Tag: big tech

Don’t Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech

Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.

The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.

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We Have to Speak in Code — Citizens With Reported Vaccine Injuries Being Silenced on Social Media

By now, nearly everyone who doesn’t simply post cat pictures and what they ate for dinner on social media, has likely experienced some sort of censorship. From a warning about a comment to having your entire social media account wiped from the internet, the algorithms protecting the established narrative lay waste to any and all rational discourse.

Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this censorship is the silencing of those who report vaccine injuries. Last year, mainstream media cheered on the silencing and removal of groups on Facebook where folks could talk about their alleged injuries from the jab.

The outlet who claims to be a panacea of progressivism and free speech, Vox, wrote an article praising Facebook for “cracking down hard” on folks who would dare raise questions about the safety of a vaccine. Now, however, Vox and the rest of the pro-censorship elite, look ignorant as claim after claim about the jabs has fallen apart over the last year.

We were told that you couldn’t get covid if you got the vaccine. That was not true. We were told that taking the jab would get our freedoms back. They never came. We were told it would stop the spread. It did not. 

What’s more, the sheer numbers of injuries reported to the government should be enough to raise countless red flags.

Late last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing a total of 1,207,779  reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines. They were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

This most recent dats included a total of 21,382 reports of deaths and 166,606 reports of serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period.

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Most Democrats Now Favor Social Media Censorship

While a majority of Americans still think social media sites should permit free speech, most Democrats want companies like Twitter and Facebook to regulate content on their platforms.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 51% of American Adults believe it’s better for the owners of social media like Facebook and Twitter to allow free speech without interference. That’s down from 61% in January 2018. Thirty-five percent (35%) now think it’s better for social media companies to regulate what is posted to make sure some people are not offended, up from 23% in 2018. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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Facebook’s former public policy director for elections suggests more censorship is needed

Former Facebook public policy director for global elections Katie Harbath says social media and tech platforms might lead to future political violence.

“I still believe social media has done more good than harm in politics, but it’s close,” she said to the WSJ. “Maybe it’s 52-48—and trending south.”

Harbath left Facebook last year. She’s now part of the Integrity Institute, yet another group that advises lawmakers in the US and Europe on laws promoting more regulation of social media. She’s also a fellow at several think tanks that focus on election issues.

Despite the massive amount of censorship that Facebook has implemented in the last few years, a move that has driven many users to seek out alternative platforms, Harbath is one of those who believes that Facebook needs to do more.

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FEC data show Twitter employees made 99% of political donations to Democrats, Google employees were at 94%

Nearly all of the political donations made by Twitter and Google employees went to Democrats in 2021, according to data from the Federal Elections Commission.

Google employees gave $652,600 to Democrats and only $37,700 to Republicans, which means that 94% of political donations went to Democrats, according to FEC records.

Twitter employees made 561 contributions totaling $14,848.98 through ActBlue, an online payment processor for the Democrat Party. There were a mere eight donations made to Republicans through the GOP fundraising platform WinRed, according to FEC data. A whopping 99% of political donations made by Twitter employees in 2021 went to Democrats, the New York Post reported.

According to FEC data, Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal donated $5,800 — the maximum legal donation an individual can give — to Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb.

Seksom Suriyapa — who was until recently the vice president and head of corporate development and strategy for Twitter — donated the legal maximum to Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna.

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Twitter creates January 6th “harmful” content enforcement team

Twitter has announced the formation of a team of content reviewers to scan the platform for “harmful” content relating to the January 6, 2021 riot.

The platform said that it “convened a cross-functional working group” from members of its Site Integrity division and the Trust and Safety team.

This new team will scan the platform for harmful content about the anniversary of last year’s riot at the US Capitol.

The new team is part of Twitter’s commitment to “strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence.”

“Our approach both before and after January 6 has been to take strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence or have the potential to lead to offline harm,” a representative for Twitter explained in a statement to Reuters.

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When Government Uses The Private Sector As Agents Of Censorship

Over the weekend, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene got the Donald Trump treatment from Twitter: The social media platform permanently banned her personal account. If this were simply a private group deciding who can and can’t participate in its forums, then there’s no problem. That would be Twitter’s right. But we know Democrats are using private companies to censor speech they don’t like, and any discussion that threatens their plans to accumulate ever more political power. This is not America, more like Amerika.

Twitter booted Greene due to her “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which is another way to say she’s tweeting messages contrary to the narrative constructed by the Faucists: There is no solution to the pandemic outside of vaccines, lockdowns, and masks.

Twitter, which regularly sends users to “Twitter jail” when their tweets challenge and offend left-wing orthodoxy, permanently banned Trump a year ago “​​due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” It has also permanently suspended a Newsmax reporter “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which means his tweets didn’t meet the Twitter mob’s demand for conformity. Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine researcher, has also been suspended from Twitter. The official word is he disobeyed the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy – he said something the Twitter hall monitors didn’t like.

Meanwhile, YouTube pulled the video of the Joe Rogan podcast in which Malone compared America’s widespread obsession with vaccine mandates and extreme pandemic measures – to the exclusion of therapeutics and sensible precautions, we should add – to “​​what the heck happened in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s.” 

YouTube also promises it will “​​remove any content published today (or anytime after) that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the 2020 U.S. presidential election outcome.” We don’t recall a similar policy dealing with the faked Trump-Russia scandal. 

None of this would be troubling if Twitter and the other social media companies that regularly police and block content (always in one direction: against the political right) if it were nothing more than private companies making private decisions. But Big Tech companies have become government agents enforcing one party’s speech codes.

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Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

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Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. 

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Did banned mRNA vax inventor Robert W. Malone M.D. just break the Google algorithm?

Did the Twitter punks who banned mRNA vaccine inventor and bona fide vaccine expert Robert W. Malone, M.D. just set off the Mother of all Backfires?

Kind of looks like it, now that they’ve drawn so much public interest to the man that they’ve apparently broken the Google algorithm for censoring stories about him. 

It started like this:

Shortly after Malone was banned on Twitter, he did an long interview with bigfoot podcaster, Joe Rogan, arguing that the disinformation and repressed information on COVID vaccines was something resembling mass psychosis.

That term, and related ones, created widely divergent results between Google and its biggest rival, the more objective DuckDuckGo search engine.

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