Tag: censorship

“Free Speech For Whom?”: Former Twitter Exec Makes Chilling Admission On The “Nuanced” Standard Used For Censorship

Yesterday’s hearing of the House Oversight Committee featured three former Twitter executives who are at the center of the growing censorship scandal involving the company: Twitter’s former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, former deputy general counsel James Baker and former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth.

However, it was the testimony of the only witness called by the Democrats that proved the most enlightening and chilling.

Former executive Twitter Anika Collier Navaroli testified on what she repeatedly called the “nuanced” standard used by her and her staff on censorship.

Toward the end of the hearing, she was asked about that standard by Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D., NM). Her answer captured precisely why Twitter’s censorship system proved a nightmare for free expression. Stansbury’s agreement with her take on censorship only magnified the concerns over the protection of free speech on social media.

Even before Stansbury’s question, the hearing had troubling moments. Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md) opened up the hearing that insisting that Twitter has not censored enough and suggested that it was still fueling violence by allowing disinformation to be posted on the platform.

Navaroli then testified how she felt that there should have been much more censorship and how she fought with the company to remove more material that she and her staff considered “dog whistles” and “coded” messaging.

Rep. Stansbury asked what Twitter has done and is doing to combat hate speech on its platform. Navaroli correctly declined to address current policies since she has not been at the company for some time. However, she then said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach:

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Rep. Stansbury responded by saying  “Exactly.”

Keep reading

Twitter Kept Entire ‘Database’ of Republican Requests to Censor Posts

WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.

That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter. Some Republicans even believe the release of the “Twitter Files” is the “tip of the spear” of their crusade against the alleged liberal bias of Big Tech.

But former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the White House’s Teigen tweet demand was hardly an isolated incident: The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.

“It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”

In interviews with former Twitter personnel, onetime Trump administration officials, and other people familiar with the matter, each source recalled what could be described as a “hotline,” “tipline,” or large Twitter “database” of moderation and removal requests that was frequently pinged by the offices of powerful Democrats and Republicans alike.

Keep reading

Canada passes online censorship bill

Canada’s Senate has passed Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act), which critics refer to as “the internet censorship bill,” along with several amendments.

The bill passed in the third reading with 43 votes in favor and 15 against, which means it is now inching ever closer to becoming law since in the next step it goes back to the House of Commons, which will consider the amendments.

The government proposed the bill as a way to amend the Broadcasting Act by modifying Canada’s broadcasting policy, and give the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) new powers as a regulator.

Opponents of the bill, including Conservative politicians and advocacy groups, however, see it as a way to increase the government’s ability to censor online speech it dislikes.

The effort to bring this legislation to life in Canada has quite a story behind it: initially, the Online Streaming Act, then known as Bill C-10, passed in the House of Commons in June 2021 but failed in the Senate.

It made a comeback as Bill C-11 in February 2022, got cleared by the House in June, and finally last week made it through the Senate.

Keep reading

Elon Musk Names Obscure Agency as ‘Worst Offender’ in US Government Censorship

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has pointed to a little-known government agency as the “worst offender” in terms of U.S. government censorship and media manipulation, alleging that it flagged Twitter accounts for suppression based on dubious criteria like promoting the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Musk named the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) as a “threat to our democracy” and pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s extensive Jan. 3 thread that delves into the agency’s interactions with Twitter on content censorship.

Taibbi’s thread that Musk pointed to for more details on the GEC’s activity includes internal correspondence among Twitter executives that indicates that even they took a dim view of engagement with the GEC, considering it “political” and “press-happy” and as having a “track record of actively advancing specific ideological agendas.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the GEC with a request for comment but received no response by publication.

Keep reading

‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Is A Slur Meant To Silence Us

Back in the 1980s, when Bill Casey was director of Central Intelligence, I asked him a direct question related to analysis. In response, he pointed to his temple and said, “Well, you just gotta use your noodle.”

Whatever you may think of Casey, his pithiness here is instructive. It’s good advice for everyone these days, especially as the term “conspiracy theory” continues to mushroom throughout Big Media, here, there, and everywhere. Team Biden seems to have pushed the term into absolute hyperdrive since he took office.

It’s used even when grand plans are out in the open. For example, participants at the recent World Economic Forum congregation in Davos publicly discussed how we should all be censored and surveilled and tracked. The Orwellian life they’d like to shove on us has been preached for decades by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, prior to his 2020 publication of “The Great Reset.”

But if you point this out you’re likely to be smeared as a “conspiracy theorist.” As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and many respected pundits have noted, the WEF goal for an unelected elite to rein in the hoi polloi is no theory. Their activists talk about it constantly.

Sure, there are some people who conjure up far-fetched notions of why and how this or that may have happened. But the term “conspiracy theorist” has become a knee-jerk label intended to discredit thoughtful investigation — or just plain observation — by describing investigators as wacky conjurers. This is one of many ways power elites exploit the natural human fear of ostracism in order to induce us to self-silence.

