Links - 8th February 2026 (1 - Big Tech Censorship)

Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors - "China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?... The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it. When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.” Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies... Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.” It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”... What’s to stop Facebook’s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping? Globalists thought that engaging with China would make that country more open; I fear it’s making us more restrictive... Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an email to me, these revelations are yet “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher’s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said “this is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg — under oath and before the election — give an account of what Facebook has been up to.”"
From 2020

Facebook workers ‘ashamed’ by tech giant’s censorship of Post’s reporting - "“Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.” So said the former Facebook insider as we sat down for an interview at a Midtown restaurant Friday afternoon. A gloomy rain had left the joint deserted, yet the man across the table from me spoke in hushed tones and looked over his shoulder in between remarks for fear of retaliation. Yet he felt he had to speak out, because staffers are “intentionally trying to swing people further to the left”... To gain access to the Facebook network on Blind, a user must sign up using his or her Facebook work e-mail address. The posters, in other words, are verified Facebook employees (and ex-employees in a few cases). So what do Facebook workers think about the company’s handling of our story? The comments speak for themselves: “[Facebook] employees want Trump to lose,” wrote one user. “If that means rigging [the platform] against him, they don’t care.” The post garnered 29 “likes” from other employees. “I was shocked that Facebook did this,” said another. “We kinda called [brought] this on ourselves. So much for ‘we are not the arbiters of truth.’ ” That comment garnered 15 “likes.” Still other comments: “Facebook bets that Biden wins the election. So an effort to jump on the bandwagon.” “Yeah this one is unconscionable. I’m ashamed.” “Imagine if we censored some leaked Trump stuff. It would be the #1 upvoted question tomorrow for Mark [Zuckerberg company-wide]’s Q&A.” Another employee wrote a detailed critique: “Why do people hate Facebook everywhere? Here’s one reason. Freaking one-sided decision. The comms Twitter account [Andy Stone’s] was definitely left-leaning, and it’s a talking point, as well. No proper response to comms feedback. Don’t want to be the what-if person. But we didn’t have problems circulating leaked Trump tax or any other s–t surrounding Trump or COVID.” “If Trump loses his supporters won’t totally blame the obvious censorship that is happening right now,” wrote one sarcastic employee. “If Biden wins, all those questions will go away? Hell no. In fact, he is better off losing, if he doesn’t want more scrutiny into his son’s ill-gotten gains.” Still another employee predicted starkly: “We’re now begging to be regulated.” Facebook didn’t reply to my request for comment. So could these voices of reason prevail inside the company? The Facebook insider, who shared the Blind comments with me, was pessimistic. “The whole thing,” he said, “is run by super-woke millennials and gen-Xers. This overwhelming majority of people make sure there’s no chance of breaking through the ideological barrier.” As a Facebook employee, the insider told me, “if you’re left-wing, you can say what you want. But if you’re conservative — or even just apolitical — you have to go on this anonymous app” to speak your mind."
From 2020

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "When you're using a search engine that censors politically-inconvenient information or buries it on page 17 of its search results, you should not be surprised that when you type "why censorship is" into a search field you get this Orwellian list of suggestions:"
The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "When you type "why censorship is" into Google search, the majority of suggestions are pro-censorship"
"why censorship is
why censorship is important
why censorship is important in social media
why censorship is
why censorship is required
why censorship is important in schools
why censorship is good in schools
why censorship is not justified
why censorship is important for media"

Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"

BREAKING: Facebook deletes #WalkAway campaign of 500,000 people as social media purge of conservatives continues - "Facebook has banned conservative leader Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users. Now hundreds of thousands of testimonials related to the movement are gone... Former Democrat and campaign member Karlyn Borysenko tweeted that Instagram just deleted her pictures as well and threatened to delete her account. She was told that several of her posts from Dec. 30 to Jan. 6 violated Instagram's Community Guidelines on violence or dangerous organization."
From 2021

Social media platforms could face fines in Poland for censoring free speech
Poland’s new social media law puts freedom of expression at risk, RSF warns
From 2021. I like how banning censorship threatens freedom of speech. This is like ending voting to save democracy

Rose McGowan calls on big tech companies to ‘stop the censorship’
From 2021

How Big Tech took over - "‘We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.’ These are the words of cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow in his ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, penned in 1996. This bombastic document articulates much of the promise idealists once saw in the internet. Above all, it was supposed to unleash free speech and self-expression beyond anything previously imagined. So central was free speech to the mythos of the online world that when the tech giants we know and fear today began to emerge, turning a once anarchic space into hugely profitable businesses, they often appealed to that very principle. Free speech, for these would-be oligarchs, provided them with some semblance of deeper purpose. In 2012, Twitter’s UK general manager, Tony Wang, famously dubbed the social network ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’. ‘Giving people a voice’ is the somewhat more bloodless formulation preferred by one Mark Zuckerberg when describing the moral mission of his social-media behemoth, Facebook... In its rationale for suspending Trump, Twitter cited a tweet in which he confirmed he would not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden, saying it could be interpreted as a coded invitation to attack it... The political leanings of Silicon Valley are at this point beyond doubt. An analysis by Wired ahead of the November election found that 95 per cent of donations by employees at the six big tech firms – Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Oracle – went to Joe Biden... From 2016 onwards, a succession of hard-right figures were banned by the big platforms over alleged hate speech, from alt-lite troll Milo Yiannopoulos to anti-Islam thug Tommy Robinson to comical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The old liberal arguments against censoring bigots – that the answer to bad speech is more speech, that censorship only drives hate underground – were dismissed, if indeed they were ever made. Commentators and politicians demanded scalp after scalp. The taste for censorship was insatiable. And as hate-speech policies widened, more respectable voices were caught up in them. One was gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy, permanently banned from Twitter for the crime of ‘misgendering’ an alleged sex offender. Even amid all this, Big Tech tried to hold to a series of increasingly sketchy lines. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said, on record and unprompted, that it wasn’t Facebook’s job to censor Holocaust denial, however offensive he as a Jewish man found it. He did not want to rule on what is and isn’t true. When Alex Jones was booted off Facebook that same year, a spokesperson was at pains to say this was over Jones’ alleged ‘hate speech’ and ‘glorification of violence’ – not his madcap claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was a ‘false flag’ or 9/11 was an inside job. But the logic of censorship is always towards more censorship. And Silicon Valley came under increasing political pressure to clamp down on online hate and misinformation, which leading Democrats in the US believe was instrumental to Trump’s election in 2016 – baffled as they are by the prospect that some voters might have simply preferred him to Hillary Clinton... Politicians hauled Zuckerberg et al before Congressional hearings, demanding that they do more to fact-check and censor, under the looming threat of their businesses being regulated or broken up. But time and again Democrats seemed less concerned about these firms’ monopolistic power and more about their apparent hesitance to wield it to the ends of censorship. 2020 was the year this all came to a head. First, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the big platforms abandoned any prior concerns they might have had about becoming the Ministry of Truth... Then came the US presidential election... at each turn, these corporate giants have had this role foisted upon them by a liberal establishment rattled by the Trump revolt and increasingly given to hysteria... liberals and leftists are already starting to wake up to the danger Trump’s social-media bans pose, and the shadow they could cast over politics in the future. In a recent New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg sums up the now common doublethink: ‘I find myself both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case, and disturbed by just how awesome their power is.’ Other world leaders have, as you might imagine, found it all unsettling. A spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel – no free-speech advocate herself – said the social-media clampdown was ‘problematic’. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador went further, likening it to the Inquisition... When John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration 25 years ago, his aim was fixed squarely on the state. ‘Governments of the Industrial World’, he thundered, ‘I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ But in Western democracies today, at least, the primary threat to online free speech comes not from national governments, but from a Silicon Valley oligarchy that was elected by precisely no one."
From 2021

Cenk Uygur on X - "Hillary Clinton just said on CNN, “we lose total control” if social media content is not more regulated. Exactly! She's accidentally admitting the whole point of their attack on social media. Social media can't be contained and they're losing their grip on power. They hate it!"

