. Peter Daszak, the man who funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars from the National Institute of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses took place, also created The Lancet’s lying letter, which offered the media an official source to level a “conspiracy theory” charge at skeptics of a zoonotic COVID origin.

While claiming its authors, including Daszak, innocent of any “competing interest.” 

Big Media — somnolent or else actively disinterested in checking the accuracy or even credibility of the WHO, Daszak, and other scientists — proclaimed the lab-leak theory debunked. 

Thus, they could ignore China; blame Trump. 

Facebook joined YouTube and others in actively preventing us from communicating about COVID, specifically its origin — using none other than Dr. Daszak as an advisor on their censorship strikes.

The other shoe?

Dr. David Feinberg, head of Google Health, acknowledged at a recent conference that the search engine had actively blocked users from finding information on the virus’s origin.*

Why? Feinberg said Google did not want to “lead people down pathways that we would not find to be authoritative information.”

Leaving us with authoritative disinformation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This courtesy of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who also discussed The National Pulse report that “Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.” 

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education and schooling ideological culture social media

Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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