Make no mistake, the new law is an overwhelming victory for Floridians and for all who favor free speech. Immediately following the passage of this law, opponents were quick to claim that this legislation will not stand in court because it is unconstitutional.

These arguments provide quick soundbites and may sound legitimate for anyone who is not familiar with the Communications Decency Act of 1996. However, on their face, these arguments are simply untrue.

Under the Communications Decency Act (CDA), there is a provision for state-based legislation. Specifically, section (e), subsection (3), allows state legislatures to enforce respective state laws so long as they are consistent with Section 230 of the CDA. This is the case with Senate Bill 7072.

The state-based exemption component of Section 230 has practically been begging for a state to pass a law such as the one in Florida. It is evident that the issue of Big Tech censorship and content moderation is unlikely to be addressed federally. Hence, the solution lies in state-based legislation that challenges these practices. Naturally, Big Tech will counter with lawsuits. //

When this case is likely heard, the Supreme Court will be grappling with the complex question of whether these social media platforms maintain First Amendment rights as a corporation. And if so, do those rights supersede the First Amendment rights of American citizens?

This very same question was posed to lawmakers in Florida with each step regarding Senate Bill 7072. When the legislation was up for consideration in its assigned committees, and when it hit the floor of the House and the Senate, Florida lawmakers had to ask themselves the same question. Which comes first: The First Amendment rights of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Or the First Amendment rights of their constituents?

Except that it was deceptive to make it appear that Gaetz was threatening Silicon Valley.

Gaetz was speaking about the First Amendment — about Silicon Valley, Big Tech censorship and cancel culture.

“Let us use the Constitution to strengthen our argument, and our movement. We have a First Amendment right to speak and assemble, and we better use it. The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us. Maybe if you’re just a little less patriotic, maybe if you just conform to their way of thinking a little more, then you will be allowed to participate in the digital world. Well, you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement or this rally or this congressman.”

He then started a separate point about the Second Amendment with, “We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it.”

But the deceptive clip left out the context that those were two separate thoughts, with that last sentence being that start of a discussion of the Second Amendment, as the longer Youtube clip reveals.

But now, after the relentless reporting of sites like this one, the Wall Street Journal, as well as the persistent questions being raised about the Wuhan virus lab leak theory by prominent Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, Facebook has suddenly and curiously done a rather dramatic about-face, telling Politico today that the ban on claims made about the possible origins of the coronavirus has been lifted:

Cristiano Lima
@viaCristiano
Scoop: Facebook will no longer remove posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, as support mounts for probes into the virus’ origins & the Wuhan lab-leak theory https://politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 tip @Techmeme //

As I noted in an earlier piece, what was once considered a wild conspiracy theory straight out of Wackoville is only now viewed as credible simply because Biden’s senior medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci recently opened the door to it being so – and that only happened thanks to Senators like Cotton and Paul and websites like RedState and others continuing to bang the drum well after the media and Democrats pretended the issue had been put to bed. //

But as President Trump, Cotton, Paul and other Republicans were raising red flags all last year about the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan, China lab, the media admittedly allowed their liberal biases to dictate what claims they treated seriously and which ones they mocked, ridiculed and supposedly “debunked.” The lab leak theory was one of them.

Because it was coming from Republicans, the approach from reporters was to treat the claim as suspect right from the start – unlike how they would have had it been made by Democrats. Journalists started out believing that the claim was false and set about proving it was rather than just simply asking questions and making determinations as to its validity after doing careful research and due diligence. And because of that it took over a year of the same Republicans and publications not backing down that got us to the point where Fauci finally said what he did and the media all of a sudden admitting for the record that the lab leak theory should be taken seriously.

“I do think that’s another issue that has been brought to bear,” he stated. “When you deplatform the President of the United States but you let Ayatollah Khomeini talk about killing Jews, that is wrong.”

The popular Republican Governor also used a recent admission from President Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on the Wuhan lab leak theory to make a larger point about the folly of Twitter and Facebook suspending and/or deplatforming a number of conservatives last year for suggesting as Fauci finally did earlier this month that the theory was plausible.

“Now we have information that this very well may have emanated from the Wuhan lab, that it was a leak from the lab,” DeSantis noted. “But you remember, when people last year were raising that as something that needed to be investigated, they were deplatformed for talking about the lab leak, they were censored for having said that, and now even Fauci admits that this may be something that may very well is the case.”

With that in mind, DeSantis asked rhetorically, “Are they going to now censor Fauci and pull him down off social media?”

On the same day Facebook’s oversight board upheld its decision to ban former President Donald Trump from its platform, Facebook removed a Federalist article, claiming independent fact-checkers found the story was “missing context.”

