Tag: censorship

State Department Won’t Say If It’s Colluding With Big Tech To Censor Speech Ahead Of 2024 Election

The State Department is refusing to say whether it is communicating with Big Tech platforms to censor free speech online leading up to the 2024 election.

The agency’s silence on the matter came after The Federalist asked about a new working group launched by the United States and Poland on Monday that seeks to counter Russian “disinformation” about Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Called the “Ukraine Communications Group (UCG),” the body will involve the two aforementioned countries and representatives from NATO states, and work to “coordinate messaging, promote accurate reporting of Russia’s full-scale invasion, amplify Ukrainian voices, and expose Kremlin information manipulation.”

According to the Associated Press, James Rubin, the special envoy and coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), was involved with and attended the UCG’s inaugural launch in Warsaw. As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland previously explained, GEC “funded the development of censorship tools” that work to silence (primarily conservative) speech online and “used ‘government employees to act as sales reps pitching … censorship products to Big Tech.’”

Notably, Rubin and the GEC are named defendants in a lawsuit filed by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas in December to stop the federal government’s censorship operations.

When pressed by The Federalist on whether the UCG or its participating members — including the State Department and GEC — will be collaborating with Big Tech and social media companies to censor what they deem to be “Russian disinformation,” a State Department spokesman claimed the working group “is a coordination mechanism between governments and will not involve collaboration with private technology companies or social media companies.”

“The UCG member states intend to work together to unify our communication efforts and ensure the world hears Ukraine’s story and never forgets the Kremlin’s ongoing efforts to wipe Ukraine off the map and subjugate its people,” the representative said.

However, when subsequently pressed on whether the State Department or GEC are collaborating or plan to collaborate with Big Tech and social media companies outside of their work with the UCG to counter so-called “disinformation,” the spokesman did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, the FBI confirmed to The Federalist last month it has resumed communications with social media platforms ahead of the 2024 election. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — another wing of the government’s censorship-industrial complex — declined to comment when asked about its alleged resumed communications with Big Tech.

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Attorney General Garland Targets “Conspiracy Theories” After Launching “Election Threats Task Force” with FBI, Sparking Censorship Concerns

Some might see US Attorney General Merrick Garland getting quite involved in campaigning ahead of the November election – albeit indirectly so, as a public servant whose primary concern is supposedly how to keep Department of Justice (DoJ) staff “safe.”

And, in the process, he brings up “conspiracy theorists” branding them as undermining the judicial process in the US – because they dare question the validity of a particular judicial process that aimed at former President Trump.

In an opinion piece published by the Washington Post, Garland used one instance that saw a man convicted for threatening a local FBI office to draw blanket and dramatic conclusions that DoJ staff have never operated in a more dangerous environment, where “threats of violence have become routine.”

It all circles back to the election, and Garland makes little effort to present himself as neutral. Other than “conspiracy theories,” his definition of a threat are calls to defund the department that was responsible for going after the former president.

Ironically, while the tone of his op-ed and the topics and examples he chooses to demonstrate his own bias, Garland goes after those who claim that DoJ is politicized with the goal of influencing the election.

The attorney general goes on to quote “media reports” – he doesn’t say which, but one can assume those following the same political line – which are essentially (not his words) hyping up their audiences to expect more “threats.”

“Media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees,” is how Garland put it.

And he pledged that, “we will not be intimidated” by these by-and-large nebulous “threats,” with the rhetoric at that point in the article ramped up to refer to this as, “attacks.”

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Trudeau Pushes Online Censorship Bill To “Protect” People From “Misinformation”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week complained that governments have allegedly been left without the necessary tools to “protect people from misinformation.”

This “dire” warning came as part of Trudeau’s effort to have the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) – one of the most controversial of its kind pieces of censorship legislation in Canada of late – pushed across the finish line in the country’s parliament.

C-63 has gained notoriety among civil rights and privacy advocates because of some of its provisions around “hate speech,” “hate propaganda,” and “hate crime.”

Under the first two, people would be punished before they commit any transgression, but also retroactively.

However, in a podcast interview for the New York Times, Trudeau defended C-63 as a solution to the “hate speech” problem, and clearly, a necessary “tool,” since according to this politician, other avenues to battle real or imagined hate speech and crimes resulting from it online have been exhausted.

Not one to balk at speaking out of both sides of his mouth, Trudeau at one point essentially admits that the more control governments have (and the bill is all about control, critics say, regardless of how its sponsors try to sugarcoat it) the more likely they are to abuse it.

