Tag: censorship

Forbes deletes article alleging psychological trauma in mask-wearing for kids

Forbes removed an article that alleges psychological damage of mask-wearing in kids after it was shared on Twitter and started to get traction. The ideas shared in the article contradict the public health bodies and government advisories on the importance of mask-wearing.

The article discouraging mask-wearing in kids went viral after it was shared by Twitter user NYC Angry Mom. They encouraged people to read the article, adding: “I’m just speechless that someone finally understands that masks on children are not benign.”

The tweet had been shared at least 400 times.

The deleted article (archive) was written by Zak Ringelstein, a PhD holder in Education at Columbia university and founder of Zigadoo, an educational and developmental app for kids.

Ringelstein begins the article by describing how he has spent his career advocating for the removal of standardized testing because of “the havoc it has wreaked on the mental health and well-being of American schoolchildren, especially kids from low-income families.”

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Twitter’s ‘Safety Mode’ is just a new way to silence opponents to the tech giant’s woke social justice agenda

Ever keen to be seen doing more about online abuse among its users, Twitter has decided to nobble free speech with a novelty ‘Safety Mode’ button, which might reduce offence. Exactly what ‘offence’ means is up to the tech giant.

Something about Twitter has long irritated me, not so much the platform itself but the smug self-righteousness of a bunch of tech nerds adopting the moral high ground over the inalienable right to free speech.

I’m not just talking about Jack Dorsey and his Silicon Valley sidekicks who blocked Donald Trump’s social media account, but about their woke-fevered, sanctimonious, purse-lipped wowserish approach in imposing their own values in judging what should and shouldn’t be allowed to be said within their software apps.

Now, using the pretext of “Safety” –I mean, gimme a break– Twitter has announced a new “Safety Mode” which will automatically block, for seven days, “accounts that add unwanted replies, Quote Tweets and mentions to your convos.” Seven days. Smiley face with tears emoji.

Firstly, if unwanted replies or mentions on Twitter are the sort of thing that spoil your day, then might I suggest, my little snowflake friend, that social media is not the place for you. And if you believe that your life will be enhanced because you chose to switch on “Safety Mode,” then more fool you for signing up to the latest tech that implicitly denies the right to free speech.

Because Twitter has turned taking offence into a maths problem. No one is actually reading your tweets or replies to figure out if offence was caused – intentionally or otherwise – no, as a senior product manager explained, “When the feature is turned on in your Settings, our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier.”

Our systems, hey? What sort of systems are they? And what sort of data will they be trawling through, analysing, keeping and using in the future? Just one click on a little green button on your phone can forever change your relationship with Twitter and the way they target you with their insidious promotions. Think about that.

That fatal click could also blow a real human-to-human relationship out of the water. Twitter’s bot decides you’ve been slighted and the offender it identifies is sin-binned for seven days. While you can unblock, it’s too late, the damage is done. They were deemed ‘abusive’ before Twitter came to the rescue and they were silenced. Now you have to pick up the pieces.

It sounds petty, but it’s the prim, disapproving nanny looking over your shoulder that gets my goat. No one voted for anyone at Twitter to monitor the public discourse on social justice and that’s exactly where you know they’ll be targeting their bots. Discussions on race, gender and even climate change will most likely be judged on Twitter’s terms, the conversation manipulated by an algorithm so that those voices taking the most offence prevail in the debate and those that dissent are simply labelled ‘abusive’ and silenced.

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Internet Shutdown Emerging As Authoritarian Weapon Of Choice

Over the last decade, governments worldwide have intentionally shut down the internet at least 850 times, with a whopping 90% of those shutdowns taking place over just the last five years.

What’s behind this troubling trend? “More people are getting online and getting access to the internet,” said Marianne Díaz Hernández, a lawyer in Venezuela and a fellow with the nonprofit Access Now. “As governments see this as a threat, they start thinking the internet is something they need to control.”

These staggering statistics come from a new report released Wednesday by Access Now and Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet that focuses on addressing societal threats with technology. The report documents the history of internet shutdowns over the last decade, the economic toll shutdowns take on the countries that impose them and what governments and the broader business and civil society community can do to stop what has fast become a widespread and grave human rights violation.

Felicia Anthonio leads Access Now’s #KeepItOn campaign, which has been documenting internet shutdowns since 2016. “Internet shutdowns don’t ensure stability or resolve crises that are happening,” Anthonio said. “It’s actually endangering people’s lives.”

The report, published in Jigsaw’s publication The Current, traces the recent spate of internet shutdowns back to the five-day shutdown in Egypt in 2011. Though exact data on every shutdown that has ever happened is non-existent and smaller-scale blackouts had taken place before that, the authors write, “never before had an entire country, one where more than a quarter of the population was connected to the internet, simply severed itself from the open web.”

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Reddit Bans Vaccine-Skeptic Subreddit r/NoNewNormal – Days After CEO Said He Wouldn’t

Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) said that the site will not ban covid-19 misinformation because it values “dissent.”

Huffman, who once moderated a subreddit on cannibalism, said that while the site will encourage users to seek authoritative information on Covid-19 from the CDC, it would not stop people from posting content that runs counter to government guidelines.

“Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate,” Huffman wrote in a lengthy post. 