Our 'experts' justify censorship of actual news with fake science to help Democrats - "Our “disinformation experts” are at it again, this time churning out a whole passel of pseudoscience under the aegis of once-respected Nature magazine to prove that icky, stupid right-wingers are dumb dumb dummies and that they deserve to be banned from X! Not like the supergeniuses of the modern left, who always get everything right and never tell lies. A new study — presumably peer reviewed — purports to show that Trump supporters and conservatives shared “low quality” news more often than their more enlightened counterparts and thus deserved the “politically asymmetric” sanctions. This study is another case of “garbage in, garbage out”: A huge part of its definition of “low quality” seems to mean sources that don’t rely on “fact checking” — which as the past eight years have shown has become a spurious and utterly partisan endeavor. Curious about what misinformation these “low quality” sites are spreading? Here’s a sample: the “unambiguously false” claim (per a paper cited in the Nature study) that “COVID-19 was created in a lab.” Trouble is, this “unambiguous” falsehood is (per the US federal government) true. Unsurprisingly, the No. 1 “high quality” news source shared by lefty users in the study was The New York Times. Right-leaning users shared Fox most often. Quickly: Which of those sources on balance has been more correct since 2016? The Times was wrong about Russiagate, writing story after story on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion based on obviously fake documents and never once apologizing for its journalistic malpractice. It was wrong about COVID on pretty much every aspect of the pandemic, from the efficacy of blue-state responses to the risk the virus presented to kids to the lab-leak theory and on and on and on. The Gray Lady helped lead the charge in trying to discredit The Post’s 100% accurate reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hah: The very folks accusing us of spreading “disinformation” were actually doing so themselves. The Times also nakedly, openly lied about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental fitness for years in order to bolster his electoral prospects, then turned on a dime to admit he’s going gaga. And all of that somehow got through the industrial fact-checking complex. Wonder why? The answer’s simple: It helped Democrats politically, which is the purpose of “fact checking.” Keep in mind, no one is actually fooled by this. A look at the data tables provided by the study’s authors proves that. Consider CNN.com, ranked very highly by “fact checkers” at .84 out of a possible 1. When rated by “politically balanced laypeople,” it gets a .47. Sounds about right to us: CNN was the biggest, fakest voice on TV for the entirety of the Trump administration, blaring Russigate lies in primetime. Modern-day Pravda MSNBC gets a .66 from the fact-checkers but a .44 from the normies. And the Times itself, the holy grail of “false but true” lib journalism, ranks at .91 from fact checkers and .45 otherwise. What’s most obscene about all this, of course, is that despite the endless, humiliating public failure of “fact checking,” this paper was clearly written in service of the larger progressive goal of suppressing speech."
"Fact checkers" just exist to push the left wing agenda

Meme - *Mark Zuckerberg at beach* "Join my OnlyBans*"

Park MacDougald on X - "Lots of earnest “how did we lose Joe Rogan?” takes from Democrats seemingly unaware that their party’s NGO minions (Media Matters / CCDH) AstroTurfed a pressure campaign against Spotify to deplatform or censor Rogan that was then endorsed by the Surgeon General and White House press secretary"
David on X - "Yeah, as a part of that, Dana White said Disney (who owns ESPN, which has UFC rights) wanted UFC to fire Joe Rogan when all that Covid/Neil Young stuff was going on. A pile on happened. Dana refused to fire Joe, saying; 'If he is gone, I am gone'."

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "An instantaneous suspension for using the word "man" in this context would have happened 100% of the time under the old Twitter regime. Now you can tell the truth and the possibility of a suspension doesn't even occur to you when you press the "post" button."
Paula Scanlan @PaulaYScanlan: "Hey Jo, This man was literally in my locker room 18 times a week. Care to explain and defend this?"
Jo @JoJoFromJerz: "Hey MAGA, Men aren't "in girl's bathrooms." But Donald Trump has bragged about being in girl's dressing rooms."
The cope is that all people who claim to be transwomen aren't men (even if they are found to be pretending)

New Update To Riot Games' Terms Of Service Gives 'League Of Legends' Dev The Right To Respond To Players' "Off-Platform Conduct" With "Penalties In-Game"

Meme - Hank from King of the Hill: "You know what's not cool, Bobby? My memes are being fact checked by people who think men can get pregnant."

Meta is ending its fact-checking program - "Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to "restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have "gone too far."... Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to "political pressure," executives said... Meta is changing some of its own content moderation rules, especially those that they feel are "too restrictive and not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender." "We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship," Kaplan told Fox News Digital. "We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules." Kaplan said Meta currently uses automated systems, which he said make "too many mistakes" and removes content "that doesn’t even violate our standards." He also said there are certain things Meta will continue to moderate, like posts relating to terrorism, illegal drugs and child sexual exploitation... "We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression," Kaplan said, referring to the incoming Trump administration. "It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on." Last year, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to COVID content, and even items like satire and humor. "The thing is, as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring U.S. companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on their companies]," Kaplan explained. "We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home.""
The left hates democracy and free expression and loves censorship, so they are upset

Scott Adams on X - "I don't think this is a mystery. Zuckerberg is insanely smart and capable. (I could end the analysis here.) He's reading the room. He's a patriot. Apparently, he likes free speech as much as you do and sees the same issues you see. Business-wise, he needs the US government to pressure other nations to stop censoring. No other way. Facebook has been crippled by their own biased fact-checkers. Community Notes works, so he's a fast-follower. Summary: Smart, perfectly timed, on point."

Guy Who Said Facebook Was Not Suppressing Free Speech Announces Facebook Will Stop Suppressing Free Speech | Babylon Bee

Defiant L’s on X - "Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that the Facebook fact check program went out of control: “It’s like something out of 1984.” You don't say?"

Biden calls Meta’s decision to drop factchecking ‘really shameful’ - "“The whole idea of walking away from factchecking as well as not reporting anything having to do with discrimination regarding … I find it to be contrary to American justice,” the outgoing president told reporters during a press call on Friday. “Telling the truth matters.” Zuckerberg said last week that the decision to end the factchecking practice on Facebook, Instagram and Threads was made because Facebook’s factchecking, brought in December 2016, had done more harm than good in terms of public trust. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”... Zuckerberg claimed during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on Friday that Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to remove certain content from the social media platform. In a letter last year to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the US House judiciary committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain Covid-19 content including humor and satire”. In his conversation with Rogan, Zuckerberg said: “Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse. It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’” Zuckerberg said he was not against vaccines per se. But he said that while the Biden administration was “trying to push” the Covid-19 vaccination program, “they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it”. He said that Facebook had “at times” bended to the administration’s bidding and made decisions that “with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”."
American justice is politically motivated censorship. No wonder Biden is such a failure

Meme - Happy Merry and Pippin: "2021: Lol, cry harder conservatives. Private social media companies can do whatever they want."
Agonised Merry and Pippin: "2025:"

End Wokeness on X - "Amazon Web Services took Parler offline after January 6th because some of the trespassers posted on there. Reddit is literally a hotbed of domestic terror, including attacks on Tesla and copycat Luigi Mangione plots. AWS hosts Reddit."
Reddit Lies on X - ">Image of mildly vandalized Tesla posted to r/Seattle
>Post includes the Tesla's exact location
>Tesla is vandalized beyond repair in under 5 hours
It appears Reddit is being used to facilitate domestic terrorism."

