Tag: censorship

WHY “CANCEL CULTURE” SHOULD MATTER TO LIBERTARIANS

Today’s cancel culture is a prime example of one of several highly influential instruments of social control outside the state. Many libertarians fall prey to the temptation of brushing aside the importance of cultural institutions and non-state means of social control because they don’t violate the non-aggression principle.

Progressives, however, have long recognized the importance of non-state foundations of social order, including public opinion. One can readily recognize today’s “organs” that form the “rallying point of public opinion”: academia, the mainstream corporate media, social media outrage mobs, and – to a growing extent – corporate boardrooms.

Today, the biggest threat to free speech and expression is coming not from the government but from “cancel culture.” The fact that this threat is not coming from the government should serve as a lesson that libertarians who turn a blind eye to non-state sources of social control do so at their own peril.

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Facebook Blocking Ron Paul Shows Tech Censorship is Not About Trump, It’s About Suppressing Dissent

Dr. Ron Paul who has been a champion of peace and liberty for decades was unceremoniously blocked from his own page on Facebook Monday. Facebook claimed Ron Paul, who has long promoted everyone getting along, civil liberties, police accountability, and ending US wars, was repeatedly going “against our community standards.”

“With no explanation other than “repeatedly going against our community standards,” Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified,” Ron Paul tweeted out Monday afternoon.

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Biden Has Ties To 5 Major Tech Companies

At least 14 people who President-elect Joe Biden has picked to serve either in his administration or to advise his transition have worked for the Big Tech firms that cracked down earlier this week on President Donald Trump and a social media site popular with conservatives.

Apple’s top lobbyist was a chief adviser to the Biden transition team. A former Facebook executive will serve as staff director in the Biden White House, and a former Twitter executive will serve as chief spokesperson for the National Security Council under Biden.

Current and former executives at those firms and two others, Google and Amazon, fill out other positions in the incoming Biden administration, or his transition team.

The five tech giants all took action this week against Trump and Parler, the social media site, in response to riots at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

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Twitter Hasn’t Suspended These Accounts Or Tweets That Openly Incite Violence

On Friday, Twitter joined a slew of other social media companies in permanently suspending Donald Trump’s accounts. Subsequently, many other conservative users found themselves deplatformed by the tech giant. The tech oligarchs’ argument is that Trump’s social media presence incites violence, as evidenced by the riot in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

Twitter argued that several of Trump’s tweets violated its Glorification of Violence policy, which states, “You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.”

Unsurprisingly, there are countless Twitter accounts that regularly call for harm or violence, in violation of this policy, yet have been allowed to persist. While the president’s posts and remarks have included some awful things, they have been in no way worse than much of what transpires on the platform.

Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has an intact Twitter account that consistently glorifies acts of violence, yet the brutal dictator has not faced any censorship or suspension. After the heartbreaking beheading of a French teacher because he showed a political cartoon depicting Mohammad, and a mass stabbing in a church in Nice, Khamenei focused vitriol on those murdered, claiming the “rage” of Muslim extremists had demonstrated its “vitality.”

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Non-MAGA Activists Caught in Social Media War as Twitter Begins Purge

While many who opposed the president celebrated, whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden warned that allowing social media companies to set a precedent where they could effectively ban whoever they want from their services set a chilling precedent. “I know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like ‘YAAAAS,’ which, like — I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,” he wrote on Twitter.

Almost immediately, a number of non-Trump accounts began to face problems, with pro-Assange journalist Suzie Dawson locked out of her account, educational file sharing website Sci Hub’s account suspended, and the Red Scare podcast’s profile deleted. Other figures began to demand that the accounts associated with the Venezuelan and Chinese government be removed from social media platforms as well. 

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ACLU Counsel Warns of ‘Unchecked Power’ of Twitter, Facebook After Trump Suspension

Alegislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump‘s social media accounts wielded “unchecked power,” by Twitter and Facebook.

Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU said in a statement that the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.

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