There was a time not long ago when liberals at least pretended to support free speech. Those days are gone, and never coming back. //

None of the people who now claim Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a huge problem saw any problem at all with Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election — a major case of actual misinformation that arguably affected the outcome of the election.

You cannot get them to admit this, though, in part because they will not admit it to themselves. Epistemic closure on the left makes it impossible for someone like The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, for example, to understand the Musk takeover of Twitter as a potential victory for authentic free speech. For Serwer, the entire debate about free speech on Twitter is a canard, “a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored.”

That pretty much sums up what the left is telling itself about all this. Allowing conservatives to speak their minds on Twitter about, say, transgenderism or abortion or critical race theory, can’t possibly be considered “free speech.” To them, it’s just “hateful conduct” conservatives engage in as part of a power dynamic, which in turn warrants censorship.

Enjoy these 100 facts that censorious Democrats might not like but a free-speech Twitter should let people tweet.

In fact, all of this worry and panic is at the heart of the left’s newfound love and redefinition of democracy.

For years, they have told us that corporations don’t have First Amendment rights. They have trashed the Citizens United case pretty thoroughly since the decision was handed down. But the moment a corporation goes fully woke in (a falsely framed) opposition to a law passed by Republicans, they suddenly deserve all those rights, and how dare the Republicans push back against it?! //

A major corporation goes woke and stands in major, vocal opposition to the Republican Party. Free speech comes with consequences. Whether or not a court will uphold those consequences remains to be seen, but it happened. And the left is crying foul.

Of course, if there were a Twitter account called “Cons of TikTok” that focused on the crazy things conservatives say on social media, the left would be apoplectic that someone would dare to expose them for simply posting what conservatives are out there saying. In fact, the left was apoplectic about one of their own getting exposed on social media: Hunter Biden. They shot the original story down over and over until after Joe Biden’s election, then waited two years to bring it up again in their own reporting to verify it.

What happened to it being a misinformation campaign by Russia? Incidentally, Lorenz suggested the same thing when she explained why she went after the Libs of TikTok account. You just never know — it could be the Russians. Gotta protect democracy from those crafty Russians. //

But that brings us to Elon Musk and Twitter. The left has lost their ever-loving minds over this deal. They truly believe it’s the end of democracy. I’m sorry, but if Twitter is the last great bastion of democracy, then democracy deserves to fail. It’s a cesspool disguised as a public square.

But, while a woke Twitter board and woke Twitter staffers can control the flow of information on the site, it’s fine. Democracy is saved. But the moment that you expose what they’re doing or saying on social media, the moment you are a threat to their public perception, you are deemed an enemy of the aforementioned democracy and need to be shut down. And that’s why they are terrified of Musk. He threatens their ability to control the narratives at any given moment //

But the left is losing their minds over the idea that more voices can be heard. The point of democracy is for the voice of the people to be heard so that everyone is informed from all sides and able to make an educated choice. That this idea is so outright rejected by the left that they have to shut down the voices that run counter to them, and that they have to lament their inability to do so in the future, well… it makes me think that perhaps “democracy” was never really the point at all.

And gee, who could have seen that coming?

People like Rogan — and me — cannot afford the mental bandwidth needed to logic out every possible response to every word we utter and then plan our speech according to those possibilities. If we can’t speak from the heart, and our own curiosity, we can’t encourage anyone to respond from the heart. Even the pouncing progressives would agree that being “emotionally honest” about something is a huge part of any meaningful discussion. They’ve been putting feelings over facts for years now. By their own measure, audiences cannot engage their feelings on an issue if they’re not being met with the honest feelings of the personality opining on the issue. Chilling the speech of the speakers chills all speech.

That is the goal, of course. To squash discussion and replace it with pre-formed ideas, given to you by the intellectual elite and their less-intellectual culture minions. You can’t respond to a bad idea you’re not allowed to hear in the first place. They don’t want our responses to their bad ideas.

That’s what makes places like RedState special…and guys like Rogan special. We do want your responses to our ideas. We do want emotion and rage and applause and laughter. We welcome the hate clicks as much as the love clicks. They all pay the same, but even better, they serve a function that we’re all on board with on the non-progressive political spectrum. They foster discussion. In this business, honesty makes for quality content.

