Tag: censorship

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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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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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You Kill Me!

Biden, Covid, Facebook, censorship

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” President Joe Biden informed us yesterday. 

At least, “That’s what I meant,” he clarified ever-so-confusingly. 

Meant last Friday, after a reporter mentioned “COVID misinformation” and asked Joe: “What’s your message to social media platforms like Facebook?”

“They’re killing people,” replied the president. “I mean, it really, look — the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

CNBC noted that Facebook “reacted defensively” to Biden’s friendly murder accusations, failing to hit LIKE on the administration’s characterization of its pandemic performance. 

“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” a company spokesperson countered. 

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people,” Mr. Biden chided the social media giant, “that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.” 

After all, the Biden Administration has certainly rolled up its sleeves, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Yes, behind the scenes, this administration works with these behemoth social media corporations to help determine what hundreds millions of Americans will be permitted to say and share and discuss — on matters such as medicine, theories of disease origins, etc. 

Didn’t we just ride this pony? Remember the supposedly baseless, debunked, conspiracy-nut-fueled Wuhan lab-leak theory? 

That idea was blocked from us by Facebook (and Google and YouTube) at the behest of Big Government Science . . . until just weeks ago.

It’s hard to keep up. 

Perhaps we are not supposed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Optimized for Attack

Whence came this pandemic? 

Now that we can investigate the lab leak theory without being smeared as conspiracy nuts or buried in an avalanche of disinformation from China, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. scientific community — all protected in their deceit by Big Tech and our mainstream media — we might make progress in our inquiries.

On June 29, in a little-covered hearing before Republican-only members of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis, several renowned scientists testified, most notably Dr. Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at Cal-Berkeley.

“I would like to emphasize five points,” Muller stated, “each of which is capable of separating or distinguishing between a natural origin — a zoonotic origin — and the lab origin” of SARS-CoV-2: 

  1. “The absence of pre-pandemic infections,” which he called “unprecedented”;
  2. “The absence of a host animal” (which was lied about early on); 
  3. “The unprecedented genetic purity. . . . Again, MIRS, SARS, previous viruses don’t have this, but it is exactly what you would expect if you’ve gone through gain-of-function”;   
  4. “The spike mutation . . . there is no known way for that spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory”; 
  5. “This virus was optimized to attack humans. Again, something that has never happened in natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”

“All the scientific evidence argues in favor of the laboratory origin,” he concluded. “The evidence in favor of the natural, zoonotic origin? There isn’t any.”

But here comes the even bigger story, one that Dr. Muller called “horrifying” and “chilling.”

Muller had asked colleagues to assist in his lab-leak investigation. But they declined to help because that would anger China, which would then blacklist those labs. 

“The idea that China has managed to interfere, to break United States’ freedom of expression, freedom of investigation, freedom of thought, through this collaboration effort,” the doctor explained, “is really scary.” 

If you think the Chinazis are merely a threat to “their own people” and neighboring Taiwan and countries bordering the South China Sea . . . think again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Here and here are links to additional testimony at that June 29th hearing. Coverage of Dr. Muller’s testimony first appeared in these pages as a “Thought.”

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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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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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The Colluders

censorship, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube

Big Tech social media companies that once boasted of providing open forums now routinely ban speech that they disagree with — speech about elections, pandemics, Wuhan labs, or what have you.

How much of this suppression is private and independently initiated? How much is imposed at the behest of government officials who are supposed to respect First Amendment rights?

Government officials not only say that people should not say such-and-such; they also, increasingly, either complain that social media companies don’t do enough to gag people or herald the extent to which they do so.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that “the White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation. . . .”

Now the American Freedom Law Center is suing Twitter and President Biden so that the question of whether the government is in effect “deputizing” private organizations to assault freedom of speech can be adjudicated.

The Center is filing on behalf of Colleen Huber, a doctor Twitter censored and suspended for saying the wrong thing about COVID-19. Of course, there are many other victims of the same policy, and it the Center seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.

The government has been enlisting social-media moguls as foot soldiers in a propaganda war. Whether this is done openly or behind closed doors, this war on free speech violates the Constitution. 

As we must hope the outcome of this legal action affirms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Worshipful and the Incurious

Fauci, Covid, Facebook, ban

Did the recent pandemic begin as a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China?

Who knows?

But in these United States there suddenly appears serious — even bipartisan — interest in finding out.

