Tag: censorship

Free Speech Dies Because We Stop Speaking Freely, Not The Other Way Around

Newly elected House Republicans have every political reason to hold investigative hearings into government abuse of power during Covid. While these hearings should have happened long ago, they will no doubt vindicate many Americans who suffered under the capricious reign of public health officials. Central to this investigation will be an inquiry into government attempts to manipulate public opinion.

We already know that officials misrepresented opinion as fact and covertly suppressed contrary information. The pronouncements of bureaucrats, who cared more for their own celebrity and power than the truth, went largely unchallenged. This represents a failure of constitutional guarantees to free speech — a failure Republicans will be happy to broadcast as yet more evidence of an out-of-control bureaucracy.

It’s tempting to think a tyrannical bureaucracy is to blame for our embarrassing foray into censorship. But if we accept this explanation, assign blame, and move on, we ignore a cultural rot that is far more dangerous than any government overreach. It is ordinary Americans, not bureaucrats, who are most to blame for censorship, because citizens are the ultimate defense against the suppression of speech, not the government.  

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Group for those affected by pandemic response appeal to Elon Musk after account was banned this week

Twitter has suspended Law or Fiction, a group dedicated to those who have been impacted by the UK government’s response to Covid-19. The group advocates for citizens, lawyers, and medical professionals.

The Law or Fiction account was maintained by British Lawyer Stephen Jackson who, in an open video, addressed new Twitter CEO Elon Musk and said that Twitter gave no reason for the ban that happened this week.

“I don’t know the reasons for it. There was no strike system warning me of the closure,” Jackson said in the video.

“All I can tell you is that I had linked to the authorization of the bivalent Covid-19 vaccine, so-called, for children aged 12 and upwards. I put the words ‘vaccine’ in inverted commas. I referred to ‘experimental’ – and that seems fair enough given that this has not been trialed on humans and if we give new technology to animals we call it experimental…We don’t know the long-term effects of the technology – that’s something with Pfizer itself admits,” Jackson explained.

“So quite what the misinformation was I don’t know,” Jackson added. “What this seems to be is an attack on comment, on debate.”

Jackson called out Elon Musk specifically, saying, he “understood” Musk to be keen on comment and debate and on “free speech,” saying he’s not going to get to Mars by suppressing “debate about the science.”

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DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events

Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.

What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:

  • 22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
  • 859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
  • 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
  • 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
  • <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
  • Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
  • Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.

While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS’s “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS’s speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.

That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.

At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS’s speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS’s “government censorship by proxy.”

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The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.”

Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface ― who could be against combating false information, which is rife online? ― it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” ― comments that were only reported in right-wing media.

The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship. Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.”

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Who Authorized the Department of Homeland Security to Police Online Speech? Not Congress

When George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the goal was to improve national security by strengthening government at various levels and helping them identify and respond to threats, particularly terrorism.

”The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response,” said Bush. ”Dozens of agencies charged with homeland security will now be located within one cabinet department with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.”

The law contained “severe privacy and civil liberties problems,” the ACLU argued, but the legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Only nine Senators voted against it (eight Democrats and one Independent).

Bush tapped Tom Ridge as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, but public policy experts admitted it was unclear precisely what the new department would do.

”The first challenge is to lower expectations,” Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution told The New York Times. ”People should think they will be safer, but remember we have a long way to go.”

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Study Details How Media, Big Tech Censored Doctors and Scientists Who Challenged COVID Narrative

A groundbreaking new scientific paper published Tuesday exposes the suppression and censorship of doctors and medical experts who opposed and challenged the official COVID-19 narrative.

Published in the sociological journal Minerva, “Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics,” details the experiences of medical professionals who spoke out against public health directives, and how they responded to efforts to suppress them.

The paper was co-authored by a team of Israeli and Australian scholars, including Yaffa Shir-Raz of the University of Haifa in Israel, Ety Elisha of The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel, Brian Martin of the University of Wollongong in Australia, Natti Ronel of Bar Ilan University in Israel, and Josh Guetzkow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

As noted by Dr. Robert Malone, himself an outspoken critic of COVID-19 “orthodoxy,” the publication of this article is particularly significant as Minerva is released by “mainstream academic publisher” Springer, a “Q1 journal in its subfield” of sociology with a “decent” research impact factor in the social sciences — meaning that it enjoys a strong reputation within its academic field.

