Tag: censorship

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Accountability First Amendment rights government transparency

Overly Broad Stonewalling

United States, censorship, intelligence agency, FBI, CIA, free speech, First Amendment

How specific do requests for records of unconstitutional activity have to be?

In February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pretended an inability to fulfill America First Legal Foundation’s freedom-​of-​information request for documents about the FBI’s pre-​election efforts to censor Twitter users. The agency declared the request to be “overly broad.”

What’s been “overly broad” is the policy of censorship, disinformation, and more by the Deep State using private partners. Meaning their real problem is doubtless that the requested documents are “overly incriminating,” too unmistakably what AFL wanted.

So the FBI stonewalled. 

And AFL has sued, in its complaint concluding that the agency’s “blanket denial of AFL’s FOIA request is contrary to law and should not stand.”

Thanks to evidence brought to light by other litigation and by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Twitter’s internal records, none of us is just guessing that the FBI has acted to censor constitutionally protected discourse. We know that the FBI’s National Election Command Post flagged at least 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation.”

But the only party to the censorship revealing relevant information voluntarily is Twitter itself, thanks to decisions by Twitter’s new management under Elon Musk.

With respect to everybody else colluding to censor social media — the FBI, the DOJ, the White House, Google, Facebook, etc. — looks like it’ll have to be lawsuits every step of the way.

The First Amendment’s stricture upon Congress to “make no law” abridging our “freedom of speech, or of the press,” does not allow the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies to simply subcontract. Nor are they free to mold public opinion. 

A government-​controlled “press” is not a free press.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Chalk One Up for Equal Treatment

chalk art, street art, censorship, BLM

“The government may not enforce the laws in a manner that picks winners and losers in public debates,” ruled Judge Neomi Rao. 

This, in response to a case where anti-​abortion protesters were arrested for chalking the words “Black Pre-​born Lives Matter” on a Washington, D.C., street back in 2020.

Emma Camp makes clear, in her Reason coverage of the ruling, that the case is not as simple as it may sound in the headlines. “While writing chalk messages on public streets and sidewalks is considered vandalism in D.C., protest leaders had an earlier conversation with a police officer in which he ‘explained that he believed Mayor Bowser had effectively opened up the District’s streets for political markings.’”

Nevertheless, during the protest, “police told demonstrators that they would be arrested if they painted or chalked any messages.” Two individuals in the pro-​life protest defied police order and scribbled their message in chalk.

It’s actually a bigger issue than just an altercation during a protest. The police in D.C. had not merely looked the other way, allowing helter-​skelter displays of “Black Lives Matter” graffiti, but the city government had actually gotten in on the act and messaged “Black Lives Matter” on the streets itself — in bold paint.

This obviously sends a message to disagreeing citizens: we are on this side, not that.

As Judge Rao insists, “The government may not play favorites in a public forum — permitting some messages and prohibiting others.”

She interprets this injunction as pertaining to the First Amendment, but it goes much deeper than that, reaching to the core idea of a rule of law, and equality of treatment under it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Students Strike Back

College Campus Commie Crybabies

In November 2021, at taxpayer-​funded Clovis Community College, the group Young Americans for Freedom requested permission to post flyers. College officials assented.

The flyers attacked socialism. Uh oh. This was a grave violation of the alleged inalienable right of socialist students on the campus to never be exposed to disagreement with their views.

Some of the aggrieved students complained. We are offended, they told the school.

Administrators furrowed their brows and quickly determined that the school could not permit such offensive speech.

Suddenly censored, the YAF students who had posted the flyers went to court, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They quickly won a district court victory that has now been affirmed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the court’s ruling, “The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad.”

This means that the case can continue.

Clovis YAF Chair Juliette Colunga hopes that in response to the ruling, Clovis will finally decide “to explicitly protect the constitutional rights of its students to speak freely.”

The school has tried to forestall further litigation to require it to set forth an unambiguous policy protecting freedom of speech by conceding that the students may post the anti-​socialist flyers.