Facebook moderation in Taiwan - "YouTuber Chen Yen-chang (陳延昶) posted a message on the Taiwan New Constitution Foundation’s Facebook page, saying: “Dear all, I support Taiwanese independence. Taiwan already is an independent country. I am a Taiwanese. I am not Chinese.” He later said that his Facebook access had been restricted for 30 days. The revelation prompted numerous complaints from commenters describing how they had been blocked or had their accounts deleted with no reason provided... Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾) shared my article and commented: “Welcome to Project Lutein,” referring to Taiwan AI Labs’ open-source analysis of social media neutrality. He was also given 30 days of restricted access to Facebook. Even though I was not banned from the platform, I was unable to sign in to Facebook for several hours. Moreover, posts by others on the issue were mysteriously removed... Facebook’s Chinese-language content moderators are mostly Chinese nationals, so it is difficult to prevent their influence on political content, and their tendency to seek control over the speech of Taiwanese and to infiltrate their lives."
From 2021

After Review, Facebook Says ‘Misgendering’ Doesn’t Violate Its Hate Speech Policy - "Facebook’s parent company Meta said that two posts that included “misgendering” were not a violation of its policies, in a case that appears to have involved content from The Daily Wire. The social media giant’s Oversight Board ruled that two posts about trans-identifying males do not violate the company’s hate speech rules... Rulings by the Oversight Board on specific posts are considered binding for the company... The move is the latest victory for conservative users as Meta says it is working to dial back censorship, including on gender identity."

Harrison H. Smith ✞ on X - "WTF? Just got an alert that a video on my Google Drive "Violates the Terms of Service." It's a Pro-White video on my private Drive. They say it has "gore" because it shows one still frame from the aftermath of a terror attack in France. This is the future of censorship."
Into the Memory Hole on X - ">you save an image to your phone
>the opinion it expresses has been deemed harmful and mean
>you are now banned and lose your email with everything tied to it
Boy that isn't radicalizing at all"

Musk's X says it won't cooperate with 'politically motivated' French probe - "Elon Musk's X on Monday accused French prosecutors of launching a "politically-motivated criminal investigation" that threatens its users' free speech, denying all allegations against it and saying it would not cooperate with the probe. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors stepped up a preliminary probe into the social media platform for suspected algorithmic bias and fraudulent data extraction, authorising police to conduct searches, wiretaps and surveillance against Musk and X executives, or summon them to testify. If they do not comply, a judge could issue an arrest warrant... X said Paris prosecutors had requested it hand over data on all user posts for analysis by researchers David Chavalarias and Maziyar Panahi, who it said had both exhibited "open hostility towards X". Chavalarias did not respond to a request for comment. Panahi denied any involvement in the investigation... X also criticised the fact that it was being investigated under organised crime charges, which could allow police to wiretap its employees' personal devices."
Weird how when the left imposed its blatant bias on Twitter, they didn't do anything, and it was only after the left wing censorship was removed that they got investigated. The left just loves control

Mark Zuckerberg says Biden officials would 'scream' and 'curse' when seeking removal of Facebook content - ""Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse," Zuckerberg told podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan. "It just got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.'"... In a letter last year to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said that the White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”"
Clearly, there was nothing wrong here and this wasn't a violation of the First Amendment. But ABC affiliates refusing to show Jimmy Kimmel because of his mocking a political assassination was the biggest threat to free speech this millennium

Liberal billionaire George Soros has spent $80 million to 'silence' Americans, Media Research Center says - "Free Press, a media group financed by liberal billionaire George Soros, "is looking to incorporate global pressure to push Big Tech platforms to juice their censorship operations before the 2024 U.S. presidential election," according to the Media Research Center (MRC)... Free Press boasted about a letter urging executives at Discord, Google, Instagram, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Rumble, Snap, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube to keep online platforms "safe and healthy" in 2024 through six specific "interventions." The letter was signed by "200 civil-society organizations, researchers and journalists," according to Free Press. The MRC found that "at least 45 of the signatories have had their coffers packed with Soros cash to the tune of a whopping $80,757,329 between 2016 and 2022 alone."... Vazquez wrote that the "explicit push for speech controls is especially disturbing in light of the stated vision of one of Free Press’s founders," noting that Free Press co-founder Robert W. McChesney once wrote in 2000, "Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism."... "The leftist group was recently exposed in a House Judiciary Committee investigation for co-authoring a ‘hate groups’ blacklist with the Soros-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI) targeting ‘conservative’ and faith-based organizations. This list was later disseminated by law enforcement to several financial institutions," Vazquez wrote... The MRC noted that Free Press previously "celebrated how it was also responsible for influencing the Obama-era FCC into adopting draconian ‘Net Neutrality’ rules that arbitrarily sanctioned massive government regulation of the internet," and "praised how the FCC reportedly cited the Soros-funded organization ‘close to 70 times’ in its final order on the matter.""
From 2024

Links - 8th October 2024 (1 - Big Tech Censorship)

Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line in Censorship - "Almost immediately upon publication, pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that any journalist even mentioning it would be roundly attacked. For the crime of simply noting the story on Twitter (while pointing out its flaws), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was instantly vilified to the point where her name, along with the phrase “MAGA Haberman,” were trending on Twitter.  (That Haberman is a crypto-Trump supporter is preposterous for so many reasons, including the fact that she is responsible for countless front-page Times stories that reflect negatively on the president; moreover, the 2016 Clinton campaign considered Haberman one of their most favorable reporters).  The two Silicon Valley giants saw that hostile climate and reacted... As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce put it, “Facebook limiting distribution is a bit like if a company that owned newspaper delivery trucks decided not to drive because it didn’t like a story. Does a truck company edit the newspaper? It does now, apparently.”... That actions by gigantic corporations are constitutional does not mean that they are benign.  State censorship is not the only kind of censorship. Private-sector repression of speech and thought, particularly in the internet era, can be as dangerous and consequential. Imagine, for instance, if these two Silicon Valley giants united with Google to declare: henceforth we will ban all content that is critical of President Trump and/or the Republican Party, but will actively promote criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democrats.   Would anyone encounter difficultly understanding why such a decree would constitute dangerous corporate censorship? Would Democrats respond to such a policy by simply shrugging it off on the radical libertarian ground that private corporations have the right to do whatever they want? To ask that question is to answer it...   It has been astonishing to watch Democrats over the last twenty-four hours justify this censorship on the grounds that private corporations are entitled to do whatever they want. Not even radical free-market libertarians espouse such a pro-corporate view. Even the most ardent capitalist recognizes that companies that wield monopoly or quasi-monopoly power have an obligation to act in the public interest, and are answerable to the public regarding whether they are doing so... both Facebook and Twitter receive substantial, unique legal benefits from federal law, further negating the claim that they are free to do whatever they want as private companies. Just as is true of Major League Baseball — which is subject to regulation by Congress as a result of the antitrust exemption they enjoy under the law — these social media companies receive a very valuable and particularized legal benefit in the form of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from any liability for content published on their platforms, including defamatory material or other legally proscribed communications.  No company can claim such massive, unique legal exemptions from the federal law and then simultaneously claim they owe no duties to the public interest and are not answerable to anyone. To advocate that is a form of authoritarian corporatism: simultaneously allowing tech giants to claim legally conferred privileges and exemptions while insisting that they can act without constraints of any kind... Twitter claimed that the Post article violates its so-called “Hacked Materials Policy”... But that standard, if taken seriously and applied consistently, would result in the banning from the platform of huge amounts of the most important and consequential journalism. After all, a large bulk of journalism is enabled by sources providing “content obtained without authorization” to journalists, who then publish it.  Indeed, many of the most celebrated and significant stories of the last several decades — the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder video and war logs, the Snowden reporting, the Panama Papers, the exposés from the Brazil Archive we reported over the last year — relied upon publication of various forms of “hacked materials” provided by sources. The same is true of the DNC and Podesta emails that exposed corruption and forced the 2016 resignation of the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee... why is Twitter not blocking access to the ongoing New York Times articles that disclose the contents of President Trump’s tax returns, the unauthorized disclosure of which is a crime? Why did those platforms not block links to the now-notorious Rachel Maddow segment where she revealed details about one of Trump’s old tax returns on the ground that it was “content obtained without authorization”? Or what about the virtually daily articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and others that explicitly state they are publishing information that the source is unauthorized to disclose: how does that not fall squarely within the banning policy as Twitter defined it yesterday?   Worse still, why does Twitter’s “hacking” policy apply to the New York Post story at all? While the Post’s claims about how these emails were obtained are dubious at best, there is no evidence — unlike the award-winning journalism scoops referenced above — that they were obtained by virtue of “hacking” by a source.   Facebook’s rationale for suppression — that it needs to have its “fact checking” partners verify the story before allowing it to be spread — poses different but equally alarming dangers. What makes Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company competent to “fact check” the work of other journalists? Why did Facebook block none of the endless orgy of Russiagate conspiracy theories from major media outlets that were completely unproven if not outright false?...   Twitter is not opposed to hacked materials and Facebook is not opposed to dubiously sourced stories. They are opposed to such things only when such stories anger powerful factions. When those power centers are the ones disseminating such stories, they will continue to have free rein to do so...   To observe that those who are cheering for this today because they happen to like this particular outcome are being short-sighted and myopic is to woefully understate the case. The only people who should want to live in a world where Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos have a stranglehold on what can be said and heard are those whose actions are devoted to the perpetuation of their power and who benefit from their hegemony."
From 2020, on the Hunter Biden NY Post story
Naturally, the left didn't learn their lesson and cheered Nigel Farage's de-banking in 2023

