Tag: censorship

The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.”

Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface ― who could be against combating false information, which is rife online? ― it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” ― comments that were only reported in right-wing media.

The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship. Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.”

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Who Authorized the Department of Homeland Security to Police Online Speech? Not Congress

When George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the goal was to improve national security by strengthening government at various levels and helping them identify and respond to threats, particularly terrorism.

”The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response,” said Bush. ”Dozens of agencies charged with homeland security will now be located within one cabinet department with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.”

The law contained “severe privacy and civil liberties problems,” the ACLU argued, but the legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Only nine Senators voted against it (eight Democrats and one Independent).

Bush tapped Tom Ridge as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, but public policy experts admitted it was unclear precisely what the new department would do.

”The first challenge is to lower expectations,” Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution told The New York Times. ”People should think they will be safer, but remember we have a long way to go.”

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Study Details How Media, Big Tech Censored Doctors and Scientists Who Challenged COVID Narrative

A groundbreaking new scientific paper published Tuesday exposes the suppression and censorship of doctors and medical experts who opposed and challenged the official COVID-19 narrative.

Published in the sociological journal Minerva, “Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics,” details the experiences of medical professionals who spoke out against public health directives, and how they responded to efforts to suppress them.

The paper was co-authored by a team of Israeli and Australian scholars, including Yaffa Shir-Raz of the University of Haifa in Israel, Ety Elisha of The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel, Brian Martin of the University of Wollongong in Australia, Natti Ronel of Bar Ilan University in Israel, and Josh Guetzkow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

As noted by Dr. Robert Malone, himself an outspoken critic of COVID-19 “orthodoxy,” the publication of this article is particularly significant as Minerva is released by “mainstream academic publisher” Springer, a “Q1 journal in its subfield” of sociology with a “decent” research impact factor in the social sciences — meaning that it enjoys a strong reputation within its academic field.

Malone said the article also is notable because one of its authors, Yaffa Shir-Raz, “broke the story with video from the internal meeting at the Israeli ministry of health” on “how they hid many of the key findings regarding the Pfizer mRNA vaccine adverse effects.”

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Canada’s Bill C-11 explained: A chilling law that lets the government censor user-generated content

Canada’s Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) is one of several recent attempts by Western governments to crush online speech while claiming that they support free expression.

The bill is being pushed by Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez — a politician who believes that unregulated speech “erodes the foundations of democracy.” And it has the full support of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a world leader who previously said freedom of expression isn’t “freedom to hate.”

The Trudeau regime first attempted to pass a version of this bill in 2020. However, this bill (Bill C-10) failed in 2021 after mass pushback over the way it attempted to censor online speech.

After Bill C-10 died, Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of the Canadian Conservative Party of Canada who was serving as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 2021, warned critics of Bill C-10 to “make sure that we’re ready the next time Trudeau and his team come for our freedom of expression.”

And just one year later, Trudeau and his team did just that by resurrecting Bill C-10 and renaming it Bill C-11.

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Senator Dick Durbin says free speech doesn’t protect “misinformation” that downplays political violence

“Free speech does not include spreading misinformation to downplay political violence,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted – referencing an alleged “uptick in hate speech” since Elon Musk took Twitter private.

“Misinformation” is protected by the First Amendment.

The uptick that Senator Durbin is referencing was a bot campaign that Twitter suggests was used to troll the platform and the media as soon as Musk took control of the company.

Senator’s Durbin’s comments followed Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeting a link to an article containing claims about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

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Judge Rejects Biden Administration’s Attempt to Block Depositions in Big Tech-Government Censorship Case

The Biden administration’s attempt to block depositions of several key officials was turned down Nov. 2 by a U.S. judge.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, rejected a request for a partial stay of his Oct. 21 order authorizing the depositions of eight officials, including President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Government lawyers asked the judge to impose the partial stay as an appeals court weighs a request to vacate the part of his order that enables the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to the president.