Have you ever wondered why the production value of your tv and movies seems to have dropped lately? It’s because the number of calculations executives and their creative partners are required to make these days about possible responses, boycotts, hurt feelings, and social media backlash forces them to think more like machines and less like thinking, feeling human beings. //

Chilling speech on the world wide web, particularly in this nation, is effectively dumbing down entertainment quality. Worse than that, it’s making machines out of humans, at a time when we need much more humanity in this world.

Legacy media is trying to memory hole the attack on the Freedom Convoy because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Many people aren’t buying the violence allegations. GiveSendGo is allowing the convoy to fundraise on its website. As of this writing, nearly $5,000,000 has been raised for the Canadian Freedom Convoy. //

Anyone who wants to harm former president Donald Trump, including Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, noted FBI liar Andrew McCabe, and the “Handmaid Resistance Vigil,” were among those Leftist causes allowed to raise money on gofundme. //

Now, here are a few who weren’t. See if you can spot a pattern.

Kyle Rittenhouse supporters were not allowed to fundraise on the website. Defending oneself against attacks by the Left’s pet protesters, it turns out, is not allowed. When Rittenhouse jumped to GiveSendGo, Discover credit card cut off the ability to give money to that fundraiser. You might want to make a note of that.
A “Save America” rally fundraiser by a conservative couple to oppose COVID-19 mandates was cut off.
Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire set up a fundraiser for Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez’s grandmother to buy a new ceiling. But it was cut off when “someone” informed the fundraising platform that AOC’s abuela wouldn’t accept the funds.
A so-called “militia” group whose members possess guns and patrol the southern border were tossed off gofundme for being hateful.
Colleague Robert Spencer who runs the influential anti-terror website Jihad Watch was de-platformed on gofundme. Being against terrorism is punishable by the Left.
Christian bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein were thrown off gofundme because they wouldn’t make a cake for a same-sex wedding.
Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray were cut off from raising defense fund money from the site. Eventually, charges were dropped against all the officers involved in the case of the heroin dealer’s death.
The effort by a Texas nurse to raise money for an anti-COVID-19 mandate lawsuit was de-platformed over what the site claimed was “misinformation.”
And, of course, the anti-vaccine mandate fundraiser by the Canadian truckers was cut off.
There are many other examples.

The playbook they’re running against Joe Rogan is obvious, recognizable, and requires new defensive weapons.

In response to concerns by Canadian officials who openly despise the mass trucker protest against the vaccine mandate and called protesters racists, GoFundMe announced on Friday that the truckers who raised millions of dollars from people around the world would be cut off from the funds. GoFundMe announced that instead, it would be stealing the funds collected by the Freedom Convoy account to redistribute to its own inevitably leftist charities.

Facing legal backlash from Florida and Texas for its corrupt actions, GoFundMe backtracked its threat and agreed to return the donations, but the fundraising site shouldn’t be let off the hook. GoFundMe proved what many Americans already knew to be true about tech companies: They will gladly collude with governments to silence dissenters and smear peaceful protesters as extremists.

As part of their trending tab, Twitter editorialized discussions happening on their platform comparing Whoopi Goldberg’s two week suspension to Gina Carano’s firing.

They wrote, “Following Whoopi Goldberg’s two-week suspension from The View for comments regarding the Holocaust, people discuss actor Gina Carano’s firing from Disney’s series The Mandalorian for comments comparing COVID-19 restrictions to the Nazis’ treatment of Jewish people.”

This is entirely alarming when viewed for what it is. //

It’s proof that the narrative proliferation worked because Heidi Heitkamp, who had clearly never seen what Carano had said, declared she was a Nazi without about as much thought as she had proof. It’s proof that Carano’s name had been drug through the mud enough that the baseless accusation stuck, othering her in the eyes of many Americans.

And finally, Twitter’s continued proliferation of the narrative shows either a willingness to reinforce the lie or the unwillingness to speak against the lie.

The bottom line here is this: Carano warned against fascism and corporations continue to bow to the fascists she spoke out against.

This single event should have been one of the most alarming wake-up calls in recent history that our media has fallen to truly evil influence. It’s proof that corporations are willing to blindly accept the narrative that they’re given by political radicals. Carano was the canary in the coalmine.

The content advisory is on the wrong people — not the people who need to be questioned even more.