He nevertheless goes on to declare that new legislative methods of “protecting people from misinformation” are needed and, in line with this, talk up C-63 as some sort of balanced approach to the problem.

But it’s difficult to see that “balance” in C-63, which is currently debated in the House of Commons. If it becomes law, it will allow the authorities to keep people under house arrest should they decide these people could somewhere down the line commit “hate crime or hate propaganda” – a chilling application of the concept of “pre-crime.”

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US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.  

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.  

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

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“A First Victory Against Big Tech!” – Belgian Lawmaker Awarded €27k From Meta For Unfair Facebook ‘Shadowban’

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been ordered to pay damages in the sum of €27,000 to a Belgian right-wing lawmaker for unfairly limiting his reach on the social media platform, otherwise known as “shadowbanning.”

The Antwerp Court of Appeal ruled on Monday in favor of Tom Vandendriessche, an MEP standing for reelection as the lead candidate for the Flemish separatist party, Vlaams Belang, in Belgium.

The court held that Facebook had unfairly censored Vandendriessche’s account, which currently boasts 234,000 followers, back in February 2021 and had failed to act “in accordance with the principle of good faith” and did not offer “sufficient procedural guarantees” for users who were subjected to such measures. His account was subsequently blocked in May of the same year.

Meta claimed it had acted in accordance with its community guidelines and accused the Belgian lawmaker of posting inappropriate content on the platform, leading to the shadowban. However, Vandendriessche was informed by the social media giant the ban had been lifted at the end of 2021, a claim he contested, as his organic reach remained artificially low.

No ruling was made on this claim, as the court held there was insufficient evidence to prove the account remained subject to adverse measures.

The judgment overruled the court of first instance, which ruled that Belgian courts did not have jurisdiction to decide on the matter, leading to an appeal to the higher court by Vandendriessche.

In a statement following the ruling, the Vlaams Belang politician hailed “a first victory against Big Tech,” insisting that “anonymous technocrats should never dictate what can be said and heard.”

“I hope that this ruling makes it clear to Facebook that they can no longer censor me, and many citizens with me, without consequences,” he added.

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E.U. Censorship Laws Mostly Suppress Legal Speech

Among those who think the United States is an unseemly cesspool of unrestrained opinions voiced by those people, Europe is often touted as an alternative for speech regulation. European Union law, following in the footsteps of national legislation, imposes enforceable duties on private platforms to purge “hate speech” and “disinformation”—or else. But free speech advocates warn that these laws are clumsy and dangerous tools that threaten to muzzle expression far beyond the bounds of their nominal targets. They’re right, and they now have receipts.

In a new report, Preventing “Torrents of Hate” or Stifling Free Expression Online?, The Future of Free Speech, a think tank based at Vanderbilt University, points out that online regulation changed in 2017 with Germany’s adoption of the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), “which aimed to combat illegal online content such as defamation, incitement, and religious insults.” That law inspired lawmakers around the world, as well as similar E.U.-wide legislation in 2022 in the Digital Services Act (DSA). “The underlying assumptions surrounding the passage of the DSA included fears that the Internet and social media platforms would become overrun with hate and illegal content,” notes the report.

But “hate” and other forms of unacceptable content are often in the eyes of the beholder. And the power to punish platforms for allowing forbidden speech encourages suppressing content.

The DSA “gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers,” cautioned the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2022.

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Google Introduces App Store Censorship Rules, Bans AI Generating Various Types of “Restricted Content,” Including “Hate Speech”

Developers of apps for Android will have to adhere to a new set of rules if they wish to publish on the Google Play Store.

The “guidance” is seen by critics as yet another wave of sweeping censorship tied to AI, as Google continues to crack down on what it considers to be hate speech, profanity, bullying, harassment, and other content listed as “restricted.”

One of the types of content developers are now banned from generating refers to sensitive events – and Google’s description is another example of what is likely a deliberately vague definition, so it can be left open to arbitrary interpretation.

Namely, this is content about sensitive events that include things that “capitalize on or are insensitive toward a sensitive event with significant social, cultural, or political impact.”

In its support pages, Google is telling developers that the intent behind the new policies is to make sure AI-generated content is “safe for all users.” And, the giant wants to make sure developers allow users to flag what they see as offensive, and incorporate that “feedback” for the sake of “responsible innovation.”

According to the rules, developers are instructed to utilize user reports “to inform content filtering and moderation in their apps.”

