Tag: censorship

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).

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Colorado Democrat Introduces Law to Fully Censor and License Internet Use

A Colorado State Senator is introducing one of the most draconian anti-free speech pieces of legislation in American history, seeking to create a governmental press licensing commission to regulate online speech.

Kerry Donovan of Vail’s “Colorado Digital Communications Act” would require internet platforms to register with the government in Colorado and submit to censorship demands. The bill targets platforms such as Parler, Gab, and Big Tech monopolies such as Facebook, (unconstitutionally) threatening the websites with fines of $5,000 a day for refusing to register with the Digital Communications Division.

The “communications division” would be obligated to fight against what Donovan says are “unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices,” raising serious questions about the standard the Democrat intends to use to justify government crackdowns.

Donovan’s act goes on to define unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices as “practices that promote hate speech; undermine election integrity; [and] disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news.” Under Donovan’s tyrannical law, claiming JFK was shot by two shooters would be criminal. Her standard for criminal speech is little more than “fake news,” in an utterly lazy power grab to ban (truthful) online right-wing speech.

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Prince Harry joins activist group to fight online “misinformation”

Prince Harry has now gotten his second “job” in the last two days. He is now a celebrity commissioner appointed to “fight against misinformation” at Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder in Washington DC. It is worth noting that Harry and his wife Meghan were very recently accused of spreading misinformation in an interview with Oprah that garnered widespread attention.

Aspen Institute is an organization with a mission to build a “free, just, and equitable society.” It is being funded by several prominent businesses, including the Big Tech social media platform, Facebook. Nonetheless, Aspen Institute ended up accepting over $8 million in federal small-business funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in public backlash.

Shortly after, the organization ended up “reflecting” on the decision and returned the funds.

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The New Normal “Reality” Police

The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I’m not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi. I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

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Facebook Scrubs Shooting Suspect Ahmad Al Issa’s Profile, Previously Revealed He’s Devout Muslim

Facebook has removed all access to the Facebook profile believed to belong to Ahmad Al Issa, the person identified by police as the King Soopers shooting suspect who killed 10 in the Boulder, Colorado shooting. Screen shots of the Facebook page taken by Twitter users reveal that Al Issa was a devout Muslim who believed in conspiracy theories.

Ahmad Al Issa’s profile was abruptly removed from the website, internet archive websites including the Archive.is and the Wayback machine, and Google’s cache nearly simultaneously.

On March 16, 2019, Al Issa shared a conspiracy theory that there was more than one shooter involved in the horrific Christchurch Mosque Shooting that occurred in New Zealand.

Similarly, Al Issa believed he was under attack from “racist Islamophobic people” who were “hacking” his smartphone. “Yeah if these racist islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could,” wrote Al Issa on June 5, 2019.

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Instagram deletes post of President Biden falling up the stairs under its “violence and incitement” policy

Instagram has deleted a clip of President Joe Biden falling up the stairs of Air Force One three times, stating that it is “violence and incitement.”

The post was shared by Ashley StClair, a political commentator, along with the caption “Joe Biden vs his biggest opponent yet…stairs.”

“We removed your story because it goes against our Community Guidelines. We created these guidelines to support and protect our community on Instagram,” Instagram stated.

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The Left’s Culture War Is A Dangerous Distraction That Warrants Total Resistance

Bill Maher made an interesting point on his show last Friday, arguing that America’s obsession with political correctness is crippling its institutions, leaving the country hobbled in the geopolitical race with China. That’s an accurate assessment, one that also tasks the defenders of cultural sanity with resisting wokeness while not getting bogged down by trivialities at the cost of basic efficiency.

That’s an impossible balance to strike. Despite the left’s false but emergent narrative that conservatives are foolishly and disproportionately obsessed with the culture war, I’d contend the response is largely proportionate. That isn’t to say flashpoints like the fight over Dr. Seuss are never milked or depicted inaccurately by some. Of course they are.

But it’s clear that ignoring and conceding perceivably small battles like, for instance, six Dr. Seuss books or Mr. Potato Head is what empowers the left’s culture warriors to take control of everything. By dismissing flare-ups of insanity on college campuses or in the legacy media, leftists normalized their radical new standards before the public even saw it coming. It’s like the metaphor of the boiling frog. Death by a thousand cuts.

Standards are set in the small dust-ups. The legacy press covers them from the left, then corporations and government institutions respond to the pressure, sometimes convinced the cost-benefit analysis suggests it’s easier to roll over. But rolling over sets the standards, and the standards are unjust.

But those standards are also now the ones by which we’re forced to live, lest we face social and professional consequences for alleged bigotry. Bear in mind that workers without the financial means of a canceled celebrity or journalist are hurt most by those rigid strictures of cancel culture, forced to violate their consciences or suffer financial consequences for perceived transgressions.

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SILENCE: Media Outlets Won’t Explain Why Damning Clinton-Epstein Article Was Quietly Deleted

Very shortly after the stories were published, they were quickly deleted from the websites. However, National File was able to retrieve this portion of the Daily Beast article from Google’s cache:

“Bill Clinton’s former body man and aide has cooperated with the federal investigation into the former president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Radar Online reports. Doug Band, normally reticent to speak about his former boss, spoke with prosecutors for the Southern District of New York around December 2020 about the millionaire sex trafficker and his alleged madam, according to the site. Band made frequent appearances on Epstein’s flight manifests in the early 2000s, at one point traveling with his alleged girlfriend Naomi Campbell to the financier’s private island Little St. James, known locally as “pedophile island.” He also accompanied Epstein and Clinton on lengthy trips through Africa and Asia. Band has claimed he urged the Clintons to cut ties with Epstein and Maxwell for years, but photos as recently as 2007 show him partying with the pair. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s many victims, named Band in a 2016 court filing as one of 70 people who would have knowledge of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s alleged sex trafficking.”

Additionally, users on Reddit posted what appears to be the full Radar Online story, as pointed out by the anti-human trafficking Twitter account known as “An Open Secret.” 

The articles were removed in the early afternoon of March 5. Less than an hour after the deletions, National File reached out to Daily Beast and Radar Online for clarification and explanation, but has not received any response. National File specifically asked if the respective outlets intended to notify readers of a retraction.

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