The action taken by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign is a blatant attempt to chill the exercise of First Amendment rights by the press and by any individual who decides to share the story or those views. I realize this last sentence is probably written in vain, but her action should be condemned by other Members of Congress and clear guidance given that no such action should ever be taken by any elected official in the future.

Yes – he said things. Those journalists who likened themselves to firefighters or the soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy were sure rendered by spoken words. It was the common theme throughout his administration, that Donald Trump was ‘’attacking’’ the free press. While true that he had stern words and harsh criticisms for the media – frequently in non-Presidential fashion – what were his actions, exactly? //

Funny how the journalists threatened with censorship never manage to shut up about it. But while the press loves to go on about how oppressed they were under President Trump we are seeing disturbing examples of calls to limit expression and clamp down on specific outlets — from the press.

When the accused tyrant Donald Trump had multiple accounts shut down (in ironically tyrannical fashion) you had Alexander Nazaryan proposing extending a blacklist to include a number of journalists with whom he disagrees.

At ABC News Rick Klein ominously proposed that it was not enough that Trump was not reelected. ”Getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.’’ //

And over at CNN Oliver Darcy is diligently lobbying cable providers and satellite networks such as Comcast and Direct TV to take down his competitive news networks. He is actively calling to have FoxNews, Newsmax, and OANN removed from channel packages.

All of this greatly exceeds any action we saw from President Trump regarding the press. //

When the very people accusing President Trump of dangerous attacks are engaging in activities which are far more threatening we are falling into a rabbit hole where fewer things make sense anymore.

Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley
I fail to see how having a "community-approach" to censure is so much better than a corporate approach. https://foxnews.com/politics/twitter-unveils-birdwatch-a-community-driven-approach-to-misleading-information Majoritarian limits on free speech are nothing new. Indeed, that is the point of free speech protections. You do not need to protect popular speech.

My main concern is still Twitter's expanding censorship of material deemed misleading. The use of community input will be part of this broader effort to identify material deemed misinformation and remove it.

...Birdwatch will encourage groups to organize objections to tweets and build the case for removals, flags, or warnings by Twitter. Who is watching the birdwatchers? These people already have their own Twitter accounts to offer opposing viewpoints.

trsoli
@trsoli
Replying to @JonathanTurley
Sounds like a shift to crowdsourcing to get around any “editorial” type activity coming from the corporation itself to keep its exemption.

Has it not been proven time and again (for nearly 250 years) that the constitutionally-prescribed philosophy of more speech, not less, is much better at producing reasonable rhetoric than censorship and repression?

DeSantis brought up the fact that there is no due process for those whose existence might be completely ruined at the whim of a big tech company and that this kind of power has to be checked.

“I’m not going to accept that and I don’t think any of you are going to accept that,” said DeSantis. “So, we’re thinking through what we can do to provide people some protections.”

DeSantis warned Texans that this problem could get far worse if nothing is done.

“What’s to stop them in October of 2022, they coming into Texas and saying they don’t like one of the candidates, and they’re just going to deplatform them off everything,” said DeSantis. “What would the recourse be? I’m not sure there’s any recourse right now under law, even if there was, by the time you sued it wouldn’t be done, it wouldn’t make much of a difference and so, they have really opened I think Pandora’s Box on this.”

Tim Cook would do well to recall these words from a fellow Big Tech CEO:

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.†

I realize that there is currently a stampede in the Silicon Valley community to take swift and decisive action in pursuit of Revolutionary Socialism. But that is no reason for Tim Cook to turn into something that he knows he hates. Since when is Tim Cook responsible for determining which speech shall be free, and then usurping the assets he has been hired to manage to do what an authoritarian state would do… if he ran that state. That is not Tim Cook’s inner voice. What has happened to that man?

† Steve Jobs (2005)

Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley
Replying to @JonathanTurley
...Darcy calls for every tweet by Trump to be labeled as disinformation while asking “and why stop there?” Precisely. Once you cross the Rubicon of speech regulation, there is little reason or inclination to stop. //

What is chilling about Darcy’s writings is that they reflect the view of many now in Congress and in the Democratic Party. Indeed, they reflect many in the Biden campaign. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be find support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.

Of course, what Darcy considers “disinformation” or what Blumenthal considers “robust content modification” is left dangerously undefined.

The head of a media watchdog organization says the media’s failure to cover eight stories may be the reason President Donald Trump lost the election.

“The media can talk all day long about Donald Trump and all day long about things that he’s doing wrong,” Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, said on a call Tuesday unveiling a poll the center commissioned, “Special Report: The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020.”

“It is absolutely unequivocal, the evidence that it was the national news movement that deliberately, and I underscore deliberately, made it a point not to tell the public about these stories that nobody can question,” Bozell said. “And now we’re showing the evidence that it cost Donald Trump the election.” //

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2020/11/24/special-report-stealing-presidency-2020

The eight themes included three negative ones about the Biden-Harris ticket, including Sen. Kamala Harris’ liberal viewpoints and the sexual assault allegation former Vice President Joe Biden faced, and five positive stories about the Trump administration, including 33.1% economic growth and the Middle East peace deals.

In whole, the survey found that 17% of people who cast their ballot for Biden “would have changed their vote if they had been aware of one or more of these important stories,” according to Noyes. //

The eight themes included three negative ones about the Biden-Harris ticket, including Sen. Kamala Harris’ liberal viewpoints and the sexual assault allegation former Vice President Joe Biden faced, and five positive stories about the Trump administration, including 33.1% economic growth and the Middle East peace deals.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that after Election Day, Facebook quickly changed its algorithm to prioritize establishment left-leaning news outlets over others.