Meme - "Rare photography of Meta Facebook content moderation algorithm elaborately deciding which posts violate the community guidelines. *chimpanzee with 2 dice*"

Meme - "Listen. And understand. That Facebook A.I. bot is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are banned."

Meme - "HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR AND VALENTINE'S!!!
"X-MEN '97 Official Trailer"
"Your content couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards"

Woke big tech has launched a fatal crusade against free speech - "Even before AI, staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter share what could be likened to an ideological hivemind, curating content in a way some conservative lawmakers have suggested is discriminatory towards Right-wing views. Former employees have suggested these companies algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups”, even though programmers often have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express dissenting but legitimate views. Most dangerous of all, these big tech firms have become giant oligopolies with almost unlimited funds and a net worth greater than Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia and Spain combined. Nor can we expect these firms to be tempered by traditional market capitalism. Google and Apple account for nearly 90 per cent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft by itself controls 90 per cent of all operating system software. Perhaps more ominously, two-thirds of the world’s cloud services – essential for AI – are controlled by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These geeky bad boys are essentially capturing not just the means of communication but control of content as well. They are becoming what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system”. People like Jeff Bezos may see this as the “beginning of a Golden Age”, but it seems closer to what the French analyst Gaspard Koenig describes as “digital feudalism”. AI looms as a force multiplier for these oligarchs. Already nearly two-thirds of US adults now get their news through social media like Facebook or Google. This is even more true among millennials, soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc. Although the Gemini project is now being re-evaluated, we inevitably face AI bots that are more subtle and persuasive, particularly for a generation that reads little and knows even less. Rather than an upsurge a new plucky start-up, AI technology seems better suited to expanding the oligarch’s stranglehold...  The inherent dangers of the AI data revolution are clear. China already employs a digitally enabled “social credit” system to track citizens’ activities. There’s even an app that rewards people for reporting signs of dissent to authorities, such as illegal publications. Christina Larson, a MIT researcher, asked the right question: “Who needs democracy when you have data?”... As we saw from Meta’s (the parent company of Facebook) handling of allegations over Hunter Biden’s laptop, Silicon Valley has the power to shape potentially election-defining news stories. As they gain more access to our health, financial and personal data, our new controllers reach for ever more soft power. It’s hardly scaremongering to suggest that hyper-monitoring could create a situation wherein people could be arrested on the basis of algorithmic predictions of violence: such a proposal has already been championed by the Trudeau regime in Canada, a nation once renowned as a staunch defender of civil rights."

Last chance to end the tech tyranny - The Spectator World - "What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets.  So Amazon doesn’t ban books. It just makes them much harder to buy and read. If a private company chooses to do that, who are you to complain? If you’re a reader, you’ll just have to hunt elsewhere — though you might find other large retailers, such as Walmart, have adopted the same corporate censorship policies. If you’re the author or publisher of a megacorp-disapproved text, you still have nothing to complain about: can’t you always start your own bookstore?... Thank God for Barnes & Noble, who deserve the thanks of all who still believe we should be able to read what we want, not just what the nannies and commissars of corporate America deem fit for our eyes.  And if Barnes & Noble goes bankrupt or succumbs to the censors? Doesn’t matter — just start another bookstore chain. Fine idea, except that businesses, and not just books, are getting canceled by Big Tech. Parler, for example, was an attempt to start a new social network. Conservatives feeling smothered by Twitter’s abridgments of political speech were willing to overlook Parler’s technical inadequacies, so eager were they for an alternative. The business found a niche. But Big Tech’s market-dominant players decided to snuff out the upstart they could not control... The lesson was clear: if you adopt free-speech policies that the tech titans dislike, they will converge to shut you down and shut you up.  Adam Smith staunchly defended private enterprise, but he warned in The Wealth of Nations that ‘people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ The tech companies that control and constrain online communications in the United States are indeed ‘a conspiracy against the public’, not to raise prices — though that warrants a closer look — but to impose their politics and morals on everyone. Monopoly is not the relevant category here. The Big Tech cartel is not the sole purveyor of its products, but its members have such a dominant position in online communications as to threaten both individual liberty and open public discourse. Even the most traditional medium of First Amendment freedoms of the written word, the newspaper, is now a creature of the tech cartel, as Google controls the web advertising on which for-profit print publications depend. Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post is an apt metaphor for the relationship between the tech oligarchy-oligopoly and the press as a whole.  Breaking up the tech companies might not be the answer, however: a cartel with a dozen members can be just as ruthless as one with only five or six. When all the players follow the same politicized hiring, management and human-resources policies, their intuitive collusion is self-reinforcing: to be canceled by one tech giant is to be blacklisted by all.   Big Tech does not truly compete. This poses a problem for conventional economic thinking: such non-competition has a psychological aim rather than a commercial one. The tech cartel has the private business world’s freedom from public accountability, yet it commands more wealth than whole nations and has a singular chokehold on published speech in the US. All this unchecked power serves a moral vision as comprehensive as that of any religion. For Big Tech, as for religions of old, error has no rights. And the public has no right to know or debate anything — not on Lord Bezos’s estate.  The Democratic party benefits politically from the suppression of speech online and the privileging of a single ideological point of view. Yet it is far from certain that Republicans understand what is required to restore the intellectual commons. There’s an obvious contradiction between GOP complaints about censorship and calls on the right for stricter libel laws and new ways to sue tech companies for what gets said on their platforms.   But if policy remedies are elusive, the cultural prerequisites of the cure are not: Americans must understand that their freedom to read what they choose and to think for themselves is opposed by an ideology that calls itself progressive and liberal, and by a concentration of unaccountable power over the tongue and mind unlike anything this country has encountered before. A new philosophical critique of this power and of the commissars who wield it must be devised, a critique as radical as the thought of Adam Smith was in 1776."

