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“Free Speech For Whom?”: Former Twitter Exec Makes Chilling Admission On The “Nuanced” Standard Used For Censorship

Yesterday’s hearing of the House Oversight Committee featured three former Twitter executives who are at the center of the growing censorship scandal involving the company: Twitter’s former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, former deputy general counsel James Baker and former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth.

However, it was the testimony of the only witness called by the Democrats that proved the most enlightening and chilling.

Former executive Twitter Anika Collier Navaroli testified on what she repeatedly called the “nuanced” standard used by her and her staff on censorship.

Toward the end of the hearing, she was asked about that standard by Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D., NM). Her answer captured precisely why Twitter’s censorship system proved a nightmare for free expression. Stansbury’s agreement with her take on censorship only magnified the concerns over the protection of free speech on social media.

Even before Stansbury’s question, the hearing had troubling moments. Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md) opened up the hearing that insisting that Twitter has not censored enough and suggested that it was still fueling violence by allowing disinformation to be posted on the platform.

Navaroli then testified how she felt that there should have been much more censorship and how she fought with the company to remove more material that she and her staff considered “dog whistles” and “coded” messaging.

Rep. Stansbury asked what Twitter has done and is doing to combat hate speech on its platform. Navaroli correctly declined to address current policies since she has not been at the company for some time. However, she then said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach:

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Rep. Stansbury responded by saying  “Exactly.”

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NJ councilman Russell Heller shot dead just a week after slaying of Eunice Dwumfour

A New Jersey municipal council member was shot dead in his car Wednesday, exactly a week after the unsolved slaying of Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour.

Russell Heller, 51, was found dead just after 7 a.m. in the Somerset parking lot of PSE&G, the local energy company where the Milford Republican worked.

Cops quickly IDed a former employee, Gary Curtis, 58, as a suspect — and found him dead in his car from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot around three and a half hours after the slaying.

The councilman’s murder came exactly a week after Sayreville Councilwoman Dwumfour — also a Republican — was gunned down in her SUV outside her home about 15 miles away. Her murder remains unsolved.

Authorities have not linked the crimes, and the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office insisted that Heller’s murder appeared to be “an isolated incident.”

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“We Want To Be On The Right Side Of History”: Ubisoft Partners With Police to Jail Gamers For Their In-Game Speech

Ubisoft, the company behind the Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six franchises, has not only partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to fight “hate” in gaming but is also now working with British police to jail gamers for their speech.

British state media is reporting on the news as a great new innovation.

From BBC, “Toxic gaming tackled by Ubisoft’s unique police alert system”:

Rape jokes, racism, bullying – if you’ve picked up a controller, or scrolled a mouse, to dabble in some online gaming then you’ve likely come across plenty.

The gaming industry, like others where people interact online, has been trying to figure out how to get to grips with behaviour like this for years.

Ubisoft, makers of major franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six, has now signed a first-of-its-kind deal with police to try and tackle the issue for its players.

The hope is for this agreement to start a conversation within the industry and see others follow suit.

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Cops Wake Innocent Man, Sleeping in His Own Driveway, Fill Him With Holes

On New Year’s Eve, Anthony Maclin, 24, was asleep in his car in his grandmother’s driveway. He had committed no crime, was not suspected of a crime, and harmed no one. However, none of this was a defense against three police officers surrounding his car, firing for seven straight seconds, and filling Mclin with holes.

On the night they filled Maclin with holes, police were responding to a call about an unidentified man sleeping in a car in a woman’s driveway. Maclin was in a rental car with Florida plates, and his own grandma called police because she didn’t recognize the car — a mistake she now direly regrets.

According to police, they attempted to wake Maclin, who was asleep with his legally owned and registered handgun in his lap. Instead of simply taking cover and waking him from a distance with a police loudspeaker, officers surrounded the car with guns drawn as if Maclin was a wanted murder suspect.

It is not a crime to sleep in your car with a gun on your lap in Indiana. In fact, Indiana has laws on the books that allow you to defend yourself on your own property — including from police officers.

Nevertheless, these cowboy cops surrounded the car, guns drawn until Maclin began moving around; at which point they attempted to execute him.

Never once in the body camera footage below do you hear officers say, “drop the gun,” or “he has a gun,” or even the word “gun.” This is likely due to the fact that Maclin never touched the gun in his lap and the trigger-happy cops opened fire on him out of sheer fear.

Once she realized that it was her grandson in the vehicle, Vickie Driver became hysterical. “That’s my grandson,” she said, immediately regretting the call to police. “I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t want to wake you guys up,” Maclin said as he lay on the ground bleeding out after being shot. Miraculously, Maclin lived. He was hospitalized for weeks and has undergone six surgeries.

He has not been charged with a crime.

