Tag: censorship

UK Home Secretary Signals Tougher Online Censorship Beyond Current Censorship Laws

Judging by the most recent statements made by UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, the government feels it will have to implement even more stringent speech-restrictive measures than those contained in the sweeping and controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

Appearing on a BBC political talk show, Cooper kept beating the now well-established drum the ruling Labour has gone for in the wake of last year’s Southport killings, and subsequent mass protests – namely, to try to portray social media companies as somehow “a part of the crime,” which is verbatim how the cabinet minister put it.

One of the recurring themes these last weeks, since the Southport trial saw its conclusion, has been that tech companies are “morally responsible” for not deleting (that request came only last week) one of the violent videos viewed by the killer, Axel Rudakubana.

This request was made even though said companies are under no legal obligation to do that, until the spring of this year and the start of the enforcement of some parts of the Online Safety Act.

The stage set that way, Cooper’s logic – or lack thereof – goes like this: “We are being clear that we are prepared to go further if the Online Safety Act measures are not working as effectively as we need them to do,” she told the host, Laura Kuenssberg.

There is no way to predict how social media firms will act once they are under obligation to remove certain types of content – and yet Cooper is already threatening to make the Online Safety Act even worse.

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EU’s “Disinformation” Code Becomes Mandatory Under Censorship Law, Platforms Preemptively Enforce Rules Ahead of German Elections

The inevitable slide of the EU’s voluntary — at least in name — disinformation code (the 2022 version) into mandatory rules integrated into the Digital Services Act (DSA) censorship law will become enforceable this July.

But just in time for Germany’s early elections, scheduled for the last week of February, large platforms – Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and X – participated in a “stress test” of their readiness to investigate risks to “civic discourse and electoral process” related to that vote.

This is taken by some reports to mean that although the voluntary code will become obligatory in the summer, the integration before February 23 in Germany means that platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU will implement “disinformation” rules, acting a “voluntary” basis one last time – in a bid “to avoid future legal risks.”

The election campaign in Germany has been marred by contentious attempts by those still in power to discredit and even censor the rising opposition. This is happening both through domestic institutions and by “delegating” some of such efforts to the EU.

The “stress test” done in late January and the reports around code integration timeline fit well in the overall trend. It was conducted by the European Commission and Germany’s digital services coordinator.

The code’s main purpose is to get signatories to step up content “moderation” – which critics see as code word for censorship, but which the EU, along with the DSA, explains as a way to combat illegal content and “protect users.”

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FBI Nominee Kash Patel Vows to End Censorship Collusion, Slams Wiretaps, and Pledges Section 230 Work

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday was a chance to learn about the direction the agency would take after a number of years filled with controversies linked to online censorship.

Patel addressed several of these issues, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop stories and the FBI’s role in the scandal – which he said would not repeat going forward.

Patel also spoke against the FBI attempting to pressure Big Tech to get these companies to censor content, as well as against wiretapping political candidates and their staff – but also pledged to work with Senator Richard Blumenthal in order to bring potentially controversial changes to Section 230 that could jeopardize end-to-end encryption.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, was on the confirmation hearing panel and recalled that in October 2020 – a month before the election – the FBI was among those who worked to falsely present Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

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World Economic Forum Panel Praises EU Censorship Law

One of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) panels brought together publishers, a French minister, and a UK think tank previously involved in US State Department-funded censorship of Americans, who praised the EU’s controversial Digital Services Act (DSA) while railing against “misinformation.”

French Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology Clara Chappaz spoke about the DSA as a solution to the “problem” presented by free speech on the internet.

Chappaz and another speaker, the CEO of the UK think tank – the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) – defended the law as not being a censorship tool but “merely” making what is illegal offline also illegal online.

Yet the French official remarked that it requires platforms to introduce measures reducing “the systemic risks” tied to “misinformation.” And this ends up providing a mechanism for censorship of whatever the authorities decide to consider “misinformation.”

Chappaz also spoke about an age verification law that was introduced in France last week, the pretext being preventing minors from accessing adult sites.

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US Government Agencies Caught Censoring and ‘Block-Listing’ The Gateway Pundit and Others with the Help of Radical UK Anti-Conservative Censorship Group

Imran Awan, the CEO at The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), bragged about getting conservative news orgs such as the Gateway Pundit, the Federalist, and Zero Hedge reported to social media AND demonetized! Especially from Google Ads, a prominent advertiser online.

According to Bad Kitty Restless Development is funded by numerous big money leftist groups and government agencies, including:

  • Obama Foundation
  • USAID (United States Agency for International Development)
  • U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
  • Clinton Health Initiative
  • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • United Nations
  • The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)
  • Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC)
  • Irish Aid
  • Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
  • Ford Foundation
  • Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA)

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TikTok and the Freedom of Speech

“Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…”
~ First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

During the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case, a fascinating colloquy took place between Justice William O. Douglas and the lawyer for the government. The case was about whether the government could prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing secret documents that demonstrated that American generals had been misleading President Lyndon Johnson and he had been lying to the American public during the Vietnam War.

The documents had been stolen by Daniel Ellsberg, a civilian employee of the Department of Defense, in an act of great personal courage and constitutional fidelity, and then delivered to both newspapers. Two federal judges had enjoined the newspapers from publishing the documents, and the Supreme Court was hearing appeals by the newspapers.

