China-owned social network TikTok is blocking users from searching for the phrase “white lives matter,” following rapper Kanye West’s recent appearance wearing a “White Lives Matter” sweater to his nine-year-old daughter North’s basketball game last week, as well as the Yeezy show in Paris earlier in the week.
Users that search for the phrase, get a “no results found” message, with further details saying that the phrase “may be associated with hateful behavior.”
Issues & Insights (I&I) is a terrific conservative website whose writers came from the editorial board of Investors Business Daily. I&I writes smart content that goes after the left, often mercilessly — and, hey, it features PJ Media on its list of recommended websites, so you can see how intelligent I&I is.
One of the key contributors to I&I is cartoonist Michael Ramirez. Even if you don’t know his name, chances are you’ve seen his cartoons. They’re perceptive, thought-provoking, gut-busting, and solidly conservative.
But Google is targeting I&I and Ramirez’s work. Here’s how I&I explains it:
Google’s AdSense network – which is used by some 3.5 million websites to generate revenue – defines “shocking content” as content that:
- contains gruesome, graphic, or disgusting accounts or imagery.
- depicts acts of violence.
- contains a significant amount of or prominently features obscene or profane language.
We appealed this ruling with Google and were denied. No explanation was offered, of course. And there’s no possible way to know what would constitute a “fix” that would satisfy Google.
Referring specifically to Ramirez, I&I’s editors say that “Ramirez’s cartoons can be provocative. They can be hilarious. They can be deadly serious. But they are works of art.” And they’re right. That’s the nature of political cartoons in general, whether they’re from the left or right, but Google is specifically targeting Ramirez.
PayPal on Oct. 8 said it was not implementing a new policy that would have enabled the company to seize money from users who allegedly promote “misinformation” or “hate.”
“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy,” a PayPal spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” the spokesperson added.
The company in September announced that it was amending its acceptable use policy, or AUP.
The policy, due to take effect in November, said that users may not use PayPal to for the “sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.”
For each violation, PayPal says users are subject to repercussions. Those include “liquated damages” of $2,500 per violation. The money will be taken directly from a person’s PayPal account.
A new policy update from PayPal will permit the firm to sanction users who advance purported “misinformation” or present risks to user “wellbeing.”
The financial services company, which has repeatedly deplatformed organizations and individual commentators for their political views, will expand its “existing list of prohibited activities” on November 3. Among the changes are prohibitions on “the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation” or “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing.” Users are also barred from “the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory.”
The company’s current acceptable use policy does not mention such activities. The Daily Wire reached out to PayPal for definitions of the added terms, although no response was received in time for publication.
Deliberations will be made at the “sole discretion” of PayPal and may subject the user to “damages” — including the removal of $2,500 “debited directly from your PayPal account.” The company’s user agreement contains a provision in which account holders acknowledge that the figure is “presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages” due to the administrative cost of tracking violations and damage to the company’s reputation.
In a September interview that went viral on social media Sunday, a United Nations operative admitted the U.S. government-funded organization “partnered with Google” to rig the results returned on the world’s dominant search engine for the phrase “climate change.”
This follows multiple casual disclosures that, yes, politics control the information on monopoly tech platforms. In fact, government officials all the way up to the White House routinely use Big Tech to control what citizens are allowed to say to each other online, as an ongoing lawsuit from several U.S. attorneys general recently divulged.
The Biden White House is fighting further disclosures about high-level federal officials’ involvement in this government-pressured censorship regime, including Anthony Fauci and the White House press secretary. The companies involved include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the court documents say.
Earlier this year, a clip of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — who threw hundreds of millions of dollars obtained from his communications monopoly company into helping Democrat activists embed inside government election offices in 2020 — also went viral. It showed him telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI also controls the information Facebook allows people to share. The FBI’s meddling affected the 2020 presidential election outcome.
Claiming that four Italian scientists who published a peer-reviewed paper earlier this year finding that there is not yet evidence of any “climate crisis” wrote the study in “bad faith,” climate fanatic scientists are urging that the journal that published the study remove it from public view.
The study in question comes to the conclusion that the so-called “climate crisis” that the mainstream media say is already upon us is not evident — at least yet — and that it is counterproductive to claim that such a crisis exists.
The study, done by four Italian scientists — physicist Gianluca Alimonti, professor of agrometeorology Luigi Mariani, atmospheric physicist Franco Prodi, and physicist Renato Angelo Ricci — states that “the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
Further, the Italian study calls into question the wisdom of leaving such a “crisis” for our children without the necessary tools — fossil fuels, etc. — they will need to adapt to such a crisis should it ever come to bear.
“Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions,” the Italian study states.
The study was first published in January, and has been cited by mainstream media outlets such as Sky News Australia. Only now are other scientists, interviewed by French news service AFP, calling for the paper to be memory-holed.
Aconsortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.
The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.
The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file “tickets” requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.
Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.
In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensif[ying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.
The private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet.
Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators.
The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN also appeared on the list, though the consortium’s after-action report emphasizes most of the mainstream media reports “were referenced as fact-checks” that played a “corrective role” against “misleading narratives.”
The report also identified the 21 “most prominent repeat spreaders [of misinformation] on Twitter,” all of them politically classified as “right.” Actor James Woods led that group, followed by The Gateway Pundit blog, Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump himself. The report emphasized 15 were verified by Twitter.
On the heels of its censorship spree in the UK – that received backlash so great it got the attention of lawmakers – PayPal is rolling out a new agreement that gives itself more censorship powers and the ability to strip income from those who don’t abide to its speech rules.
Violation of the “Acceptable Use Policy constitutes a violation of the PayPal User Agreement and may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation,” PayPal writes.
PayPal’s clause about taking users’ funds for a violation of its rules has long been established. But, as published on September 26th and to be effective on November 3rd, 2022, PayPal will add restrictions to its acceptable use policy that go beyond illegal activities and fraud and into the realm of policing speech.
The updated policy prohibits users from using PayPal for activities that:
“Involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable … (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) … (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation … or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.”
Big Tech platforms are increasingly finding ways to punish people’s speech under the guise of banning “misinformation,” and making themselves as the arbiters of truth in deciding what is and isn’t true.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.