I’ve been curious for some time, but why wasn’t more of the media interested from the beginning? Why were questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as the questioners often attacked?  

“[T]he newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true,” Thomas Frank, the progressive historian and author, explains in The Guardian, “that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers,” adding that he “always trusted the mainstream news media.”

Thank goodness Senator Rand Paul confronted Dr. Fauci, again, leading to Fauci acknowledging the need for further investigation into the Wuhan lab that performed research on bat coronaviruses, arguably including gain-of-function research, with indirect U.S. funding. 

“Renewed focus on Wuhan lab scrambles the politics of the pandemic,” was one of several recent explanatory Washington Post articles.

Politics? 

You don’t say!

“The shifting terrain highlights how much of the early debate on the virus’s origins was colored by America’s tribal politics,” the paper reported, “as Trump and his supporters insisted on China’s responsibility and many Democrats dismissed the idea out of hand . . .”

The Post should include itself when referring to Trump-blaming “Democrats.” 

Another article The Post dangled before readers captures the moment — “Facebook: Posts saying virus man-made no longer banned.” 

In addition to the media and social media failure on this lab-leak story, let’s not forget the “expert fail.” Mr. Frank fears that if Big Science is found to be the cause of the pandemic, it “could obliterate the faith of millions” in “the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism.”

We should be so lucky. 

What’s next: a release of Fauci’s emails?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Threat/No Threat

Facebook, censorship

Last week, I asked whether the social media companies that mine our data — which they obtain from our posts — might not expend a little more attention to allowing us to mine our own data with more ease and sophistication.

Today, let’s look at the biggest problem.

Politics.

Facebook and Twitter initially gloried in enabling users to easily communicate political ideas and activism. 

Then they realized that people don’t all agree, and that platform headmen Zuckerberg’s and Dorsey’s friends got upset when they lost, blaming Facebook and Twitter for allowing “democracy” to be compromised.

Now, that was overblown. Democracy wins when people use communication technology to convince others — just so long as they do not opt out of democracy’s integral respect for minority rights. 

Which is what Democrats accused Republicans — Trump was “obviously” authoritarian. 

Which is what Republicans also accused Democrats — and throwing people off a supposedly non-partisan platform for partisan reasons sure looks anti-democratic.

Robby Soave, arguing to the contrary at Reason, says that “Both the Left and the Right Are Exaggerating the Threat Posed by Facebook.” His article’s blurb boasts his thesis: “Facebook can’t kill, jail, or tax you. It can only stop you from posting on Facebook.”

True — but is it true enough? The political ramifications of Facebook’s de-platforming strike me as a great breach of contract — not just a matter of no physical threat. Plus, as mentioned Monday and previously, big tech is not immune to Washington’s political pressure and massive financial clout.

Meanwhile, Mr. Soave quotes Candace Owens, whose advice seems apt to me: “Twitter and Facebook are Fascist companies” that we should be “slowly migrating away from. . . .”

Soave is spot-on to highlight the limits to Facebook’s clout, reminding that we can stop feeding their data mining operations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Reddit Redacts the Internet

Social Media, censorship, Odin

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has obtained evidence that the government of California and the Biden camp violated the First Amendment rights of Americans during the 2020 presidential campaign. 

In at least a couple dozen cases, social media companies complied with governmental requests to delete posts containing “misinformation,” the new code word for “stuff that I don’t want people to see or discuss.” 

But hey: were all materials containing “misinformation” deleted from the annals of humankind, historians would be left with maybe ten or twelve pages and scrolls of primary documents. Into the trash? Herodotus, Josephus, Gibbon!

On the other hand, the social-media giants often curtail online discourse without any apparent urging by government censors.

Example? The popular discussion group Reddit has taken upon itself to block users from viewing the videos hosted by certain popular alternatives to YouTube like Rumble and BitChute. Reddit has China-walled links to the videos regardless of content. The problem, it seems, is that Rumble and BitChute are too much in favor of free speech.

Now, it may be that Reddit does its redactions in eager pursuit of its own ideological agenda rather than in obedience to some politician(s), but questions remain. When it comes to suppressing voices that socialist social media moguls find politically uncongenial, how much is reluctant submission to government pressure and how much is spontaneous voluntary initiative?

I’d like to know. 

Barring any likelihood of a certain answer, we citizens must vigilantly watch governments — along with the tech firms receiving lucrative government contracts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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