Tag: censorship

Activists complain bipartisan antitrust law proposal could make online censorship more difficult

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act that is currently making its way through Senate committees before being put up for the final vote, is attracting attention both from those who support it and Big Tech’s lobbyists, who earlier reports said had already launched a broad campaign against it.

The bill that has so far received bipartisan support, aims to significantly limit the way Apple, Amazon, and Google use their monopolistic business practices to undermine competition and antitrust laws.

Either by design or coincidence, it isn’t just openly lobbying firms who are attacking the bill from various angles; they are joined by organizations like Free Press, which claims it is nonpartisan and fighting “for your right to connect and communicate.”

However, in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Free Press sees a “flaw” that would, essentially, make connecting and communicating easier – and doesn’t like it. Namely, the bill, if passed, they argue, could prevent censorship, specifically of what’s labeled as “hate speech or misinformation.”

Keep reading

Instagram says it will cut the reach of posts that are “likely” to contain “hate speech”

Instagram is introducing more vaguely defined restrictions on its users, this time acting “proactively” to lower Feed posts and Stories that “may” contain bullying or hate speech, or those which “may” encourage violence – as well as content that is “potentially upsetting.”

In a blog post, Facebook’s platform said that this means the already existing policy of reducing the reach of posts determined to contain misinformation by third-party “fact-checkers” – and all posts from accounts that are said to have shared misinformation “repeatedly” – is being expanded.

It is Instagram’s “systems” that will be tasked with making the distinction between what “may” or is “likely” or “potentially” contains hate speech and represents bullying. The blog post explains that (algorithms) will make these decisions by comparing captions – if a caption is similar to another that was already found to be violating the platform’s rules, then the post will be pushed down Feeds and Stories.

Instagram also said that the new policy, that smacks of shadow-banning, affects individual posts and not accounts themselves, and that posts Instagram actually thinks break its rules, rather than suspect them to, will be removed, as before.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.)

Keep reading