Tag: censorship

Direct Government Censorship Of The Internet Is Here

Censorship of the Internet has been getting worse for years, but we just crossed a threshold which is going to take things to a whole new level. 

On August 25th, a new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union.  Under this new law, European bureaucrats will be able to order big tech companies to censor any content that is considered to be “illegal”, “disinformation” or “hate speech”.  That includes content that is posted by users outside of the European Union, because someone that lives in the European Union might see it.  I wrote about this a few days ago, but I don’t think that people are really understanding the implications of this new law.  In the past, there have been times when governments have requested that big tech companies take down certain material, but now this new law will give government officials the power to force big tech companies to take down any content that they do not like. 

Any big tech companies that choose not to comply will be hit with extremely harsh penalties.

Of course mainstream news outlets such as the Washington Post are attempting to put a positive spin on this new law.  We are being told that it will “safeguard” us from “illegal content” and “disinformation”…

New rules meant to safeguard people from illegal content, targeted ads, unwanted algorithmic feeds and disinformation online are finally in force, thanks to new regulation in the European Union that took effect this month.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

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The Global War on Thought Crime

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.

In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.

In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”

One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.

The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.

The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.

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That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez’s Free Speech Rights

The case of 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is not quite closed. While the Vanguard School’s board of directors has declared that he may sport a “don’t tread on me” patch on his backpack, a closer look at the school district’s policies suggests that administrators are still inclined to tread all over Rodriguez’s free speech rights.

That’s according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy organization. FIRE spoke with Jaiden’s mother, who said that contrary to the board’s public statement, a district official—Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs, Colorado—told her that her son would only be allowed to display the Gadsden flag patch as long as no one else complained about it.

Moreover, Rodriguez is still prohibited from displaying a secondary patch that references the Firearms Policy Coalition and expresses support for the Second Amendment. The justification for this restriction is the district’s categorical ban on content having to do with alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons.

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Elite Crackdown On Free Speech Worldwide Intensifies

The leaders of nations, representatives of international organizations, and philanthropists say they are committed to creating free and open societies. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has independent fact-checkers, is open to all perspectives, and doesn’t interfere in elections. And, in response to questions from a colleague at Public, a representative from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations insisted the philanthropy supported free speech.

“In response to your effort to conflate any attempt to address hate speech as a frontal assault on free speech itself,” the Soros spokesperson said, “perhaps the words of the UN Secretary-General will help in illuminating a crucial distinction: ‘Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech.’”

But these words are a thin veil covering an aggressive attack on freedom of speech around the world, from Australia to North America to Europe, where the Digital Services Act, which demands Internet companies “Address any risk they pose on society, including public health, physical and mental well-being,” goes into effect today.

A blockbuster new investigation by Australia’s Sky News discovered that Meta-Facebook has been paying activists to serve as neutral fact-checkers while, in reality, using their power to censor their political enemies.

The context is that this fall, Australians will vote in a special national election, the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, on whether to give special political powers to native peoples. Facebook is funding those in favor of the referendum to censor its opponents. “An audit of RMIT Voice fact checks showed the 17 Voice checks between May 3 and June 23 this year were all targeting anti-Voice opinions or views,” Sky News Found.

Meta allowed the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) to censor disfavored views even while “knowing it was a breach of the rules Zuckerberg established to distance himself from fact-checking responsibilities,” reported SkyNews.

The RMIT, which is a respected technical university like America’s MIT, “used the powers Facebook has given it to throttle Sky News Australia’s Facebook page with false fact checks multiple times this year, breaching the Meta-endorsed IFCN Code of Principles and preventing millions of Australians from reading or watching Sky News Australia’s journalism.”

How did the fact-checkers abuse their powers? By smearing their political enemies as racists. “Fact-checkers employed by RMIT have led to numerous code breaches,” reports Sky News, “including one fact-checker using her social media account to label Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a fear-mongering racist for his views on the Voice.”

As for Soros’ Open Society Foundations, its spokesperson cleverly tucked a call for expanded censorship into her response to our queries.