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Stop letting governments request social media censorship in secret

Governments around the world routinely request global social media and search platforms to remove content. This can be a positive thing if the content in question is clearly harmful. But it can be nefarious if the content is simply inconvenient or disagreeable to a government’s viewpoint on a particular current news topic.

Unfortunately, when governments around the world request or demand censorship, they do so with the expectation that their request will remain private and not be publicized. Some online platforms report a summary of these government requests. Other platforms are completely silent.

This has been observed recently in content removal requests from a powerful court justice in Brazil. X has brought the most recent requests into the glare of public lights with its initial refusals to comply, but it is clear that Brazil and other governments around the world intend to silence their opposition online without the embarrassment of making such requests in public.

The massive publicity around Australia’s recent request to remove content has triggered a national discussion in Australia on content moderation and the role of government in making specific requests.  

There are also undoubtedly numerous government requests to remove content that creates a truly imminent threat of harm. But sometimes they may be slow to or unable to remove such content quickly. Transparency for all these government requests, both good and nefarious, will improve both online safety and viewpoint neutrality.  

These governments, including the EU, and U.S. federal government agencies have built or are building organization infrastructure to make content removal requests. These government agencies expect their requests will not be made public and the social media platforms will quietly comply as directed to avoid facing regulatory, legal or financial consequences from these government entities.

However, when these requests are made public, such as we have seen with X publicly refusing the recent requests from Brazil and Australia, then the requests can be scrutinized and judged by the public in those countries as well as globally. 

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Fauci is Put On Notice, Told To Preserve Records For Major Free Speech Lawsuit

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) non-profit has sent a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci and several medical and other US officials, as well as to Google, making sure they are formally notified of their obligations to preserve communications records.

The records in question are relevant to a major First Amendment case alleging collusion between the government and tech companies, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which is currently in the US Supreme Court.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The NCLA letter specified that the request pertains to all documents and electronically stored information, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34.

Those named in the letter are former chief medical adviser to President Biden Dr. Anthony Fauci, his colleague from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that Fauci headed during the pandemic) Dr. David Morens, Adam Kirschner of the US State Department, and Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado, among others.

The letter recalled that Fauci is a defendant in the landmark First Amendment case, alleging that he and other government officials named in Murthy v. Missouri – including the president himself – engaged in unconstitutional censorship of social media around Covid issues such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines.

NCLA has joined the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and is now in that capacity requesting that Fauci, Morens, and others preserve all documents, including drafts and copies, and paper files maintained by their staff that are relevant to the case.

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House Bill Pulls Plug on Biden’s AI Censorship R&D Funding

A House bill seeks to stop the Biden Administration from continuing to spend taxpayer money to fund development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that will censor online content the government wants to dismiss as “disinformation.”

H.R. 8519, sponsored by more than two dozen House Republicans, is an 83-word bill defunding the federal government’s online censorship research:

A BILL

To prohibit the obligation or expenditure of Federal funds for disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. PROHIBITION.

No Federal funds may be obligated or expended by any Federal department or agency for the following:

(1) Disinformation research grants.

(2) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace grants.

(3) Programs within the National Science Foundation’s Track F: Trust and Authenticity in Communications Systems.

NSF’s Track F program is identified as a grave threat to online free speech in a report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The report details specific examples of how the program spends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund development of ways AI can be used to censor online speech.

“As the distributor of multi-million-dollar grants, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is a key player in the ‘censorship industrial complex,’” the report says:

“In recent years, under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, NSF has been funding AI-driven tools and other new technologies that can be used to censor or propagandize online speech.”

As the report explains, the Biden Administration’s program is actually a purveyor of disinformation (emphasis added):

“In March 2021, NSF introduced Track F: Trust & Authenticity in CommunicationSystems, allocating $21 million to the program. For Track F, NSF solicited proposals to address the manipulation or ‘unanticipated negative effects’ of communication systems—a departure from the Convergence Accelerator program’s other, more concrete research topics.

“The euphemistic ‘trust and authenticity in communication systems,’ in fact, means combatting so-called ‘misinformation,’ i.e., censorship. In an early draft solicitation, NSF indicated that Track F projects will ‘address issues of trust and authenticity in communication systems, including predicting, preventing, detecting, correcting, and mitigating the spread of inaccurate information that harms people and society.’ As NSF’s Track F program manager, Michael Pozmantier, explained more plainly in a June 2021 email, Track F isthe NSF ‘Accelerator track focused on combatting mis/disinformation.’”

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