Twitter Censors Conservatives, But Won’t Ban Pedophiles. - "Even an account that was just selling MAGA winter hats just got suspended…. But it gets better, despite the fact Twitter won’t delete even some of the worst pedophile profiles….they did manage to censor and hand out ban hammers to people that spoke out AGAINST them…"
From 2018

Global Government Affairs on X - "We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society. We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. #KeepitOn"
From 2021. Ironic, given how many people they blocked

Glenn Greenwald on X - "The most under-reported and under-discussed story of 2023: a federal district court judge, upheld by a unanimous appellate panel, found the Biden WH and FBI committed one of the gravest attacks on the 1st Am in decades by coercing Big Tech to censor dissent online."
FBI, White House likely coerced social media platforms: Appeals court
This won't stop left wingers from denying the facts and claiming that the government flagging material to companies is just keeping in line with the companies' policies

Don Wolt on X - "An MIT team the govt funded to create AI censorship tools claimed people dedicated to sacred texts & American founding documents were more susceptible to “disinformation” because they “often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources and performing their own synthesis.”"
AI Censorship Targets People Who Read Primary Sources - "NewsGuard announced last week it’s using AI to automatically prevent American citizens from seeing information online that challenges government and corporate media claims about elections ahead of the 2024 voting season.  “[P]latforms and search engines” including Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard’s “ratings” to stop people from seeing disfavored information sources, information, and topics in their social media feeds and online searches. Now censorship is being deployed not only by humans but also by automated computer code, rapidly raising an Iron Curtain around internet speech.   Newsguard rates The Federalist as a “maximum” risk for publishing Democrat-disapproved information, even though The Federalist accurately reports major stories about which NewsGuard-approved outlets continually spread disinformation and misinformation. Those have already included the Russia-collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh rape hoax, numerous Covid-19 narratives, the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the deadly 2020 George Floyd riots.  NewsGuard directs online ad dollars to corporate leftist outlets and away from independent, conservative outlets. The organization received federal funding for developing these internet censorship tools that now include artificial intelligence...   Numerous federal agencies are funding AI censorship tools, including the U.S. Department of State, the subject of a December lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas. The report last month from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reveals shocking details about censorship tools funded by the National Science Foundation, one of hundreds of federal agencies...   “In my dream world,” censorship technician Scott Hale told NSF grantmakers, people like him would use aggregate data of the speech censored on social media to develop “automated detection” algorithms that immediately censor banned speech online, without any further human involvement. “Misinformation” that NSF-funded AI scrubs from the internet includes “undermining trust in mainstream media,” the House report says. It also works to censor election and vaccine information the government doesn’t like. One censorship tool taxpayers funded through the NSF “sought to help train the children of military families to help influence the beliefs of military families,” a demographic traditionally more skeptical of Democrat rule.  Federal agencies use nonprofits they fund as cutouts to avoid constitutional restraints that prohibit governments from censoring even false speech. As Foundation for Freedom Online’s Director Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson and journalist Jan Jekielek in recent interviews, U.S. intelligence agencies are highly involved in censorship, using it essentially to control the U.S. government by controlling public opinion. A lawsuit at the Supreme Court, Murthy v. Missouri, could restrict federal involvement in some of these censorship efforts.   Yet, as Benz noted, corporate media have long functioned as a propaganda mouthpiece for U.S. spy agencies. That relationship has continued as social media displaced legacy media in controlling public opinion. Today, dozens of highly placed Big Tech staff are current or former U.S. spy agency employees. Many of them manage Big Tech’s censorship efforts in conjunction with federal agency employees. Nonprofit censorship cutouts use “tiplines” to target speech even on private messaging apps like WhatsApp. AI tools “facilitate the censorship of speech online at a speed and in a manner that human censors are not capable,” the House report notes. A University of Wisconsin censorship tool the federal government funded lets censors see if their targets for information manipulation are getting their messages and gauge in real-time how their targets respond.   A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team the federal government funded to develop AI censorship tools described conservatives, minorities, residents of rural areas, “older adults,” and veterans as “uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online,” says the House report.   People dedicated to sacred texts and American documents such as “the Bible or the Constitution,” the MIT team said, were more susceptible to “disinformation” because they “often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources, and performing their own synthesis.” Such citizens “adhered to deeper narratives that might make them suspicious of any intervention that privileges mainstream sources or recognized experts.”  “Because interviewees distrusted both journalists and academics, they drew on this practice [of reading primary sources] to fact check how media outlets reported the news,” MIT’s successful federal grant application said.  People who did this were less likely to believe the federal government’s propaganda, making them prime obstacles to government misinformation."
Critical thinking is dangerous
Clearly, this is not a violation of the First Amendment, because free speech doesn't mean hate speech or disinformation

Meme - "You" *standing in shower*
"Fun on Facebook" *soap on floor*
"Community Standards" *someone standing behind you*

Malaysia outraged at Meta takedown of media’s Facebook posts on PM’s Hamas meeting - "“I condemn Meta’s actions of removing posts, especially since they were in relation to the Prime Minister’s official visit to Qatar,” Communications Minister, Fahmi Fadzil, who is also government spokesperson, told a regular briefing.  “What I regret is that these actions were taken by an organisation based in the United States, and it’s clear that they do not respect the freedom of media outlets in using their platform.”"
Malaysia to take legal action against Meta over ‘undesirable’ content
Malaysia Orders Meta, TikTok to Formulate Plan for ‘Harmful’ Content
Ironic.

Deva Hazarika on X - "What all the free speech and moderation discussion makes abundantly clear is many people’s principles boil down to amplify content they agree with and restrict content they disagree with"

Wiceboy_Photography on X - "Social media be like: "What's on your mind?" then ban you for saying it. 🤣🫠"

i/o on X - "Something just occurred to me: When I started out on Twitter years ago (with a previous account), I was among the first people to candidly tweet about the racial IQ gaps. When I did, my replies would instantly fill up with angry people (including academics) who would accuse me of spreading misinformation even though I'd link to well-established scientific findings and data. Hardly any lefty accounts seemed to believe that these gaps even existed.  Now this never happens. It seems that everyone on social media is now aware of the gaps.   All it took was a few people (who were willing to get suspended every once in a while) to start posting this information and other accounts to retweet it."
This is why left wingers hate Elon Musk so much

Meme - Woman on bus 1: "What happened?"
Woman on bus 2: "I don't know, he saw his phone and then cried"
"poor boy, he surely have received bad news"
"Maybe semeone died"
"You can't post or comment for 30 days. This is because 7 of your previous posts didn't follow our Community Standards."

Reddit Lies on X - "Every "hot" post on r/Politics right now is either glazing Democrats or demonizing Republicans. Literally. Every. Single. Post. It's difficult to describe just how insanely biased Reddit is."

House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 on X - "Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech."

