Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on Twitter - "BREAKING: The American Medical Association is asking Big Tech and the Department of Justice to censor, deplatform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is "disinformation.""
Oilfield Rando on Twitter - "Twitter systematically censoring video of citizens questioning their school boards is really just a hell of a leap"
Inside ‘Facebook Jail’: The Secret Rules That Put Users in the Doghouse - WSJ - "In Facebook Jail, many users are serving time for infractions they don’t understand. Colton Oakley was restricted after ranting about student debt. The recent graduate of the State University of New York at New Paltz posted that anyone who was mad about loan cancellation was “sad and selfish.” His sentence: three days without posting on Facebook. Alex Gendler, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y., got a similar ban after sharing a link to a story in Smithsonian magazine about tribal New Guinea. Nick Barksdale, a history teacher in Oklahoma, served 30 days recently after jokingly telling a friend “man, you’re spewing crazy now!”... The plight of baffled users caught in Facebook’s impenetrable system for adjudicating content has reinforced the company’s reputation for heavy-handed and inept policing of its online platforms. The problem, which has been mounting for years, is increasingly acute as lawmakers and the public focus on the vast power social-media companies hold over the flow of information... In its earlier decisions, the [appeal] board has zeroed in on Facebook’s legion of rules, calling them unclear and “difficult for users to understand.”... Since it began taking cases in October, the Oversight Board has received more than 220,000 appeals from users, and issued eight rulings—six of them overturning Facebook’s initial decision... A research paper from New York University last summer called the company’s approach to content moderation “grossly inadequate” and implored Facebook to stop outsourcing most of the work and to double the overall number of moderators... Mr. Barksdale, a history teacher in Newcastle, Okla., has been banned from his Facebook page several times since last fall, each time for reasons he says he doesn’t fully understand. One time he was restricted from posting and commenting for three days after sharing a World War II-era photo of Nazi officials in front of the Eiffel Tower as part of a history discussion, with a brief description of the photo. He got a 30-day ban for trying to explain the term pseudoscience to one of his followers. In March, after he joked with another history aficionado during a debate that “you’re spewing crazy now,” Facebook alerted him that he had been restricted for seven days. When Mr. Barksdale clicked a button to appeal, Facebook disagreed, and lengthened his ban to 30 days, saying six of his past posts had gone against the company’s Community Standards... The Oversight Board disagreed when Facebook took down a post in which a user wrongly attributed a quote to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, saying it violated its Community Standard on “dangerous individuals and organizations.” Facebook told the Oversight Board that Goebbels is on an internal list of dangerous individuals. Facebook should make that list public, the board said... she wrote that she had traveled in Morocco by herself and “felt much safer there than I do here in the USA with all these crazy white men going around shooting people.” Facebook took down her comment, and informed her she had been restricted from posting or commenting for 30 days because the post violated the Community Standards on hate speech. Ms. Chapman says she was confused, because another comment posted after hers voicing a similar perspective had been left up. That post read: “Most acts of violence in this country are committed by white men. Usually christian, often white supremacists, and almost always white men,” according to screenshots of the posts viewed by the Journal. Ms. Chapman had earlier received a 30-day ban for calling two other users who were degrading Vice President Kamala Harris racist. Even though she reported the comments made by the other users, they weren’t taken down. “What I’m learning about Facebook is not to talk on Facebook”... Facebook increasingly polices content in ways that aren’t disclosed to users, in hopes of avoiding disputes over its decisions, according to current and former employees. The algorithms bury questionable posts, showing them to fewer users, quietly restricting the reach of those suspected of misbehavior rather than taking down the content or locking them out of the platform entirely... Users say they have had content taken down from months or years earlier with no explanation, in what one user called “Facebook’s robot gone wrong.”... Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year, Facebook users haven’t had an opportunity to appeal bans at all, and instead are given the option to “disagree” with a decision, without further review, although Facebook did look at some of those cases and restore content. Facebook says that is because it has lacked the human moderators to review cases. In a late April decision, the Oversight Board urged Facebook to “prioritize returning this capacity.”... Facebook users should be allowed to show breastfeeding photos, the company wrote in a document to moderators, but warned: “Mistakes in this area are sensitive. Breastfeeding activists or ‘lactivists’ are vocal in the media because people harass them in public. Any removals of this content make us exposed to suggestions of censorship.”"
