Let’s be honest…
Tag: censorship
Democrats’ SAFE TECH Act Could ‘Destroy Most of the Open Web’
A newly-proposed change to Section 230 would introduce legal liability for online platforms and forums for third-party speech. It is being suggested as a way of combating alleged racial and social online injustices. According to critics, however, the bill is ill-conceived and has the potential to transform large parts of the internet for the worse and empower powerful players against smaller competitors.
Section 230 has become a hot topic in the US in recent years. Under this law, which “defined how the Internet works”, platforms adopting a hands-off approach to content moderation cannot be held reliable for harmful or illegal third-party content hosted by them. The protections under the law do not extend to sites which filter users’ submissions and curate content featured on the page. As the Washington Post recounts, the Section was created in the wake of two lawsuits in the 1990s – against Prodigy Services and against CompuServe – coming to similar conclusions.
The provision has come under criticism from both Democratic and Republican legislators, albeit for different reasons. The goal of Republicans, including former president Trump, was to address selective political censorship which has been repeatedly alleged against Silicon Valley online platforms. For example, in December last year, Trump attempted to use his veto power over a proposed defence bill as leverage against the Congress to outright repeal Section 230.
On the other hand, critics of the law among the Democrats have been blaming social media platforms for being reluctant or slow to remove content deemed as harmful, from hostile communication perceived as harassment to the spread of unreliable information.
Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring “Disinformation” to Silencing Truth
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.
This is how it starts.
Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.
Last resort…
Leftist Activists Try To Ban Researchers From Studying Transgender People
The University of California at Los Angeles’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior was preparing a National Institute of Health-backed study to better understand brain structures and responses among people living with gender dysphoria. The study was titled, “Gender identity and own body perception – implications for the neurobiology of gender dysphoria.” Its researchers were seeking transgender participants when LGBT activists demanded the study be shut down.
According to the physicians attempting to conduct the study, “We want to understand the neurobiology of gender dysphoria and the interactions between sex hormone therapy treatment, the brain, and the body phenotype.” However, the executive director of the local activist group Gender Justice LA objected, claiming the study “opens the door for advancing the highly disregarded and dangerous practice of conversion therapy.”
Gender Justice LA claims the study is designed to “trigger” gender dysphoria in those who have not begun treatment and therefore would be psychologically harmful to the participants. They asserted that because the study could be used “for the creation of therapeutics to treat gender dysphoria as one would treat anorexia” it could be used as a method of conversion therapy.
The California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network circulated a letter to local LGBT communities urging transgender and gender-nonconforming people to stay away from the “dangerous” study.
Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms
“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.
We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.
All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.
With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It, therefore, should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves.
Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.
Texas Republicans Give Massive Taxpayer Handouts to Big Tech, Effectively Financing Censorship of Their Voters
Texas Republicans have financed Big Tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars using the Texas Enterprise Fund.
The report from the Texas-based Current Revolt exposes the Texas Enterprise Fund, showing how Republicans in the Texas Legislature have backed the diversion of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of the Big Tech companies that engage in the censorship of their very own constituents.
The aim of the TEF, as disclosed on the Texas government website, is to award “deal closing” grants to companies in order to persuade them into choosing Texas as the location for their new site, whatever that may be. “The fund serves as a financial incentive for those companies whose projects would contribute significant capital investment and new employment opportunities to the state’s economy,” the website states.
However, the TEF, supported by a large list of Texas Republicans, gives money to Big Tech corporations, who regularly engage in the censorship and attempted cancellation of conservatives.
Facebook, who regularly bans conservatives from their platform and recently permanently banned President Donald Trump, were awarded $1.4 million.
Apple, who recently kicked conservative social media platform Parler off their App Store, received $46 million.
Uber, whose employees gave 97% of their political donations to Democrats, and who permanently banned former Republican Congressional candidate Laura Loomer from their service, were awarded $24 million.
RFK Jr. kicked off Instagram for vaccine misinformation
Instagram on Wednesday banned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, from repeatedly posting misinformation about vaccine safety and COVID-19.
Kennedy Jr. has amassed a huge following on social media, where he frequently posts debunked or unproven claims about vaccines. He also uses his social media pages to post about large pharmaceutical firms and environmental health concerns.
In an emailed statement, Kennedy Jr. stood by his Instagram posts, adding they have been carefully vetted.
Editor’s note: disregard the following words: debunked, unproven, misinformation.
Instagram to Permanently Ban Users Who Send ‘Hate Speech’ in Private Messages
Instagram has announced that they will now be permanently banning users who send “hate speech” in private messages.
The platform announced their new speech policing policy on Wednesday.
In a statement about their censorship, Instagram boasted that 95% of the “6.5 million pieces of hate speech” from July through September were censored by the platform without anyone even reporting it. In other words, nobody was upset or offended, but the platform decided what you can or cannot see and share.
“Today, we’re announcing that we’ll take tougher action when we become aware of people breaking our rules in DMs. Currently, when someone sends DMs that break our rules, we prohibit that person from sending any more messages for a set period of time. Now, if someone continues to send violating messages, we’ll disable their account. We’ll also disable new accounts created to get around our messaging restrictions, and will continue to disable accounts we find that are created purely to send abusive messages,” the statement explained.
Facebook’s enforcement report reveals AI is deleting 97 PERCENT of ‘hate speech’ before anyone reports it
Facebook has patted itself on the back for nuking almost all “hate speech” that supposedly violated its rules. But not only was most content deleted before anyone could flag it, users weren’t even allowed to appeal most deletions.
Unveiling its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the fourth quarter of 2020 on Thursday, Facebook bragged that its expanded use of artificial intelligence had helped it delete almost twice as much “bullying and harassment” content as the previous quarter, just one of several categories in which removals skyrocketed, while its Instagram subsidiary dramatically expanded its ability to catch suicide and self-injury related content.
Facebook axed 6.3 million bullying items, nearly doubling last quarter’s 3.5 million and assisted in large part by its AI technology. Expanded translation ability helped it remove 26.9 million pieces of “hate speech” content, up from 22.1 million in the third quarter. And Instagram nabbed 6.6 million pieces of hate speech while more than doubling the amount of suicide and self-harm content it removed – from 1.3 million to 3.4 million this quarter.
Hellbound and Down 
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