Tag: censorship

The Babylon Bee Strikes Back: Lawsuit Takes on California’s Anti-Satire Laws

In a world where politicians crave safe spaces from jokes, California’s latest move to suppress satire might just take the cake. California has decided that it’s time to put an end to all that pesky “political humor.” Yes, the state that brought us Hollywood is now terrified of a few biting punchlines, and naturally, satire site The Babylon Bee and outspoken attorney Kelly Chang Rickert are not having it.

The champion of online irreverence has just slapped the State of California with a lawsuit that reads less like legalese and more like a desperate plea for common sense. They’re arguing, quite reasonably, that California’s new laws—AB 2839 and AB 2655—are a massive overreach, a heavy-handed attempt to quash their First Amendment rights and kill the punchline before it even has a chance to land.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

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Big Tech-Government Collusion: Biden-Haris Admin, Meta, Google, and Others Launch AI Partnership to Combat “Disinformation” and “Hate Speech”

The current US White House seems to be exploring every possibility that might secure another avenue for what opponents (and quite a few lawmakers) refer to as “collusion” with (Big) Tech.

A new scheme has just been announced, that revolves around the “AI” and “disinformation” buzzwords, and includes the US State Department, Meta, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI.

Looks like quite an “ensemble cast” – or “usual suspects” – right there.

It’s called, Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI, and it was announced by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken along with a decision to bankroll programs “identifying disinformation using AI” with $3 million.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

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EXPLOSIVE CENSORSHIP DOCUMENTS – America First Legal Releases Complete Internal Facebook Onboarding Documents Used to Train CDC Employees on How to Censor the American Public

Today, America First Legal released additional documents from its litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), exposing the complete onboarding documents Facebook used to train CDC employees on their government censorship portal to block free speech on “Covid & Vaccine Misinformation.” 

Many Americans remember the unprecedented level of censorship by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021. Unelected public health officials constantly revised their guidance, leading to repeating something that was “true” a week ago could suddenly get an account suspended. The Biden-Harris Administration’s clumsy and heavy-handed attempts to keep up with the rapidly evolving information environment entailed by a global pandemic gave all Americans a stark reminder of why the First Amendment was listed first.

These documents reveal how Facebook, on the heels of extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House (including from Rob Flaherty, a current senior Harris Campaign staffer) to remove specific posts, responded:

  • Facebook created a new “end-to-end workflow” so that government officials could submit links for removal from Facebook;
  • Facebook only gave access to the portal to approved government and law enforcement personnel;
  • The new portal dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring;
  • By moving from email chains to a Facebook-hosted portal, the new system also made it harder for organizations like AFL to provide oversight to individual censorship requests;
  • Each censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands;  
  • The documents further show how Facebook explained precisely what content it would remove and what it needed from the CDC in order to censor certain narratives within the bounds of its “community standards.” 

This release comes on the heels of recently released documents from that lawsuit, which exposed the United Kingdom’s influence on the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship policy, and Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook only engaged in censorship after extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House. 

The Intercept previously released excerpts from this slide deck, but AFL is now publishing the entire deck for the first time. 

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Journal Pressured to Retract Study on Covid-19 Vaccine Harms

Avaccine manufacturer based in India launched defamation proceedings against researchers who published a study that reported adverse events in people following Covid-19 vaccination.  

The manufacturer also sued the editor of the international journal that published the study and demanded that the offending article be retracted immediately.

The Peer-Reviewed Study

The study at the centre of the controversy is a post-marketing safety analysis (phase IV) of Covaxin, one of India’s homegrown Covid-19 vaccines.

The researchers concluded that serious adverse events of special interest (AESI) after vaccination “might not be uncommon” and that the majority of AESIs in people persisted “for a significant period.”

Of the 635 participants involved, one-third reported developing AESIs such as new-onset skin disorders, nervous system disorders, and menstrual and ocular abnormalities.

Serious AESI, such as stroke and Guillain-Barre syndrome, were experienced by 1% of participants, but no causal link could be established in the study.

The researchers called for “enhanced awareness and larger studies” to carefully examine the potential for long-term harms of the vaccine.

The study was published in the journal Drug Safety on May 13, 2024, after it was examined by two independent peer-reviewers and the editor of the journal.

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Facebook Built a VIP Censorship Pipeline For The White House

In case you thought 2021 was just about ever-shifting “expert advice,” think again. Thanks to America First Legal, we now know that behind the chaotic public health messaging, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Facebook were playing a little game of “whack-a-mole” with your freedom of speech.

Today, new onboarding documents were unearthed, which shows just how cozy Facebook got with the CDC. The social media giant wasn’t merely policing what it thought was “misinformation” on COVID and vaccines; it was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative. The Biden-Harris Administration, while trumpeting their “fight for truth,” had essentially deputized Facebook to clean up the messy world of online discourse. And who decides what’s messy? Apparently, anyone with a .gov email address.

Let’s rewind to 2021, the peak of the pandemic drama. The public was dealing with a mutating narrative on what constituted “the truth.”

In other words, what was factual one week might be misinformation the next, depending on who you asked—or more accurately, who was in power.

At the time, the administration faced heavy criticism for overseeing a clampdown on dissent. Social media platforms, like Facebook, took on the noble mantle of censoring anything that didn’t align with the latest CDC talking points.