FB bans popular Jewish academic for post denouncing Hitler tweet - "Saad posted on Facebook a photo of his retweet of Malik’s Twitter post with the caption “I see this every day. Every day.” The post was banned by Facebook and Saad was “temporarily blocked” from posting with his account. Saad replied, “Last night, I posted a tweet of a horrifying person who was hailing Adolf Hitler. I was trying to show the horrors of Jew-hatred.” He added, “I’m a Lebanese Jew who escaped religious persecution in the Middle East. I fight against all bigotry, but I know firsthand about Jew-hatred having lived in the Middle East.” “I shared this tweet to demonstrate the vile and endemic Jew-hatred that is normalized by individuals such as this person. All hatred is deplorable, but Jew-hatred is unique in that in many places in the world it is considered laudable,” he said. “You banned me! I shared a tweet to demonstrate the ugliness of genocidal Jew-hatred (as a Jewish person), and I get banned?!” he said... After the ban, Saad tweeted, “I am losing hope. @Facebook has banned me for sharing a tweet of a person who was endorsing Hitler. The Lebanese Jew gets banned for speaking out against endemic Jew-hatred.”"
PayPal says $2,500 fine for 'misinformation' was posted to policy in error - "PayPal was criticized for updating its user policy, saying it would fine users $2,500 for 'promoting misinformation.' Now, the company released a statement that the policy was "posted in error," reversing the policy and deleting it from its user agreement. The money app caught all kinds of heat online, with critics wondering how a private company would impose such a fine against its own customers. The company is now being accused of spreading its own 'misinformation.'... PayPal's former CEO even took a shot at the company's snafu. "It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity"
Elon Musk on Twitter - "@davidmarcus @PayPal Agreed"
Justice Thomas argues for making Facebook, Twitter and Google utilities - "Justice Clarence Thomas argued that it was time to rein in Section 230 immunity. Now, Justice Thomas is laying out an argument for why companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google should be regulated as utilities... the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling in finding that President Trump had acted unconstitutionally by blocking people on Twitter. That case, which the justices deemed moot, hinged on the idea that the @realdonaldtrump account was a public forum run by the president of the United States, and therefore, was constitutionally prohibited from stifling private speech. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas agrees with the decision, but argues that, in fact, Twitter's recent ban of the @realdonaldtrump account suggests that it's platforms themselves, not the government officials on them, that hold all the power... Thomas argues that some digital platforms are "sufficiently akin" to common carriers like telephone companies. "A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people," Thomas writes. "Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way.""
Twitter vs. Trump: ‘Fact-Checking’ Undermines Free Speech - "Twitter is fact-checking opinion, not facts... try as you might, you can’t fact- check the future... Twitter got its own facts wrong. Twitter’s statement responding to the president declared, “Fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.” That is untrue. To the extent that voter fraud exists, fraud associated with mail-in ballots “is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention,” according to The New York Times. A study done by Cal Tech and MIT also confirms the increase in fraud associated with mail-in voting is enough of a problem that the study’s authors recommended states “restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.” There’s also the accompanying issue of “ballot harvesting”... Twitter’s third mistake is that fact-checking only works insofar as you trust the institution doing it, and Twitter has no credibility, journalistic or otherwise, to wager here. It was quickly noted that Twitter’s executive in charge of “site integrity,” who is largely responsible for devising and implementing its new fact-checking policies, is a man with thin journalistic credentials named Yoel Roth. Roth has his used his own Twitter account to express his vitriolic and anti-Trump political opinions... Its new fact-checking policy is unclear and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be applied consistently. So far only Trump has been fact-checked by the platform, and badly at that. But since Twitter’s inception, foreign governments have routinely used it for indisputably dishonest propaganda reasons. The most recent example being China, a country with actual concentration camps, unleashing a huge disinformation campaign on Twitter to deflect blame for unleashing the coronavirus on the world. This has been ongoing for months now and Twitter has done little to stop it. While it would be nice to believe that Twitter was making rookie fact-checking mistakes, that doesn’t account for the fact that the same fallacious rhetorical tactics are endemic to PolitiFact and other media fact-checkers, who have been employing political double standards for years. Other social media companies, notably Facebook, even rely on media fact-checkers’ subjective and frequently tendentious judgments to censor political speech."