The Federalist article, titled “Pentagon Develops Microchip Detecting COVID-19 By Tracking Your Blood” is based on a “60 Minutes” report by Bill Whitaker that aired on April 11.

On Friday afternoon, Facebook began attaching a ridiculous fact check to my top-read Federalist article of last week titled, “There’s No Way Americans Can Trust The Jury’s Chauvin Verdict.” Anyone who wanted to share the article on Facebook was forced to do so with the opinion-based “fact check” attached, which means Facebook also likely throttled the distribution of the article on its platform. //

This is not a “fact check.” It is a disagreement about what the facts indicate. It is also the naked suppression of ideas based on partisan ideology, using the monopoly power of Big Tech to control what people are allowed to say and discuss. This is a direct attack on Americans’ ability to have a self-governing society, which requires the free expression of ideas, not massive private entities deciding what people are allowed to say and share.

I said nothing illegal and called for no violence. I merely expressed my opinion about a current event of major public attention based on information the “fact checker” could not dispute as false.

Also, the “fact check” isn’t even about my specific article! Facebook attached a “fact check” that specifically argues with another person expressing a similar opinion — “Derek Chauvin did not get a fair trial” — then used it also to throttle my article that no “fact checker” publicly reviewed, all in the name of preventing “misinformation.” That’s ridiculous. It’s an utterly absurd and compromised process. Nobody could believe it is fair or reasonable except extreme partisans. //

Facebook started choking this opinion after more facts emerged that support it. On April 22, an alternate juror in the Chauvin trial, who was included in all the jury duties and treated like the other jurors except for not finally voting in the verdict, told a local news outlet, “I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.”

She also noted that during the trial rioters came near her home and protesters blocked a local interstate she was driving on. This clearly reinforces the factual basis for the opinion I expressed about the Chauvin trial in the article Facebook choked: “Given the circumstances of the trial, however, it’s extremely hard to believe the jury was solely concerned with either truth or justice. It’s extremely hard, if not impossible, for any thinking person not to have a reasonable doubt about the outcome.”

This juror’s information came out the day before Facebook and USA Today colluded to suppress an opinion supported by these facts. They clearly did so not based on facts, but based on a competing opinion. //

The USA Today article’s entire argument is: “Three lawyers disagree with you, so you’re not allowed to express this opinion.” But the question is not whether “three legal experts” have some opinion. The question is why USA Today is privileging some people’s opinions over those of others, and why Facebook knowingly uses them to do so. Everyone knows the answer is controlling people by controlling their speech.

Everybody also knows that you can get three lawyers to say just about anything you want them to. Their entire profession is based on advocating specific viewpoints in exchange for money.

Abigail Marone
@abigailmarone
Why won’t Facebook & Instagram let users share this @nypost article about ‘BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real estate buying binge’?

https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/ins

Abigail Shrier
@AbigailShrier
Facebook will not allow you to post this NY Post story or even to message it to another person. (I just tested it).

So Facebook is now effectively opening your mail and reading the contents for ideologically objectionable material.

Anyone worried?
Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ million-dollar real-estate buying binge
nypost.com

Last week, Google pulled a video of DeSantis on March 18 discussing COVID-19 with medical scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas, who all hail from elite institutions — Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. All but Gupta, who is based in the United Kingdom, also joined DeSantis’s April 12 press conference to respond to Google’s ban.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

“I’m very worried about the future of science because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So if this continues, this kind of attitude, the censoring of scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 200 years of Enlightenment,” Kulldorff said Monday. //

“The lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history,” Bhattacharya said on the banned March 18 panel. He said lockdowns are psychologically compelling to rich societies terrified of death, but are not only ineffective at stopping disease and death, they also make both worse. He noted a few minutes later:

The international evidence and the American evidence is clear: The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way. The disease spreads on aerosol by droplets, it’s a respiratory disease. It’s very difficult to stop. The idea of the lockdown is incredibly beguiling… but humans are not like that. What’s happened instead, we’ve exposed working class, we’ve exposed poor people at higher rates. We’ve created this illusion that we can control disease spread when in fact we cannot. //

Lockdowns Are Bad for People, But Good for Google
Keeping people at home indefinitely has also drastically increased people’s screen time, which provides Google more ad revenue and influence over how people think and the information they receive. Screen use is correlated with obesity, and obesity puts people at a dramatically higher risk from COVID-19.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 78 percent of those hospitalized with COVID were obese, and lockdowns have directly contributed to a huge increase in First World obesity, especially among children. Among people who have died while COVID-positive, according to the CDC, 94 percent had other significant medical conditions, including diseases exacerbated by obesity: diabetes, cardiac arrest, and heart failure.