When Justice Douglas asked the government lawyer if the phrase “no law” in the First Amendment literally means no law, he was unable to answer. The court found his mumbo jumbo reasoning so telling that it actually published the transcript of the Q and A in the court’s opinion itself – something it had not done before in modern times nor since.

The court ruled in that landmark case that freedom of speech and the right to know what the government is doing and the right to consult whatever source one chooses when forming an opinion each trump the government’s concerns for protection of state secrets. Thus, it matters not how the media obtains information; if it is material to the public interest, the media may publish it, without fear of civil or criminal liability.

The Pentagon Papers case was the high watermark for the freedom of speech: Freedom trumps safety. But the court studiously avoided answering Justice Douglas’ question about no law. If the Constitution means what it says, then no law literally means no law, and thus all sorts of legislation about speech – from defamation to treason to silencing TikTok – is unconstitutional. But if no law doesn’t really mean no law, then what does it mean?

Regrettably, today, no law means whatever the court says it means. That’s what happened last week when the court upheld congressional legislation silencing TikTok.

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TikTok Officially Banned in the United States – President Trump Expected to Reinstate App

TikTok has been officially banned following a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to remove the app’s availability in the United States.

This comes after a Friday decision upholding a law forcing China-owned ByteDance to divest from TikTok by Sunday or face a ban from U.S. app stores.

President Trump previously asked the Supreme Court to pause the ban so his administration could be given “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”

Trump also said in an interview with NBC that he will “likely” give Tiktok a 90-day extension when he takes office.

Per NBC:

“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” Trump said in the phone interview.

“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he said.

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The Secular State Reinvents the Inquisition

One of my favorite books is The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Set in the 1930s when Mexico was still persecuting the Catholic Church (a persecution which the government of the United States consented to), the novel follows the life of a nameless “whiskey priest” who, despite being a drunk and a fornicator with an illegitimate daughter, continues to illegally minister to the people while other more reputable priests have abandoned their ministry out of fear of the punishment by the government.

The whiskey priest is lured to his doom by his sense of duty, as a request for a deathbed confession is communicated to him by a lying Judas-like figure. Despite his suspicions, the whiskey priest goes and is arrested. Sentenced to die, and denied confession by one of those priests who had abandoned ministry, we see into the whiskey priest’s thoughts for a final time in what I consider the most moving paragraph in all of literature:

What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead—soon he wouldn’t even be a memory—perhaps after all he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.

The novel ends with another fugitive priest arriving, and a young boy who had previously been a skeptic greeting him enthusiastically, having been inspired by the martyrdom of the whiskey priest.

Years ago, this novel helped convince me that I could enter seminary despite the heavy realization of my own sinfulness. In 2020, those of us who were trying to get sacraments to people despite being forbidden by tyrants certainly could identify with the sense of duty demonstrated by the whiskey priest. I know of one priest who had to remove his cassock, put on jeans, and pretend to be a grandson in order to bring the sacraments to a woman in the nursing home.

The irony in all of this, however, is that some powerful men in the Church wanted the novel placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Thankfully this would not occur, and Greene’s account of the conflict includes a useful comparison to totalitarianism:

The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was “paradoxical” and “dealt with extraordinary circumstances.” The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states…would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.

I’d like to suggest that understanding the use (and abuse) of the religious impulse to limit what type of content an adherent consumes can help us to understand the wave of censorship which has taken hold in the West, especially with respect to what began in 2020.

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Brussels Ramps up Investigation Into Elon Musk in First Salvo of Upcoming Transatlantic War Between the US and EU Over Free Speech and Online Censorship

The historic inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 47th US President will usher in a new Golden Age in America in many aspects, including free-speech.

But across the pond, a generation of failed Globalist ‘leaders’ is scrambling to counteract that, and keep things as they are in terms of online censorship to carry their political narratives alive.

So, yesterday (17) Brussels showed their intent to fully unleash its infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) against tech billionaire-turned-Trump trusted advisor Elon Musk.

The DSA has been demonstrated to be a new form of censorship in Europe, incompatible with real European values or the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Furthermore, CIA-linked Newsguard is mentioned to have being heavily involved in the implementation of the nefarious act.

Now, with Musk flexing his geopolitical muscles, ‘regulators’ in thew EU refused to scale down an investigation of social media network X.

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Biden Warns of Tech Oligarchs’ Power in Farewell Speech, Ignoring His Own Role in Expanding Digital Censorship

Outgoing President Joe Biden concluded his presidency with a farewell address on Wednesday night, sharply criticizing what he termed the “tech-industrial complex” while urging tighter accountability for social media platforms. Ironically, Biden’s remarks highlighted the decline of free press and the dangers of “misinformation,” even as his administration has often been linked to censorship efforts and suppression of dissenting viewpoints.

During his speech, Biden drew parallels to President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about the “military-industrial complex.” He stated, “Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.” His comments painted a picture of concentrated power in the hands of tech oligarchs, whom he accused of enabling an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation” to flourish unchecked.

The president, leaving office with historically low approval ratings, accused social media platforms of abandoning fact-checking efforts and contributing to the erosion of public trust. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking,” Biden said.

Biden’s condemnation of social media fact-checking policies appeared aimed directly at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose platform recently transitioned away from third-party fact-checking to a “community notes” model reminiscent of the system employed by Elon Musk’s X.

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