From 2020
Facebook censors and punishes The Babylon Bee for mocking rioters - "Facebook blocked a post and threatened to demonetize The Babylon Bee's Facebook page (which they did hours later). The post in question was penalized for "promoting crime" when it was obviously a satirical post making fun of rioters' hypocrisy... "UPDATE: Since we requested the review, Facebook has INCREASED our level of restriction, moving us from a warning to RESTRICTED MONETIZATION."... Ironically, on the other side of the political spectrum, nowhere on Big Tech-managed social media has there been a single instance of censorship of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) unironically calling for protestors to "get confrontational" when out marching"
Gad Saad - "It now appears as though @instagram has PERMANENTLY deleted my account, which I had started yesterday (and it had already garnered many followers). No recourse. No possibility to speak to anyone. No accountability. I'm left in limbo. It's simply unbelievable. @Facebook"
From 2021
Amazon employees protest the sale of books they say are anti-trans - The Washington Post - "A group of Amazon employees on Wednesday disrupted a Pride Month event at the company’s headquarters in Seattle, protesting the company’s continued sale of books they say are anti-trans. Approximately 30 employees participated in the protest, interrupting Amazon’s annual raising of the pride flag by laying on the ground wrapped in trans flags, according to an employee who attended the event. The participants are members of No Hate at Amazon, which is demanding that the company stop producing and selling books the group says are harmful to transgender youth... Amazon has previously been willing to remove content from its site, pulling a book called “When Harry Became Sally” in March 2021 because it described “LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” But more recently, it has declined to remove these books — some of which, like “Irreversible Damage,” the company sells as Kindle editions and others of which, like “Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult,” it distributes through its direct publishing arm. Amazon has continued to sell and print “Irreversible Damage” even after the American Booksellers Association apologized for promoting it and retail competitor Target removed the book from its website in July."
Anything liberals don't like is "hate"
The Folly of Pandemic Censorship - "Substack is home to tens of thousands of writers and over a million paying subscribers, quadruple last year’s total of 250,000. The sites range from newsletters for comics enthusiasts to crypto news to recipe ideas. Like the Internet as a whole, it’s basically a catalogue of everything. Still, panic campaigns in legacy press consistently focus on handfuls of sites, and with impressive dishonesty describe them as representative. I was particularly struck by a recent Mashable article that talked about a supposed “backlash” against Substack’s “growing collection of anti-trans writers,” which seemed to refer to Jesse Singal (who is no such thing) and Graham Linehan and — that’s it. Substack is actually home to more trans writers than any other outlet, but to the Scolding Class, that’s not the point. The company’s real crime is that it refuses to submit to pressure campaigns and strike off Wrongthinkers. Substack is designed to be difficult to censor. Because content is sent by email, it’s not easy to pressure platforms to zap offending material. It doesn’t depend on advertisers, so you can’t lean on them, either. The only real pressure points are company executives like Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best, who are now regular targets of these ham-fisted campaigns demanding they discipline writers... Every one of these campaigns revolves around the same larger problem: would-be censors misunderstanding the basic calculus of the freedom of speech. Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official. Whether it’s WMDs or the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco or the missile gap or the red scare or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, the worst real-world disasters always turn out to be driven or enabled by official falsehoods... The only defense against these most dangerous types of deceptions is an absolutely free press. People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down, the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. Unfortunately, censors by nature can’t help themselves... I’ve used Substack to show the amazingly diverse range of speech deemed unallowable on private platforms, from raw footage of both anti-Trump protests and the January 6th riots, to satirical videos no one had even seen yet, to advocates and detractors of the medication Ivermectin, to a Jewish tweeter’s pictorial account of Hitler’s life, to a now proven-true expose about the president’s son. The latter case is on point, because the widely distributed story that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was the actual disinformation. If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed. This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years. NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake... We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted. To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation. It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.”... Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices. This is the central problem of any “content moderation” scheme: somebody has to do the judging. The only thing worse than a landscape that contains misinformation is a landscape where misinformation is mandatory, and the only antidote for the latter is allowing all criticism, mistakes included. This is especially the case in a situation like the present, where the two-year clown show of lies and shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health than a handful of Substack writers... the Guardian editors should puke with shame for even thinking about condemning anyone else’s “misinformation,” while their own fake story about Assange’s “secret talks” with Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy remains up"
Of course, we need to pretend that the Daily Mail and Fox News are the only unreliable news sources and the Guardian must be trusted
Facebook Will Now Ban Criticism of "Concepts, Institutions, Ideas, Practices, or Beliefs" When They Risk "Harm, Intimidation, or Discrimination" Against Religious, National, or Other Groups - "Protected characteristics are "race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease"; so it seems like Facebook may block:
Criticisms of religious institutions and belief systems, if Facebook concludes they seem "likely to contribute to imminent … discrimination" against the targeted religious group.
