Tag: censorship

X Says It Will Reduce the Visibility of Posts That Purposely Ignore a Person’s Preferred Pronouns

For some reason quietly, X has started enforcing revised rules, detailed in its platform guidelines for users – among other things, adding a section to the “Abuse and Harassment” that concerns the use of pronouns, and speech referring to persons “transitioning” (in terms of transgenderism).

The “amended” rules came into force at some point between January 24 and 27 this year, and should an X user be found to “purposefully” address another using a pronoun different than what that user has chosen for themselves, they can expect to be (and they ostensibly already are) punished by having their posts’ visibility on the platform “reduced.”

It’s not entirely clear if this constitutes straight-forward shadowbanning, i.e., if the supposed guidelines violator is immediately notified of this; but given the nebulous nature of any attempt to determine if someone is doing this “purposefully” – the revised rules spell out that those addressed using “the wrong pronouns” will be consulted.

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‘Stunning Act of Scientific Censorship’: Journal Retracts Peer-Reviewed Study Critiquing COVID-19 Vaccine

The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper’s authors, called the retraction “a stunning act of scientific censorship.” He told The Defender:

“The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper at any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract a paper without adequate justification.”

The paper, published last month, detailed the vaccines’ potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind adverse events, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.

The authors concluded:

“Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA injectable products on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits.”

They also called for the vaccines to be immediately removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood immunization schedule and for the boosters to be suspended.

The paper was read more than 350,000 times in the month after it was posted. An average Cureus paper has only approximately 2,700 views in an entire year.

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MSNBC Legal Analyst Argues for ‘Common Sense’ Speech Restrictions Live on Air

A legal analyst at MSNBC argued earlier this week that there is a need for “common sense” restrictions to the First Amendment to prevent “disinformation” online.

The comments from University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade underscore how many on the far left now view basic American Constitutional rights.

During an interview with network host Rachel Maddow that The New York Post flagged on Thursday, McQuade argued that current restrictions on free speech might not go far enough.

McQuade said previous arguments from the U.S. Supreme Court had set a precedent — that there are some limitations to what people can say if it is intended to create harm — but she added those might not be far-reaching enough.

One such case is 1919’s Schenck v. United States, in which it was ruled that a person could not shout “fire” while in a crowded theater if that person’s rationale for speaking was only to cause public harm.

In the context of American political discourse in the age of social media, McQuade said that the country’s “deep commitment to free speech,” a cornerstone of society, is leaving people vulnerable to being misled.

While hawking a new book she has authored called “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America,” McQuade told MSNBC she hoped to initiate a “national conversation about truth and our commitment to [free speech].”

After Maddow asked if Americans are vulnerable to being misled more than citizens of other countries without First Amendment protections, McQuade agreed.

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Meta Launches Real-Time Content Censorship Unit for 2024 Elections

When Facebook (Meta) wants to safeguard its “right to censor,” the company presents itself as basically just another private company out there minding its own business.

But when election campaigns get in full swing, especially in the US, but also the EU, the way Meta reacts, announcing all sorts of yet new policies and new units to deal with information related to elections, shows that it could have a massive influence on their outcome.

And while it’s repeatedly said that (mostly arbitrarily “defined”) misinformation is the scourge of democracy, there is another, this time, no doubt about it: censorship, sometimes based on such flimsy excuses as basically somebody’s subjective opinion – for example, “potential threats.”

None of this seems to be important to Meta, who have just announced how they are “preparing” for the elections in the EU this summer.

There’s a slew of news on this front: Meta will have what it calls an Elections Operations Center whose job will be identifying “potential threats.” And then real-time “mitigation” (i.e., censorship) will follow.

Oh happy news: despite all the controversies around “fact-checker,” Meta has announced it is continuing to rely on them, and even boasts about having “the largest fact-checking network of any platform.”

