Tag: censorship

CISA, FBI Resuming Talks With Social Media Firms Over Disinformation Removal, Senate Intel Chair Says

Key federal agencies have resumed discussions with social media companies over removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears, a stark reversal after the Biden administration for months froze communications with social platforms amid a pending First Amendment case in the Supreme Court, a top senator said Monday.

Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters in a briefing at RSA Conference that agencies restarted talks with social media companies as the Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that first began in the Fifth Circuit appellate court last July. The case was fueled by allegations that federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were coercing platforms to remove content related to vaccine safety and 2020 presidential election results.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether agencies are allowed to stay in touch with social media firms about potential disinformation. Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed the suit on the grounds that the Biden administration violated First Amendment rights pertaining to free speech online in a bid to suppress politically conservative voices.

According to Warner, communications between agencies and social platforms resumed roughly around the same time that multiple justices appeared to favor the executive branch’s stance on the issue, he said. 

“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” he said, adding that, in the event of election interference attempts akin to Russia in 2016, the Biden administration should more forcefully call out nation-state entities that attempt to meddle in the U.S. election process.

Warner said his committee will convene a hearing on elections security in two weeks. The panel was supposed to hold the session with CISA Director Jen Easterly and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines last month, but it was postponed amid GOP attempts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

For around six months, agencies chilled their communications with social firms about election security and other disinformation flash points. Warner previously said that White House lawyers had been “too timid” in their legal interpretation of the case, especially given that the high court allowed the Biden administration to temporarily continue their talks until a ruling was made.

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TikTok Sues US Government Over Forced Divestment Law

TikTok filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to block a new law requiring either the sale of the app by its Chinese parent company or its removal from app stores and web-hosting services. About two weeks ago, President Joe Biden signed the bill, which had passed both legislative chambers with broad bipartisan support.

In a filing with a federal appeals court in Washington, TikTok challenges the constitutionality of the new law on the grounds that the U.S. government infringed the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its hundreds of millions of users over national security concerns.

The new law sets the initial deadline for a TikTok sale by January 2025, and President Biden can decide to extend the deadline by another three months to allow the deal to be completed.

Lawmakers supporting the new law argued that it was not a ban but a divestiture aimed at preventing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from accessing American consumer data and the algorithm owned by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, from potentially influencing Americans.

However, the company has maintained that it has not and will not share American user data with the CCP. According to China’s counterespionage law, ByteDance must hand over data on American users if requested.

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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. 

The censors developed a belief at the highest levels of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: our side favors banning gatherings, closing schools, says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake, favors masking, mass vaccination, and mail-in voting, and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury, whereas their side takes the opposite approach. 

It was a war over information, undertaken in total disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn’t even exist. Moreover, the operation was not only political. It clearly involved intelligence agencies that were already hip deep in the “all-of-society” pandemic response. 

“All of Society” means all, including the information you receive and are allowed to distribute. 

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Mitt Romney Says Congress Supports Banning TikTok for Israel

In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) acknowledged that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.

Blinken blamed social media in general when asked by Romney why Israel was losing the global PR war. Palestinian journalists have been able to broadcast to the whole world the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza using social media, including graphic videos of dead or wounded children being dug out of rubble following an Israeli airstrike.

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Latest Government Report Reveals 10 Times Biden Regime Pressured Facebook to Take Down What Ended Up Being Truthful Information on COVID and the Vaccines

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee released an 800 page report on the Biden White House censorship regime.

The report included numerous times the Biden regime threatened social media companies to censor, silence and take down information on the COVID origins and the COVID vaccines.

Here is the full 800 page report released by the House Judiciary Committee on the Biden Administration’s Censorship Industrial Complex.

On Thursday, investigative reporter Mike Benz revealed “10 flaming examples” Facebook, YouTube and Amazon explicitly said they only passed censorship policies because they were threatened by the Biden government.

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Backpage: A Blueprint for Squelching Speech

U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa acquitted three former Backpage executives of myriad counts against them last week—more evidence of how empty so much of the federal case against them is. Humetewa ruled that there was insufficient evidence to uphold 50 of the counts* against journalist and Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey, 10 of the counts against former Executive Vice President Scott Spear, and 18 of the counts against former Chief Financial Officer Jed Brunst.

From the beginning, this prosecution has been premised on a bogus rationale (authorities yammer on about sex trafficking though none of the defendants are charged with sex trafficking), overreaching in its scope (attempting to hold a web platform accountable for user-generated speech, in contradiction to Section 230), offensive to the First Amendment, and relentless in its attempts to handicap the defense. So it’s a treat to see a judge slap prosecutors down a notch, even if it comes very late in the game (after two trials and after one defendant taking his own life) and even though it may not make much of a practical difference for Lacey, Brunst, and Spear (who face imprisonment for the rest of their lives even with the acquittals).

But to read Humetewa’s recent order is to get infuriated about the underlying case all over again. Presenting the evidence in the light most favorable to the government’s position, Humetewa manages (inadvertently?) to highlight how insane and unfair this position is.