Criticisms of a foreign country or government (China, the Palestinian Authority, in principle Israel), if Facebook concludes they seem "likely to contribute to imminent … discrimination" against its citizens or people who share an ethnicity with it.
Criticisms of pro-transgender-rights or pro-gay-rights beliefs, if if Facebook concludes they "likely to contribute to imminent … discrimination" against sexual minorities.
Criticisms of feminism, if Facebook concludes they seem "likely to contribute to imminent … discrimination" against women.
Criticisms of pro-disability-rights positions, if Facebook concludes they seem "likely to contribute to imminent … discrimination" against the disabled.
And of course the proposal contemplates that this would be applied to election campaigns, even when candidates for office are debating these very issues, and even when swaying a small percentage of the electorate can change the outcome"
Libs of TikTok joined the new lefty social platform Tribel that "doesn't censor" and was banned in 20 minutes for stating a biological fact - "The lefties have created a new social media platform that promises to be a place of inclusion, tolerance, and free speech. It's called "Tribel," and they explicitly say they don't censor speech, but their algorithm does filter out fake news and hate... just so it's clear that it wasn't a mistake, Tribel Social confirmed on Twitter, to the applause of left-wing haters and groomers everywhere, that they proudly removed LOTT for her hateful conduct."
Biology is hateful, after all. As is anything liberals hate
Meme - SOCRATES @YaBoiSocrates: "I dunno man, I'm beginning to think that maybe the Ruling Elite aren't as wise as they claim to be
Learn more about how Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens
2:00 PM. Circa 399 B.C."
Meme - Laocoon @TrojanPriest: "We must not bring the wooden horse into the city. I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts. We must burn it!
Learn how the generous Greek peace offering is safe and secure.
15:21 PM Feb 18, 1250 BC Twitter for Abacus"
Meme - "Shout out to Tom from MySpace. Homie cashed his check, and bounced. He never tried to influence elections, be an advocate for "free speech," purchase competitors, sell our information or any of that. Just taught us all some basic HTML and rolled out."
Facebook Blocks Story That Says We Weren't Always At War With Eastasia | Babylon Bee - "Originally, Facebook gave no reason for blocking the story, but eventually, they released a statement saying their policy has always been to "defer to experts on who we are or have been at war with" and not let "dangerous misinformation be shared.""
International fact-checkers aren't quite celebrating Zuckerberg's decision to block Trump - "fact-checkers outside the United States shook their heads and began a discussion. Is this policy going to be applied worldwide? Isn’t it a risky decision? Can other politicians be affected too?"
Twitter banned James O’Keefe of Project Veritas after he exposed CNN and now he is suing them for all they’re worth - "It's worth noting that PV has never lost a court case against the many people who have defamed them. They just owned The New York Times in one such case."