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FBI whistleblower raises fresh concerns about bank record mining, undercover agents in J6 probe

Arecently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst told Congress in a whistleblower disclosure that agents in Boston were improperly pressured by Washington to open criminal cases on 140 people who had simply taken a bus ride to the Jan. 6 rally in Washington. The agents refused because there was no evidence the attendees engaged in any criminality, the whistleblower said.

George Hill’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee also raised new civil liberty concerns about the FBI’s Jan. 6 probe, including whether the Bureau mined Americans’ bank records without court authority and whether the agency possesses video footage it is refusing to release because it identifies undercover agents and human sources who were at the U.S. Capitol that fateful day.

Hill, a military veteran and longtime analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI who retired last year from the Bureau’s Boston field office, told Just the News on Wednesday night that he disclosed concerns earlier this week to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition, including that the Bureau analyzed banking data without evidence of a crime — simply to find Americans who traveled to Washington around the time of Jan. 6 or who owned a gun.

Hill said supervisors in the Washington field office pressured to open cases, first on seven individuals who came up in a sweep of bank records provided by Bank of America, and then on the larger group of 140 Americans who paid to take bus rides to President Donald Trump’s now infamous rally on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob overran police lines and flooded into the Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 election results. He credited his supervisors in Boston for resisting the pressure.

“There’s no evidence of a crime being committed here,” he said during a wide-ranging interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show. “We cannot open up preliminary investigations on someone for using a financial instrument in the District. And so they pushed back, and Boston did not take any action on those names.”

Hill also said the Washington field office, which led the Jan. 6 probe, did not react well to the refusal, escalating up the chain of command, but at each step of the process the Boston office held its ground. “Getting on a bus and participating in a political rally is not predication for a crime or a preliminary investigation,” he said, explaining why Boston resisted.

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Twitter Kept Entire ‘Database’ of Republican Requests to Censor Posts

WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.

That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter. Some Republicans even believe the release of the “Twitter Files” is the “tip of the spear” of their crusade against the alleged liberal bias of Big Tech.

But former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the White House’s Teigen tweet demand was hardly an isolated incident: The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.

“It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”

In interviews with former Twitter personnel, onetime Trump administration officials, and other people familiar with the matter, each source recalled what could be described as a “hotline,” “tipline,” or large Twitter “database” of moderation and removal requests that was frequently pinged by the offices of powerful Democrats and Republicans alike.

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New York Assembly Bill Would Prohibit Geolocation Tracking and Geofencing Warrants

A bill introduced in the New York Assembly would ban geolocation tracking and geofencing warrants. Passage of the legislation would not only protect privacy in New York; it would also hinder the growth of the federal surveillance state.

Asm. Michaelle Solages (D) and a large coalition of fellow Democrats introduced Assembly Bill 3306 (A3306) on Feb. 2. The bill is a companion to Senate Bill 217 (S217) introduced last month. The proposed law would ban the search of geolocation data or keyword data of a group of people who are under no individual suspicion of having committed a crime but rather are defined by having been at a given location at a given time or searched particular words, phrases, character strings, or websites. It would also bar courts from issuing reverse location search warrants and create a process to suppress any evidence gathered in violation of the law.

In effect, the passage of A3306 would end a process called “geofencing.” Reverse search warrants authorize police to search broad geographical areas to determine who was near a given place at a given time. In practice, these warrants give police permission to use Google location data to engage in massive fishing expeditions and subject hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people to police location tracking. According to the New York Times, federal agents first utilized the practice in 2016. According to the report, these broadly construed warrants help police pinpoint possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Google employees said the company often responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices. Police can gather similar information using cell-site simulators, often called “stingrays.”

According to the New York Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), concerns about how location data collected during the state’s battle against COVID-19 could be used by police. The Wall Street Journal reported that federal, state and local governments were partnering in a warrantless cellphone tracking program to gather information on Americans’ movements in over 500 cities.

“We are deeply alarmed by federal, state and local officials’ growing use of warrantless location tracking and so-called ‘reverse search warrants,” STOP executive director Albert Fox Cahn said. “While this type of tracking may be appropriate for some public health officials, it’s outrageous that this information is being shared with police. COVID-19 cannot grant New York’s police departments a blank check for surveillance. Even when police gain a warrant, wide-area geolocation searches make a mockery of the Constitution. When a single court order okays searches on hundreds or even thousands of individuals, it undermines the entire purpose of requiring warrants in the first place. The judges approving these orders simply can’t know how much data they’re handing over to law enforcement when they approve the request.”

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Nothing About the Chinese Balloon Saga Makes Sense

Nothing about the “Chinese spy balloon” story makes sense—but that hasn’t stopped U.S. officials from using it to stoke anti-China sentiment and cancel an attempt to ease diplomatic relations.