Malone said the article also is notable because one of its authors, Yaffa Shir-Raz, “broke the story with video from the internal meeting at the Israeli ministry of health” on “how they hid many of the key findings regarding the Pfizer mRNA vaccine adverse effects.”

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Canada’s Bill C-11 explained: A chilling law that lets the government censor user-generated content

Canada’s Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) is one of several recent attempts by Western governments to crush online speech while claiming that they support free expression.

The bill is being pushed by Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez — a politician who believes that unregulated speech “erodes the foundations of democracy.” And it has the full support of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a world leader who previously said freedom of expression isn’t “freedom to hate.”

The Trudeau regime first attempted to pass a version of this bill in 2020. However, this bill (Bill C-10) failed in 2021 after mass pushback over the way it attempted to censor online speech.

After Bill C-10 died, Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of the Canadian Conservative Party of Canada who was serving as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 2021, warned critics of Bill C-10 to “make sure that we’re ready the next time Trudeau and his team come for our freedom of expression.”

And just one year later, Trudeau and his team did just that by resurrecting Bill C-10 and renaming it Bill C-11.

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Senator Dick Durbin says free speech doesn’t protect “misinformation” that downplays political violence

“Free speech does not include spreading misinformation to downplay political violence,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted – referencing an alleged “uptick in hate speech” since Elon Musk took Twitter private.

“Misinformation” is protected by the First Amendment.

The uptick that Senator Durbin is referencing was a bot campaign that Twitter suggests was used to troll the platform and the media as soon as Musk took control of the company.

Senator’s Durbin’s comments followed Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeting a link to an article containing claims about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

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Judge Rejects Biden Administration’s Attempt to Block Depositions in Big Tech-Government Censorship Case

The Biden administration’s attempt to block depositions of several key officials was turned down Nov. 2 by a U.S. judge.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, rejected a request for a partial stay of his Oct. 21 order authorizing the depositions of eight officials, including President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Government lawyers asked the judge to impose the partial stay as an appeals court weighs a request to vacate the part of his order that enables the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to the president.

Absent a stay, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants” their request, the government said.

Doughty ruled that the government failed to show how the officials would be irreparably harmed apart from referencing a diversion from “significant duties.” That didn’t meet the standard for showing irreparable harm, he said.

On the other hand, the plaintiffs, including the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, would be irreparably harmed by a partial stay because they’ve alleged a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and ‘The loss of First Amendment freedoms, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,’” Doughty said, quoting from a ruling in a separate case.

“The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions,” he added.

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How the government hid the truth behind Hunter Biden’s laptop

The more we find out about the collusion that has been going on among the Biden administration, the security agencies and Big Tech, the more alarming it is — and the more unrepentant they are.

The latest bombshell from The Intercept, based on communications unveiled in the federal lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, shows that the Department of Homeland Security has been having monthly meetings with Facebook and Twitter to pressure them to censor social-media posts about topics such as the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of COVID vaccines, racial justice and US support for the war in Ukraine — In other words, anything that could be detrimental to public support for the Biden administration.

We already know that the FBI was involved in efforts to censor and bury information that might have harmed Joe Biden’s candidacy back in 2020, including The Post’s exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020. That amounted to election interference, which successfully prevented the American people from doing the necessary due diligence on one of the two candidates for president. So successful was the strategy that the Biden administration appears to have expanded it.

Security agencies have switched their attention from combating foreign disinformation to censoring the speech of American citizens who dissent from the government-approved narrative. No matter that free speech is protected by the First Amendment; if the Biden administration doesn’t like the speech, they label it “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malformation,” and they are deputizing the FBI and DHS to strong­arm Big Tech to censor it and de-platform serial offenders.

It doesn’t matter what brand your politics is, this is Stasi stuff.

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