Tag: censorship

Emails Show Biden Campaign Pressured Facebook to Censor Trump Before the Election

Emails obtained by CNN reveal how the Biden campaign pressured Facebook to censor President Donald Trump before the 2020 election.

The messages reveal how Biden campaign officials repeatedly insisted that Facebook remove information that it deemed to be ‘violent rhetoric’, a concern that seemed to be absent during months of leftists rioting and burning down entire city blocks throughout the summer.

After a deluge of public and private complaints by members of Biden’s team and other Democrats, a former Biden campaign staffer said Facebook “essentially did nothing” in response.

The focus was primarily on the official Team Trump account, with Biden officials infuriated that Facebook didn’t remove enough videos that warned people of upcoming election fraud.

Gee, I wonder why they were concerned about that.

“It was the most frustrating series of conversations,” a Biden aide said. “We went to Facebook with a series of letters, public complaints, private emails and all throughout, they essentially did nothing.”

Naturally, CNN spins the story as an example of how Facebook failed to clamp down on “misinformation,” despite the social network giant banning many of Trump’s most prominent supporters before the election and engaging in industrial-scale levels of censorship of pro-Trump content.

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Now ‘trigger warning’ is banned by Brandeis University along with the ‘offensive’ phrases ‘picnic’, ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘take a shot at it’

A liberal arts college in Massachusetts has warned its students and faculty against using ‘violent language’ – even banning the phrase ‘trigger warning’ for its association with guns.

Brandeis University in Waltham has created an anti-violence resource called the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center which provides information and advice to students and staff. 

It lists words and idioms, including ‘picnic’ and ‘rule of thumb,’ which it claims are ‘violent’ and suggests dreary alternatives such as ‘outdoor eating’ for the former and ‘general rule’ for the latter.

The college claims that ‘picnic is often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people.’

Picnic is derived from the French ‘pique-nique,’ originally used to describe the taking of one’s own wine to a meal, which later evolved to encompass the sharing of food outdoors and started being used in England in the 18th century. 

Lynchings were often public spectacles and could be described as taking place in a picnic-like setting. A project by the Equal Justice Initiative entitled ‘Lynching in America’ notes that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, ‘white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.’

However, the word picnic itself is not derogatory and has no intrinsic links to slavery, lynchings or racism.  

Brandeis also disagrees with ‘rule of thumb’ which it claims ‘comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.’

But this is another spurious etymological interpretation which has been wrongly attached to the phrase by myth and rumour.

The precise origins of the phrase are unclear but it is meant in the sense of approximating something using the thumb rather than a specific tool – there is no evidence of a legal application to wife beating.

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New Video Shows University Of Oklahoma Faculty Teaching How To Silence And Punish ‘Problematic’ Conservatives

According to newly released video footage, University of Oklahoma instructors want to punish students who defy campus orthodoxy. Their plan is to “avoid ‘a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence’ that closes ears to marginalized voices,” by — you guessed it — silencing marginalized voices. 

On Tuesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit focused on protecting campus free speech, publicized video footage of an April 14 workshop on “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The workshop’s leaders presented slides about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “subverting white institutional defensiveness.” In an attempt to teach so-called antiracism, the workshop’s leaders also promoted censorship and indoctrination.

The event was “one of nine professional development workshops for instructors and grad students” at OU. During the workshop, three faculty members taught their colleagues “how to foster an anti-racist environment in their classrooms,” brainstorming tactics for dissuading, censoring, and penalizing “problematic” speech. 

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Democrats now demand all “hate speech” be banned from the internet… but THEY get to define hate speech, of course

Former Congressman Denver Riggleman and American Jewish Congress president Jack Rosen both want online free speech to come to an end, all in the name of stopping “hate.”

In a recent op-ed they co-wrote for Newsweek, Riggleman and Rosen condemned the social media platform Gab for allowing conservative voices like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to post “questionable” content.

Because Greene compared forced mask-wearing to the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, she has quickly become the scapegoat for trying to shut down all digital platforms that are not left-wing echo chambers.

