Tag: censorship

Dallas police to limit more details on crimes from public view

Public information used by news outlets to report breaking news and neighborhood groups to monitor crime will be harder to access in Dallas.

Names are being redacted from public reports, and there are plans to delay real-time information about active crimes in the city.

City staff started quietly changing what shows up in open records and only said an “incident” spurred it. But it’s still unclear what that incident was. At least one member of the city council wants answers.

Certain records aren’t as open on the city of Dallas’ open records website.

The city stopped putting in the personal information for people who report or witness crimes. And it plans to redact more information and even delay real-time active 911 call data for 24 hours. 

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Authors and Their ‘Progressive’ Book Publisher Sue Sen. Elizabeth Warren Over Free Speech

Aprogressive publishing company and the authors of a book critical of the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus emergency have sued Sen. Elizabeth Warren for allegedly attempting to pressure Amazon.com into yanking their title, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal.

Joining Chelsea Green Publishing and authors Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath, and Ronnie Cummins in the suit against Warren is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known vaccine critic who wrote the forward to the book.

The lawsuit is based on a lengthy letter Warren wrote to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy accusing the company he runs of “peddling misinformation” by labeling the book a “best-seller” and allowing it to be at the top of results when consumers search for information about COVID-19.

Chelsea Green Publishing was founded in 1984 to promote “progressive politics” along with “sustainable living…and, most recently, integrative health and wellness,” according to its website, and its titles have earned accolades from The New York Times and several other outlets.

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Media outlets campaign to get Facebook to censor climate “misinformation”

A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.

These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.

One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”

The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.

The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.

“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.

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Big Tech announces climate change “misinformation” to be the next censorship target

After “tackling” – some say disastrously for online speech – the topics of US elections and Covid by promoting content that is considered “authoritative” and suppressing, to various degrees, everything else, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are further narrowing the space for their users’ free expression.

These enormous digital squares, the social platforms-turned-approved speech enforcers will now add climate change to the list of issues discussions about which are strictly controlled and censored, when information users post or share clashes with the giants’ idea of what’s true and what’s false.

Media like Axios already have something akin to a pejorative for those who happen not to be on board the current climate change narrative – their stance is described as “climate denialism.”

And as the elites are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland for the UN-sponsored COP26 summit, tech giants who operate some of the biggest social media platforms on the planet are using the opportunity to “finally” fall in line and contribute with the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) they have to offer – censorship, and manipulation of content visibility and reach.

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The UK plans to make online “pile-ons” a crime, in chillingly broad attempt to suppress speech

The UK is preparing to criminalize what is perceived as internet trolling that causes “likely psychological harm,” thanks to the country’s upcoming Online Safety Bill that is introducing a new set of criminal offenses.

And while the punishment internet users in the UK could face under the new legislation is clear – up to two years in prison – the definitions of their “crimes” are a good deal murkier.

In addition to their posts “likely” causing psychological harm, users can also be accused of committing a crime if they post messages containing “threatening communication” – but not necessarily, as defined in the previous law dealing with online hate speech and abuse, because they are found to intend to follow through on the threat.

Instead, it would be enough to “prove” that the recipient of such posts and messages “feared” the threat was real.

Another offense has to do with spreading information that internet users “know” is false, again, in order to cause emotional or physical harm to their “likely audience.” The proposed bill is littered with equally vague and subjective definitions of future crimes that could be hard to prove in a court of law.

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport incorporated the “likely psychological harm” as a basis for the new legislation, as recommended by the Law Commission, and will include them in the bill once it is forwarded to the UK government, which should approve it before it hits parliament in November.

Another recommendation that has been accepted is to make online “pile-ons” a crime – i.e., several users sending trolling messages perceived by the recipient as harassing, while one example a government source gave to the media of what it means to “knowingly” spread false information would be if a vaccine skeptic or a vaccine hesitant person speaks about their conviction – that is apparently automatically considered untrue, while the author is held responsible for “knowing” it.

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Afghanistan watchdog accuses State Department of ‘bizarre’ attempt to censor embarrassing information

State Department officials attempted to censor watchdog reports on U.S. efforts in Afghanistan as Taliban militants swept across the country, according to a top oversight official.

“Some of the requests were bizarre, to say the least,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Ropko said Friday. “State requested we redact Ashraf Ghani’s name from our reports. While I’m sure the former president may wish to be excised from the annals of history, I don’t believe he faces any threats simply from being referenced by SIGAR.”

The requests extended a pattern of information suppression that the auditor described as “outrageous” and “offensive.” The habit of hiding embarrassing information damaged public debates about the conduct of the war and set the stage for the tragic chaos of the final evacuation from Kabul’s international airport.

“In my opinion, the full picture of what happened in August, and all the warning signs that could have predicted the outcome, will only be revealed if the information that the departments of Defense and State have already restricted from public release is made available,” Ropko said in his prepared remarks. “But as SIGAR has experienced all too often in the past, good intentions for transparency by senior leaders are frequently thwarted by bureaucratic inertia or fear of the public knowing the truth.”

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Facebook employee said censorship colleagues were “drunk on power”

A Facebook data scientist accused fellow employees of being “drunk on power” for censoring posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who killed two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at the height of last summer’s riots.

The data scientist said some of the censored posts did not violate the platform’s policies as they were discussing whether Rittenhouse was being treated fairly and if he was acting in self-defense. Rittenhouse’s official stance at trial will be self-defense.

Facebook removed many posts supporting Rittenhouse because its policies prohibit the praising of “mass shootings” and “mass shooters.”

In Facebook internal discussions, obtained by the New York Post, most employees agreed with the censorship of pro-Rittenhouse posts. However, one employee, a data scientist, disagreed.

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Google blocked animal rights group from blowing whistle on NIH-funded cruel dog experiments

Last month, Google removed ads by an animal advocacy group that was raising awareness on cruel dog experiments that received funding from a Dr. Anthony Fauci-led division of the National Institute of Health (NIH). The search giant was not clear on the policies that the ads violated.

While the cruel animal experimentation story is now a national scandal, the public could have learned about it earlier if it were not for Big Tech censorship.

The White Coat Waste Project (WCW) is an animal advocacy group that raises awareness on taxpayer-funded experiments involving animals. The group investigates government-backed research and creates public awareness of these questionable research projects.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, WCW discovered that Fauci’s division of the NIH had “spent $424,000 to commission a study in which healthy beagles are given an experimental drug and then intentionally infested with flies that carry a disease-causing parasite that affects humans.”

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