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Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

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Talking About Sex Online Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Kayden Kross, an adult film entrepreneur and a former business partner of mine, sent me a text message a few months ago. She was excited—she was seeing a community of straight dudes gather on Deeper, the power exchange and BDSM-themed website she owns, to discuss their sexual preferences, turn-ons, and other various tastes. And she was seeing this across other platforms too. This felt rare to her, and groundbreaking to me. 

When I asked Lucie Fielding, a mental health counselor in Washington state, how many spaces she was aware of for straight men to have these conversations, she said “Oh, not many—unless we’re talking incels—there’s got to be stuff on Reddit, but apart from that, these are such important forums. Because there’s such a societal pressure for men not to be talking with one another about these things.” But on platforms like Deeper, PornHub, and other online providers of adult videos, the comments section is just that sort of conversation.

Kross described the communities as having creeds of acceptance, giving examples such as “The ‘don’t yuck my yum’ thing. It’s agreed upon that so long as you are not saying something that is a political minefield, it is not OK to dog on someone else’s expression of what they’re there for. And when people do, even if it’s something where you can’t imagine anyone would be into that, you’ll see people rush to that person’s defense. There’s very much this understanding that in order for this to work, everyone has to agree not to add shame to the pile.”

And it isn’t just sexuality being shared. Someone might say, according to Kross, “‘My dog died today.’ And then someone else will chime in with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ And then the person will say, ‘I had no one,’ and ‘I’m alone.’ And then someone else would be like, ‘Well, I would have given you a hug if I was there.’ We all know, there’s this kind of idea of traditional masculinity, and the expectations are that men don’t really talk about their feelings. And the fact is, in the comment section, when you’re anonymous, you’re not subject any longer to expectations, right? That’s why we have trolls. But it’s also why you end up with these kinds of conversations that, you know—otherwise, who would you have them with?”

But these conversations, like so many others, are at risk of being censored out of existence. New state laws requiring verification of consumers’ ages threaten to wipe out small producers and scare off subscribers concerned about threats to their own reputations in the event of a data breach. Laws like SESTA/FOSTA have made promotion of adult entertainment—already an uphill battle—even more starkly difficult, reaching as far as those Reddit communities Fielding mentioned and causing many subreddits about sexuality to shutter. And payment processors and banks have been denying adult workers access to financial infrastructure for decades.

Why does freedom of speech and freedom from shame matter in this context? According to Fielding, “Shame tells us that we are bad. That our desires are bad, that our pleasure isn’t valid. And the relationship between shame and isolation is that when we feel that we are bad or that there’s something to be ashamed of, we withdraw because we don’t want to share that.… That leads to social withdrawal.… It means that folks are trying things in very risky ways, because they don’t have the community around them.” One example is choking—without proper safety and risk-informed consent, this risky activity can turn deadly with alarming ease.

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Satellite Images of Maui Fire Taken Down “At the Request of Responding Organizations in Hawai’i”

Actions by officials on Maui have contributed to an air of suspicion about the handling of the Lahaina fire that killed over 100 and left around 1000 people unaccounted for, including many children. Media access is tightly controlled, drones are grounded for getting too close to the suspected origin site of the fire and now satellite images from the fire have been taken down from a news site. The censorship incident appears to be isolated but troubling just the same. The photos were widely published and remain online elsewhere.

A Gateway Pundit reader sent in a tip (thank you) that an interactive satellite map APP comparing before and after photos of Lahaina has been taken down. The map was featured in a news article by Scooty Nickerson with the Bay Area News Group headlined: Interactive Maui wildfire map: Before and after images of Lahaina show scale of devastation

A message where the images once were reads: “At the request of responding organizations in Hawai’i and out of respect for the ongoing situation, the imagery and data in this app have been removed.” The before picture is still available by clicking the “close” button in the display.

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Look How Google Shoos You Away From The Biden Family Biz And Other Big News

While fact-checking a Federalist article early Monday morning, I did a quick Google search for “hunter biden joe biden ‘an absolute wall.’”