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Biden Admin. pressured Amazon to censor books about vaccine safety risks during Covid

White House officials pressured Amazon in 2021 to censor and minimize access to books on its online site that questioned the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to e-mails released earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman, U.S. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The campaign to curtail any vaccine-related book sales during the height of the pandemic was led by President Biden’s Senior Advisor for Covid-19 Response, Andrew Slavitt, and sought to avoid the spread of “propaganda and misinformation.”

“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” Slavitt wrote to Amazon in a Mar. 2, 2021, e-mail.

In initial discussions, Amazon officials discouraged “a manual intervention” to censor or remove certain book titles from populating in search results, concerned that it would be too obvious and lead to further criticism. “We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” one e-mail between Amazon executives read. “The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon officials, whose names were redacted from the e-mails, reveal that another individual at the company “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”

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The 2024 Santa Monica Film Festival was chock full of red-pilled conspiracy content

The 18th annual Santa Monica Film Festival, which held in-person screenings on Saturday, February 3 and which is running online screenings through February 28, chose to feature and then give awards to some dangerous right-wing conspiracy theories masquerading as “documentary” films.

The festival awarded “Best Documentary Feature” to The Great Awakening, the third film in anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Mikki Willis’ Plandemic series. The Santa Monica Film Festival website describes the film:

The Great Awakening is the third installment of the ‘Plandemic’ series. This documentary experience assembles forbidden puzzle pieces to reveal the big picture of what’s really happening in America and beyond. The Great Awakening is intended to be a lighthouse to guide us out of the storm and into a brighter future.

 The Plandemic website also provides a description of the film:

Witness the culmination of truth-seeking as PLANDEMIC 3: The Great Awakening unravels the layers of corruption and unveils a path towards a brighter future. Prepare to be inspired, awakened, and empowered to take a stand for liberty.

After the screening, the audience was treated to a Q&A with Rizza Islam, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and member of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s disinformation dozen.

The first installment of Plandemic was released May 4, 2000, and was largely responsible for the viral spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation. The New York Times explained in 2020 that nothing in the pandemic had gone as viral as the 26-minute short film, “a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.”

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Biden Admin Wants To Spend Around $1 Million on University “Disinformation” Monitoring Program

The White House’s latest initiative to carry out its brand of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (which is now referred to by the handy “MDM” initial) continues to co-opt the education sector.

The Department of Justice agency the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) is behind the funding effort that is said to be designed to study and research “effective technologies and tools for identification, moderation, and/or removal of extremist content.”

A grant worth $1 million will be spent to come up with a dashboard featuring an MDM tracker, which is supposed to surveil the internet for both speech, and narratives, and do so in real time. The project’s official name is, “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns.”

And reports say that the targeted speech coincides with “contentious political events.” Critics say that the taxpayer dollars here are in reality going towards suppression of conservative and religious groups, rather than as declared, violent extremists.

The recipient of the grant is South Carolina-based Clemson University. Researchers there are expected to come up with computer models that will keep an eye on accounts singled out as MDM peddlers and identify people associated with allegedly spreading MDM.

Eventually, the effort should produce the real-time tracking dashboard.

Regular citizens may not benefit from this project – considering the “fluid” nature of the very definitions of misinformation and its companions (some reports mention the initial, and subsequent treatment of the Covid origin and Hunter Biden laptop stories as examples of this.)

But the grant does specify who will benefit: law enforcement and policymakers.

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Bill Gates Partner GAVI Vaccine Alliance Targets Online Memes

An international group promoting vaccines with ties to the Gates Foundation in going after memes. Whatever could make more sense?

But things here aren’t as haphazard as they might seem. Bill Gates is known, and rich, for two things: as the founder of one of the most oppressive (in terms of design, security, and historically predatory toward free-as-in-freedom competing technology) companies ever – Microsoft.

And the other is Gates – now as a billionaire – reinventing himself through his “uncanny valley” philanthropic efforts, centered and emanating from his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and focusing by and large on all sorts of vaccines, and – agriculture.

