Tag: 1st amendment

Democrat Congresswomen Tell Social Media Platforms to “Quickly and Decisively” Censor Hurricane “Misinformation”

Despite recent pushback for politicians encouraging social media platforms to increase censorship online, in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, a cadre of Democratic House representatives from the affected regions have appealed to major social media platforms to intensify their efforts to censor alleged “misinformation” related to the storms.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

“We write to your platforms with an urgent request on behalf of states affected by the devastation of Hurricane Helene and those currently being impacted by Hurricane Milton,” the letter states. “In the aftermath of Helene, we have witnessed a troubling surge in misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and scams that are hindering recovery efforts and exploiting vulnerable individuals and families.”

The representatives say are concerned about the proliferation of false claims and blame these reportedly false claims for the hindering of recovery efforts. The congresswomen also say that social media posts are undermining public confidence in institutions.

The call for a crackdown on misinformation was articulated in a letter addressed to seven major social media entities, including Meta, X, TikTok, Discord, YouTube, Snap, and Instagram. Authored by Representatives Deborah Ross (D-N.C.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), and Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.), the letter alleges that misinformation is having a dire impact.

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Free Speech on Trial: RFK Jr. Battles Biden Over Alleged Social Media Censorship

The Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al. lawsuit on Tuesday heard oral arguments presented by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD), who are suing the Biden-Harris administration, alleging its collusion with Big Tech to censor what should be protected online speech.

Listen to the oral arguments here.

Anthony Fauci is named as a defendant along with Biden, and they are accused of carrying out a systematic and concerted campaign in order to “compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech,” the filing states. The companies in question are Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

The legal battle is now taking place in the 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals, which is set to decide whether the case has standing to proceed – that is, whether the actions they are suing over have resulted in direct and concrete injuries that a court can redress.

Previously, as CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg recalled, a lower court ruled that Kennedy and CHD – who brought the suit along with another plaintiff, Connie Sampognaro – had legal standing (while Sampognaro did not), and the court of appeals will now accept or reject that opinion.

Another consideration before the judges is the injunction by the Louisiana court, where the case was filed in the spring of last year, and whether to uphold it. If the 5th Circuit goes with the lower court’s position, the Biden-Harris White House’s “coordination” with social platforms will have to be put on hold pending the outcome of these proceedings.

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Senators Demand Answers on CISA’s Role in 2024 Election Oversight

US Senators Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Eric Schmitt have sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), regarding its involvement in flagging online content.

CISA is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the three Republicans want to know how it is preparing for the November elections – given, as they spell it out in the letter, CISA’s “past mistakes that put the agency in direct conflict with the First Amendment.”

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The senators specifically want to know how CISA is organizing and working now, to avoid repeating those same mistakes – namely, monitoring, flagging, and censoring political speech.

Even more specifically – the point is to make sure that there is acknowledgment from CISA that it will not engage in the same kind of activities, this electoral cycle around.

The letter cites the House Judiciary Committee reports as the basis for the senators’ belief this type of censorship was happening back in 2020.

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Arizona State University Caught in Free Speech Tug-of-War Over Gov-Funded “Disinformation” Battle

Arizona State University (ASU) is a public school and therefore undisputed subject to the US Constitution’s free speech rules. Yet a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demonstrates that it was prominently involved in working with, and on behalf of the US government. To affect free speech.

That would be a blatant example of what Congress is investigating and what the critics are calling Big Tech-(Big) Government collusion, given that the target of the “collaboration” the university was involved in was online “disinformation.”

The thing to remember when talking about this collusion is that the current White House had enough wits about it to never make a “beeline” reaching the end result of censorship. From what is known from the congressional probe and the Twitter Files alone, this was always instead a meandering effort that included many seemingly intermediary and/or legitimate actors.

According to James Rushmore for Racket News, in this case, ASU was the recipient of grants (and, in line with the overall “process” – the purpose of the one given in January 2024 and reported by the Washington Examiner is not clearly stated). The grant though did come from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

In and of itself, not ring many alarm bells – until the reason behind it, and the activities of GEC are taken into account. Those activities, in the case of ASU’s involvement, meant working with government agencies to flag what was decided to be disinformation, but also something referred to as “falsified media.”

The obsession with “Russian disinformation” featured here as well, a hallmark of “arguments” of the political party that came to power in 2020 in the US. But also a hallmark that had been introduced into public discourse with the party’s defeat four years earlier. The claims have since, but it seems to no avail, been thoroughly debunked.

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Colorado’s Supreme Court dismisses suit against baker who wouldn’t make cake for transgender woman

Colorado’s Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed on procedural grounds a lawsuit against a Christian baker who refused to bake a cake for a transgender woman. Justices declined to weigh in on the free speech issues that brought the case national attention.

Baker Jack Phillips was sued by attorney Autumn Scardina in 2017 after his Denver-area bakery refused to make a pink cake with blue frosting to celebrate her gender transition.

Justices said in the 6-3 majority opinion that Scardina had not exhausted her options to seek redress through another court before filing her lawsuit.

“We express no view on the merits of these claims,” Justice Melissa Hart wrote for the majority.

Phillips’ attorney, Jake Warner with the Arizona-based firm Alliance for Defending Freedom, had argued before the high court that the baker’s actions were protected free speech and that whatever Scardina said she was going to do with the cake mattered for his rights.

Warner said Tuesday that his client had been pursued and mocked for years by those who disagreed with him.