That’s not enough for FIRE, though, which is proceeding with the litigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights social media

Big-​Gov-​Google-​Plex

social media, censorship

A major presidential candidate is suing YouTube for censorship.

The candidate’s a Democrat.

That’s right. Democrats can also be muzzled by social media companies … that is, by big corporations that obey the First Amendment-​violating instructions of government officials.

Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for collaborating with the federal government to violate his free speech rights by removing various of his videos from YouTube.

Kennedy’s sins include openly disputing Official Government Doctrines about COVID-​19 and the pandemic. Doctrines espoused by, among others, the incumbent he is running against.

The title of the complaint names only “Google LLC” and “YouTube LLC.” But the document makes clear the originating role of the federal government in censoring Kennedy. The complaint is avowedly about “freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear.”

YouTube’s conduct “may be fairly treated as that of government itself,” the filing explains. “For example, although it cited its own COVID vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.”

The relief that Kennedy seeks includes restoration of the deleted videos and an order declaring Google’s speech-​banning misinformation policies to be “unconstitutional on their face.”

Kennedy wants to be able to state his views and distinguish them from the incumbent’s without being routinely censored by the Big-Gov-Google-plex.

Google and other social media companies must somehow be prevented from colluding with politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in the democracy they only pretend to support.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Melting in the Force of Opposition

snow flake, news, Covid, censorship

Is it time to bring back the pejorative “snowflake”?

We got used to the term in the early days of woke political correctness, but maybe the most egregious snowflakes are the elites in government and Big Pharma.

They melt when anything is said challenging their narratives about disease and cures and public health measures.

An article on online censorship in The Epoch Times, by Naveen Athrappully, discussed recent revelations that Representative Jim Jordan (R‑Ohio) calls “the Facebook Files” — all about COVID-​19, and the official Government Narrative surrounding it.

In July 2021, “President Biden accused Facebook of ‘killing people’ by not censoring COVID-​19 content that the administration perceived to be ‘misinformation,” Mr. Athrapully explains. “The White House wanted Facebook to remove humorous or satirical content that it thought suggested the COVID-​19 vaccine wasn’t safe. The Biden administration even wanted to remove honest information about the vaccines.” [Emphasis added.] 

I mean, wouldn’t you add the emphasis? Forbidding even honest and true information that might give an inconvenient take surely goes too far. Facebook’s communications documents say that the Surgeon General wanted the social media giant “to remove true information about the side effects if the user does not provide complete information about whether the side effect is rare and treatable.” Astounding!

This level of touchiness, this obsession for control, shows a remarkably fragile bearing on the part of bureaucrats. The winds of doctrine and the gales of opinion? Mustn’t let that whirl around!

It’s the fainting couch set who most desire to control speech.

These government officials should be fired on principle. 

Every. Last. Snowflake.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Way We Censor Now

Joe Biden, social media, China, censorship

In China, the government now sells software to social media companies so they have the best real-​time idea of what the government currently does not want people to say. 

The companies then perform such obliging actions as removing posts and banning users.

The software serves as a self-​defense system — of the social media companies. You see, if the companies fail to sufficiently prevent government-​outlawed speech on their websites, they will be punished. Maybe ruinously. By the Chinese government.

So who is doing the censoring here? 

Obviously, the government.

In the U.S., the intimidatory relationship between government and social media firms is not quite so advanced or nearly so clear. But as we keep learning from documents extracted by litigation and subpoenas, for years now our federal government has been telling firms to censor things, and the firms have complied.

The latest example is that Facebook, which has always said that its content-​moderation policies are “independent,” obeyed White House demands to censor posts about the likelihood that the COVID-​19 virus originated in a Chinese lab, not in nature.

In a July 2021 email, Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive, asked whether anyone could “remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/​labeling — claims that Covid is man-made.”

To which a VP in charge of content policy replied: “We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

No matter how White House press secretaries or others try to dress it up, “private” censorship conducted in obedience to governmental requests is governmental censorship.

And is eerily close to the Chinese practice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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