Huffman’s note came in response to dozens of subreddits having gone ‘private’ protest the vaccine and mask-skeptic ‘r/NoNewNormal’ subreddit – vowing to stay locked until it was banned from the platform.

On Wednesday, Reddit did just that, banning NoNewNormal. Admin ‘worstnerd’ posted an even lengthier screed defending their about-face. In it, he accuses NoNewNormal users – without evidence – of ‘brigading’ other forums (invading them to cause trouble).

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NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

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Twitter Permanently Bans Alex Berenson After Viral COVID Tweets

It was never a matter of if, but when.

Science journalist Alex Berenson has been permanently suspended from Twitter, just one day after a viral series of tweets spotlighting an Israeli preprint study which showed that natural immunity from a prior Covid-19 infection is 13 times more effective than vaccines against the delta variant.

“The account you referenced has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told Fox News.

The last tweet he posted, meanwhile, accurately noted that the vaccine “doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission.”

“Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” he added. “Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.”

“And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

“This was the tweet that did it. Entirely accurate. I can’t wait to hear what a jury will make of this,” wrote Berenson on his substack blog, Unreported Truths.

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Active Duty, Retired Naval Intelligence Members Told They Cannot ‘Disrespect’ Biden Over Afghanistan Debacle

`Top leadership at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) informed active duty and retired service members that they cannot condemn President Joe Biden amid the chaotic — and now deadly — pullout of American troops from Afghanistan. 

In an email from the ONI’s Chief of Staff, ONI members were reminded that per a Uniform Code of Military Justice and Department of Defense Directive clause they cannot disrespect senior government leadership. This includes the President, Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, and more. 

The email reads: 

Given the heightened political and social atmosphere surrounding Afghanistan, it is important to remind our uniformed personnel (active duty and reservists on temporary active duty) and military retirees of their responsibilities and obligations under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Department of Defense Directive 1344.10. While it is vital to protect the constitutional right of freedom of expression for these groups, consistent with mission accomplishment, national security, and good order and discipline, it’s important to remember certain limitations. Namely, uniformed personnel and military retirees are prohibited from disrespecting senior government leadership (e.g. the President, Vice President, Congress, Secretary of Defense, Service Secretaries, etc.).

Per the same uniformed personnel policy, ONI members cannot participate in partisan political activity or distribute partisan political literature. An internal ONI member told The Daily Wire that these policies were more relaxed under the Trump administration and recalled retired officers condemning the former President. 

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Twitter Locks House Candidate Jarome Bell’s Account Because Taliban Has ‘Recognized Right to Privacy’ When They Execute People

Virginia Congressional candidate Jarome Bell was locked out of his Twitter account after posting a Taliban execution video, because the Big Tech site determined that Afghan terrorists have a “recognized right to privacy.”

Conservatives and others across the political spectrum have been critical of the Joe Biden administration over the chaos that has resulted from the attempt to pull US troops out of Afghanistan. One of them was Jarome Bell, a candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 2nd District. “These men assisted our troops and were left behind with over 15000 Americans,” Bell wrote on Twitter, attaching a video of Taliban fighters executing men who were believed to have worked with American and Allied forces in the country. “This will be Joe Biden’s legacy and the democrats and some of you approve of this message.”

As a result, Bell’s Twitter account was locked, with the Big Tech platform seemingly determining that the video of Taliban executions violated the privacy of those involved. Specifically, Bell’s tweet allegedly violated their rules on “posting private media of an individual from a country with a recognized right to privacy law.” It is unclear how this could be the case, given that the Afghanistan government and therefore any regime that could implement such a law, has fallen to the Taliban.

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Facebook Reported To Secretly Be Building An Election “Misinformation” Censorship Board

Forming an “election commission” to oversee a fair and smooth election process, until recently, used to be something exclusively reserved for nation states, but now Facebook is reported to be meddling in that domain, at least semantics-wise.

The New York Times reported that the “commission” could be coming this fall, just in time to affect the way US midterm election campaigns are carried out on the giant platform.

The way these announcements are interpreted currently is that the “election commission” will play a role similar to that the Oversight Board already has in dealing with content censorship on Facebook, only clearly focused on election related content.

The Board is referred to as independent, brings together a number of academics and experts, and is ultimately seen by critics as another way for Facebook to wash its hand off the responsibility in how diverse politically and ideologically sensitive content is treated and “moderated.” Another notorious way is Facebook’s third party “fact checkers.”

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US Surgeon General says there’s “not nearly enough” social media censorship

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, criticized social media platforms for not doing enough to stop the spread of “misinformation” online.

“The speed, scale and sophistication with which it is spreading and impacting our health is really unprecedented,” Murthy said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “And it’s happening largely, in part, aided and abetted by social-media platforms.”

The Surgeon General did acknowledge that these platforms were already working to censor but said what they are doing is “not nearly enough.”

“There are people who are super-spreaders of misinformation,” he said. “And there are algorithms, still, which continue to serve up more and more misinformation to people who encounter it the first time. These are things that companies can and must change. And I think they have a moral responsibility to do so quickly and transparently.”

Murthy’s remarks came shortly after Facebook released its “content transparency report,” revealing the most viewed content.

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