Melissa Chen on X - "As some of you know, as early as April 2020, I had floated the sensible opinion that the lab leak hypothesis should not be so handedly dismissed on Facebook, citing references from elsewhere. My account was suspended and the post itself was removed.   This was more than a year before the public destigmatization would occur (thanks to Jon Stewart in June 2021), suddenly depriving this viewpoint of its cooties and conspiratorial stench.   It was also successfully-coded as a racist trope. Only God knows how on earth they managed to do such a thing given that the alternative hypothesis (Chinese people eating bat soup) was far more racist.   Oh wait, now I get it! This worked primarily because of our stupidity to conform, combined with widespread CENSORSHIP on social media platforms so that only approved narratives could percolate.   In the time since, the lab leak story has proved to be more than plausible (even the US DoE concludes as such).   It’s hard to think about the counter-factual but please for a moment, just imagine that Twitter/Facebook did not comply with the Biden-Harris admin request.  Instead of taking 18 months relying on someone the MSM had anointed with sainthood (St. Stewart) to publicly discuss it, many people would’ve been openly talking about the possibility of a lab leak as early as I was, circa April 2020. Citizen journalists and researchers could collaborate and find each other more easily.   Maybe the public pressure would’ve allowed virologists to speak their minds knowing there was widespread support of this view, and not have been pressured by Fauci to change their minds.   Maybe some public pressure would’ve put media and government pressure on Fauci earlier on, rather than give the very culprits - the people who went around the government policy on GoF research -the time to regroup, the time to censor our posts, the time to cover up their own tracks, and in the process give China time and space to scrub the seafood market clean, stall on conducting an independent inquiry (which they refused for more than a year and when they finally did the investigators were hand-picked), and all involved to hide the evidence (at the Wuhan Institute of Virology). Australia had asked for an independent investigation and instead was slapped with trade tariffs and other economic retaliatory measures.  We have not fully accounted for the consequences of Meta’s speech suppression. But it is absolutely not trivial because it likely prevented us from knowing the truth about one of the biggest coverups in our lifetime."

Meme - "l believe we must continue to stand for free expression." - Mark Zuckerberg
"False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers. See Why"

Zuckerberg says he regrets caving to White House pressure on content - "Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was “wrong” and he plans to push back if it happens again...   Zuckerberg also expressed regret for Meta’s downplaying of content related to coverage by the New York Post about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election that the FBI warned may have been rooted in a Russian disinformation operation."
Weird. We kept being told that this never happened

Meme - "Warning. Although this information is factually correct, it makes Democrats look bad.
It appears you are attempting to view something that may cast Democrats in a bad light. Therefore we blocked you from seeing it. Now back to work, comrade.
Go Back
Report to the thought police"

Unscientific American

Unscientific American

"Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern... the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

This was the national climate when Laura Helmuth took the helm of Scientific American in April 2020... Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Scientific American’s increasing engagement in politics drew national attention in late 2020, when the magazine, for the first time in its 175-year history, endorsed a presidential candidate...

Scientific American wasn’t alone in endorsing a presidential candidate in 2020. Nature also endorsed Biden in that election cycle. The New England Journal of Medicine indirectly did the same, writing that “our current leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent” and should not “keep their jobs.” Vinay Prasad, the prominent oncologist and public-health expert, recently lampooned the endorsement trend on his Substack, asking whether science journals will tell him who to vote for again in 2024. “Here is an idea! Call it crazy,” he wrote: “Why don’t scientists focus on science, and let politics decide the election?” When scientists insert themselves into politics, he added, “the only result is we are forfeiting our credibility.”

But what does it mean to “focus on science”? Many of us learned the standard model of the scientific method in high school. We understand that science attempts—not always perfectly—to shield the search for truth from political interference, religious dogmas, or personal emotions and biases. But that model of science has been under attack for half a century. The French theorist Michel Foucault argued that scientific objectivity is an illusion produced and shaped by society’s “systems of power.” Today’s woke activists challenge the legitimacy of science on various grounds: the predominance of white males in its history, the racist attitudes held by some of its pioneers, its inferiority to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and so on. Ironically, as Christopher Rufo points out in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, this postmodern ideology—which began as a critique of oppressive power structures—today empowers the most illiberal, repressive voices within academic and other institutions.

Shermer believes that the new style of science journalism “is being defined by this postmodern worldview, the idea that all facts are relative or culturally determined.” Of course, if scientific facts are just products of a particular cultural milieu, he says, “then everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” Without an agreed-upon framework to separate valid from invalid claims—without science, in other words—people fall back on their hunches and in-group biases, the “my-side bias.”

Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.

“Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,” Shermer says, “marshaling evidence in favor of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.” This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course. Even before the Trump era, the mainstream press boosted stories that support left-leaning viewpoints and carefully avoided topics that might offer ammunition to the Right. Most readers understand, of course, that stories about politics are likely to be shaped by a media outlet’s ideological slant. But science is theoretically supposed to be insulated from political influence. Sadly, the new woke style of science journalism reframes factual scientific debates as ideological battles, with one side presumed to be morally superior. Not surprisingly, the crisis in science journalism is most obvious in the fields where public opinion is most polarized.

The Covid pandemic was a crisis not just for public health but for the public’s trust in our leading institutions. From Anthony Fauci on down, key public-health officials issued unsupported policy prescriptions, fudged facts, and suppressed awkward questions about the origin of the virus. A skeptical, vigorous science press could have done a lot to keep these officials honest—and the public informed. Instead, even elite science publications mostly ran cover for the establishment consensus. For example, when Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and two other public-health experts proposed an alternative to lockdowns in their Great Barrington Declaration, media outlets joined in Fauci’s effort to discredit and silence them.

Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, is a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, which can make naturally occurring viruses deadlier. From the early weeks of the pandemic, he suspected that the virus had leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence increasingly suggests that he was correct.  I asked Ebright how he thought that the media had handled the lab-leak debate. He responded:

Science writers at most major news outlets and science news outlets have spent the last four years obfuscating and misrepresenting facts about the origin of the pandemic. They have done this to protect the scientists, science administrators, and the field of science—gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens—that likely caused the pandemic. They have done this in part because those scientists and science administrators are their sources, . . . in part because they believe that public trust in science would be damaged by reporting the facts, and in part because the origin of the pandemic acquired a partisan political valance after early public statements by Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump.

 During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).” Today we know that the poisonous atmosphere around the lab-leak question was deliberately created by Anthony Fauci and a handful of scientists involved in dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. And the case for banning gain-of-function research has never been stronger.

One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.

As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage. Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data.

The mainstream science press never misses an opportunity to ratchet up climate angst. No hurricane passes without articles warning of “climate disasters.” And every major wildfire seemingly generates a “climate apocalypse” headline. For example, when a cluster of Quebec wildfires smothered the eastern U.S. in smoke last summer, the New York Times called it “a season of climate extremes.” It’s likely that a warming planet will result in more wildfires and stronger hurricanes. But eager to convince the public that climate-linked disasters are rapidly trending upward, journalists tend to neglect the base rate. In the case of Quebec wildfires, for example, 2023 was a fluky outlier. During the previous eight years, Quebec wildfires burned fewer acres than average; then, there was no upward trend—and no articles discussing the paucity of fires. By the same token, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a lower-than-average number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. between 2011 and 2020. But there were no headlines suggesting, say, “Calm Hurricane Seasons Cast Doubt on Climate Predictions.”

Most climate journalists wouldn’t dream of drawing attention to data that challenge the climate consensus. They see their role as alerting the public to an urgent problem that will be solved only through political change.

Similar logic applies to social issues. The social-justice paradigm rests on the notion that racism, sexism, transphobia, and other biases are so deeply embedded in our society that they can be eradicated only through constant focus on the problem. Any people or institutions that don’t participate in this process need to be singled out for criticism. In such an atmosphere, it takes a particularly brave journalist to note exceptions to the reigning orthodoxy.

This dynamic is especially intense in the debates over transgender medicine... Families facing treatment decisions for youth gender dysphoria desperately need clear, objective guidance. They’re not getting it.

Instead, medical organizations and media outlets typically describe experimental hormone treatments and surgeries as routine, and even “lifesaving,” when, in fact, their benefits remain contested, while their risks are enormous. In a series of articles, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir has documented how trans advocates enforce this appearance of consensus among U.S. scientists, medical experts, and many journalists. Through social-media campaigns and other tools, these activists have forced conferences to drop leading scientists, gotten journals to withdraw scientific papers after publication, and interfered with the distribution of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which challenges the wisdom of “gender-affirming care” for adolescent girls. While skeptics are cowed into silence, Sapir concludes, those who advocate fast-tracking children for radical gender therapy “will go down in history as responsible for one of the worst medical scandals in U.S. history.”