According to Riggleman and Rosen, saying things that deviate from the official script is “hateful” and should not be allowed. Further, any platform where “hate” might have occurred, such as Gab, must be immediately shut down to promote “love.”

“There are two options for dealing with online platforms that promote hate – and potential violence – in our political system,” the op-ed reads.

“The first is to ban them. There are precedents in law where exceptions to the First Amendment regarding hate speech exist. These standards could be applied to political campaigns as well, making it clear that hate speech in support of political candidates will not be tolerated and that, by extension, funds raised by politicians on hate-based platforms like Gab will not be permitted.”

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Twitter Locks News Site’s Account for Report on Teen Boy Dying After Getting Vaccine

Twitter locked the account of the National File, a conservative-leaning news website, after it reported on a tweet from a woman who claimed her 13-year-old nephew died after receiving a second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed to news outlets it locked the National File’s account for 12 hours “in error.” The account has since been reinstated, but the outlet has now said the social media giant “has now suspended” reporter Jack Hadfield “for celebrating Twitter’s decision to reverse the suspension” of the publication.

The Epoch Times has contacted Twitter for comment.

According to the National File, the report that triggered the action from Twitter included claims from a woman, Tami Burages, who said her nephew died after getting the vaccine.

“Our family is devastated. I struggled with putting this out on twitter. I am pro-vaccine. We vaccinated my own 14-year-old son as soon as it was available. I know it is *mostly safe*. But Jacob is dead now,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) website guidance for vaccines stipulates that most COVID-19 vaccines should not be given to children, although an advisory panel in May advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that Pfizer’s vaccine could be administered to children aged 12 years and older.

“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment,” the WHO’s page on COVID-19 vaccines says in bold.

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Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: ‘Deplatforming Works’

“Deplatforming works,” boasted former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, who became notorious among Reddit users for her pro-censorship policies during her brief tenure as head of the company, in a tweet posted this week.

Pao made the tweet in response to a study that showed the decline in attention for a group of right-wing commentators in the wake of their bans from YouTube.

“Deplatforming hate works,” said Pao. “It worked on reddit in 2015, and now it’s working on YouTube.”

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Amazon Deletes America’s Frontline Doctor’s Website from the Internet – Doctors Scramble to Salvage Site

Amerca’s Frontline Doctors, the courageous group of doctors who spoke out against the government’s irresponsible and damaging COVID responses, had their website taken down by Amazon.

The AFLDS reported:

America’s Frontline Doctors website was deleted from the Internet by Amazon.

If you didn’t know, many top websites and services, such as Netflix, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and thousands of others, are hosted on Amazon’s Internet servers.

So it came as a surprise when AFLDS received notice from Amazon that they were deleting our website–and that they were giving us less than 4 days to get it off of their server before deleting it from the Internet forever.

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LinkedIn censors Swedish journalist’s profile in China after he references Tiananmen Square thesis

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has censored the profile of Swedish journalist Jojje Olsson in China after he included a single sentence in the “Education” section of his profile that referenced his thesis on the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Cultural Revolution.

LinkedIn is one of the few Western social networks to not be blocked in China because of its willingness to “implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content” and apply these restrictions to the profiles of non-Chinese users when they’re viewed from China.

By introducing this censored version of LinkedIn in China, the US platform has grown its Chinese user base to 53 million users and China is now its third-largest market.

LinkedIn didn’t specifically mention which part of the Education section in Olsson’s profile had led to the censorship but the sentence on the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Cultural Revolution is the only part of this section that references topics that are often censored by the Chinese state.

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Civil Rights Lawsuit Filed Against Democrats Over Censoring Americans’ Election Tweets

“California Democrats have access to a rapid response team at Twitter, which takes down tweets at the request of Democrats,” Mike Cernovich pointed out.

How can Democrats square their support for “democracy” with government and corporations rigging the election process to stifle the dissent of their opponents?

This case is vital for a robust defense of free speech rights in the Information Age on digital platforms that have become the equivalent of the public square. If the California government can get away with working with corporations to censor Rogan Handley, then next it can censor you.

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