One day it was, “Don’t wear masks,” and the next, “You must wear two.” If you were quick enough to quote the CDC’s latest declaration, congratulations, you won a reprieve from the online guillotine. But heaven forbid you posted a month-old statement—down came the banhammer.

The First Amendment? Ah yes, that pesky little thing. It felt like an afterthought in the administration’s relentless quest to manage the pandemic, or rather, manage the narrative about the pandemic.

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The Australian Government Reboots the Misinformation Bill

This week Australia’s Labor Party reintroduced its misinformation and disinformation bill. I did a deep dive into the bill last May. Among its many flaws, the biggest is its very origins.

As Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in Parliament on September 12, “This bill seeks to strengthen the voluntary code by providing a regulatory backstop.” That code was co-written by First Draft, participants in the Aspen Institute’s coordinated effort to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

If that story is new to you, the Twitter Files revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organised a “table-top” exercise with Twitter, Facebook, First Draft, and a host of media organisations including the New York Times and Washington Post, that ran through a day-by-day playbook of how they would respond to the release of a Hunter Biden laptop. The story didn’t break publicly until October, so how did the Aspen Institute know two months in advance?

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Gates proposes using AI to stifle free speech; the UN is aiming to be in control of AI, globally

Bill Gates wants to use artificial intelligence (“AI)” for real-time censorship of vaccine-related “misinformation,” sparking a heated debate about free speech rights, mind control and the rewriting of history by the so-called “elite.”

According to Bill Gates, online misinformation is the No. 1 unsolvable problem facing today’s young people.   Gates spends a lot of his time and money pushing global climate change mitigation measures and vaccines but, as CNBC noted, one problem has him stumped –  what he refers to as “misinformation.”

Recently, Gates proposed AI for real-time censorship of what he deems “vaccine misinformation,” arguing that while free speech is important, it should have limitations, especially when it incites violence or discourages vaccination.

Gates, a prominent advocate for vaccines through his “philanthropic” organisations, believes that those who advise against vaccines are “inciting violence” and hindering public health. He envisions AI as a tool to establish and enforce speech “boundaries” to control the narrative surrounding vaccines.

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Senators Push Big Tech to Increase Content Moderation, Share More Info With Government Ahead of 2024 Election

During a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing titled “Foreign Threats to Elections in 2024 – Roles and Responsibilities of U.S. Tech Providers,” several senators urged Big Tech executives to increase their censorship of foreign “disinformation” and share more information with the federal government.

While the senators pushing these measures insisted that such efforts would be focused on foreign adversaries who are creating inauthentic content, previous incidents, most notably the censorship of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, have shown that measures claiming to combat foreign disinformation often result in the speech of Americans being censored.

In his opening statement, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told the witnesses, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) President and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker, that he hoped the hearing would result in greater information between Big Tech and government.

“Our committee’s bipartisan efforts also…resulted in a set of recommendations for government, for the private sector, and for political…campaigns,” Warner said. “Recommendations for which I hope today’s hearing will serve as a status check. These recommendations included greater information sharing between the US government and the private sector…about foreign malicious activity. Not domestic, foreign malicious activity.”

He continued by claiming that there’s already been “a pretty successful effort to share threat information about foreign influence activity with the private sector” and complained that X (which has reduced censorship on its platform since entrepreneur Elon Musk took over) didn’t send a representative to the hearing.

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Gavin Newsom Just Signed an AI-Deepfake Ban That Could Impact Free Speech. This Is the First Lawsuit Against It.

We were waiting for California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign on the dotted line of a new controversial bill that limits speech around AI “deepfake” content that many believe could impact memes. Now that Newsom has signed the bill, the first of several lawsuits against the censorial bills can be filed.

Christopher Kohls, an online content creator known for his political satire, has filed a lawsuit against the state, challenging recent legislation aimed at regulating AI-generated content. The lawsuit seeks to strike down two California laws which Kohls claims infringe upon First Amendment rights.

Read the lawsuit here.

The controversy began when Kohls posted a satirical video parodying Vice President Kamala Harris, which quickly caught the attention of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Following the video’s viral spread, largely due to a share by Elon Musk, Governor Newsom criticized the content, leading to the swift passage of AB 2655, the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024,” and AB 2839, related to “Elections: deceptive media in advertisements.”

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Crazy Nutcase Tim Walz Wants to Ban Free Speech in America if Kamala Wins – Elon Musk Weighs In

Democrats want you silenced!

On Monday twice-failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton joined MSNBC’s chief conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow to discuss the 2024 election.

Hillary Clinton immediately launched an attack on President Trump and said he is a danger our country and world just one day after a second assassination attempt against him.

“The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is,” Hillary Clinton said.

Hillary Clinton then suggested that those who spread misinformation should be charged with a crime!

Hillary Clinton then suggested jailing Americans for posting “misinformation.”

Clinton was whining about so-called Russian propaganda when she launched an attack on Americans and the First Amendment.

“There were Russians engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016, but I also thing there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda and whether they should be civilly or criminally charged would be something that would be a better deterrent,” Hillary said.

Hillary is not alone.

Minnesota nutcase Tim Walz also wants to ban speech in America.

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