Tag: censorship

Spotify censors art for “misinformation,” pulls Ian Brown’s anti-lockdown track

Spotify has removed an anti-lockdown song by Ian Brown, the former lead vocalist of English rock band The Stone Roses. The music streaming service claims the song violated its policies against COVID-19 misinformation.

Brown released the anti-lockdown song “Little Seed Big Tree” last September. “NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS NO TRACKS NO MASKS NO VAX,” he tweeted while launching the song.

On March 12, Brown took to Twitter to announce that Spotify had removed his song.

“SPOTiFY stream the streams and censor artists like they have with my last song TOOK IT DOWN just put it down the memory hole! FREE EXPRESSiON AS REVOLUTION,” he wrote.

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PSU uses YouTube’s copyright reporting system to censor video exposing the college’s censorship

Portland State University (PSU) filed a false copyright claim with YouTube on a professor’s video that tried to expose the university’s effort to censor academic freedom of speech. The video followed a resolution passed by the university to silence critics of critical race theory.

PSU Professor Bruce Gilley recently published a report called The New Censorship in American Higher Education: Insights from Portland State University.”

The video, meant to accompany the report, included clips from a March 1 meeting of the faculty senate. During the meeting, the senate unanimously passed a resolution that deems critics of critical race theory bullies and anti-progressives.

His report claims that the resolution “imposes a gag order on criticisms of a university’s professors, programs, teaching, and research — criticism which is itself the heart of academic freedom — as an abuse of academic freedom.”

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Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists

What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.

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Twitter Will Enforce a ‘Strike System’ Against Coronavirus Vaccine ‘Misinformation’

Social media giant Twitter announced this week that it will begin labeling tweets that share “misleading information” about the coronavirus vaccine and will implement a strike system for repeat offenders of the “misinformation policy.”

The Verge reports that Twitter announced on Monday that it will begin labeling tweets that share what the company decides is misleading information about coronavirus vaccines. The labels will link to relevant information from government bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a system allowing for five strikes will be implemented for users that repeatedly violate its misinformation policies.

Repeated violations of the policies could lead to Twitter locking or permanently suspending accounts. The new labels are similar to Facebook’s anti-misinformation banners which were launched as part of Facebook’s attempts to curb what it considers coronavirus misinformation last December.

Twitter plans to apply the new labels through a combination of human and automated review systems and will begin the rollout with English language content first. The criteria for labeling coronavirus posts have been outlined in Twitter’s misleading information policy but overall Twitter is focusing on five categories of false or misleading information, according to the Verge:

Misinformation about the nature of the virus
Misinformation about the efficacy of treatments and preventive measures
Misinformation about regulations, restrictions, and exemptions in association with health advisories
Misinformation about the prevalence of the virus and the risk of infection or death
Misleading affiliations (for example, claiming to be a doctor or public health official)

Labels will also play a major part in the new strike system. Twitter has stated that a tweet deemed harmful by the company counts as one strike. A tweet that adds to a larger conspiracy connected to the virus that Twitter deems dangerous, such as the idea that vaccines include microchips to track people, may also be deleted by the platform.

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Twitter sues Texas AG to avoid investigation into its censorship practices

On Monday, Twitter filed a complaint in court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who launched an investigation into the platform’s content censorship policies. Twitter argues that Paxton launched the investigation in retaliation to the de-platforming of former president Trump, which the company ironically claims is an abuse of power.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” the company wrote in the court filing.

Following the suspension of Trump’s accounts on most mainstream social media platforms after the Jan 6 riot, Paxton launched an investigation into the moderation policies at Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon.

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