Tag: censorship

The New York Times Admits That ‘America Has a Free Speech Problem’

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note of “America’s free speech problem” and points to both right-wing legislation and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as culprits.

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved) condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly attacking the left’s censorship impulse.

“Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” wrote The Times. “Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

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People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put $200,000 toward Kyiv Independent’s funding. The outlet is being so loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms“) has gained a million followers since the start of the Russian invasion.

Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the US-centralized empire‘s propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent news outlet. It’s very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if you don’t know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.

This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, “The US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality through propaganda.”

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This Is the End of Free Speech Online

The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.

This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.

Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.

What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.

Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.

Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.

After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.

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Twitter blocked links to Daily Mail article that questioned Covid death stats

Twitter has put a warning on an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, one of the biggest news outlets in the country, that describes the article as potentially being “unsafe.”

The article is written by the newspaper’s deputy health editor, Eve Simmons, and discusses how official government figures vastly overstated the COVID-19 death rate due to bad reporting.

“Warning: this link may be unsafe,” Twitter displays when users  go to click the link to the article.

“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy,” it says at the time of writing.

It’s unclear who these “partners” are that have called for the censorship of the article.

“Health chiefs admitted, embarrassingly, that the numbers they’d been feeding the Government were only an approximation – provoking fury from Ministers,” the article reads.

“More recently it was revealed that a quarter of Omicron deaths included in the daily figures did not, in fact, list Covid as a primary cause.

“More than two years since Covid-19 emerged, many feel they want a simple answer: how many were killed by this virus?

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Science papers now subject to extreme censorship if they question the “official” narrative on anything: COVID, AIDS, vaccines, climate, virology and more

The “moderators” at Cornell University‘s arXiv server, an open-access archive and free distribution service for scientific material, have been censoring scientific studies that they claim contain “inflammatory content and unprofessional language.”

A “preprint server” for preliminary versions of scientific studies that are moderated but not yet peer-reviewed or published, arXiv is supposed to be neutral when it comes to what gets published. The reality, however, is that arXiv is selectively censoring studies and even banning scientists for publishing work with “controversial” viewpoints.

In one instance, researchers tried to publish a study presenting an opposing viewpoint to another study about room temperature superconductivity. Those researchers aligned with the opposing point of view study are reportedly now “in hot water” on arXiv for daring to buck the “consensus.”

The server also proceeded to ban University of California San Diego (UCSD) theoretical physicist Jorge Hirsch from posting anything on the platform for six months as punishment for his conflicting viewpoints.

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Google will soon ask Australian users to show ID to view some content

Governments all over the world have started pushing for ways to collect ID on social media users, often under the guise of providing a safe space for kids online.

In about a month, Australian users will be asked to provide age verification documents like a driver’s license, passport, or credit card to access age-restricted content on the Play Store and YouTube.

The move complies with the “Online Safety Declaration 2022,” which requires platforms to verify age before allowing users to see age-restricted content.

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Russia’s RT television network can no longer be legally broadcast on Canadian screens, CRTC rules

Canada’s federal broadcast regulator has ruled that RT, a Kremlin-controlled network, can no longer legally be carried on Canadian television screens.

“Freedom of speech and a range of perspectives are a necessary part of our democracy. However, it is a privilege and not a right to be broadcast in Canada,” the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission wrote in its decision on Wednesday.

The CRTC statement added that the regulator is “concerned with programming from a foreign country that seeks to undermine the sovereignty of another country, demean Canadians of a particular ethnic background and undermine democratic institutions within Canada.”

The decision came after an expedited hearing into whether the English-language channel and its French service, RT France, should be allowed on Canadian TV screens, following Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

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UK Online Safety Bill, that will censor some “legal but harmful” content, presented to Parliament

The Online Safety Bill, the most far-reaching online censorship law to ever be proposed in the UK, has been presented to Parliament.

UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to “make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online.”

However, as with many bills that are positioned as a way to keep children safe, this Online Safety Bill contains sweeping speech restrictions that will affect all UK internet users.

The bill requires Big Tech companies to take action against “priority legal but harmful” content which will be decided by the government. The DCMS Secretary of State has the power to add more categories of priority legal but harmful content via secondary legislation in the future.

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YouTube Flags Tulsi Gabbard’s Criticism of “War Machine” as “Offensive” Content

YouTube flagged a Fox News interview in which former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said war in Ukraine was good for the military industrial complex as “offensive” content.

Yes, really.

Apparently, upsetting war profiteering defense contractors is now grounds for censorship.

During the interview, host Laura Ingraham asked Gabbard why people were still demanding no fly zones, something that would likely cause World War III, when President Zelensky was “stepping back from his earlier NATO wishes and even demands?”

Gabbard responded by pointing out that Zelensky has said he’s willing to negotiate with Putin and “set this NATO membership thing aside.”

According to YouTube, such advocacy for peace is borderline content and needs to be hidden behind a warning screen. The video is also age-restricted.

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Vimeo bans “fake news” that creates “a serious risk of material harm”

Video sharing platform Vimeo has updated its terms of service to ban “fake news, deepfakes, propaganda, or unproven or debunked conspiracy theories” that create “a serious risk of material harm to a person, group, or the general public.”

Vimeo’s previous terms banned “conspiracy-related content where the underlying conspiracy theory makes claims that…a real-world tragedy did not occur” but didn’t reference fake news, deepfakes, propaganda, or unproven or debunked conspiracy theories.

These new terms also ban “false claims that a violent crime or catastrophe has occurred.”

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