The basics: A Chinese balloon started drifting into U.S. territory about 10 days ago. It first entered Alaskan airspace, then drifted over Canada, then made its way back into U.S. airspace, appearing over Montana on February 1. By Saturday, when U.S. forces shot down the balloon, it was floating over the shores of South Carolina.

What the Chinese say: It was “a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes”—a weather balloon, essentially—that veered off course due to westerly winds and “limited self-steering capability.”

What Americans are saying: It’s a spy balloon! It’s an act of open hostility! U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called it “a violation of our sovereignty” and “a violation of international law.” House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) declared the balloon “a threat to American sovereignty” and “a threat to the Midwest.” Mitt Romney used it as an opportunity to call for banning TikTok.

The fallout: Blinken was supposed to visit Beijing this past weekend, on a trip designed to help keep relations cordial and keep lines of communication open between the countries. He was even scheduled to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. But Blinken canceled the trip last week, as the Chinese balloon loomed large (literally and figuratively) over America.

Not only did the balloon nix a diplomatic visit, it’s inflaming tensions—and paranoia—here in the States. The balloon is “more fodder for China hawks in Washington, for sure,” NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen said on Saturday. Kelemen described the incident as sounding like a story out of the Cold War, which was “exactly what [Blinken’s] trip was supposed to prevent.”

The absurdity: The balloon in question is absolutely massive, with “an undercarriage roughly the size of three buses,” as The New York Times put it. This would be an absolutely bonkers way to spy on the United States—especially since the images it picks up are reportedly no better than those it can obtain through satellites. One defense official said, as summarized The Washington Post, that the images a balloon like this could obtain “wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites.”

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Oregon Democrat Proposes Increasing Congressional ‘Diversity’ by Adding Seats

Within weeks of allegations that his wife engaged in insider trading when she acquired $15,000 worth of Amgen stock, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has introduced legislation to expand the number of Congressmen and women in D.C.

The Restoring Equal and Accountable Legislators in the House (REAL House) Act aims to increase the number of representatives and increase their “diversity,” as well as the diversity of the Electoral College because Blumenauer thinks that congressional districts are too large.

“The number of constituents living in a single congressional district has dramatically increased since the number of House members was arbitrarily capped in 1929,” Blumenauer said. “Current district sizes threaten the direct constituent connection on which the House was founded.”

Currently, there are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives, a cap from when the U.S. population was only 122 million people.

“The REAL House Act will help our government better reflect our districts and constituents’ needs,” Blumenauer said in a statement online. “To restore the House’s direct link to the public and to foster greater diversity among members and the Electoral College, we must increase the number of representatives.”

The proposal did not outline how much it would cost to increase the size of the U.S. government by his suggested 149 seats.

Since 1929, Blumenauer argues the U.S. population has more than doubled to 328 million people and, as a result, the size of congressional districts has nearly tripled while the number of representatives has remained stagnant.

“The average congressional district now includes 800,000 constituents. If Congress fails to act, by 2050, each member of Congress is on track to represent more than one million people,” he said.

In December 2022, the Democratic National Committee approved a move to remove Iowa as the first state on the party’s presidential nominating calendar—as has been tradition since 1972.

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Boston Mayor Formally Announces Reparations Task Force

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced the members of the city’s Reparations Task Force at the Museum of African American History during a press conference on Tuesday. The task force will study the impact of slavery on Boston and eventually come out with a plan to pay cash reparations to black citizens. Other leftist states and cities — including California — have advanced plans to pay reparations after forming similar task forces.

Mayor Wu, a Democrat, said the program will help to build a better Boston for everyone. “This conversation has been generations in the making, and we are appointing a multigenerational task force to reflect the full breadth of that history and struggle,” Wu said. “We will be another step closer to reconciling our complicated history with our vision for a more connected, more inclusive, more equitable Boston for all of us.”

Boston’s task force will propose reparation payments for those who can document that they are descendants of slaves. Other municipalities have debated on paying reparations to all black citizens regardless of whether they descend from slaves, though Boston has laid out that requirement.

The announcement comes two months after the Boston City Council unanimously agreed to create the reparations committee, The Boston Globe reported. Boston’s reparations task force will study “Boston’s participation in slavery,” and asses “the city’s attempts to repair the harm done by this practice; and then making recommendations on what forms repair could take.”

Five commission members were required to be “descendants of American freedmen, or Africans enslaved in the United States.”

The task force is hoping to complete its work and come up with a payment plan by 2024.

“We want to make sure that we’re grounded in the community,” Joseph D. Feaster Jr., a former Boston NAACP president and member of the commission. “We want to be transparent, we want to be inclusive, and we want to be thorough, and we want to be intentional.”

In announcing the task force last June, Boston — which was the epicenter of the abolition movement prior to the American Civil War — issued a formal apology for slavery and “the death, misery, and deprivation that this practice caused.”

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