Tag: censorship

The War on Free Speech Is Really a War on the Right to Criticize the Government

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

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How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex

I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My résumé also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.

[Read the accompanying #TwitterFile – The Informational Cartel]

In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital-security workshops for journalists and human-rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

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THE WAR ON FREE SPEECH IS REALLY A WAR ON THE RIGHT TO CRITICIZE THE GOVERNMENT

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

Keep reading

The Government’s Sprawling Effort to Censor (True) Information During the Pandemic

In July 2022, Twitter permanently suspended Rhode Island physician Andrew Bostom after awarding the epidemiologist and longtime researcher at Brown University a fifth strike for spreading “misinformation.”

A July 26 tweet alleging that there was no solid evidence Covid-19 vaccines had prevented any children from being hospitalized—”only RCT data we have from children reveals ZERO hospitalizations prevented by vaccination vs. placebo”—was apparently the final straw.

The funny thing was, it appeared Bostom’s tweet was true.

Dr. Anish Koka, a cardiologist and writer, said he was initially skeptical of Bostom’s claim. But after speaking with him for more than an hour, he realized Bostom was citing the government’s own data, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) briefing document that included randomized controlled trial (RCT) data on children.

“…Dr. Bostom’s tweet appears quite correct as per the FDA documents,” Koka wrote on Substack. “In the RCTs available, there does not appear to be evidence that the vaccine prevented hospitalizations.”

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Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony

Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, is the delegate from the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Congress. Last month, when independent writers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, she described them as “so-called journalists” and sought to undermine their testimony about government pressure to restrict speech on Twitter.

She has now gone much further.

Plaskett recently sent a letter to Taibbi accusing him of perjury and suggesting that he could face up to five years in jail. The letter was obtained by Lee Fang, a writer who works with Taibbi and publishes on Substack. In it, Plaskett notes that providing false testimony to Congress “is punishable by up to five years imprisonment.”

The congresswoman’s basis for accusing Taibbi of perjury is a handful of errors that he made during the publication of the Twitter Files. These mistakes caught the attention of MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who skewered Taibbi in an interview and suggested the entire Twitter Files project rested upon a house of cards.

It is true that Taibbi made some errors: In one of his tweets about the web of organizations engaged in identifying so-called misinformation on Twitter, he confused CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—an organ of the federal government—with CIS, the Center for Internet Security—a nonprofit. Hasan has never sufficiently explained why this mistake would render the Twitter Files obsolete; in fact, both organizations participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, a Stanford University project that sought to monitor the election-related discourse on social media. Taibbi pointed out this fact in a tweet admitting to the mistake.

Regardless, it is obviously not the case that Taibbi committed perjury. Plaskett’s letter describes the CISA/CIS mistake as an “intentional” one; this is simply false. Taibbi did not willfully mischaracterize the two organizations; when he rewrote “CIS” as “CISA,” he honestly thought the tweet in question had referred to the government agency rather than the nonprofit.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), described Plaskett’s letter as shocking.

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Facebook Censors Seymour Hersh’s Article About US Involvement In Nord Stream Pipeline Attack

Facebook is censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story about US involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines using a ‘fact checker’ with links to the Norwegian government in what represents a clear conflict of interest.

Earlier this year, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation which was organized with the aid of the Norwegian government, Norwegian Secret Service and Navy.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger first noticed the issue when he tried to post Hersh’s article to Facebook, but saw the social media giant had slapped a warning label on the link stating, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”

Except the ‘fact-checkers’ in question aren’t independent at all.

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FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf says “regulation” is needed to target “misinformation”

In an interview with CNBC, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said that online misinformation was harming the life expectancy of people, there is a need for “better regulation” on how to handle health misinformation and that “specific authorities at FDA, FTC, and other areas are going to be needed.”

“We know more and more about misinformation. It relates back to this life expectancy,” Califf said. Why aren’t we using knowledge of diet? It’s not that people don’t know about it. Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. The COVID vaccines and the antivirals give us an easy way to talk about it, but this is not limited to those areas. In heart disease, so many people don’t take their medicines, even though they’re now generic and very low-cost, often [they’re] deluded into taking things that are sold over the Internet that aren’t effective.”

According to the FDA commissioner, one of the solutions is telling the “truth is a louder volume.”

“In the good old days, when I was a practicing cardiologist, for the most part, people developed products, they got through the FDA, the label determined what was talked about, the Internet didn’t exist, you advertised in medical meetings and journals. There was sort of a hierarchy of information that went through the prescriber or the implanter in the case of devices to the patient. Of course, the problem in that system is it left a lot of people out. We now know about that. Now, everyone’s included because everyone’s connected to the Internet. But we can put out a statement about what we’ve determined based on the highest level of evidence, within ten minutes, someone who’s thought ten minutes about it can reach a billion people. And there’s nothing that restricts them from telling things that are not true. This has always existed. … But they couldn’t reach so many people,” he explained.

He added that there isn’t enough regulation on health information and that is “impacting our health in very detrimental ways.” As such, he thinks “there is a real need for better regulation of how to deal with this complex information.”

Califf noted that the FDA already has regulatory authority over advertisements content on tech platforms. But he feels the agency could do it better.

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Jacinda Ardern to Become New Zealand’s De Facto Censorship Tsar

These days, it’s hard to find any globalist who will let go of power gracefully, let alone retire from the stage of politics.

This seems to be the case with New Zealand’s increasingly unpopular radical Marxist former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who also just happens to also be a World Economic Forum young leader, and mentored by none other than Tony Blair. Undoubtedly, a brilliant resumé for any aspiring technocrat.

Not content with destroying her country’s economy and society over the last three years with her fanatical “zero Covid” lockdown and brutal vaccine mandates, Ardern is now being positioned by the Establishment to become the country’s de facto censorship Tsar…

Bloomberg News reports:

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will lead the nation’s push for greater safeguards against terrorist and violent content online.

Ardern has been appointed Special Envoy for the ‘Christchurch Call’, a global initiative she set up in the wake of a terrorist attack in the South Island city in 2019, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said Tuesday in Wellington. She will report directly to Hipkins and has declined to receive any remuneration for the role, which will commence on April 17, he said.

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