“The laptop class, they have protected themselves through the lockdowns while we have thrown the working class under the bus,” Kulldorff said during the panel discussion Google banned. //

On Monday, DeSantis noted the irony of Google banning professional discussion from doctors whose scientific research has been cited by Google Scholar more than 10,000 times, more than 17,000 times, and more than 25,000 times, respectively. //

Three of the four doctors on the March 18 panel authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement now signed by nearly 14,000 medical scientists and more than 42,000 health practitioners, as well as nearly 800,000 “concerned citizens,” that promotes based on the scientific evidence the policy of focused protection in response to COVID, instead of ineffective mass lockdowns.

The safe space—“a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm,” according to the Oxford Dictionary—arose out of a perceived need for designated places in which marginalized groups could feel permitted to express themselves openly, and therefore is theoretically predicated on the ideals of free speech.

But, as safe spaces have sprung up on college campuses around the world, they’ve turned on that mission entirely.

Rather than promote open expression, safe spaces instead specialize in stifling contrarian ideas. By conflating words with violence, they merely provide “protection” by shielding students from opposing ideologies that might cause them offense. In doing so, they’ve emotionally and ideologically bubble-wrapped a generation. By delineating echo chambers, safe spaces endanger minds.

“No amendment to the Constitution is absolute. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and call it freedom of speech. From the beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own.”

This is what the government politicians say, right before they are about to impinge on your rights. The phrase about yelling fire in a crowded theater is often used by people trying to curb speech without really understanding the context in which it was used. It was in non-binding dicta in a case that was then later overturned so it was never a binding thought on anything. So when people use it, it reveals they’re not aware of the law.

From The Atlantic:

As Rottman wrote, for this reason, it’s “worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech. When used metaphorically, it can be deployed against any unpopular speech.” Worse, its advocates are tacitly endorsing one of the broadest censorship decisions ever brought down by the Court. It is quite simply, as Ken White calls it, “the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.”

“Lazy cheat” excuse to impinge on your rights.

Successful libel actions are good for the press. They help keep it free of censorship, by enabling the public to trust that the press has respect for the truth and does not knowingly or negligently spread lies. Allowing blatant falsehoods to circulate unchecked turns the public against the press.

Accordingly, trust in the media has been declining steadily since the Sullivan decision and is now at an all-time low. The latest Gallup survey found 60 percent of the U.S. public has little or no trust in the media, with self-identified Republicans’ trust dropping from 32 percent in 2015 to 10 percent in December 2020.

To help restore at least some of that lost credibility, the Supreme Court should heed Thomas and Silberman and revisit the arrogant, unjustified, and immensely destructive Sullivan decision.

When journalists defend the removal of art you know we are plunging down the cultural waterslide… //

Some, like Philip Bump, go so far as to say if you defend these ‘’racist’’ books it is because you want to defend racism. Defending a person’s right to speak is not defending their actual speech. He knows this, or at the very least he should. But for him, and the others, preserving their right to expression is less important than virtue signaling, and then using the call for free expression as a tool to injure political opposition.

It is a shallow and craven mindset. This is echoed in the belief that every person has a right to vote, but if a racist votes for a certain candidate then everyone who voted for said candidate is a racist. It is the thinking that justifies targeted silencing and approves of making an entire movement a pariah. That our members of the press are pushing this is beyond disturbing.

They weren’t content to just suspend RSBN for carrying live feed of a former president speaking at a major political gathering (that used to be called “news”), YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet (or Google), also removed most copies of President Trump’s CPAC speech from that platform. //

What is ominous is the omerta that has descended over this action by YouTube. You’d think that major news organizations would have their hair on fire over YouTube deleting content from their YouTube channels. But crickets. //

Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
This sort of manipulation and interference only shows how much weight these monopolies put on the scale of freedom. It’s never going to end until we all band together to stop it.

Breaking911
@Breaking911
NEW: YouTube deletes all videos of President Trump’s CPAC speech, suspends RSBN for two weeks //

Developing new platforms is not a solution because if recent history shows us anything at all, it is that Soviet scholar Robert Conquest was right, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” If the First Amendment is going to be anything more than an odd artifact, these monstrous conglomerates need to be broken up, and we need to ensure that the people who work there who support this totalitarian behavior never work anywhere again as a lesson to whatever corporations rise from the ashes to never, ever behave this way again.

Knowledge truly is power and book burning/book banning is reducing the power of humanity in ways that many don’t understand. How much knowledge have we lost over the course of centuries because we lost the books that contained that knowledge? What kind of civilization would we have now if recorded history went back far past our current reckoning? What medicines, technologies, medicines, etc. were lost as a result? What lessons could we have learned?

We cannot allow the banning to continue. It costs humanity too much.

