Tag: free speech

Free Speech Activist Attacked in SF Now Faces Same Censorship He Was Rallying Against.

Anderson says he got banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in quick succession on Sunday night with little to no explanation after being vocal online about the attack he suffered at the hands of an Antifa activist, who knocked out his teeth.

He says it began with a notice on Sunday that his Facebook had been banned for 30 days. A screenshot of the notice provided to Human Events cites posts advertising the event that “didn’t follow [Facebook’s] community standards” against “dangerous individuals and organizations.”

But “an hour later,” Anderson says his Facebook was shut down completely.

Anderson showed Human Events evidence of at least one instance where a tweet of his, including a video of the assault, was shared to a Facebook account and flagged by Facebook as “False information” that had been “checked by independent fact-checkers.”

“I’m like you’re saying it’s false information that a man hit me in the face and my teeth came out my mouth like are you serious right now?” Anderson said.

“Instagram literally just banned me because the shadow ban wasn’t working anymore after Antifa knocked my teeth out yesterday and everyone was coming to follow me and look at my posts,” Anderson wrote on Twitter Sunday night “Instagram & Facebook are against our right to Free Speech and peaceful protest.”

His Twitter account was suspended shortly afterward.

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Don’t Be Fooled By Our Media Wars: Everybody Hates Free Speech

As America’s acid bath of a presidential campaign boils to a merciful close, the political clamor is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a shouting match about, over, and against the media. Twitter is still blocking the New York Post‘s main account a week after the tabloid’s controversial article on Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption. President Donald Trump has been waging preemptive war against upcoming debate moderator Kristin Welker and 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. Sacha Baron Cohen, in a Borat sequel that ends with a plea for viewers to vote, just tried to honey-pot Rudy Giuliani.

The partisan lopsidedness to this debate, between attempted authoritarian and “enemy of the people,” can give off the misleading impression that the divide over free speech and its applications is a clean philosophical schism, with conservatives on one side, progressives and most journalists on the other. In fact it is not.

The fight over media is more a fight over power, and who gets to wield it, than a fight over principle, and how it should be applied. Trump and Joe Biden both want to roll back the speech protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; the difference is that the president would do it in the name of protecting conservatives and the former vice president would do it in the name of restricting conservative misinformation. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) agree that Facebook and Twitter are guilty of “election interference”; it just depends on which election. Google faces antitrust enthusiasm from House Democrats and Bill Barr’s Justice Department alike. (This morning, on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Donald Trump, Jr., asserted that this election would be a referendum on the First Amendment, because only his father could be trusted with following through on his promise to break up Big Tech, because Democrats who talk a big game are actually in bed with their censorious Silicon Valley overlords.)

The more politics (and its worst form, war) subsumes life, the more free speech is treated as a means to an end rather than as a magnificent if always-threatened achievement of the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the bipartisan clampdown on speech in the governmental realm is coinciding in the intellectual realm with a noisy right-left rethink of the Enlightenment itself.

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Antifa Knocks Out Black Man’s Teeth for Holding Free Speech Rally While Calling Him ‘N’ Word

An Antifa counter-protester in San Francisco knocked out the front teeth of a black man who organized the Free Speech Rally and Protest on Saturday. People in the crowd can be heard yelling racial slurs and the man.

Shortly before a Free Speech Rally and Protest in San Francisco, event organizer Philip Anderson can be seen in a video tweeted by Chester Belloc helping a white man walk through an angry counter-protest filled with Antifa anarchists. As they walk through the crowd, a man wearing all black (black bloc) comes up from behind Anderson and punches him in the face.

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