Tag: censorship

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Public-​Private Censorship Partnership

censorship, mind control

When government pays people to help censor critics of its policies and talking points, this makes it even more obvious that it’s acting to repress speech and violate the First Amendment.

Thanks to a recent lawsuit against the Biden administration, we have been seeing emails confirming that government officials routinely ask Big Tech to censor this and that.

Now, Just the News reports that government agencies and liberal groups such as Common Cause and the Democratic National Committee worked with a consortium of private groups — the Election Integrity Partnership — during the 2020 election season to target and censor social media posts.

The EIP “set up a concierge-​like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency and State’s Global Engagement Center to file ‘tickets’ requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.”

About 35 percent of the many posts EIP flagged in 2020 were sanctioned in some way by Big Tech.

Millions of tax dollars have been funneled to consortium members to fund these efforts to censor “misinformation,” i.e., speech that government officials disapprove of.

The EIP remains active in 2022.

Of course, politically controversial speech is just the kind of speech that the Founders were concerned to protect. Madison and Mason didn’t expect that the ability to publicly debate whether Bach is better than Beethoven or the best way to shingle a roof would ever be in great jeopardy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

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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First Amendment rights public opinion too much government

The Method to the Current Madness

fact checking, fake news, social media, censorship, Covid, public health

The safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines has been disputed from the beginning.

What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-​vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-​state as fact the original and now more-​dubious propaganda. 

Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.

How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-​wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-​19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-​19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-​claims carry their own weight.

In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”

And as excess deaths and inexplicable demises increase around the world we are “not allowed” to state this in many public forums.

No way to run a health crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights First Amendment rights general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Just a Board Whose Intentions Were Good?

Homeland Security, censorship, spying, social networks, free speech, disinformation

They say it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

The Department of Homeland Security has caved and is now closing its new Disinformation Governance Board. Critics had been disinformatively saying that the board would probably be used for censorious purposes.

Au contraire, says DHS — even though the board was originally headed by an exponent of countering wrongthink about such matters as the “alleged” Hunter Biden laptop. No. Per DHS, this board really, truly, deep down, supposedly had only benign intentions.

When announcing the shutdown, DHS also announced that it has a bridge to sell you.

(Gotcha! DHS didn’t announce anything about a bridge. That’s just a bit of disinformation that I perpetrated with the help of my woefully abused First Amendment – protected freedom of speech!)

In May, DHS Secretary Mayorkas insisted that the board was no threat to free speech. The point was to address threats “without infringing on free speech.” Rather, the board would be doing things like disputing the strangely persuasive misinformation that the U.S. now has an open southern border.

Even early on, though, the board had been planning to coordinate its anti-​disinformative efforts with Big Tech social media firms, which have been censoring on behalf of government. And various government officials will still be working to delegate the nuts and bolts of violating the First Amendment to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. No letup on that front in sight.

DHS may be ending its ill-​named board. But beware: its spirit and agenda live on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: This board was previously discussed in these pages on May 2, in “Homeland Censorship Board.”

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy

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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