Tag: censor

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Amazon’s Wide, Flowing, Constricted River

Amazon, censor, censorship, surveillance, mind control

Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from censoring speech.

It often tries anyway. 

One of the ways, as we’ve learned, is by pressuring social media and other companies to suppress speech. Since the federal government can make life very difficult for any company, some companies are understandably reluctant to ignore such pressure.

Amazon did not. When asked by the Biden administration in the person of one Andrew Slavitt, an advisor for the White House’s COVID-​19 “response team,” the company agreed to hide books critical of the COVID-​19 vaccines

Among the emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee is Slavitt’s March 2, 2021, communication with Amazon complaining that “if you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up [books criticizing the vaccine].… [I]f that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

Amazon was reluctant to intervene “manually” to demote such books and worried privately that rigging the game against particular books because of their viewpoints might undermine the company. But it caved nonetheless, soon modifying its algorithm and advising the White House that “we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-​vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”

Are such decisions consistent with a “consumer-​centric” approach that easily allows people to find just what they’re looking for? Which is Amazon’s big selling point?

Of course not.

But as it has done so often over the years, our government was putting its thumb on the scale.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Amazon, censor, censorship, surveillance, mind control

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Brownells Defends Itself

YouTube, guns, gun control, censorship, 2nd Amendment, censor, ban, school shootings

I’m glad to be able to say this: Brownells has, present tense, a YouTube channel. Especially glad because, on June 9, Google had shut that channel down without warning or explanation.

Brownells is a family-​owned supplier of firearms, firearm parts and accessories, gunsmithing tools, and emergency gear. Well-​known and well-​regarded by shooters, hobbyists and gunsmiths, the company has a website and a YouTube channel that serves as a “portal to everything shooting and hunting,” as Pete Brownell explains.

Brownells’ YouTube channel is substantial, with almost 1,800 instructional videos and some 71,000 subscribers. Patrons stress that there’s nothing outré, radical, or offensive about the offerings — unless you’re reflexively anti-​Second Amendment, I guess. 

We’ve got no smoking gun in the form of an explicit admission from Google. But we may plausibly suspect that the firm terminated this YouTube channel for ideological reasons. Perhaps Google shot from the hip here in reaction to the recent spate of school shootings, without pausing to properly distinguish between promoting responsible gun ownership and promoting murder.

We may also never know whether Google expected Brownells to meekly accept the arbitrary snuffing of a resource it had spent so much time and energy developing. In any case, Brownells used Twitter and other forums to urge supporters to call Google and object.

The self-​defense paid off. On June 11, Google undeleted the channel. The protests against injustice must have been too many to ignore. 

YouTube is no longer a mere platform for video sharing. It has taken political controversy and complaints as excuses to editorialize.

Were it a government, I’d say “censor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

That Something You Do

Congress, Facebook, hearings, control, regulations, Mark Zuckerberg, censorship, censor, regulate

Congress grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last week, and as usual ended up roasting itself. 

“Zuckerberg has already experienced the worst punishment of all,” quipped comedian Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. “He had to spend four hours explaining Facebook to senior citizens.”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, retiring after his 42nd consecutive year in Washington, asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“Senator,” Zuckerberg incredulously replied, “we run ads.”

Inc. magazine reported the obvious: “several of our elected leaders asked questions that were highly uninformed, or in some cases just plain weird.”

Uninformed. Weird. That’s them, alright.* 

Still, the Washington establishment seems to seriously think these same congressmen ought to be re-​writing privacy rules. 

“Elected officials know the public wants them to do something to protect their privacy,” announced Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. “The question now turns to what is that something?”

“Americans are largely together on this issue,” Todd said, citing a recent poll where a similar “66 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans say they want more control over the information companies have about them.”

But Democrats and Republicans are together on something else: Only 21 percent of Democrats and a tiny 14 percent of Republicans “trust the federal government” to act on the issue.

The senators, though obviously “confused about basic topics,” Emily Stewart wrote at Vox,  “seem to agree they want to fix something about Facebook. They just have no idea what.”

Please Congress: DON’T “do something.” Don’t do that thing you do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Reason TV has a very funny video on the Zuckerberg hearing.

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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Why They Hate the First Amendment

Facebook, censorship, censor, first amendment, free speech, Citizens United, elections

Does banning Facebook in the weeks leading up to an election sound like freedom?

“The corrosive effect of social media on democratic life,” writes The New Republic’s Jeet Heer, “has led both French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make the same threat to Facebook: self-​regulate or be regulated.”

But Macron doesn’t go far enough. “If fake news truly poses a crisis for democracy, then it calls for a radical response,” Heer insists. 

“Many countries have election silence laws, which limit or prohibit political campaigning for varying periods of time ranging from election day alone to as early as three days before the election.” And Heer sees little reason not to apply such regulations to social media. 

“What if you weren’t allowed to post anything political on Facebook in the two weeks before an election?”

This exactly parallels the prohibition of political spending “by corporations” before an election, as in the McCain-​Feingold campaign finance regulation. Except here we have it directly affecting normal citizens.

The current excuse, “fake news,” appears to be defined by partisans almost entirely as the errors and lies and spin of their opponents’ side(s).

But since lying about one’s political enemies is at least as old as the Election of 1800, why is this different now? 

Because, I submit, Facebook is just another area the folks pushing such obvious breaches of the First Amendment — politicians and most of the media — do not yet control.

Competition mustn’t be tolerated. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: by John Nakamura Remy

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest

Gatekeeping 2.0

gate keeper, Jordan Peterson, censor, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, censorship, new media,

There once was opinion hegemony, almost a monopoly. Official gatekeepers kept unwanted ideas — including some of mine, including many I strongly oppose — out of public consideration. 

Then came the online media revolution, which switched influence from corporate, academic-​approved media outlets to truly new media, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

And now? The counter-revolution. 

We saw it obviously in the downgrade and then banning of Milo Yiannopoulis’s Twitter, last year. Since then, new measures surface on a regular basis.

We helots, we commonfolk, must not be allowed actually to affect an election!

Or the hearts and inquiring minds of Americans, Europeans, and others worldwide.

Unless that opinion has received the imprimatur of the Center-Left.

I’ve written about this return of the Gatekeeper mentality before. The latest malefactor is YouTube, which locked Dr. Jordan Peterson out of his account this week* as well as put in place new policies to hobble the social sharing elements of YouTube.** 

A week or so earlier, Patreon, an online crowdfunding patronage web service I’ve been thinking about trying out, cancelled independent journalist Lauren Southern’s account. Patreon managers charged that her most recent endeavor might cause “loss of life,” but, tellingly, “showed no evidence or proof, are allowing no appeal and have acted as judge, jury and executioner” — as one concerned netizen not inaccurately summarized.

The company’s CEO calmly explained himself to Dave Rubin on YouTube. Does he convince you? 

I catch a whiff of panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* Dr. Peterson’s account has since been reinstated, no explanation given.

** You can learn all this and more on YouTube itself — so the platform hasn’t been shut down as such. Instead, a new Artificial Intelligence will restrict videos that do not even break YouTube terms of service, removing Likes, Comments, and Search features.

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