Tag: wrongthink

Twitter Just Banned Ex-UN Weapons Inspector For Revealing Crimes Against Humanity Committed By Ukraine

On Wednesday, Twitter ‘permanently suspended’ retired US Marine Corps officer Scott Ritter.

By disputing Ukrainian authorities’ accusations that Russian soldiers massacred residents in Bucha near Kiev, Twitter accused the former UN weapons inspector of participating in prohibited behavior.

On his Telegram channel, Ritter shared a screenshot of the message he received.

“So apparently I’ve been suspended from Twitter for the crime of challenging the orthodox narrative of the so-called Bucha massacre”

He said hehad appealed the decision adding that “Freedom of speech in America today is an endangered concept.”

RT reports: According to the screenshot, Twitter’s censors had decided that Ritter violated their rules against “harassment and abuse” by saying the Ukrainian police had committed crimes against humanity in Bucha, and were trying to shift blame onto Russia with US help.

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Barack Obama Backs Internet Controls to Grapple with the ‘Demand for Crazy’

Government regulation and control over the internet can defeat a “demand for crazy” through the spread of incorrect messages, former President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, 60, spoke with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at an event hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the magazine.

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.

Obama lamented how misinformation plays out across the U.S., accusing those who say President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election as guilty of falling for conspiracy theories.

He called out “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

The former president blamed smartphones for accelerating “an erosion of accountability norms and standards in political life” from 2010 onwards.

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Pinterest bans all climate change misinformation on its platform

Pinterest announced today it’s becoming the first major digital platform to introduce a comprehensive misinformation policy designed to combat false and misleading claims around climate change on its platform. According to the company’s newly updated misinformation guidelines, Pinterest will now be able to remove content that denies the existence of impacts of climate change, denies human influence on climate change and denies climate change is backed by scientific consensus, among other things.

It will also remove false and misleading content about climate change solutions that contradict scientific consensus, content that misrepresents scientific data either by omission or cherry-picking in order to erode trust in climate science and experts and harmful and misleading content about public safety emergencies including natural disasters and extreme weather events.

The company noted the new Community guidelines don’t only apply to posts on the social network, but also to ads. Pinterest advertisers will have to follow the same rules and the Pinterest Advertising guidelines were updated to also prohibit ads containing conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation related to climate change.

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YouTube is emailing users to say “members of the community” are “concerned” about their comments

YouTube’s “Community Outreach Team” has been emailing users to tell them that “members of the community were concerned about some of the comments you’ve posted on YouTube.”

The emails, forwarded to Reclaim The Net by YouTube users, don’t tell users which of their comments allegedly caused concern to members of the community and instead urges them to take a survey.

“After you take the survey, someone from our team may follow up to better understand your feedback,” YouTube’s email adds.

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YouTube deletes entire back catalog of Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges

YouTube is at it again, this time setting its sights on Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges, whose entire video archive for the On Contact program published on Google’s platform has been deleted.

Hedges announced this in a blog post, saying that the show, which was broadcast for six years on RT America and RT International and even received Emmy nominations, is now gone from YouTube.

Hedges goes on to list some of the high profile people he spoke with over the years and explains that those interviews are now gone: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf, Slavoj Zizek, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, among dozens of others.

Hedges has been treated by YouTube like so many other creators over the years of stepped-up censorship that has little time, and sees little reason to explain itself: namely, there has been no explanation.

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Denmark Puts Coronavirus ‘Anti-Government Extremism’ on Terrorism List

Denmark’s domestic security on Tuesday designated pandemic-linked “antigovernmental extremism” as a menace for the first time ever.

The agency, known by its Danish acronym PET, said in its annual assessment that although this type of extremism is not “a significant driving force for the terrorist threat” in the country, it does make the situation “more complex.”

PET said the menace which expresses the need to use violence against elected representatives, had appeared in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michael Hamann, head of PET’s Center for Terror Analysis that analyzes the threat of terrorism against Denmark and Danish interests abroad, said the vast majority of instances where authorities were heavily criticized for their handling of the pandemic unfolded peacefully.

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Spotify Purges Dissident Voices In Latest Censorship Escalation

Multiple American podcasters who speak critically of the political status quo in their country are reporting that their channels have been shut down as the censorship campaign against Russia-backed media continues to escalate. These include Moment of Clarity with Lee Camp, The Politics of Survival with Tara Reade, and By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik.

“My podcast ‘Moment of Clarity’ has been removed from Spotify,” Camp tweeted Wednesday. “Let it be known – you can do anti-women, anti-trans or racist content on Spotify but you can’t be anti-war. That’s not allowed.”

“Without explanation or notice, Spotify has removed By Any Means Necessary from their platform, but we’re not going anywhere!” said the program’s Twitter account. “There’s a clear effort in motion to suppress anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist voices, join us in the fight by spreading the word!”

“You can still find my podcast on other platforms even though Spotify inexplicably removed it,” tweeted Reade.

This comes as Spotify closes its office in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

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Google suppresses America’s Frontline Doctors in search results

More evidence is emerging of Google manipulating algorithms powering its mammoth and highly influential search service to give certain results (much) more visibility than others.

And now, reports say, Google is not even trying to hide that this is the case, as America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) has been informed its reach on the internet is being artificially limited.

This organization says it is dedicated to improving doctor-patient relationships that are jeopardized by what it calls politicized science and biased information. The AFLDS would also like to provide patients with access to “independent, evidence-based information” that will inform people’s decisions regarding their healthcare choices.

Well, meeting that goal might prove to be quite difficult since Google Search, on which a huge majority of US-based users rely for their internet queries, says it is deliberately deranking information coming from the AFLDS.

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California weighs punishing doctors for challenging ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ on COVID

Disagreement with the “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID-19 issues could be deemed “unprofessional conduct” for California doctors.

Democratic Assemblyman Evan Low’s AB 2098 “may” be the subject of a March 17 hearing in the Assembly Committee on Business and Professions, where it was referred last week, according to the legislative history.

The bill, which was cowritten by five other California Assembly and Senate members, goes beyond regulating how California doctors can treat their own patients. It opens their statements about COVID — public or private — to review by the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, with possible sanctions to follow.

“Existing law requires the applicable board to take action against any licensed physician and surgeon who is charged with unprofessional conduct,” according to the legislative counsel’s summary, and the bill would “designate the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation” about COVID as “unprofessional conduct,” without specifying what’s prohibited.

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