Amazon has openly signaled to the entire world that it cares not for dialogue, nor for freedom. //

But how much longer will so-called conservatives cling to these idealistic sentiments about the private and public square when the outcomes are nearly indistinguishable? What are we to do then, in the eyes of French? Lay down and say “screw it” because of aphorisms about free markets applied to markets that are not at all free?

Above all else, the conservative believes that his rights derive from God. Andrew Klavan made this point in response to French’s horror at the Anderson book ban. French, who cheered on censorship when it wasn’t of his friends, was called out by Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway prior for his hypocritical stance on Big Tech.

“If in reality (where we live) private entities now exist that can render our rights meaningless, that reality has to be addressed. God-given rights trump legalistic theories,” Klavan wrote.

Speaking up and speaking out is a scary thing to do for many Americans for fear that doing so will just make them a target. One false move could see you fired from your job, arrested, or in extreme cases, the mob may very well show up at your door.

Social justice is an ideological stance that requires very shallow thinking, hatred of the “others,” and complete compliance with the ever-shifting narrative. Anything less will result in consequences. It feels no sympathy, it makes time for no nuance. It is pure hatred, intolerance, and ignorance wrapped into an easy to digest ideology.

That kind of ideological blue pill is the same kind of attitude we saw in Nazi Germany then, and we’re seeing a lot of that now. Cancelations, calls for lists to be made, political-ideological stances to be wiped out, violence, intimidation, and censorship are running rampant today from the left just like it did from the Nazis then. It’s the same beast, it just carries a different name.

Carano was right. While libertarians and conservatives aren’t being ushered onto trains and taken to concentration camps, we are seeing the beginning stages of what leads to that.

What should worry you is that Carano was silenced for exposing that truth.

In another act of Big Tech censorship, YouTube has banned the popular pro-life website LifeSiteNews from its platform and completely removed all of the videos posted on its channel.

“YouTube just completely removed the LifeSiteNews YouTube channel. This isn’t a temporary ban; every single one of our videos is completely gone,” LifeSiteNews reported Wednesday.

“Thankfully, we have backups of all our videos, but this means hundreds of thousands of people have lost access to our truth-telling content,” staff writers said in an article describing what happened

After the hearing video was posted on YouTube, this Alphabet (Google)-owned enterprise acted to take down the videos. //

The censors at YouTube have decided for all of us that the American public shouldn’t be able to hear what senators heard. Apparently, they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed, and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies. Government-sanctioned censorship of ideas and speech should frighten us all. //

The left is on the march, and they taste victory. They are so sure of their victory that Senate hearings can be memory-holed, and not a single Democrat cares. //

Companies, particularly those in the financial and retail sector, are the sinews of capitalism. Corporations lining up to form an ideological test for usership is a counterintuitive way to run a free market. //

We’re talking about digital-era monopolies that, in their market power and influence, rival the Gilded Age trusts and cartels that once exercised exclusive control over vast swaths of American industry. Instead of dithering over whether to tweak Section 230, we need to ask ourselves whether Amazon should be allowed to own AWS?

Should Facebook be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp and scores of other digital companies? Should Google be allowed to own YouTube and Android and DoubleClick? At what point do we say that these companies simply have too much power and that they represent combinations and trusts that must, like their 19th-century forebears, be broken up? //

As Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a member of the Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee and a brilliant attorney, tweeted recently, “the consumer welfare standard is . . . not a narrow concern with prices. As Judge Bork wrote, it encompasses ‘innovation, choice among differing products’ and quality.” Markets, he noted, must “work for consumers, not just monopolists.” //

It’s time to de-prioritize and end the billions in state, local, and federal subsidies fed to Big Tech companies. Both Google and Amazon enjoy substantial federal contracts with the government – AWS provides cloud computing for the CIA, for example. Those should be leveraged for better behavior.

Section 230, Big Tech’s congressionally granted legal immunity, should be reformed so tech companies are incentivized to address the exploitative and harassing content that proliferates on their platforms, and more accommodating of diverse political speech. Or, absent that, repeal it altogether. //

Our speech and communications in the public square have been fundamentally altered by the digital era, so perhaps a common carrier statutory framework should apply.

In short, stop privileging the companies who threaten pluralism and a free society, and restore the proper hierarchy of America, where the people rule — not the mob, not the corporate barons, not the bureaucrats, and not the tech titans.

Tim Pool
@Timcast
·
Feb 5, 2021
This tweet may be snarky but its factually true Time said this

Twitter has published a false statement of fact

Tim Pool
@Timcast
I don't think this even matters at this point. Time magazine just came out said that a cabal of elites rigged the election

I'm sorry they said they didn't rig the election they "fortified" it, by changing the rules and laws as well as manipulating the flow of information https://twitter.com/CassandraRules/status/1357708988482269189
This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence
Tim Pool
@Timcast
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
time.com