Tag: censorship

Facebook puts new restrictions on groups and individuals to curb spread of ‘harmful content’

Facebook announced Wednesday that it will restrict the popularity of groups and users that accrue violations and, in some cases, remove them altogether in order to reduce harmful content and misinformation.

“We’ve taken action to curb the spread of harmful content, like hate speech and misinformation, and made it harder for certain groups to operate or be discovered, whether they’re Public or Private. When a group repeatedly breaks our rules, we take it down entirely,” Facebook announced in a press release Wednesday.

Building upon its decision to stop recommending political groups to U.S. users in January after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook will now reduce the privileges and popularity of groups that violate its content moderation rules.

This means users will be less likely to discover groups that have had Facebook community violations in the past and will see warnings when they try to join them.

Groups with a large number of members who have broken Facebook rules will be required to get administrator and moderator approval before posts can be published.

Individual users who have repeatedly violated Facebook policies within a group will be blocked altogether from posting in groups or inviting others to groups and creating new groups themselves.

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Naomi Wolf: We’ve Reached “Step Ten” of the 10 Steps to Fascism

In 2008, I wrote a book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.

I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.

Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.

The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”

We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.

Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.

Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.

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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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