Tag: censorship

FBI responds to Twitter censorship allegations, blames “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation”

Responding to allegations in the Twitter Files that it regularly communicated with Twitter employees, flagging content and accounts that potentially violated the platform’s terms of service, the FBI has suggested that what it did wasn’t censorship as it did not ask Twitter to “take action.”

FBI officials said that they provided information to Twitter so that the platform could make a decision on whether or not to take action.

“We are providing it so that they can take whatever action they deem appropriate under their terms of service to protect their platform and protect their customers, but we never direct or ask them to take action,” the FBI officials said.

The allegations that the FBI and Twitter were in close contact were made in the sixth installment of the Twitter Files, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

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Was Obama the Architect of the FBI and Big Tech Illegal Censoring Machine?

With the release of the Twitter files by Elon Musk, we learned that the FBI was working with Twitter in censoring and managing messaging on the social media site.  From information being gathered in the case between Missouri and Louisiana and the US government, where The Gateway Pundit is the lead plaintiff, we have also learned that this was taking place with other government departments and other Big Tech companies.

Jason Goodman at Crowdsourcethetruth.com reminds us that Barack Obama signed an Executive Order in 2015 that ties all of this together.

In 2015, long after Ayers and Dohrn helped the obscure Illinois State Senator rise to international prominence, President Obama held a technology summit at Stanford University. After delivering remarks on the future of technology and industry, Obama signed Executive Order 13691 Promoting Private Sector Cybersecurity Information Sharing. In it, the President commanded that, “private companies, nonprofit organizations, executive departments and agencies (agencies), and other entities must be able to share information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents and collaborate to respond in as close to real time as possible.” Stanford students in attendance were probably unaware, but this order codified long standing FBI demands to supersede the fourth amendment and investigate anyone they wanted. This paved the way for the Neo-fascism now being exposed in the ongoing releases of the “Twitter Files”.

Making good on his campaign promise, Obama ensured that America would be fundamentally transformed from a Constitutional Republic into a Neo-fascist Technocratic Autocracy. This new authority would be enforced by a digitally enabled Super-Stasi made up of FBI InfraGard members, (https://www.infragard.org/) and other contractors including hundreds, perhaps even thousands of ordinary citizens patrolling on-line as America’s Secret Police.

Such an Orwellian overthrow would be calculated to happen without anyone noticing until it was too late. The merger of government and corporate technological power enabled a class of politically aligned bureaucratic elites to maintain control by monitoring and stifling opposition rather than allowing open debate in a free marketplace of ideas. These traitors have trampled the Constitution and destroyed the most fundamental aspect of American greatness.

EO 13691 states the following [emphasis added]:

Section 1. Policy. In order to address cyber threats to public health and safety, national security, and economic security of the United States, private companies, nonprofit organizations, executive departments and agencies (agencies), and other entities must be able to share information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents and collaborate to respond in as close to real time as possible.

Organizations engaged in the sharing of information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents play an invaluable role in the collective cybersecurity of the United States. The purpose of this order is to encourage the voluntary formation of such organizations, to establish mechanisms to continually improve the capabilities and functions of these organizations, and to better allow these organizations to partner with the Federal Government on a voluntary basis.

Such information sharing must be conducted in a manner that protects the privacy and civil liberties of individuals, that preserves business confidentiality, that safeguards the information being shared, and that protects the ability of the Government to detect, investigate, prevent, and respond to cyber threats to the public health and safety, national security, and economic security of the United States.

One section of this EO states that agencies are required to share assessments of their agency’s activities and provide those assessments to the DHS.   It may be helpful to get ahold of these assessments.

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VP Kamala Harris says she would “require” social media to work with The White House to protect “democracy”

Vice President Kamala Harris said that social media companies should work with The White House to combat misinformation and disinformation to protect “democracy.”

Harris made the comments in an interview with NPR on Monday. Asked about her thoughts on the changes made by Elon Musk on Twitter, the Vice President said:

“I think about this issue a bit differently, which is my deep and profound concern about how misinformation and disinformation have infiltrated information streams in our country.”

Vice President Harris referenced her role as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she was involved in the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

She alleged that the investigation proved that there was a “profound amount of intentional disinformation and misinformation targeting specific demographics to take advantage of what might be pre-existing disparities and skepticism about the role and importance of government,” and that it was done to weaken democracy in the US.

“When I see how social media is used in that way, it causes me a very deep level of concern,” Harris said. “So, what I would say about any social media site is this: I fully expect and would require that leaders in that sector cooperate and work with us who are concerned about national security, concerned about upholding and protecting our democracy, to do everything in their power to ensure that there is not a manipulation that is allowed or overlooked that is done with the intention of upending the security of our democracy and our nation.”

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Biden Admin Funds AI To Police Online Language

Government spending records have revealed that the Biden Administration is dishing out more than half a million dollars in grants to fund the development of artificial intelligence that will censor language on social media in order to eliminate ‘microaggressions’.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that the funding was part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion ‘American Rescue Plan’ and was granted to researchers at the University of Washington in March to develop technologies that could be used to protect online users from ‘discriminatory’ language.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton compared the move to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to “censor speech unapproved by the state,” calling it a “project to make it easier for their leftist allies to censor speech.”

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Elon Musk endorses Church-style committee to probe FBI’s engagement in social media censorship

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday endorsed the idea of creating a commission, similar to the historic Church Committee, to probe why the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community are involved in online censorship.

“Hear, hear!!” Musk tweeted in response to a tweet from venture capitalist David Sacks, who said: “We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”

The so-called Twitter Files have revealed federal law enforcement’s questionable involvement in suppressing news stories, such as the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Sacks’ tweet was in response to a video from 1975 posted by Blaze Media CEO Tyler Carditis. The video showed Idaho Sen. Frank Church telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. … Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies we must know. At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left.”