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The TikTok Ban Is The Next Patriot Act

HR 7521, called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, is a recent development in American politics. TikTok has been in the news for the past few years, after the public became aware of its connections to China. The popular social media mobile app is currently owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese company. China and the United States currently have a rocky relationship, leading to fears that the Chinese government could potentially use this app to spy on American citizens. Several states and counties voted to restrict the usage of the app in some ways, mostly disallowing government employees from using it on government-owned phones. Earlier this month, the United States Congress passed a piece of legislation that would restrict the app’s availability if certain requirements are not met by ByteDance.

Putting aside the idea that politicians rarely have pure motives, this act has the potential to be just as dangerous as the Patriot Act. With a supposed goal of protecting American national security, the Patriot Act granted sweeping permissions to the federal government and the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens, with far less due process. In addition to having the potential to violate privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, this new act is a blatant attack on property rights. Mobile device manufacturers and owners have every right to install whatever software they would like, as it is their property. Any illusion of a right to national security is immediately contradicted as collective rights are positive in nature and thus not rights at all.

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U.S. Government Helps Pro-Ukraine Media Spread Propaganda And Silence American Critics

Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield — to win hearts and minds.

A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer are among the critics on both the left and the right who have been cast as part of a “network of Russian propaganda.”

But the figures targeted by the Ukrainian watchdog groups are hardly Kremlin agents. They simply have forcefully criticized dominant narratives about the war.

Sachs is a highly respected international development expert who has angered Ukrainian officials over his repeated calls for a diplomatic solution to the current military conflict. Last November, he gave a speech at the United Nations calling for a negotiated peace.

Mearsheimer has written extensively on international relations and is a skeptic of NATO expansion. He predicted that Western efforts to militarize Ukraine would lead to a Russian invasion.

Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning independent journalist who has criticized not just war coverage but media dynamics that suppress voices that run counter to U.S. narratives.

“What they mean when they demand censorship of ‘pro-Russia propaganda’ is anything that questions the US/EU role in the Ukraine war or who dissents from their narratives,” Greenwald has observed.

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Maricopa County and Arizona State Collaborate To Surveil Social Media and Censor “Misinformation”

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office and the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office have been exposed as doing their best to team up with social media companies, non-profits, as well as the US government to advance online censorship.

This, yet another case of “cooperation” (aka, collusion) between government and private entities to stifle speech disapproved of by federal and some state authorities has emerged from several public records, brought to the public’s attention by the Gavel Project.

The official purpose of several initiatives was to counter “misinformation” using monitoring and reporting whatever the two offices decided qualified; another was to censor content on social platforms, while plans also included restricting discourse to the point of banning users from county-run accounts.

“Online harassment” was another target, and Maricopa County took it upon itself to “identify” – and then report to law enforcement.

One striking example of the mindset behind all this is a draft of a speech County Recorder Stephen Richer delivered to Maricopa Community Colleges.

As reports note, Richer is hoping to be reelected this year, while back in September 2021, he complained that “lies and disinformation” are undermining “the entire election system.”

“And it is in this respect, that the Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment,” Richer said – before declaring himself “a huge fan of the Constitution.”

When his office was earlier in the month asked to, essentially, “make it make sense” – they didn’t, stating only that Richer “stands by his speech (…) especially the part where he says he’s ‘a huge fan of the Constitution’.”

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UN Official Condemns Health “Misinformation,” Advocates for “Digital Integrity Code”

The United Nations continues with an attempt to advance the agenda to get what the organization calls its Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms implemented.

This code is based on a previous policy brief that recommends censorship of whatever is deemed to be “disinformation, misinformation, hate” but that is only the big picture of the policy UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is staunchly promoting.

In early April, Fleming gave a talk at Boston University, and here the focus was on AI, whose usefulness in various censorship ventures makes it seen as a tool that advances “resilience in global communication.”

A piece on the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases site first asserts that AI had a “major role” in helping spread misinformation and conspiracy theories “in the post-pandemic era,” while the UN is described as one of the institutions that have been undermined by all this, while “working to dispel these narratives.”

(The article also – helpfully, in terms of understanding where its authors are coming from – cites the World Economic Forum (WEF) as the “authority” which has proclaimed that “the threat from misinformation and disinformation as the most severe short-term threat facing the world today”).

You will hardly hear Fleming disagreeing with any of this, but the UN’s approach is to “harness” that power to serve its own agendas. The UN official’s talk was about AI can be used to feed the public the desired narratives around issues like vaccines, climate change, and the “well-being” of women and girls.

However, she also went long into all the aspects of AI that she perceives as negative, throwing pretty much every talking point already well established among the “AI fear-mongering genre” in there:

“One of our biggest worries is the ease with which new technologies can help spread misinformation easier and cheaper, and that this content can be produced at scale and far more easily personalized and targeted,” she said.

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