Tag: censorship

The Trouble With World Government

A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.

Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.

This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?

Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.

Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.

That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.

In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”

The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.

It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.

Keep reading

Garland and Wray Launch “Election Threats Task Force,” Sparking Censorship Concerns for 2024

US Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray have spoken about their departments’ plans regarding what they refer to as election threats.

The plans were laid out during a meeting of a Department of Justice (DoJ) outfit called Election Threats Task Force, which was set up in 2021, shortly after the previous presidential election.

Critics of the Biden White House – particularly the way it handles opponents and their right to free speech, often “in collaboration” with Big Tech – are suspicious about the timing of the announced measures.

This has to do with both the fact that the next election is less than six months away and that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Intelligence Experts Group has just been disbanded as a result of a lawsuit brought by America First Legal non-profit and Ambassador Richard Grenell.

Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online Mike Benz has explained whatever is branded as a misinformation narrative is also considered to be the result of a campaign – and so “any US civilian who clicks the retweet button to amplify said narrative is deemed to be participating in said ‘campaign’.”

Keep reading

The Israel lobby is First Amendment’s “principal enemy,” former senior diplomat warns

Amid pro-Palestinian demonstrations condemning Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza, the Antisemitism Awareness Act was passed in Congress. For former Ambassador of the United States to Saudi Arabia Chas W. Freeman Jr., the Israel lobby that pushed for the legislation is the “principal enemy” of the First Amendment.

The act passed in Congress by a vote of 320 in favor and 91 against. The bill would mandate that the Department of Education adopt the broad definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental group, to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

This would also strengthen the crackdown efforts on nationwide university protests. The proposal first defines antisemitism and then gives the Education Department the ability to suspend funding if it determines a school does not act against students who violate that definition. Once passed and rolled out, it will give the department new tools to threaten or punish schools that don’t take the department’s definition of antisemitism seriously.

The bill is seen by Freeman as another attempt to suppress denouncement of Israel’s genocidal attacks in Gaza.

“The principal enemies of the First Amendment in recent years have been… the Israel lobby,” he said in a May 4 “Dialogue Works” interview. “Basically, they have tried to prohibit any speech opposed to the state of Israel.”

He also pointed out that the redefinition of “antisemitism” conflates opposition to the mass killing and starvation of civilians with an irrational hatred of Jews. “Anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Zionism and people who object to genocide or the conduct of that by a foreign government cannot be called antisemitic,” he said.

Keep reading

Censorship Is Evil and Leads to Evermore Evil

A valid moral judgement cannot be made on the rightness or wrongness, the good or evil of an act planned or presently engaged in, if the factual truth of the situation is not first determined. An accurate and truthful awareness of the facts of the situation must precede a morally valid judgment by one’s conscience regarding how to respond to the situation. Knowing the facts is an essential requirement in Catholic moral decision making, indeed in the moral decision making in just about every philosophical moral system. In some theological moral systems facts are irrelevant. If a god says kill, you kill, facts be damned!

All censorship is intended to keep facts, truth, out of peoples’ awareness because the censor thinks if they were known people would not do what he or she or they desire. Censorship is the lethal enemy of Christian morality because when it is employed in a matter of morality where a person is called to make a choice, it is just another way of manufacturing an intentional lie by which to deceive people into thinking evil is a good which they should approve, support and in which they should consent and participate.

Once it is seen that censorship has entered into a situation where a moral judgment is to be made, a person must postpone his or her decision whether to participate in or support the activity the censor wishes him or her to endorse or to oppose because he or she knows for certain that facts pertinent to understanding the truth of what is happening are being concealed. Without access to the known facts an authentic moral choice is impossible. Censorship is integrally hostile to the morality of the Gospels and to basic human morality. Why? Because, censorship is hostile to truth and the search for truth, and the Spirit of truth, i.e., God. It is a process which intentionally manufactures untruth in order to pass it off as truth.

Keep reading

YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

YouTube has (“voluntarily” or otherwise) assumed the role of a private business entity that “supports elections.”

Google’s video platform detailed in a blog post how this is supposed to play out, in this instance, in the EU.

With the European Parliament (EP) election just around the corner, YouTube set out to present “an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information.”

The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the “war on disinformation.”

And what better way to “support” an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s

But YouTube was happy to share that in 2023 alone, it removed 35,000 videos uploaded in the EU, having decided that this content violated the platform’s policies, including around what the blog post calls “certain types of elections misinformation” (raising the logical question if some types of “election misinformation” might be allowed).

Keep reading

Merrick Garland and Chris Wray Proudly Announce Government Censorship Apparatus to Target “Cyber-Enabled Campaigns” and Censor Americans in Run-up to 2024 Election

Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Monday their latest plan to censor Americans under the guise of combatting “election threats.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland who is directly tied to the historic persecution of opposition candidate Donald J. Trump led the discussion today in Washington DC on election threats.

He should have mentioned his name first when he lectured on current election threats.

Merrick Garland today mentioned the DOJ and FBI’s work to protect elections from national security threats. Garland added, “It includes our National Security Division’s and the FBI’s work to protect our elections from national security threats, including malign foreign influence and cyber-enabled campaigns.”

Talk about gaslighting! These are three of the most controversial and corrupt officials in Washington DC today lecturing on clean elections.