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children...

Fortunately, glimmers of light are shining through on the gender-care controversy. The New York Times has lately begun publishing more balanced articles on the matter, much to the anger of activists. And various European countries have started reassessing and limiting youth hormone treatments...

Scientific American has yet to offer an even-handed review of the new scientific skepticism toward aggressive gender medicine. Instead, in February, the magazine published an opinion column, “Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People.” Shockingly, it argues for even less medical caution in dispensing radical treatments. The authors approvingly note that “many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care,” arguing that patients should have “access to hormones and surgery on demand.” And, in an implicit warning to anyone who might question these claims and goals, the article compares today’s skeptics of aggressive gender medicine to Nazi eugenicists and book burners. Shortly after the Cass report’s release, SciAm published an interview with two activists who argue that scientists questioning trans orthodoxy are conducting “epistemological violence.”

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous debate over scientific questions. In fact, in both science and journalism, adversarial argumentation is a vital tool in testing claims and getting to the truth. “A bad idea can hover in the ether of a culture if there is no norm for speaking out,” Shermer says. Where some trans activists cross the line is in trying to derail debate by shaming and excluding anyone who challenges the activists’ manufactured consensus.

Such intimidation has helped enforce other scientific taboos. Anthony Fauci called the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and successfully lobbied to censor their arguments on social media. Climate scientists who diverge from the mainstream consensus struggle to get their research funded or published. The claim that implicit racial bias unconsciously influences our minds has been debunked time and again—but leading science magazines keep asserting it.

Scientists and journalists aren’t known for being shrinking violets. What makes them tolerate this enforced conformity? The intimidation described above is one factor. Academia and journalism are both notoriously insecure fields; a single accusation of racism or anti-trans bias can be a career ender. In many organizations, this gives the youngest, most radical members of the community disproportionate power to set ideological agendas.

“Scientists, science publishers, and science journalists simply haven’t learned how to say no to emotionally unhinged activists,” evolutionary psychologist Miller says. “They’re prone to emotional blackmail, and they tend to be very naive about the political goals of activists who claim that scientific finding X or Y will ‘impose harm’ on some group.”

But scientists may also have what they perceive to be positive motives to self-censor. A fascinating recent paper concludes: “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists.” The authors include a who’s who of heterodox thinkers, including Miller, Manhattan Institute fellow Glenn Loury, Pamela Paresky, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker, and Wilfred Reilly. “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups,” they write.

Whether motivated by good intentions, conformity, or fear of ostracization, scientific censorship undermines both the scientific process and public trust. The authors of the “prosocial motives” paper point to “at least one obvious cost of scientific censorship: the suppression of accurate information.” When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today...

Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line. Their worldview insists that, rather than challenging the progressive orthodoxy, science must serve as its handmaiden. This pre-Enlightenment style of thinking used to hold sway only in radical political subcultures and arcane corners of academia. Today it is reflected even in our leading institutions and science publications. Without a return to the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society risks drifting onto the rocks of irrationality."

The 2022 article mentioned in the post was where "Scientific" American was claiming the lab leak theory was a "conspiracy theory" and "disinformation" and called it dangerous. Clearly science proceeds by ignoring and censoring alternative views. 

Related: "Scientific" American's claim that saying that you can't sleep in public is somehow criminalising human biology.

Fists of Ham: Why the Liberals Keep Trying (and Failing) to Control the Internet

Fists of Ham: Why the Liberals Keep Trying (and Failing) to Control the Internet

"There are solid national security reasons for the U.S. Congress to fret about TikTok and its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Plenty of evidence suggests TikTok exerts a malign influence over political debate in the U.S. and other Western countries. The sheer volume and imbalance of anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian rhetoric on the social media platform, for example, has many observers suggesting its algorithms and moderation techniques are calibrated to deliberately drive new wedges into American politics at China’s behest. A recent essay in the Jewish Review of Books calls TikTok “an instrument of Chinese antagonism towards the United States.” Even Canada requested a security review of TikTok last September...

While TikTok’s direct Chinese connection is concerning and relevant in and of itself, Trump is right to worry about the things that TikTok, Facebook and virtually all other commercial internet businesses have in common, namely the manner in which they collect and traffic in their users’ data – i.e., our data. Without transparent, reliable and ironclad safeguards to protect the personal details that users share inadvertently and habitually throughout their day-to-day interactions with these companies, as well as the manner in which that information is re-used, re-sold or otherwise manipulated, we are all powerless to control our own online destinies. They know what we like, where we go and what we are thinking. No government has a right to all that information; why, then, should the owners of social media platforms have it?

Rather than grapple with these fundamental issues, however, Trudeau and his revolving circus of ministers in the Heritage and Justice portfolios have instead tried to “manage” the internet’s end-user experience. A trifecta of flawed bills has sought to restrict how Canadians can express themselves online – and thus put an end to the internet as an unregulated forum for the free exchange of ideas. And while the TikTok dilemma is not of the Trudeau government’s own making, these three bills certainly are.

The first of these three foolish foundation stones was laid with the Online Streaming Act, also known as Bill C-11...

Others saw Bill C-11 as a 1980s-style effort to bring the wide-open internet under the control of the notoriously meddlesome and hidebound Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). In an effort to impose Canadian-content rules on major streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, the bill sets criteria and extracts funds to “support Canadian artists and creative industries, advance Indigenous storytelling and increase representation of equity-seeking groups.” The Trudeau government, in other words, is using it as yet another way to favour designated groups whose approval it craves and further impose wokism on Canadians.

In doing so, the Online Streaming Act also threatens to bring the entire independent podcasting world to heel. While individual digital creators are not directly regulated by the act, the streaming companies who host them are, and it is entirely reasonable – if not fully expected – that these firms will censor and bully those independent voices into following Ottawa’s direction. It is exactly the sort of top-down, elitist-driven scheme to which the internet is properly allergic.

The response to these likely consequences from online creators and content providers has been deafening... He and his colleagues, McCullough explained, are “often very entrepreneurial, very self‑directed people that have started from very little and have become very successful.” They don’t want or need Ottawa’s heavy hand on their shoulder – or in their wallet.

The Trudeau brain trust’s next assault on the internet turned out to be a failure of epic proportions – hurting the very industry it was supposed to help. Bill C-18, the Online News Act, was meant to ameliorate the financial problems of the mainstream media by extracting cash from Google and Facebook to hand over to those failing businesses. This was to be accomplished by forcing the two social media giants to pay for the privilege of hosting online links to news stories from the legacy outlets. While Google agreed to pay $100 million into this scheme, Facebook-owner Meta took the opposite approach and stopped posting news links entirely.

Meta’s move immediately severed a key connection between online readers and news publishers and did far more damage in terms of lost marketing power than was gained from Google’s outlay. According to the CBC’s Third Quarter Financial Report, for example, “Digital reach for CBC is trending below target due to Meta’s news withdrawal in Canada.” Traffic at the English language website dropped by 23 percent year-over-year, all of which can be ascribed to the Facebook news link ban. Far from “stealing” the legacy media’s content, as alleged, the social media giants were clearly helping them reach their audiences. Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne called the legislation “a transparent shakedown operation.” The real purpose, Coyne observed, could be summarized by the observation that “the platforms have money, and the media want some.”

