Tag: censorship

Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

Keep reading

YouTube Punishes Journalist for Factual Video Showing Democrats AND Republicans Make Election Fraud Claims

In September, video journalist Matt Orfalea made two videos for TK News that highlighted election denial in the past two presidential elections.

The first video, Memory Holed: “The Election Was Hacked,” was a montage of Democrat politicians and commentators saying that the 2016 election was illegitimate, hacked, or rigged.

The second video, Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election, compares the statements made by Republicans after Donald Trump lost and those made by Democrats after he won in 2016.

For instance, when Trump was asked if he’d concede, he said “I have to see.” Orfalea showed Hillary Clinton saying, “No, I would not,” when asked the same question after she lost.

Matt Taibi at TK News highlighted the statements that were made the video:

“This video after all is packed with clips of people like Karine Jean-Pierre saying the 2016 election was ‘stolen,’ Joe Biden saying ‘I absolutely agree’ Trump is an ‘illegitimate president,’ Kamala Harris saying ‘you’re absolutely right’ Trump didn’t really win in 2016, and even Jimmy Carter saying ‘Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.’ Old pal Keith Olbermann proclaimed the public wouldn’t stand for this ‘bloodless coup’ called voting, Chris Hayes said Trump ‘cheated,’ and a conga line of officials from Adam Schiff to Elizabeth Warren insisted foreigners had ‘hacked our elections.’”

Initially, YouTube demonetized both videos, then reversed the decision. However, on Friday, Orfalea announced that the second video had been removed. YouTube also gave his channel a strike which is a more serious YouTube punishment as getting strikes eventually results in a channel being permanently removed.

Keep reading

Musk’s Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive

When Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was first announced this past April I said that the purchase likely wouldn’t go through if the empire thought it posed a threat to its information interests. I said that any reduction of censorship protocols which Musk implements on the platform would probably not be of the sort that make any difference to the powerful, but would instead just amplify vapid partisan culture war nonsense.

So far since Musk’s takeover, this does appear to be the case.

In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a “digital town square” to debate and discuss ideas.

And it’s not enough. Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you’re really doing something, but in the end all you’ve done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven’t done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

Keep reading

The Intercept that funded Government/Big Tech Censorship begs for Donations after FTX Grants are put on hold

The Intercept begged its readers for donations after the publication revealed that a multimillion-dollar grant from disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried would be placed “on hold” due to FTX filing for bankruptcy.

The Intercept is one of several media outlets that received a hefty donation from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation. However, as Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai discovered in 2020, eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar is the founder and funder of The Intercept and also funds the Government and Big Tech censorship infrastructure.

Bankman-Fried pledged $4 million to The Intercept over two years. So far, the outlet has received $500,000 out of the $4 million to support their reporting “on biosafety and pandemic prevention.”  However, The Intercept’s Acting Editor-in-Chief, Roger Hodge, announced on Friday that future grant payments are “on hold,” and used the announcement to ask readers for donations.

Bankman-Fried moved billions of dollars from FTX to sister company Alameda Research through a bespoke software “backdoor.” Similarly, the US and UK governments use backdoors, bespoke purpose-built portals, for Facebook and Twitter to directly access, monitor and censor users.  And The Intercept funds this deep collusion between Big Tech and government entities.

At the end of October, The Intercept published an “investigation” into the Department of Homeland Security’s (“DHS”) efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous. “Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents – obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents – illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.,” The Intercept wrote.

However, two years ago Dr. Shiva exposed the deep collusion between the United States government and social media companies – specifically Twitter but also YouTube and Google – in his historic Federal lawsuit.   Dr. Shiva has accused The Intercept of manipulating and hijacking his work to intentionally conceal Intercept boss Pierre Omidyar’s role in creating the Government and Big Tech censorship infrastructure.

According to Dr. Shiva, the entire operation appears to be a “limited hangout” – disclosing a self-contained and sensational but relatively benign story to overshadow something more damaging.  To deceive people into thinking they got the “truth” while the real truth is buried.

Keep reading

Study Identifies variety of Tactics used to Silence Doctors and Scientists

A defrocked philosopher and bon viveur, Giordano Bruno committed a heinous crime: his philosophy did not agree with the official science embodied by the Catholic Church. Bruno thought the earth rotated around other planets and the universe was infinite: real heresy. After eight years of detention, unlike Galileo, he refused to recant and was burned at the stake in AD 1600.

