Tag: censorship

Twitter suspended New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon for questioning vaccine passports and mandates

New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon was silenced on Twitter and was only reinstated when he agreed to delete his tweet.

The tweet, posted on June 25, read “Given that we have crushed Covid with combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for.”

Twitter’s response to O’Scanlon’s Twitter post was to lock him out of his account without giving a specific reason as to why.

On Twitter, Republicans blasted the lawmaker’s detention. The state GOP called the action a “continuous and rising limitation of freedom of expression.”

On O’Scanlon’s timeline, the tweet has been deleted, with a warning that says, “This Tweet is no longer available because it violates the Twitter Rules.”

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Who Are the COVID-19 Misinformation ‘Dirty Dozen’ WH Wants to Silence?

On July 15, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki disclosed the fact that the White House was flagging COVID-19 misinformation posts for Facebook. She continued to dig herself into a hole on Friday, discussing how the administration is in contact with the social media companies and arguing that they needed to work across platforms to ensure the companies coordinated to ban users. She claimed that 12 individuals were responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook.

At some point on Friday, Twitter locked the account of journalist Alex Berenson, the author of the series Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns. When Psaki referred to the dozen users, it seemed logical to think that Berenson and others who have objected to the preferred narrative, like evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, would be on the list. Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have also given a platform to dissenting doctors. After following COVID-19 news very carefully for the last 18 months, I can say that all of these seem like logical targets for the administration.

As it turns out, none of them are on the list. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) produced a report called “The Disinformation Dozen,” based on its analysis of anti-vaccine Facebook posts. The CCDH is the same group that pushed for Google to demonetize The Federalist and ZeroHedge and for Twitter to ban British firebrand Katie Hopkins. According to Influence Watch, it is a UK-based NGO made up of people tied to the Labour Party. From the CCDH report’s executive summary:

Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.

Of the names on the list, one is easily recognizable, only because he is notoriously anti-vaccine and the son of a political dynasty:

  1. Joseph Mercola
  2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
  3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger
  4. Sherri Tenpenny
  5. Rizza Islam
  6. Rashid Buttar
  7. Erin Elizabeth
  8. Sayer Ji
  9. Kelly Brogan
  10. Christiane Northrup
  11. Ben Tapper
  12. Kevin Jenkins

According to the report, social media users shared many of the posts and articles written by these 12 individuals in anti-vaccine groups that existed before COVID-19. The CCDH called for the social media companies to work together to deplatform all 12 of these individuals and organizations that oppose vaccines:

  • Children’s Health Defense (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)
  • Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) (Del Bigtree)
  • National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) (Barbara Loe Fisher, Joseph Mercola)
  • Organic Consumers Association (OCA) (Joseph Mercola)
  • Millions Against Medical Mandates

Once you know the source of the users flagged by the White House, it blows up their message that this is a political issue driven by conservatives or confined to red states. The identified individuals are from all kinds of backgrounds. Some have been producing alternative health content and products for years. Almost all were opposed to vaccines before COVID-19, and some of them were so bold as to object to face masks. At least three base their opinion on past sins of the government in medical experimentation and speak specifically to those fears in the black community.

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“We’ve Got To Fight Disinformation,” Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation

The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

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Right or Left, You Should Be Worried About Big Tech Censorship

Conservatives are being censored

Claiming that “right-wing voices are being censored,” Republican-led legislatures in Florida and Texas have introduced legislation to “end Big Tech censorship.” They say that the dominant tech platforms block legitimate speech without ever articulating their moderation policies, that they are slow to admit their mistakes, and that there is no meaningful due process for people who think the platforms got it wrong.

They’re right.

So is everyone else

But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants. It’s Palestinians and other critics of Israel, including many Israelis. And it’s queer people, of course. We have a whole project tracking people who’ve been censored, blocked, downranked, suspended and terminated for their legitimate speech, from punk musicians to peanuts fans, historians to war crimes investigators, sex educators to Christian ministries. 

The goat-rodeo

Content moderation is hard at any scale, but even so, the catalog of big platforms’ unforced errors makes for sorry reading. Experts who care about political diversity, harassment and inclusion came together in 2018 to draft the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation but the biggest platforms are still just winging it for the most part.

The situation is especially grim when it comes to political speech, particularly when platforms are told they have a duty to remove “extremism.”

The Florida and Texas social media laws are deeply misguided and nakedly unconstitutional, but we get why people are fed up with Big Tech’s ongoing goat-rodeo of content moderation gaffes.

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Facebook faces lawsuit for suspending user who cited lack of evidence for masking children

An influential COVID policy skeptic is threatening to sue Facebook for suspending his account based on a graphic he posted Tuesday, titled “Masking Children is Impractical and Not Backed by Research or Real World Data.”

Justin Hart was identified in a recent MIT paper as one of a handful of “anchors” for the anti-mask network on Twitter. He’s also chief data analyst for the COVID contrarian website Rational Ground.

A warning letter to Facebook from Hart’s lawyers at the Liberty Justice Center said the graphic was “science-based and contains footnotes to scientific evidence supporting its claims.” Facebook issued him a three-day suspension the next day, citing the post as misinformation. The page remains live but the post is no longer there.

Hart’s mask argument is similar to one made recently by University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad. “No one has any clue” if the benefits of masking children outweigh the risks, he wrote in MedPage Today. “During the last year and half, the scientific community has failed to answer these questions. Failed entirely.”

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Big Tech and the ‘Single Point of Truth’

It was recently revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci was privately saying in emails that the SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At the same time, Big Tech was deleting posts and manipulating search results that raised the same questions. Hence, what else are scientists currently saying about the pandemic and possible vaccine side effects that Facebook may not want you to hear?

When Project Veritas broke the news on May 24, 2021, of two Facebook whistleblowers who revealed an extensive program to combat so-called “vaccine hesitancy” by censoring accurate information if it tended to make people question the COVID-19 vaccines developed at “warp speed,” we weren’t surprised.

The Big Tech consortium has long engaged in a program of deception against the American public, sold through the mainstream media as a campaign against “hate speech,” but which in reality is nothing less than an authoritarian campaign against diversity of thought.

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