From the Times:

“In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls ‘news ecosystem quality’ scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.”

The author explained that N.E.Q. scores play only “a minor role” in deciding what content shows up on users’ feeds. But after the election, Zuckerberg chose to “increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to N.E.Q. scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently.”

What’s more dangerous about Facebook’s decision is that many of its employees are pushing for the change to become permanent, according to the Times.

Social media does not get to determine the veracity of a sworn affidavit any more than corporate media gets to determine who won an election.

Bad ideas can be cured easily but it begins with the free flow of information. If your position is that you need to control what grown men and women see and hear because you believe it is your moral duty to do so, then that says more about the degradation of your character than it does of our society. It says that you believe yourself above others and that you know better.

You don’t. You’re just a fallible human like the rest of us, and no amount of makeup chairs, wardrobes, camera time, assistants, and staff changes that fact.

Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR

US Senate candidate, AR
All of these headlines are true.

"Misinformation" = facts liberal journalists don't like.

Kevin Roose
@kevinroose
Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation right now. These are all among the 10 most-engaged URLs on the platform over the last 24 hours (per @NewsWhip data)

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Key detail in this @NYMag story on the pro-censorship movement inside NYT by its own employees: NYT tech reporters were angry that the anti-censorship posture of NYT editors would impede their campaign to pressure Silicon Valley to censor more robustly:

Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf slammed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over censorship of the U.S. border chief as a threat to national security.

Josh Hammer
@josh_hammer
.@jack allows this on his platform but blocks the @nypost, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, from accessing its own account because it published thus-far undisputed reporting against Jack’s preferred presidential candidate.

Khamenei.ir
@khamenei_ir
The next question to ask is: why is it a crime to raise doubts about the Holocaust? Why should anyone who writes about such doubts be imprisoned while insulting the Prophet (pbuh) is allowed?

Sean Davis
@seanmdav
If the New York Post wants to get its Twitter account back, it apparently needs to threaten a second Holocaust. At Twitter, foreign calls for genocide are kosher, while American journalism is verboten. https://twitter.com/chedetofficial

Gardner was tough on Dorsey, asking why the platform didn’t delete tweets by the Iranian leader that denied the Holocaust, yet flagged tweets by Trump.

“It’s strange to me that you flagged the tweets from the president but haven’t hidden the ayatollah’s tweets on Holocaust denial or calls to wipe Israel off the map?”

Dorsey said it is a different type of misinformation.

“We do have other policies around incitement to violence,” Dorsey said. “Some of the tweets that you mentioned are examples that might fall afoul of that.”

Gardner: “So, somebody who denies the Holocaust happened is not [spreading] misinformation?”

Dorsey: “It’s misleading information, but we don’t have a policy against that type of misleading information.”

Twitter suspended U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan for a post celebrating the success of the southern border wall.

Cruz is mostly interested in the saga of how Dorsey thought his company had the power to forbid Americans to share a couple of stories published by the New York Post detailing the hijinks of the on-going RICO violation that is the Joe Biden and his relatives and why they thought they had the right to lock a major newspaper out of its own account. Dorsey’s explanation of the so-called “hacking” rule is obvious bullsh**. If it had been invoked, nothing from Wikileaks would have been discussed. The clincher comes here when Dorsey says that Americans can share the New York Post’s reportage on the Biden family.

Dorsey claims that Twitter allows the New York Post stories on the Biden family financial shenanigans to be sent by Twitter because they made a bad decision, and being the adults that they are, they have rectified the error.

This was flagged immediately by Abigail Marone of the Trump campaign fast response team:

“Potentially harmful.” To Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Ted Cruz had it right in his opening remarks. Twitter poses a direct threat to our republic. Jack Dorsey is either a pathological liar or an out-of-touch dupe. In this case, it makes no difference. He lied to a senator in a public hearing.

On the heels of what looks like blatant partisan censorship of legitimate news sites on the part of huge social media companies, the debate over free speech online has never been more contentious for Americans. Those fears are even more understandable following a report from The Epoch Times that reads like an anatomy of censorship. It details how the Chinese state pays online “trolls” to manipulate public opinion about a news report unfavorable to government following food contamination and an outbreak of a novel illness.

And the tactics look uncomfortably familiar.

The article, using internal documents from Chinese “censorship authorities,” purports to show how paid online “trolls” responded to an outbreak of African Swine Fever in a food product by writing “social media posts praising the authorities” and removing posts that were critical.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-how-chinese-internet-censors-manipulate-public-opinion-on-social-media-platforms_3533078.html

Axios reported today that in spite of Facebook’s and Twitter’s attempts to censor the New York Post’s blockbuster story on Hunter Biden’s emails, the story was the most popular election story on their respective platforms last week.

The breakdown in the numbers is as follows:

-The Post’s story generated 2.59m interactions (likes, comments, shares) on Facebook and Twitter last week — more than double the next biggest story about Trump or Biden.

-5 of the 10 biggest stories were about the Hunter Biden story, the fallout, or how Facebook and Twitter reacted.

-It was the 6th-most engaged article this month, trailing pieces like Trump testing positive for COVID-19 and Eddie Van Halen’s death.

-83% of the interactions happened on Facebook, with the other 17% on Twitter.