Keep reading

Beware of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act

The House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” on May 2, by a vote of 320-91 in reaction to demonstrations on numerous university campuses and elsewhere against the brutal and genocidal policy of Israel in Gaza. The Act has now been sent to the Senate, where it seems certain to pass. This is an extremely dangerous bill that could criminalize the Bible, many Christian Churches, as well as any negative remarks about Israel and Jews. In brief, it threatens us with totalitarian thought control. We must do everything we can to oppose it.

First, let’s take an overview of the Act. It adopts the very broad definition of anti-Semitism of the “International Holocaust Remembrance Association.”  The Act calls this definition “a vital tool which helps individuals understand and identify the various manifestations of antisemitism.”

What does this definition say? “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed in hatred of Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” How you can be anti-Semitic toward someone who isn’t Jewish isn’t immediately apparent.

The authors of the definition give someone examples of what they consider anti-Semitic. These include saying that the Jews control the media and Congress, saying that Israel is a racist state, propagating the “blood libel” that the Jews killed Jesus, minimizing or denying the Holocaust, and claiming that Jews in America have “dual loyalty.”

As a number of writers including Tucker Carlson and John Zmirak have pointed out, the definition allows large parts of the Bible to be banned. The most famous such passage is Matthew 27: 25. “His blood be upon us and our children.” This is the “blood libel” that the Act wouldn’t let us teach!

You might object that the Act would never be enforced in this way. The American people would never stand for it! But it would always be there, like a sword of Damocles, hanging over our heads. And don’t be so sure it wouldn’t be enforced! The Scottish Hate Speech Act was passed in 2021, and people predicted it would never be enforced. Beginning in April 2024, though, it has been enforced, and many people have been fined and imprisoned for violating it.

Keep reading

The Proof of Censorship Is… Censored

It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex.

The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it.

Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality.

Keep reading

Banning TikTok isn’t the flex proponents think it is

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance this week sued to block a new law banning the social media app, claiming it is unconstitutional because it infringes upon Americans’ right to free speech and prevents access to lawful information.

The law, passed in April, would ban TikTok in the U.S. if ByteDance does not liquidate its American assets within nine to 12 months — citing national security concerns about the app. National security has been at the forefront of U.S. bans on Chinese tech, such as the ban on selling telecom equipment and services from Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese providers.

Another concern about TikTok — data privacy and security — is not entirely unfounded, as about 150 million Americans use it. However, China does not need apps like TikTok to collect that data. U.S. consumer data can be bought on the open market from data brokers, including precise location and financial transaction data. Even the U.S. National Security Agency has leveraged data brokers to collect Americans’ data. Anonymized data is also not the fail-safe measure that it is touted to be, as it can be de-anonymized using data that is not considered personally identifiable, like sex, ZIP code, and birthdate. In some ways, TikTok even collects less private information than Meta. In short, TikTok is no more a unique threat to data privacy and security than are data brokers and other American social media sites.

Banning TikTok or any other Chinese business in the U.S. won’t protect U.S. citizens’ data from exploitation. The sheer profitability of U.S. citizens’ data for businesses — both buyers and sellers – is undergirded by the lack of protections for collecting data or compensating individuals for their data. Solving this problem eventually would require federal-level, comprehensive data privacy and protection regulations. Without such regulation, there is little incentive for social media companies — Chinese or not — to responsibly buy, sell, collect, or otherwise exploit user data. If the U.S. government’s goal is to protect private American citizens’ data to enhance national security, then it must legislate acceptable limits on the exploitation of Americans’ data, perhaps even following a framework like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Some believe that banning TikTok and other Chinese apps in the United States could force China to provide more equitable access to the Chinese market and put pressure on China to change unfair business practices towards foreign firms, like intellectual property theft, opaque subsidization and preferential treatment, raids, and fines. These inequities have long been a major concern and subject of high-level conversations between U.S. and Chinese officials. However, the U.S. bans on Chinese businesses so far appear to have neither compelled Chinese businesses nor the Chinese government to change their behaviors, instead spurring them to reduce reliance on the U.S. market and focus on exploring alternative markets.

Keep reading

Meta Relies On ‘Human Rights Norms’ To Censor Protected Speech, Board Member Admits

Amember of the Meta Oversight Board said in a recent livestream that Meta places “international human rights norms” above the First Amendment when it considers free speech issues. This admission is especially concerning considering a recent revelation that the FBI and CISA have renewed collaboration with social media companies to censor posts they label “disinformation.”

“As Meta became more global, it realized what an outlier the United States was, and could not simply default back to U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence,” said Kenji Yoshino, a member of the Meta Oversight Board, an independent entity that advises the platform. “Our baseline here is not the U.S. Constitution and free speech, but rather international human rights norms.”

Meta’s Censorship in Theory

Yoshino, a board member for the left-wing William J. Brennan Center for Justice, made this comment in a livestream with fellow Meta Oversight Board member and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Michael McConnell. The National Constitution Center hosted the online panel on April 29, and its CEO Jeffrey Rosen moderated the discussion about ways Meta shapes content during elections.

Meta originally sought to follow the First Amendment, Yoshino said. But as Meta expanded across the world, he noted, it shifted its content policies beyond the First Amendment.

McConnell disagreed with Yoshino’s reasoning and said the more important distinction is the First Amendment’s application to private entities. But he admitted he agrees with Meta’s ability to censor content. “Even within the United States, private companies are free to not convey speech that they disagree with over their platforms,” he said.

Meta has always prohibited some content like obscenity from the very beginning, according to McConnell. The Wall Street Journal, however, reported last year that Meta-owned Instagram connected vast networks of pedophiles, and its algorithms promoted child sexual content.

Keep reading