Bruno’s end was extreme. Although it would not happen nowadays, the persecution principle is alive and kicking. It has been energised but also brought to the surface by the Covid pandemic.

In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.Shir-Raz, Y., Elisha, E., Martin, B. et al. Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics. Minerva (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4

The above is taken from a study that explored the experiences and responses of doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements about Covid-19 that challenged official views.   Trust the Evidence reviewed this recent study and summarised its findings.

Keep reading

Massive ‘CitizenFreePress’ News Site Suspended from Musk’s Twitter for Sharing Video of Obama Admitting Election Machine Exploits.

The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.

CitizenFressPress.com (CFP) was not the only account to have shared the clip, though appears to be the only one that has received a suspension for doing so. Though the video can still be viewed on Elon Musk’s platform, it now carries a warning label which claims the video is “misleading,” as well as noting that the clip can no longer be replied to, shared, or liked.

The video is still shareable from other accounts, and still available on CSPAN. But someone at Twitter appears to be trying to nuke it, at least from CFP’s account.

Keep reading

Techno-Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay: China and the Deep State Have Joined Forces

“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church

The votes are in.

No matter who runs for office, no matter who controls the White House, Senate or the House of Representatives now or in the future, “we the people” have already lost.

We have lost because the future of this nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy or freedom.

The fate of America is being made in China, our role model for all things dystopian.

An economic and political powerhouse that owns more of America’s debt than any other country and is buying up American businesses across the spectrum, China is a vicious totalitarian regime that routinely employs censorship, surveillance, and brutal police state tactics to intimidate its populace, maintain its power, and expand the largesse of its corporate elite.

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows. This way lies outright tyranny.

Keep reading

Facebook Censors Posts on Vaccine Harms Because They “Make People Feel Unsafe”

This morning, a friend published a short post on Facebook, drawing attention to how it seemed to him the company was not even bothering any more to refer to the so-called ‘independent fact-checkers’ to justify their censorship. He had re-posted a clip where Fox reporter Tucker Carlson discussed the negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, referring to peer-reviewed studies. The clip is available here.

How on earth can peer-reviewed results constitute “misinformation”? The peer review process isn’t perfect, far from it, but after all it is the accepted standard. A first conclusion therefore is that the word ‘misinformation’ does not refer to misinformation any more, it simply refers to any information the censor wants suppressed. The word has become meaningless.

The action, then, is suppression of a certain kind of information, but what about the reason? The reason for suppressing uncomfortable information about COVID-19 vaccines is that seeing this information may “make some people feel unsafe”. What does this mean precisely?

There are at least two possibilities, and here I’m talking only about those who believe in the narrative. The first is that people may feel unsafe seeing evidence that contradicts what they’ve been told by the authorities, the mainstream media and the social media giants; the ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Watching Tucker Carlson’s review of the evidence might make people feel unsafe, uncertain, sceptical towards the propaganda, relentlessly pushed towards them; this is what happens when you discover you’ve been deceived by someone you trusted. You feel unsafe for you don’t know who to trust any more.

Keep reading

The left’s newest stealth attack on free speech

America’s two most important rights are free speech and the right to bear arms. Without the first, no people are free; and without the second, there is no first. Totalitarians always go after both; that is, they silence and disarm them. For decades, the left has been open in its war on the Second Amendment. They’ve struggled more with the war on speech, but they may finally have come up with a new approach that will sneak around constitutional muster.

When it comes to speech that incites violence or is otherwise imminently threatening, the law has always been clear: The threat must be very explicit and imminent for the speech to lose its First Amendment protections. At the most simplistic level, saying, “I wish so-and-so were dead” is not an actionable opinion. However, saying, “I’m going to kill so-and-so this week” or “You all need to kill so-and-so; I’ve got a plan” is criminally actionable speech. (The standard is more sensitive when speech is directed at the president, of course.)

This constitutional limitation on making (conservatives’) political speech criminally actionable has long vexed the left. They’ve trained their young acolytes that speech is violence (so much say that almost half of college students say “hate speech” should get the death penalty) but, so far, courts haven’t fallen for that gambit. Unless speech creates an imminent threat, it gets a pass.

Lately, though, the left has come up with a new concept that seeks to say that any speech that opposes leftist policies is actual and imminent “terrorism.” Or as leftist academia calls it, “stochastic terrorism.”

Keep reading