Tag: censorship

Biden’s FCC Commissioner Nominee Gigi Sohn Wants To Nuke Right-Leaning Broadcasters From Air

President Joe Biden’s nominee for commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission hates Fox News and wants the federal agency to regulate conservative broadcasts because she disagrees with them.

The White House first announced Gigi Sohn as Biden’s FCC nominee in October.

“Gigi is one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks,” the Biden administration claimed. “For over thirty years, Gigi has worked to defend and preserve the fundamental competition and innovation policies that have made broadband Internet access more ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and protective of user privacy.”

Sohn’s inclination towards censorship and partisan regulation, however, torpedoed her chances of confirmation. Biden re-nominated Sohn at the beginning of the year but her chances of gaining Republican support are once again slim considering her history of criticizing and painting TV networks she disagrees with as threats to our democracy that need to be punished.

In one 2019 tweet, Sohn hinted that Fox News should be scrutinized because they “have played their own role in destroying democracy.”

“I agree that scrutiny of big tech is essential, as is scrutiny of big telecom, cable & media. And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy & electing autocrats. Like, say, Fox News?” she tweeted.

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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’

For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.

Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.

This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.

A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.

A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.

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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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270 Angry Scientists Cite MSM ‘Fact Checks’ In Open Letter Urging Spotify To Censor Joe Rogan

You knew it was coming…

Two weeks after Joe Rogan interviewed mRNA inventor Dr. Robert Malone on his Spotify podcast – which boasts 11 million viewers on average – an angry letter brigade of 270 doctors and scientists have written an open letter to Spotify to demand they censor Rogan and implement a Covid-19 “misinformation policy,” so that people, even highly trained virologist-immunologists such as Malone, can’t contradict ‘the science.’

Getting down to their core argument:

In episode #1757, Rogan hosted Dr. Robert Malone, who was suspended from Twitter for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. Dr. Malone used the JRE platform to further promote numerous baseless claims, including several falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and an unfounded theory that societal leaders have “hypnotized” the public. Many of these statements have already been discredited.

The links go to an instagram slideshow and three MSM ‘fact checks’ – one of which doesn’t even discuss Malone, and say his actions are not only “objectionable and offensive, but also medically and culturally dangerous.”

And of course, just three of the signatories are immunologists, roughly 10% are nurses or nurse practitioners, and 33 are some type of ‘assistant’ (professor, nurse, lab, etc.). In short – hardly any of these people are qualified to refute Malone, which is probably why they link to ‘fact checks’ instead of compiling their own response on the merits of what Malone said.

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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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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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