But the funny thing about those “content advisories.” When they originally started putting that stuff on music, it made people more interested in looking at it. If the powers that be don’t want you to see it, it tends to make you want to see it all the more. The controversy has made even more people look at Joe Rogan, then wonder what the heck the controversy is and doubt the media even more. So basically the left shot themselves in the foot with this effort and just made their effort to control the narrative more obvious.

Matthew Rosenberg
@AllMattNYT
Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us.
3:36 PM · Jan 30, 2022

“Maus” is an interesting work of art that uses cartoons and text to make a valid point. But as an avid reader and cartoonist, and as a parent who once had children in 8th grade, I don’t think “Maus” is the best literary source to tell the story of the Holocaust — whether as history or as language art. Would I have objected to its use as a parent? Probably not, but McMinn County made the call to remove it from one grade’s curriculum, as age inappropriate. That is all it did. It didn’t ban Spiegelman’s graphic novel.

But a good and useful lie was launched, and McMinn became a lightning-rod for the left and the “twitterverse.”

Never let a good lie go to waste.

Malone discusses a controversial October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci in response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, Collins called three of the declaration’s authors “fringe” epidemiologists and demanded a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises”. I completely agree this was problematic.

As I have argued elsewhere, 2020 was a time of deep uncertainty about the science surrounding Covid-19 and the appropriate policy response to the pandemic. Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.

The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

One problem, which has been on full display in this controversy, is that censorship may draw more attention to incorrect ideas. Another is that in the middle of any crisis, the answers to many scientific and policy questions will be uncertain. Disagreement on these questions is natural, and attempts to suffocate “harmful” speech run the risk of stifling critical debates, including by silencing third parties who may have important contributions but who fear the professional or reputational consequences of speaking up.

Perhaps the most serious objection to censorship is that the censors themselves are not fit for the task. Censors are unaccountable. They may be biased, misinformed or undereducated. They may lack perspective. In short, they are as fallible as the people they are trying censor. This is especially true in science, where, as history shows us, consensus views can turn out to be false, while controversial or heretical ideas can be vindicated.

Finally, in the modern world, where the censor is so often a giant technology company, there is tremendous potential for abuse. The same tools used to suppress scientific “misinformation” may someday be used to solidify political power and stifle dissent.

Russia's Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, Russia's oldest human rights group.

Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era.

Formally it has been "liquidated" for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a "foreign agent".

That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.

But in court, the prosecutor labelled Memorial a "public threat", accusing the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet crimes instead of highlighting a "glorious past". //

There were shouts of "shame!" from those in court as the decision was read out.

The ruling also shines a light on the rise in repression in modern-day Russia, where Memorial's own human rights wing now lists more than 400 political prisoners, and independent groups and media are increasingly blacklisted as "foreign agents".

In court, lawyers for Memorial argued that the group's work was beneficial for the "health of the nation". They declared Memorial a friend of Russia, not its enemy, and called the case for liquidation absurd and "Orwellian".

Among the sites the group failed to mark with its "foreign agent" status was the vast database of victims of political repression that it has assembled over three decades of work.

The team argued that any mistakes had been corrected and that shutting down a prominent and respected organisation over such technical errors was disproportionate.

In a statement later on Tuesday, International Memorial said it would challenge the ruling and find legitimate ways to continue its work. Russians needed an honest reflection of their past and no-one would succeed in "liquidating" that need, it added. //

Vladimir Putin has placed great store on the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War Two, part of his hankering for the old days of superpower status - a far more attractive focus for many Russians than the parallel history of secret courts, prison camps and firing squads.

"Why should we, descendants of the victors, be ashamed and repent, rather than take pride in our glorious past? Memorial is probably paid by someone for that," the prosecutor claimed in court. //

"A power that is afraid of memory, will never be able to achieve democratic maturity."

"Власть, которая боится памяти, никогда не сможет достичь демократической зрелости."

Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director / директор @AuschwitzMuseum https://t.co/0Oqsc1xvDf
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 28, 2021

In sum, despite their pro-speech intent, anti-SLAPP laws are typically used by media conglomerates and Big Tech companies to punish individuals who dare to fight back against being libeled or censored. These laws are not narrowly targeted to protect speech, but sloppily drafted so as to place insurmountable burdens on ordinary citizens seeking to fight back against powerful entities.