“Enough is enough,“ Warner said. ”Jack has been dragged through courts for over a decade. It’s time to leave him alone.”

Scardina’s attorney, John McHugh, expressed disappointment and said he was evaluating if there were any remaining legal options.

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The Big Tech Think Tank Campaigning to Censor Satire

The Brookings Institution, seems to believe it has solved the problem faced by those who would like to censor memes. The problem is that memes are a form of satire, and censoring them while claiming to be a democracy is a difficult task.

But now, senior Brookings Institution fellow Nicol Turner Lee and Isabella Panico Hernandez, a project assistant, have revealed their thinking: AI memes should be treated as election disinformation “manifested” through satire.

One could use a similar form of mental gymnastics to say that this kind of argument represents a call for censorship manifested through supposed concern about disinformation.

The Brookings, meanwhile, is not just any foot soldier in the “war on memes”: it is a powerful think tank funded by the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, but also massive financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase (via its philanthropic foundation) and that of Mastercard, Impact Fund.

Brookings speaks about memes, particularly those AI-generated (adding some AI panic into the mix can only help the cause), as an extremely dangerous phenomenon hidden behind humor, and perceived as humor by pretty much everyone.

But the think tank, and others going after memes, present themselves as smarter and able to understand the true nature of this clearly humorous and often satirical imagery, which they say only “seem harmless” and “appear innocuous.”

Instead, the authors of the article say memes can influence how voters perceive candidates and other election-related information, “could potentially lead to violence” – and are “globally perceived” as being capable to “fuel extremist behavior” – which is in contrast to the US, supposedly because of the lack of appropriate regulation.

And so, less than a month before the presidential election, these according to the authors insidious messages use humor merely as a vehicle to spread dangerous influence, but are not properly tackled in the US.

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Jack Smith Trump Filing Argues That Free Speech Is Criminal

Illegal DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith wants Twitter jail to be physical. His new election-interfering filing against Donald Trump essentially argues that Trump’s free speech should be considered criminal.

Challenging the integrity of election results is almost as old as the United States itself, and Democrats have most certainly been claiming that elections are fraudulent or illegitimate since Andrew Jackson. Remember when Hillary Clinton and her supporters claimed that the 2016 election was a fraud? Jack Smith apparently does not, because his new filing against Trump argues that Trump’s speech, including his tweets, about election integrity and election fraud is reason to prosecute and convict the former president.

The First Amendment protects Americans’ free speech when criticizing the government and criticizing elections. In America, you have always been allowed to claim that you thought elections were fraudulent, whether that is true or not. It’s a First Amendment right. Smith wants to criminalize that constitutionally protected free speech when the Democrats’ most formidable opponent uttered it. But if you think it will stop with Trump, think again. The Democrat party has become the anti-free speech party, the party of the censorship industrial complex.

The Biden-Harris administration and the Harris-Walz ticket want to silence Americans as much as Smith wants to silence Trump. Didn’t John Kerry just describe the First Amendment as a “block,” and didn’t Tim Walz just endorse and defend censorship during the vice presidential debate?

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Columbia Law School Told Professors to Call Campus Police on Student Protesters

Administrators at Columbia University braced themselves over the weekend for planned citywide walkouts marking the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel and the start of the war on Gaza. In an email Sunday evening, a Columbia Law school administrator told professors to call campus security officers on protesters who did not heed requests to stop any disruptions in classrooms.    

The administrator’s email instructed professors to give two warnings to “students or others who violate the Rules of University Conduct.” Afterward, professors and teaching assistants were told to call the campus Public Safety department if the students “involved in the disruption refuse to stop despite your request they do so” and “there is no immediate safety concern,” according to the email, which was obtained by The Intercept. The email referred to the instructions as “highly practical tips for addressing and de-escalating classroom disruptions.”

The email also instructed professors to call 911 “if the disruptive behavior is so severe that it poses an immediate threat to your safety or the safety of others.” Campus security officers are unarmed.

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Hillary Clinton says social media companies need to moderate content or ‘we lose total control’

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday that social media companies must moderate content on their platforms or else “we lose total control.”

Clinton told CNN host Michael Smerconish that while there have been some steps taken at the state level to regulate social media, she wants to see more done by the federal government to moderate content.

“We can look at the state of California, the state of New York, I think some other states have also taken action,” Clinton said.

“But we need national action, and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children,” she added.

Clinton said she believes the issue should be “at the top of every legislative political agenda” and called for the repealing of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which protects online platforms from being held liable for third-party content, such as user content on social media. This immunity applies to the content itself and the removal of content in certain circumstances.

“We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted,” Clinton said.

“But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” she continued. “And it’s not just the social and psychological affects, it’s real life.”

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American Hurricane Victims Forced to Support Israel for Govt Aid

Texans applying for relief from Hurricane Harvey faced an unusual stipulation to receive aid. Over 20,000 people in Dickinson, Texas, had their lives affected by the storm. The US federal government is offering to provide some form of aid, but first, residents must agree to support Israel.

The “Verification not to Boycott Israel” clause states that by signing the agreement, “the Applicant verifies that the Applicant: (1) does not boycott Israel; and (2) will not boycott Israel during the term of this Agreement.”

This is absolutely outrageous as once again our government places its boot on the neck of the people to force them to abide by their agenda. There is absolutely no correlation between Israel and the hurricane as this measure is simply all about power and forcing the people to submit.

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