Absent a stay, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants” their request, the government said.

Doughty ruled that the government failed to show how the officials would be irreparably harmed apart from referencing a diversion from “significant duties.” That didn’t meet the standard for showing irreparable harm, he said.

On the other hand, the plaintiffs, including the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, would be irreparably harmed by a partial stay because they’ve alleged a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and ‘The loss of First Amendment freedoms, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,’” Doughty said, quoting from a ruling in a separate case.

“The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions,” he added.

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How the government hid the truth behind Hunter Biden’s laptop

The more we find out about the collusion that has been going on among the Biden administration, the security agencies and Big Tech, the more alarming it is — and the more unrepentant they are.

The latest bombshell from The Intercept, based on communications unveiled in the federal lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, shows that the Department of Homeland Security has been having monthly meetings with Facebook and Twitter to pressure them to censor social-media posts about topics such as the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of COVID vaccines, racial justice and US support for the war in Ukraine — In other words, anything that could be detrimental to public support for the Biden administration.

We already know that the FBI was involved in efforts to censor and bury information that might have harmed Joe Biden’s candidacy back in 2020, including The Post’s exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020. That amounted to election interference, which successfully prevented the American people from doing the necessary due diligence on one of the two candidates for president. So successful was the strategy that the Biden administration appears to have expanded it.

Security agencies have switched their attention from combating foreign disinformation to censoring the speech of American citizens who dissent from the government-approved narrative. No matter that free speech is protected by the First Amendment; if the Biden administration doesn’t like the speech, they label it “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malformation,” and they are deputizing the FBI and DHS to strong­arm Big Tech to censor it and de-platform serial offenders.

It doesn’t matter what brand your politics is, this is Stasi stuff.

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Elon Musk Taps Jussie Smollett Hoaxer For Twitter Censorship Advice

Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk said he wants to bring free speech absolutism to the world, but he isn’t off to a great start after tapping a Jussie Smollett hoaxer for censorship advice.

“Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL, @YaelEisenstat, @rashadrobinson, @JGo4Justice, @normanlschen, @DerrickNAACP, @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies,” the self-professed “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” announced on Tuesday.

Rashad Robinson, president of the leftist group Color of Change, repeatedly tweeted his support for Smollet after the “Empire” actor falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019. At the time, Smollett claimed two assailants beat him up while screaming, “This is MAGA country.”

Politicians, celebrities, leftists, and the corrupt corporate media rushed to ally themselves with Smollett, who was later convicted of five felony counts of disorderly conduct for staging the alleged crime.

Even after evidence suggested Smollett was lying about the alleged attack, Robinson continued to express disdain for anyone who dubbed Smollett’s scheming a hoax.

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Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

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The City of Charlottesville’s new online speech restrictions for employees is likely unconstitutional

The City of Charlottesville passed a new policy for city workers that prohibits them from commenting, offline and online, about a wide range of topics. The policy is a potential violation of employees’ First Amendment free speech rights.

The policy was passed in response to how the city handled Allen Groat, an analyst for the fire and police department, for his involvement in the January 6 2021 riot at the US Capitol. Groat tweeted that he would engage in a “show of force,” and posted a photo of himself and former head of the Proud Boys.

Groat was investigated but was not criminally charged. Mayor Lloyd Snook said that Groat was not going to be fired because he had not been criminally charged. In response to the outrage that followed, Mayor Snook said that the city would review personnel policy.

The new policy, as reported by Fire, which went into effect last week, “requires that employees refrain from conduct, on- and off-duty, that will undermine City government objectives or impair the proper performance of governmental functions.”

That includes conduct that “undermines close working relationships that are essential to the effective performance of an employee’s job duties,” as well as conduct that impairs “discipline or harmony among co-workers.”

The policy heavily restricts city employees from exercising their First Amendment rights. An employee could be punished even for criticizing dangerous working conditions.

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