St-Onge’s immediate predecessor, Pablo Rodriguez, used to brag that the “world is watching” Canada’s efforts to manage the internet. Unfortunately for everyone involved, he was right. So closely, it turns out, that not only did the Online News Act cost the domestic news industry a great deal of money, it hurt other countries as well. In 2021 the Australian government cajoled Facebook and Google into making payments to news providers in what might be considered a test run of Canada’s Bill C-18. But Meta was so pleased with how its business proceeded after its news link ban in Canada that it subsequently notified publishers in Australia that it plans to end its deal with them as well...

Having thus damaged the news industry on two continents, Trudeau’s government decided to again reach beyond its intellectual grasp and turn what could have been a perfectly useful piece of legislation dealing with the most problematic aspects of the internet into a dystopian mess. Say hello to Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, unveiled in February. Promoted as being necessary to “protect children” from a cesspool of online content, the bill actually comprises two distinct and wholly unrelated halves. One good, one evil.

The first part sets up mechanisms to shield vulnerable children from inappropriate content online, as well as to protect victims of online sex crimes, such as the unauthorized sharing of sexually-intimate videos. Unfortunately, this entirely legitimate goal was then welded onto a despicable attempt at suppressing free speech in Canada.

The “evil-twin” portion of the bill seeks to stamp out “hate” within Canada by creating new speech and thought crimes and by setting up an ominously named Digital Safety Commissioner. Expressions considered hateful by the courts will be made punishable by up to life in prison. What constitutes “hate”? According to the bill, hate speech is defined as “detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals.” It is not, however, “disdain or dislike.” Got that?

The promotion of genocide is dealt with in an equally severe manner, but defined in an equally vague way. (Could legitimate research into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools disputing claims of genocide be considered illegal? Who knows?) Further, the courts can order house arrest for anyone suspected of intending to commit a future hate crime. And the bill revives the thoroughly discredited and properly abandoned concept of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act by allowing anonymous hate-speech “victims” to bring complaints against anyone who has said something they consider offensive, and in the process enrich themselves with cash awards.

Apparently lulled into a catatonic state by the aspects of the bill that protect children, many Canadian commentators were initially supportive of C-63. Coyne, for example, initially gave it “One Cheer”. But then outside voices began to weigh in. Britain’s The Telegraph, for example, talked of Canada’s “descent into tyranny”. According to columnist David Collins, “For Canadians, Trudeau’s Online Harms Act will [result in] a tightly-monitored police state more suited to North Korea than North America. It will harm more people than it protects.” The Spectator, another British publication, was similarly outraged:

“The stated intent of the Bill is something every decent person supports: protecting children from online victimization. Yet behind this noble aim lurk the thought police.

This is no exaggeration. This legislation authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime. It’s right there in the text: if a judge believes there are reasonable grounds to ‘fear’ a future hate crime, the as of yet innocent party can be sentenced to house arrest, complete with electronic tagging, mandatory drug testing and communication bans.”

Prominent U.S. free speech advocate Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School and frequent expert witness on First Amendment issues to the U.S. Congress, told Fox News the bill represents a “doubling down on Canada’s commitment to reducing free speech.”...

As for the reaction among elected politicians, the federal NDP are big fans of the bill and the Bloc Québécois want to make it even tougher. Only the Conservatives seem to recognize its slippery, dual-headed nature...

Amid all the embarrassing missteps and ham-handedness of the Justin Trudeau government’s entire internet policy package, a crucial question arises. Why? What makes a government turn a streaming act designed to force Netflix to support Canadian film and TV production into one with implicit authority over all podcasts? How does a bill designed to make web giants support news organizations wind up wreaking financial harm on what remains of the independent press? And who takes the concept of protecting vulnerable children and twists it into an internationally-decried assault on free speech? Meanwhile, why is no one doing anything to address the real online issues of data collection, trafficking and storage? The Liberals are essentially bringing a hammer down on how Canadians use the internet at home while ignoring the much bigger problems backstage.

In a search for answers, I sought out three experts for their opinions on how the Liberals lost their minds over the internet. Timothy Denton, a consultant and former CRTC Commissioner, says leaders in Canada and elsewhere have become nervous about the manner in which the internet has freed citizens from their control. “Governments everywhere in the western world are engaged in programs that are malign by intention and can only be made to work…by the repression of people’s capacity to see, perceive and organize,” he explained via email. The three bills, in other words, are part of a concerted effort to curtail independent thought. “I think this is becoming increasingly clear to many, many people, and from their point of view, this ability must be hampered and stopped.”

Len St-Aubin, a long-time regulatory consultant, sees part of the problem arising from a weakening of the policy-making process within the public service that began during Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. “The problem is the total politicization of policy making grounded in short-term thinking, and the corresponding demise of evidence-based policy making,” St-Aubin says. “The Libs either inherited a public service with greatly diminished policy making capacity, or chose to adopt the same echo chamber policy-making model.” (Then again, the Harper government did repeal Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, which was being misused to suppress unpopular opinions.)

Putting political considerations ahead of serving the public is a recurring pattern for the Trudeau government, argues St-Aubin. “Bill C-11 was driven by, and ultimately sought to benefit, private sector broadcasters and independent producers who depend on regulations” for their livelihood, he says. “That was almost certainly driven by political motivation, rather than any policy analysis within the public service. The same is definitely the case with the Online News Act. And both are proving to be abject failures.”

As president of the Internet Society Canada Chapter, Philip Palmer has appeared before the House of Commons Heritage Committee and its Senate counterpart to speak to the government’s internet legislation. He is also an Ottawa-based internet and telecommunications lawyer and former Senior General Counsel with the Department of Justice. To understand the Trudeau government’s approach, Palmer says, it’s best to look to mindset rather than motivation.

“In my view, the problem with the Liberal government is the sin of pride,” says Palmer. “They see themselves as virtuous and, in consequence of this self-understanding, the initiatives they undertake reflect virtue as they would have it. Of course, if they are virtuous, and their political actions reflect virtue, then opposing those measures is anti-virtuous – possibly even evil. The Liberals compound the sin of pride with that of sloth: they seem unable or unwilling to examine their actions against real-world reality. They do not take the trouble to see potential virtue in their opponents’ point of view – as of course their opponents, by definition, lack their virtue.”

Palmer points to how all of the Trudeau government’s legislation tends to go beyond the necessary initial objectives and grant sweeping powers to various non-government authorities such as the CRTC, Human Rights Tribunal, Digital Safety Commission or, through Criminal Code amendments, the police and Crown prosecutors. It’s a pattern, he says, that comes down to “simple lack of imagination.” As Palmer puts it, “They can neither imagine that they are capable of doing harm, nor that in the course of experienced life others will come to hold the levers of power and be able to use those unrestrained powers for purposes that are entirely foreseeable but beyond their ken.”

If Palmer is right, and sinful pride is at the heart of Trudeau’s legislative assaults on Canadians’ liberty, then perhaps the unfolding crisis over TikTok and the three online-related laws are omens of a fall yet to come. Considering TikTok, note that the platform is wildly popular among those who graduated from high school after the turn of the century. The Online Streaming Act’s shortcomings primarily befall this demographic cohort as well. Comprising Millennials and Gen Z, they now outnumber their parents, the once-dominant Baby Boomers. They are also the first generation to have grown up with the internet. Plus, seventy percent of TikTok’s users are under 40 and the majority are female. That’s not only the dream demographic for advertisers, it’s also the segment of the population that, in the 2015 federal election, most enthusiastically threw its support behind Trudeau and his “sunny ways”.

Now, having watched their dreams of home ownership crumble on Trudeau’s watch and witnessed his bungled efforts at legislating the internet, this group also seems to be suffering the most from buyer’s remorse. If current polls are to believed, it appears Millennials have shifted their allegiance in spectacular fashion and are now almost twice as likely to support Poilievre’s Conservatives as they are Trudeau’s Liberals."