Tag: censorship

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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The Woefully Ignorant Media Is Getting America’s Anger Over the Cancelation of Dr. Seuss Books so Wrong, so Let Me Help

White people didn’t inject racism into these books. The left did. Seuss didn’t write these books in question with any racist intent, and no one reading them became an ounce more racist for seeing them. It took the left arbitrarily making it racist for it to be a racial issue.

The real reason conservatives (and it’d be more accurate to say Americans across the political spectrum) are mad over the cancelation of certain Dr. Seuss books is very simple; we don’t want to be the culture that burns books because we disagree with what’s written in them. We want to be a society that’s mature enough to make our own decisions about what is and isn’t bad, and to be able to weigh what is and isn’t racist for ourselves. What we don’t want is a group of hyper-sensitive busybodies with chips on their shoulders and a holier-than-thou complex declaring what is and isn’t appropriate for our culture to see. We especially don’t want corporate businesses making that call for us as well.

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Google and Urban Dictionary censor ‘Blue Anon’ following widespread mockery of left-wing conspiracy theories

The life of new term “Blue Anon” in the online Urban Dictionary was short-lived. After emerging on social media and landing in a spot in the slang-term glossary on Saturday, it was quickly purged. A Google search brings up nothing on the term other than brand name ski gear.

Jack Posobiec pointed out the deletion from Urban Dictionary: “I have never even heard of a word being banned from Urban Dictionary before the banned Blue Anon.” A search of the dictionary for the term comes up short.

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