It’s the language now-President Joe Biden used during the 2020 campaign to allege a separation between his vice-presidential duties and his son’s overseas work for the family business. It’s back in the news after the House Oversight Committee on Thursday asked the National Archives and Records Administration for unredacted communications containing three of Joe Biden’s vice presidential pseudonyms: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.

Google, however, apparently didn’t want me to find too much information — at least not from certain sources.

“It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information,” Google alerted me, prompting me to make sure the source is “trusted on this topic” and maybe just to “come back later.”

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Australia’s Misinfo Bill Paves Way for Soviet-Style Censorship

The Australian Government’s proposed new laws to crack down on misinformation and disinformation have drawn intense criticism for their potential to restrict free expression and political dissent, paving the way for a digital censorship regime reminiscent of Soviet Lysenkoism.

Under the draft legislation, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will gain considerable expanded regulatory powers to “combat misinformation and disinformation,” which ACMA says poses a “threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy.”

Digital platforms will be required to share information with ACMA on demand, and to implement stronger systems and processes for handling of misinformation and disinformation.

ACMA will be empowered to devise and enforce digital codes with a “graduated set of tools” including infringement notices, remedial directions, injunctions and civil penalties, with fines of up to $550,000 (individuals) and $2.75 million (corporations). Criminal penalties, including imprisonment, may apply in extreme cases.

Controversially, the government will be exempt from the proposed laws, as will professional news outlets, meaning that ACMA will not compel platforms to police misinformation and disinformation disseminated by official government or news sources.

As the government and professional news outlets have been, and continue to be, a primary source of online misinformation and disinformation, it is unclear that the proposed laws will meaningfully reduce online misinformation and disinformation. Rather, the legislation will enable the proliferation of official narratives, whether true, false or misleading, while quashing the opportunity for dissenting narratives to compete.

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Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted

The sitting vice president, shortly before moving to Washington, D.C., successfully scapegoated through heavily publicized if legally unsuccessful pimping prosecutions a career newspaperman who last week shot himself to death at age 74 rather than sit through yet another prostitution-facilitation trial that he insisted to his dying days was an attack on free speech.

Yet the chances of Kamala Harris being asked this week—or any week—about the late James Larkin, or her starring role in the demonization of his and Michael Lacey’s online classified advertising company Backpage as “the world’s top online brothel,” are vanishingly small. That’s because people have a natural revulsion toward anything associated—however falsely—with child prostitution or sex trafficking, true. But it also stems from something far less excusable: When it comes to conflicts between the feds and those from the professionally unpopular corners of the free speech industry, journalists have been increasingly taking the side of The Man.

You could see this dynamic in stark relief last month in the elite-media response to U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s Independence Day injunction against the federal government from pressuring social media companies to censor individuals for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” As catalogued at Reason by Robby Soave, J.D. Tuccille, Jacob Sullum, and Robert Corn-Revere, and as I experienced during a bizarre panel discussion on CNN, the default journalistic reaction was anxiety that the ruling (in the words of the New York Times news department) “could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.” Sure, there may be First Amendment implications, but, well, have you seen that dangerous whackaloon Alex Berenson?

Far too often, journalists reserve their free speech defenses for people they actually like. And man, did they not like Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey.

This antipathy for Larkin/Lacey and the New Times alt-weekly chain the duo launched in Phoenix was obvious long before politicians began moving on from Craigslist to Backpage in their morally panicked crusade against technology companies that allegedly promote “sex trafficking.” (I use quotation marks here not to intimate that sex trafficking does not exist, but rather that, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has documented better than any living reporter, the term is overwhelmingly deployed by politicians and law enforcement to describe and punish conduct that has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing unwitting adults, let alone minors, into the sex business.)

The New Times honchos—especially Lacey, who was always the more public and pugilistic face of the franchise—were resented because they threw sharp elbows at both the graybeard alternative weeklies to their left and at the big-city dailies that were originally to their right but then tacked over time to the kind of bloodless lefty respectability space inhabited by NPR. The New Times papers hurled buckets of snark onto anyone perceived as Establishment, which pissed off boomer lefty journalists almost as much as elected Republican officials such as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

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