From 2021
Instagram Removes Weird Al Yankovic's Post With 'Pablo Escobar' - "Weird Al took to Twitter to express his bemusement at the photo-sharing app for removing a post that was clearly a joke. Weird Al tried to post a photo with a Pablo Escobar lookalike with the caption: “Okay, fine, I admit we took a FEW creative liberties with #WEIRDTheAlYankovicStory. For instance, in real life, Pablo Escobar and I are still very close friends.”... Fellow oddball celebrity Tommy Wiseau replied to Weird Al’s tweet with his own screenshot of Instagram removing content... “Instagram has been doing odd things lately. A month ago my entire account was disabled, because they apparently thought I was a bot,” writes one user. However, it’s not just Instagram. Earlier this month, astronomer and astrophotographer Mary McIntyre was locked out of her Twitter account for three months after a video of a meteor she published to the platform was flagged as “intimate content.” McIntyre’s video was flagged by Twitter’s automated moderation system and she was given only one option: delete the tweet. If she did so, however, it would have meant she agreed with the assertion that the content violated the social media company’s rules."
The Pendulum Of Internet Censorship Swings Leftward Again - "This follows a mass purge of right-wing accounts in the wake of the Capitol riot earlier this month, a swing-back of the censorship pendulum that surprises nobody who knows anything about anything. That purge was broadly supported by shitlibs and a surprisingly large percentage of the true left, despite the overwhelming and growing pile of evidence that it is impossible to consent to internet censorship for other ideologies without consenting to censorship for your own. I encountered many arguments in support of the right-wing purge from the online left while it was happening, and none of them were good. "They're only banning fascists," they told me. "Why are you defending fascists?" Well first of all there was never any evidence that these social media corporations were only purging fascists. We know for example that included in the sweep were tens of thousands of basic QAnon posters, who while ignorant and wrong would not in most cases meet most people's definition of "fascist". We don't know who else was eliminated in the purge, but believing on blind faith that Facebook and Twitter were only targeting fascists who want to violently overthrow the US government is silly... "Ultimately this content moderation movement will restore a system where the only allowable route to a mass audience is through a major institutional partner," journalist Matt Taibbi recently observed... When you realize that corporations are America's real government, the whole "it isn't censorship if it's a private company doing it" argument is seen for the joke that it is. When you learn that this censorship is being actively coordinated with the official government, it’s even more of a joke."
From 2021
Facebook Calls for More Regulations on Everything But Censorship - "Facebook is calling for more regulation of the tech industry, including a vague call for “more transparent” content moderation and accountability for hosting illegal content, but makes scant mention of regulation to prevent censorship and political interference by the Silicon Valley giants themselves... the four areas that Facebook calls for more regulation in would not check the company’s vast and growing power to interfere in elections around the world... There is no sign that Facebook supports a Hawley-style exemption for companies below a certain market cap, meaning the regulation would mainly hurt smaller companies that don’t have the content moderation capacities (and multibillion-dollar warchest) that Facebook does — companies like Gab, Parler, Rumble, and Minds. Not only does Facebook fail to call for regulation to prevent Silicon Valley’s political interference — a growing concern for foreign governments — it openly boasts about efforts to interfere in politics around the world. “We detect and remove manipulation campaigns around the world and across our apps,” boasts Facebook. “Since 2017, we have removed over 100 networks worldwide for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior, including ahead of major democratic elections.” While branded as a campaign against “inauthentic behavior,” Facebook’s election interference has overwhelmingly targeted the populist right."
From 2021
We need more than deplatforming (Mozilla)
It seems all of tech is compromised
Mozilla and Google Chrome refuse to support Gab’s Dissenter extension for violating acceptable use policy - "Gab, the “free speech” social network and a popular forum for far-right viewpoint holders and other fringe groups, launched a browser extension named Dissenter that creates an alternative comment section for any website. The plug-in is now removed from the extension stores of both Mozilla and Google, as the extension violates their acceptable use policy... When asked for more clarity on which policies Dissenter did not comply with, Mozilla said that they received abuse reports for this extension. It further added that the platform is being used for promoting violence, hate speech, and discrimination, but they failed to show any examples to add any credibility to their claims. The extension developers responded by saying that they do moderate any illegal conduct or posts happening on their platform as and when they are brought to their attention. “We do not display content containing words from a list of the most offensive racial epithets in the English language,” added the Gab developers. Soon after this, Google Chrome also removed the extension from Chrome Extension Store stating the same reason that the extension does not comply with their policies. After getting deplatformed, the Dissenter team has come to the conclusion that the best way forward is to create their own browser... Looking at this move by Mozilla, many users felt that this actually contradicts their goal of making the web free and open for all... Mozilla has not revoked the add-on’s signature, so Dissenter can be distributed while guaranteeing that the add-on is safe and can be updated automatically. Manual installation of the extension from Dissenter.com/download is also possible."