Keep reading

WHO releases international pandemic treaty zero draft that targets “misinformation” and “disinformation”

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new powers to “tackle” anything that it deems to be “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” if passed.

The WHO has been pushing the treaty since December 2021 and those drafting the treaty intend to present a final report to the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.

If adopted, the treaty will be legally binding under international law and the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) would be required to comply with the treaty’s demands to target misinformation.

The zero draft is similar to previous versions of the treaty and the provisions related to misinformation are described in Article 17 (“Strengthening pandemic and public health literacy”).

This section of the treaty calls for member states to “tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, including through promotion of international cooperation.”

It also urges member states to manage “infodemics” — a term coined by the WHO that refers to “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.” Specifically, member states are told to manage these so-called infodemics “through effective channels, including social media.”

The scope of this treaty also extends beyond the WHO’s member base. Article 16 (“Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at the national level”) urges member states to collaborate with non-state actors and the private sector as part of a “whole-of-society response in decision making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, as well as effective feedback mechanisms.”

We obtained a copy of the zero draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty for you here.

Keep reading

Biden’s Controversial FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn to Face Scrutiny over Calls for Censorship, Leftist Advocacy

Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden’s progressive nominee for the FCC, will likely face intense scrutiny over her seemingly endless controversial statements as she hopes to get confirmed to the nation’s leading technology agency.

Biden renominated Sohn in early January after Senate Democrats failed to secure a majority to confirm her as a commissioner due to her far-left sympathies and controversial statements. If Sohn were confirmed to the FCC, it would give the agency a Democrat majority, which could allow them to pursue net neutrality regulations and other leftist priorities.

Most recently, Breitbart News senior technology correspondent Allum Bokhari reported how Sohn was appointed to the board of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) in 2018, two years before the group gave its “pioneer award” to a dominatrix named Mistress Blunt.

Sohn has called Fox News “state-sponsored propaganda” that is “dangerous to democracy” and called on the FCC to investigate if Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative-run network of local TV stations, should have a broadcast license.

Sohn was the cofounder and CEO of the leftist advocacy group Public Knowledge, which called on cable and satellite providers to cancel One America News Network.

Keep reading

Department of Health and Human Services is sued after ignoring freedom of information request over censorship demands

Activist group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for all records and communications between the Surgeon General’s office and social media companies about COVID-19 vaccines.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the HHS refused to adequately respond to a FOIA request filed in March 2022.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The request was for: “All records, including, but not limited to, electronic mail, texts, memoranda, and handwritten notes, of, regarding, referring, or relating to any efforts of Alexandria Phillips, Communications Director, Office of the Surgeon General, to contact any employee of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest concerning COVID-19 vaccines.”

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has previously called for censorship of Covid misinformation. In 2021, he published a report titled “Confronting Health Misinformation,” which aimed to “slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”

The report encouraged platforms to censor vaccine misinformation and other misinformation related to the pandemic.

Keep reading

Twitter Moderators Knew the ‘Russian Bots’ List Was Fake: Twitter Files

Twitter content moderators knew that a “Russian bots list” used by mainstream media to discredit unwelcome political viewpoints was fake, but ultimately remained silent on it due to fears of bad press, according to newly unveiled internal email exchanges.

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday released the latest installment of revelations dubbed the “Twitter Files.” This new batch of internal communications involved the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a nonprofit organization that studies strategies to counter campaigns to “undermine democratic processes” across the world.

ASD also created and maintains “Hamilton 68,” a dashboard that tracks, among other things, 600 Twitter accounts alleged to be Russian government-controlled bots. This online tool received positive mainstream media coverage, including from Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN.

In screenshots of emails shared by Taibbi, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth appeared to have dismissed Hamilton 68’s list of Russian bots as untrustworthy.

In a January 2018 email, Roth lamented Hamilton 68’s accusing an organically trending political hashtag of being driven by Russian bots. He also talked about potentially calling out such behavior.

Keep reading

YouTube censors and punishes Project Veritas over undercover Pfizer video

YouTube has deleted an undercover video by Project Veritas that showed a Pfizer director of research and development make comments about an idea he calls “directed evolution.”

YouTube has also punished the entire Project Veritas by issuing a “strike.”

“YouTube has taken down our Pfizer DirectedEvolution bombshell. It had 800K views,” O’Keefe announced on Twitter. “Pfizer is scrambling today per sources inside.”

“Project Veritas channel has been given a ‘strike’ and ability to upload ANY new videos is ‘restricted’ for a week with threats of future ‘permanent removal’ Project Veritas announced.

The subject of the video, Jordan Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s director of research and development strategic operations, was later approached by O’Keefe and his team in a New York restaurant and asked about the comments he made in the undercover video.

The later video showed the Pfizer employee becoming angry after being confronted by O’Keefe.

“You work for Pfizer,” O’Keefe said to Walker in the video. “My question for you is, why does Pfizer wanna hide from the public the fact that they’re mutating the COVID viruses?”

O’Keefe was referring to an undercover video, that YouTube has now deleted, where Walker said, “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [the COVID virus] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right?”

Keep reading