One of those involved, the GAVI Vaccine Alliance (that gets money from Gates) now wants to reframe memes – internet’s succinct expression of humor and satire – as “health disinformation super-spreaders.”

And we’ve heard this one before – this genre, that, in the digital age, might as well be considered as any other artistic format in previous times, is said to be capable of evading “fact checkers and content moderators” (i.e., censors).

In previous eras and authoritarian states, that would get the books with imagery and words characteristic of memes banned or burned.

So what could be the solution in the current era? And what does the big picture amount to?

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As war drums beat louder, the Regime will revel in crushing its internal enemies in the name of frustrating its external enemies

Previous waves of censorship have hit the “Online Right” particularly hard such as the 2017 backlash to the Trump presidency and the covid saga.

As the war drum beats ever louder, we must remember that war and threats to national security are permanent states of exception that a regime can use to ram through all manner of draconian laws and limits to free expression. So, it’s important to prepare for what comes next instead of only reacting after the fact.

Previous episodes of censorship may have acted as a filtering process.  Thanks in large part to covid, “the Regime” has the technical and regulatory frameworks to cancel people. We can also thank the pandemic for allowing the Regime to know who is and is not susceptible to trusting their narrative.  Rest assured, the list of dissenters has already been drafted and names noted of the rotten apples that must be tossed out of the barrel. 

In an essay, Morgoth explores a hypothetical scenario where “the Regime” can claim that those naysaying the “war effort” are a danger to national security and can therefore be dealt with accordingly.  The essay explores the options facing the Online Right, dissenters who speak out online, in an era of heightened geopolitical tension and national security risks.

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NATO’s New Mission: Peace Through Censorship

When pondering the ranks of institutions captured by leftist elitists, one of the most ominous is the American military. The left is brazenly proselytizing, neutering, and politicizing the American military with its DEI ideology—an inherently partisan, divisive assault designed to hollow out its historical warfighting spirit and value system.

That the left would expand its political proselytizing into affiliated militaries within our alliances is to be expected. That these politically subversive assaults on our and our allied military must be opposed is imperative.

To wit: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

A transatlantic military alliance in search of a reason for perpetuating its existence, NATO was a prime target for left-wing capture and weaponization; consequently, embracing the left’s paranoid narratives, NATO seeks a new mission that placates the elites by asserting that, in stopping nebulously defined authoritarians, the first line of defense is censoring and controlling member states’ free citizens.

Thrice annually, NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre’s (JWC) Public Affairs Office publishes a magazine for its 31 members, “The Three Swords.” In Issue 39 of October 2023, Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw [hereinafter, “the Commander”], a Royal Netherlands Navy Subject Matter Expert in the Strategic Communications and Information Operations NATO Joint Warfare Centre, wrote, “To raise awareness of a new NATO concept that is in its infancy, but that will have a significant impact on individuals, groups, societies, and the way future wars are fought: cognitive warfare.”

In 2021, NATO initiated this “new concept’s” implementation, and the final concept is on the verge of being approved by NATO’s Military Committee. Evidently, that means it is time for the alliance to inform the free world that 2024 will usher in 1984.

Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology [NBIC].

Yeah, once that first shovelful of authoritarian disinformation is heaped upon our unwitting brains, we populist-peasants could become domestic threats, performing the enemy’s work for them gratis. Enter NATO, who knows what you are thinking even if you do not. As the Commander enlightens us:

In cognitive warfare, the ultimate aim is to alter our perception of reality and deceive our brain in order to affect our decision-making. We are commonly unaware of such attacks before it is too late and they have already affected their targets. Therefore, we must protect ourselves by raising awareness and developing a system of indicators and warnings that can provide real-time information. [Italics mine.]

This will sound familiar to those devotees of the Maoist DIE cult’s unconscious bias canard within the larger disinformation op of “systemic racism” (which can never end, lest all those credentialed H.R. apparatchiks lose their sinecures). Per the Commander, “cognitive warfare” is so pervasive, incessant, and unending that you do not consciously recognize it and will always need NATO to sniff and stamp it out.

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