Streaming services ban episodes of Spongebob Squarepants due to 'inappropriate content' deemed sexist and racist - "Cancel culture finds its way to Bikini Bottom as two episodes of Spongebob Squarepants are pulled from Paramount+ and Amazon. According to the Associated Press, the move was made after the episodes were deemed to include "inappropriate content". Mid-Life Crustacean, an episode in which Mr. Krabs, Spongebob, and Patrick break into a woman's house and steal her underwear, was taken off air back in 2018. More recently, however, an episode called Kwarantined Crab was pulled. The plot centres around the arrival of a fictional virus, the "Clam Flu", at the Krusty Krab. Hysteria breaks out, and those who have the virus are "shunned and tossed in a freezer". Nickelodeon decided that the events depicted in this episode might not be appropriate, citing "sensitivities surrounding the global, real-world pandemic"."
The same people who mock bowdlerisation are cheering this
Big Tech is preparing to punish social media users for their behavior. OFFLINE. - "Don't like the sound of Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, planning to use a major social media platform he controls to "take action" against users "who display certain harmful behaviors" anywhere at any time including while not even on his platform? What, you support "deadly violence?" There's a reason they start off with "deadly violence," as one of the "certain harmful behaviors" over which they will take action, and a reason why their media enablers do as they're told and make sure that's right up there in the headline. It's to shut you up... Twitch will be perfecting the platform and opening that ever-growing Overton Window of what is considered acceptable so that it can then be expanded at their discretion. They aren't even being coy about it. In fact as the very first question they address in their FAQ was "Why doesn't this new policy address other serious offenses?"... He was accused. By an unnamed woman. And now his livelihood has been taken away. There is no due process in this new corporatist world, no checks and balances. No redress of grievances. Only power... the corporations' interests have aligned with one political party including corporate media interests. Taken together, they have the power to control the political conversation. They might be "private" but given their ideological collusion and power, they are far more. Just this past weekend you had over 100 CEOs gather to discuss how to use their power in a coordinated action to further the political interests of one political party over another."
Thread by @Eric_Schmitt on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🚨BREAKING: In our deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan on Tuesday, we found that the FBI plays a big role in working with social media companies to censor speech - from weekly meetings with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to asks for account takedowns. Chan, the FBI's FITF, and senior CISA officials had meetings with social media companies in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in which Chan personally told the social media companies that there could potentially be a Russian “hack and leak” operation shortly before the election. Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the 2020 election. Chan stated that the FBI regularly sent social media companies lists of URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they were disinformation from “malign foreign influence operations.” The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content. On many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI."
Facebook - "Still doubt the suppression? They added a "fact check", which only focuses on one narrow aspect of the whole matter. Ignoring the fact that just eliminating those few nudes would not have affected the rest of the issue - that the laptop was real and not Russian disinformation as claimed, and would have affected the election result, whether there was indeed corruption links to Biden Snr or not."
On Facebook "fact-checking" Twitter's Hunter Biden censorship
Facebook to change rules on attacking public figures on its platforms | Toronto Sun - "Facebook Inc will now count activists and journalists as “involuntary” public figures and so increase protections against harassment and bullying targeted at these groups"
So much for speaking truth to power
Is Social-Media Censorship a Crime? - WSJ - "Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability... Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might... This post-Civil War statute responded to the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan and similar private organizations. Then as now, government officers sometimes relied on private allies to accomplish what they couldn’t—sometimes violently, sometimes more subtly. Whether for government officers or cooperating private parties, Section 241 makes conspiracy to violate civil rights a crime... The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild. Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), “It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.”... there’s nothing marginal about the most massive system of censorship in the nation’s history. If the gov-tech partnership to suppress speech isn’t a conspiracy to interfere in the enjoyment of the freedom of speech, what is?"
So much for the First Amendment being totally irrelevant to private companies