Libel and deplatforming victims are frequently unemployable and incapable of raising money due to censorship — recall that Rittenhouse was thrown off GoFundMe when he tried to raise money for his legal fees. The threat that a libel victim will have to pay the legal fees of the wealthy corporations that have slandered them is often enough to prevent the victim from bringing suit in the first place.

Overturning Sullivan would be quite difficult, requiring a Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment. By contrast, there is nothing stopping states from repealing their anti-SLAPP laws and allowing ordinary citizens a level playing field on which to fight back against Big Media and tech companies in court.

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Kari MacRae, a Massachusetts high school teacher who was fired in retaliation for posts on social media objecting to the inclusion of critical race theory in schools (MacRae vs. Matthew Mattos and Matthew A. Ferron (No. 1:21-cv-11917).

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, asks for damages against Hanover School Superintendent Matthew Ferron and Hanover High School Principal Matthew Mattos for retaliating against MacRae, a math/business teacher at Hanover High School, for exercising her First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit details that MacRae, who was hired as a Hanover High School teacher on August 31, 2021, was fired over several TikTok video posts that were made months prior to her hiring at the school. MacRae, who in May of 2021 was elected to the Bourne School Committee, said she made the posts in her personal capacity as a citizen and candidate for public office…

Last November, Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, testified before Congress that: “Content moderation rules and their potential effects, as well as the process used to enforce those rules, should be simply explained and understandable by everyone. We believe that companies like Twitter should publish their moderation process. We should be transparent about how cases are reported and reviewed, how decisions are made, and what tools are used to enforce.”

Dorsey’s claims are far from Twitter’s actual conduct. Upon appealing, I received a notification minutes later that “Twitter Support” verified I broke the rules, without any kind of reference to the text of my appeal.

As it wasn’t clear they had actually read it, I submitted it again. Then after not hearing back, I submitted another appeal. Over the course of two weeks, I submitted at least three appeals; the only reply I received throughout was the apparent auto-reply indicating Twitter Support verified I violated the “Twitter Rules.”

Dorsey also testified, “We have worked to build better in-app notices where we have removed Tweets for breaking our Rules. We also communicate with both the account that reports a Tweet and the account that posted it with additional detail on our actions.”

Again, I can vouch that none of this happens. I’ve explained in precise detail how my tweet fell well within the bounds of Twitter’s rules. Twitter refuses to explain why they believe otherwise. Worse, after forcing me offline, I had followers tell me Twitter had “unfollowed” them from my account.

In preventing people like me from accessing Twitter despite plainly qualifying under their own terms of service — and in failing to provide the kind of communication Dorsey testified under oath occurs in situations like mine — Twitter is arguably engaging in fraud, telling the public one thing while engaging in the opposite.

Much like the corporate news media, social media companies now operate as the communications wing of the Democratic Party, while continuing to be regulated like a public utility. This indemnifies them against content-related litigation even as they invest ever greater energy into carefully curating what appears on their platforms.

Ultimately this enables them to create a false sense of what’s “trending” or “viral” and what the “consensus” thinks, and protect notable personalities from criticism. It’s information warfare in service of progressive politics. Or, as Matt Taibbi recently put it, “What was supposed to be a historically democratizing technological tool [has] transformed into a dystopian force for censorship and control.”

Twitter’s demarcations around what’s allowed and what’s not are intentionally fuzzy, so that its faceless censors are empowered to decide for themselves. As conservatives like me know, that’s simply a pretext for carrying out shadow banning, frequent censorship, and permanent bans.

Recall that these enforcement actions come at the request of the Biden administration, which has made clear it wants social media companies to erase information they deem unhelpful. This enables the state to curtail our rights without amending the Constitution. It’s a disease rotting our republic, and it’s only getting worse.

Fourteen of the world's leading computer security and cryptography experts have released a paper arguing against the use of client-side scanning because it creates security and privacy risks.

Client-side scanning (CSS, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets) involves analyzing data on a mobile device or personal computer prior to the application of encryption for secure network transit or remote storage. CSS in theory provides a way to look for unlawful content while also allowing data to be protected off-device.

Apple in August proposed a CSS system by which it would analyze photos destined for iCloud backup on customers' devices to look for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), only to backtrack in the face of objections from the security community and many advocacy organizations.

The paper [PDF], "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning," elaborates on the concerns raised immediately following Apple's CSAM scanning announcement with an extensive analysis of the technology.

