Tag: censorship

UK’s online censorship bill has amendment that targets non-citizens

The UK’s messy Online Safety Bill, that its authors say is designed to protect children from online harms, keeps causing controversies and rifts – but also continues to “grow” through amendments, some of which observers find difficult to decipher.

A recent one aims to prevent children from accessing content that would inform them about what might turn into dangerous ways to cross the channel between the UK and France.

Specifically, the amendment speaks about crossing the English channel “with the aim of entering the UK in a vessel unsuited or unsafe for those purposes,” and references a popular way in which illegal immigrants have taken to enter the country.

But now, the question is being asked, who do UK’s legislators think they are legislating for? The bill would impose legal requirements in the country, but the amendment suggests that it would somehow be used to restrict access to certain content to those outside it – and, it seems, mostly non-citizens.

This is far from the only example of contentious or just baffling provision in the proposal. This week, the draft caused a “rebellion” staged by members of parliament from the ruling Conservative party.

Namely, close to 50 Conservative MPs had an amendment of their own – one to add the possibility of imprisoning social media execs, in case their platforms are found not to be adhering to the bill’s provisions to protect children from content such as child abuse, suicide and self-harm.

If found guilty, under the future law, these high ranking representatives of tech companies would be put in jail for up to two years, the amendment said.

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Rep. Adam Schiff’s staffers repeatedly asked Twitter to censor memes

The latest batch of Twitter Files, released on Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, showed that Rep. Adam Schiff’s office repeatedly contacted Twitter requesting the removal of posts critical of Joe Biden and staff at Schiff’s office.

“Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down,” Taibbi wrote. “This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a ‘Peter Douche’ parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request.”

Taibbi said that Schiff’s office pestered Twitter to remove the parody photo after former President Donald Trump retweeted it.

“To its credit, Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious ‘humorous intent’ and ‘any reasonable observer’ – apparently, not a Schiff staffer – could see it was doctored,” Taibbi wrote. “Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein didn’t give up, claiming there was a ‘slippery slope concern here.’”

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Campaign funded by Pfizer and Moderna lobbyists sent Twitter weekly lists of tweets to censor

The Public Good Projects (PGP), a nonprofit that has developed several projects to fight so-called Covid “misinformation,” received $1,275,000 from the Pfizer and Moderna lobbying group, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter’s Covid misinformation rules. As part of this campaign, PGP sent Twitter lobbyists and content moderators weekly emails containing lists of tweets to censor.

Journalist Lee Fang published one of the weekly emails that Twitter received from PGP as part of the latest release of the Twitter Files — collections of internal Twitter communications that have exposed the censorship relationships Twitter had with government agencies and other powerful groups before Elon Musk took over.

The email shows Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, sharing “this week’s misinfo report” from PGP. The February 24, 2022 email included a list of top trends the PGP had seen during the week and two attached lists. According to Fang, one of the lists contained tweets the PGP wanted Twitter to take down and the other list contained tweets that it wanted Twitter to verify.

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Adam Schiff continuously demanded Twitter ban, censor, suppress criticism of self, staff, Biden: Twitter Files

A brief batch of Twitter Files dropped on Friday by Matt Taibbi shows that staff of House Democrat Adam Schiff were in frequent communication with Twitter to demand the removal of content from the platform. Documents show that the DNC and Schiff made requests to remove a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden after President Donald Trump retweeted the photo. 

Twitter refused to remove the photo, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying that it had obvious “humorous intent” and that “any reasonable observer” could tell that the photo was edited. 

Schiff’s staff did not lay off, however, claiming that there was a “slippery slope concern” to be had.

Taibbi wrote that even when Twitter did not suspend accounts, they would often act against accounts. “Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweeting about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier.

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Yes, Virginia, There IS a Deep State—and It Is Worse than You Think

Mention the term “deep state” in polite company and most likely no one will want to speak to you the rest of the evening. The deep state is what Wikipedia calls “discredited,” something reeking of conspiracies, false accusations, and the substitution of fantasy for the truth.

After the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida, Trump alluded to “deep state” actions, which brought predictable ridicule from the mainstream media. Trump was speaking conspiratorially, and if one follows the mainstream media these days, the only conspiracies are on the right. (You know, like the one in which the unarmed, ragtag January 6 rioters nearly overthrew the US government.)

After the recent revelations about how Twitter worked to hide the story of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, Trump attributed the secrecy to a plot by the “deep state.” However, while the facts of the story really are outrageous, I don’t believe it was as much a secret conspiracy as a case of people being able to engage in certain actions with no political consequences.

Furthermore, journalist Matt Taibbi’s stunning revelations regarding FBI and CIA agents’ outright interference in the 2020 election via Twitter on the pretense that Russian operatives were spreading disinformation has further exposed both the involvement of federal law enforcement agents in partisan activities and the sad fact that those agents need not worry about being held accountable—especially if they are engaged in a “progressive” cause.

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The White House’s most brazen, entitled, social media censorship demands

The latest batch of revelations into the social media censorship directed by the Biden White House reveal a range of broad, often petty, censorship demands, some of which are purely requests to boost President Biden’s image and show him and his family in a better light.

The revelations came as part of the discovery in the ongoing lawsuit against the government for its alleged First Amendment violations, making clear requests to silence American citizens through online platforms.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, shared some of the documents obtained during discovery.

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Biden admin asked Twitter to silence Robert F. Kennedy Jr

A recently published email has provided more evidence of President Joe Biden’s administration asking tech platforms to censor content that challenges the federal government’s Covid messaging.

The email shows the Biden White House’s Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, Clarke Humphrey, requesting that Twitter remove a tweet from environmental health lawyer and author Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” Humphrey wrote to Twitter in the January 2021 email. “And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~genre that would be great.”

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From the Twitter Files: Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company’s massively profitable Covid jabs

On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers – saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.

The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.

It came not from an “anti-vaxxer” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food & Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”

No matter.

By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.

Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.

The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”

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“Project Censored” List: Top 25 Most Censored News Stories Of The Year

“Published each year by Seven Stories Press, featuring dispatches from the ongoing revolution in independent journalism, each book reports the year’s top-25 independent news stories, which corporate media have ignored, misrepresented, or censored; analyzes corporate “junk food” news and “news abuse;” highlights organizations that exemplify media democracy in action; and investigates hot topics in journalism and politics.” – Source

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. The Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 have been selected from several hundred candidate stories submitted by 207 student researchers from ten US college and university campuses. – Source

About Project Censored

 “Project Censored educates students and the public about the importance of a truly free press for democratic self-government. We expose and oppose news censorship and we promote independent investigative journalism, media literacy, and critical thinking. Through our website, weekly radio program, annual book, and other programs, we provide this service to the United States, Canada, UK, and the world.

2021-2022 Theme: Billionaire’s Press

Writing for the Santa Fe reporter, “Project Censored, The billionaires’ press dominates censorship beat” Paul Rosenberg explained “Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories—like Watergate before the 1972 election—that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense, but in a broader, expanded sense reflective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship defined as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment: Without the free flow of vital information, government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.”

“Yet, from the very beginning, as A.J. Liebling put it, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’”

“In their introduction to Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press, [ ] Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth [ ] observe, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite owners, seldom serves the public interest.”

“Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs—Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet)”.

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Summaries Of All ‘Twitter Files’ To Date

It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

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