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FBI flagged jokes and satirical accounts to Twitter for censorship

The sixth batch of Twitter Files, published on Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi, has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were regularly flagging content to Twitter for censorship between January 2020 and November 2022 and that some of the flagged content contained jokes and satirical comments.

According to Taibbi, there were more than 150 emails between the FBI and former Head of Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and a “surprisingly high number” of these emails were FBI requests for Twitter to “take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”

Taibi noted that the the FBI’s social media-focused task force is known as FTIF and was created in the wake of the 2016 election. Since its inception, this task force has grown to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to “identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”

Taibbi shared several examples of the FBI’s censorship requests and said Twitter employees would often look for reasons to suspend accounts after receiving these requests.

These censorship request emails reveal that the FBI would target both large and small accounts and sometimes issue preservation letters and request location information for the flagged accounts. Some of the large accounts that were flagged include those of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) (which has over 873,000 followers) and actor Billy Baldwin (which has over 204,000 followers). However, accounts with as few as 15 followers were also flagged to Twitter by the FBI.

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Israel to introduce sweeping online censorship law

The Israeli government has announced that it will adopt recommendations to regulate social media platforms to create a “safer” online environment. The recommendations are similar to the social media rules in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which will take effect next year.

Outgoing Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel announced that Israel would adopt recommendations made by the committee for examining legislation on online social media platforms, which was formed in October 2021. The committee, which was led by the Communications Ministry director-general Liran Avisar Ben-Horin, was created to find solutions to tackle the regulatory and ethical questions related to social media.

“This is an unregulated space where negative and harmful social phenomena have emerged,” said Hendel, as reported by the Times of Israel. “Legal responsibility needs to be applied to digital platforms in relation to the distribution of illegal sexual content, incitement to violence and terrorism, and more.”

“The step we are taking today brings us closer to a more protected and safer online space while preserving freedom of expression.”

The committee recommended that social media companies should be obligated to immediately remove illegal and offensive content, create an online hotline for reporting offensive and illegal content, create a system where users can appeal censorship and suspension decisions, and be more transparent.

Courts will be given the power to issue content removal orders, and a social media regulator will be created. Platforms operating in Israel will be required to set up offices in Israel.

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The Porn Industry Is Worried That a Republican Senator Wants to Ban Porn

Some members of the adult industry are worried that a prorposed federal bill that’s going after content that aims to “arouse, titillate, or gratify” sexual desires has the potential to outlaw porn nationwide.

This week, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, from Utah, introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which seeks to “establish a national definition of obscenity that would apply to obscene content that is transmitted via interstate or foreign communications,” according to a statement from Lee’s office. 

Technically, a federal standard that defines obscenity already exists. Under the decades-old Miller Test, content is obscene if it hits certain conditions, including that the content in question depicts sexual conduct “in a patently offensive way.” At the moment, producing and distributing sexual content is legal in the U.S. 

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for workers in the adult industry, and its members are watching Lee’s bill closely because they believe it represents yet another attempt by conservatives to censor speech and expression about sex. 

Lee “introduced a bill that would remove porn’s First Amendment protections and effectively prohibit distribution of adult material in the US,” Free Speech Coalition (FSC) tweeted. “FSC is monitoring the bill, and will continue to do so in the new Congress.”

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Deep State interference was a conspiracy theory, until it wasn’t

Under the direction of Elon Musk, troves of files regarding Twitter’s dealings have been made public. We’re seeing just how much government bureaucrats colluded with the tech company to justify the suppression of stories which detailed the extent of the Biden family corruption. We can safely assume that government officials also had discussions with other media outlets because the suppression of the story was almost universal. Any journalist worth a lick would have known about the kickbacks to Hunter from Burisma, and would have been aware of the video which recorded Joe Biden dangling $1 billion of taxpayer money to coerce the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor looking into the corruption.

Now, most media outlets are also suppressing the Twitter Files. These agencies are clearly more outraged at Musk’s transparency than with government interference in elections, which just illustrates the media’s willingness to aid and abet. They are clearly out to silence Musk.

When Trump and other conservatives talked about a “Deep State” of government bureaucrats, the complicit media called the claim a conspiracy theory — yet when bureaucrats seek to control the narrative and talking points and subjugate what should be a free press, that is exactly what we’re talking about.

The media and other government officials claimed that everything Dr. Fauci said was gospel, no matter how much he got wrong. They squelched people who disagreed so the public wouldn’t challenge government edicts. They falsely labeled the theory that the Wuhan lab was the origin source as a disproven conspiracy theory.

The Washington Post ran a story mocking the notion there may be nefarious actors in our unchecked federal agencies which was titled, “The ‘deep state’: From scholarly critique to toxic conspiracy theory”. The piece read:

Even Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, who has become America’s Doctor in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of being a deep state actor.

One of the silliest efforts to discredit the entrenchment of a “Deep State” was made by CNN, which declared:

President Donald Trump is deeply invested in the idea that there is a ‘Deep State’ embedded within the government bureaucracy – and centered in the Department of Justice – which actively worked to defeat him in 2016 and then sought to undermine him once he won the presidency.

That conspiracy theory, which has never had much merit, suffered a near-fatal blow Friday afternoon when the Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.

That might be the most ridiculous circular logic I’ve ever read — there’s no “Deep State” because a corrupt government bureaucracy failed to find fault in one of their own. Gee, that’s convincing.

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UK government asked Twitter and Facebook to “tweak” algorithms during Covid

Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”

But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.

And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.

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