Penned by some of the most prominent computer science and cryptography professionals – Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Jon Callas, Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter G. Neumann, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Vanessa Teague, and Carmela Troncoso – the paper contends that CSS represents bulk surveillance that threatens free speech, democracy, security, and privacy.

"In this report, we argue that CSS neither guarantees efficacious crime prevention nor prevents surveillance," the paper says.

"Indeed, the effect is the opposite. CSS by its nature creates serious security and privacy risks for all society while the assistance it can provide for law enforcement is at best problematic. There are multiple ways in which client-side scanning can fail, can be evaded, and can be abused." //

But the paper notes that this approach depends on Apple being willing and able to enforce its policy, which might not survive insistence by nations that they can dictate policy within their borders.

"Apple has yielded to such pressures in the past, such as by moving the iCloud data of its Chinese users to three data centers under the control of a Chinese state-owned company, and by removing the 'Navalny' voting app from its Russian app store," the paper says.

And even if Apple were to show unprecedented spine by standing up to authorities demanding CSS access, nations like Russia and Belarus could collude, each submitting a list of supposed child-safety image identifiers that in fact point to political content, the paper posits.

"In summary, Apple has devoted a major engineering effort and employed top technical talent in an attempt to build a safe and secure CSS system, but it has still not produced a secure and trustworthy design," the paper says. //

CSS, the paper says, entails privacy risks in the form of "upgrades" that expand what content can be scanned and adversarial misuse.

And it poses security risks, such as deliberate efforts to get people reported by the system and software vulnerabilities. The authors conclude that CSS systems cannot be trustworthy or secure because of the way they're designed.

"The proposal to preemptively scan all user devices for targeted content is far more insidious than earlier proposals for key escrow and exceptional access," the paper says.

"Instead of having targeted capabilities such as to wiretap communications with a warrant and to perform forensics on seized devices, the agencies’ direction of travel is the bulk scanning of everyone’s private data, all the time, without warrant or suspicion. That crosses a red line. Is it prudent to deploy extremely powerful surveillance technology that could easily be extended to undermine basic freedoms?"

Imagine a future without access to knowledge..."

So we take timing, attention, name recognition, Ngo’s primary subject of reporting, and the typical leftist social media pattern of nebulous reasoning, and you have a strong case for Ngo’s banning by SoundCloud to be a message to America.

“We’re running SoundCloud,” is the message and it’s a message coming straight from the hard-left. Combined with the fact that almost every social media platform shares this sentiment, it’s one more place that makes the message concrete. They own the internet and they want you to know that. //

progerp
an hour ago
As long as they can buy political loyalty every election cycle, they will be allowed to discriminate against conservatives at will. It is no different than teacher and labor unions buying influence. The days of representation for the people is gone, and it has been replaced by representation for the highest bidder.

What do you get when you cross the largest social media platform in the world with the most powerful, Communist regime in existence? Apparently, you get a match made in Marxist heaven. A recent report shows that Facebook has become quite protective over the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda reports on its site. Indeed, the social media giant appears to be treating the brutal regime far better than Americans who happen to be right-leaning.

The Media Research Center recently published a report detailing how the CCP is allowed to operate unimpeded on Facebook, which routinely censors conservative content. //

Forty accounts on Facebook, amassing over 751 million followers, are managed by Chinese state-controlled media outlets. For comparison, 751 million is over six times (6.39x) more followers than CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, The Washington Post and CBS News have combined (roughly 117,500,000) on Facebook.

Facebook has removed disinformation operations connected to Iranian state-controlled media and had targeted Russian state-controlled media, as well. However, the company has done very little to curb Chinese propaganda disseminated on the platform through its government-run media outlets. //

Thirty-seven of the 40 Facebook accounts identified by the Media Research Center as belonging to Chinese state-controlled media have corresponding accounts on Twitter. There they were labeled “state-affiliated” media. The MRC identified only 23 out of the 40 accounts that Facebook labeled state-affiliated accounts on its platform — a blatant violation of its policy on identifying accounts run by state-controlled media outlets. //

etbass
3 hours ago
It's all about the money. They censor the right and they lose what? 20 million accounts, maybe? 10 million? 5?

CCP has 751 million. Money, money, money. They do what they are told to get China's money.