After several commentators on MSNBC displayed public outrage on Monday and Tuesday about their employer, NBC, hiring former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to be a paid contributor, NBC abruptly fired her after less than one week on the job.
MSNBC hosts claimed that McDaniel was an “election denier” because she initially questioned the outcome of the 2020 elections. Yet McDaniel said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that President Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square” and that he’s “the legitimate president.”
However, that didn’t stop MSNBC hosts on Monday from piling attacks on McDaniel and insisting that their employer fire her immediately so that she could not share their “sacred airwaves” as “one of us,” a “badge-carrying employee of NBC News.”
Rachel Maddow said, “And so I want to associate myself with all my colleagues at MSNBC and NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company for putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who is still trying to convince Americans that this election stuff doesn’t really work. That this last election wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.”
As a result of this immense internal pressure, NBC caved to its employees — many of whom are biased former Democratic operatives. McDaniel herself did not find out that she was fired by NBC executives directly, but by hearing about it in the news.
This decision reveals what many already knew: the mainstream media has a deep left-wing bias, and they have no tolerance for those that disagree with them.
The new chairman of the RNC, Michael Whatley, discussed this on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch” with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “[… The legacy media] really, truly wants to make sure that their viewers are only getting one side of any given debate, which is really unfortunate. You know, when the American voters are informed voters, they make better decisions.”
Sadly, McDaniel’s firing reflects a deeper problem that has spread throughout our country: cancel culture. Just ask presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who has continuously been canceled by the Democratic Party and social media. Both have tried to delegitimize Kennedy because he disagrees with the Left’s base about how to address issues such as mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, open borders, the Israeli-Hamas war, and environmental policies.
And although Kennedy still holds liberal positions on many issues, the Democratic Party would not tolerate dissent from their base or even allow him to debate Joe Biden during the Democratic primary race. This ultimately led Kennedy to leave the party and become an Independent candidate.
Democrats and Republicans alike used to care deeply about free speech and defend that right — even for those they disagree with. After all, free speech is a fundamental right protected by our Constitution’s First Amendment and essential to a functioning democratic republic. However, more Democrats are realizing that the base of their party has dropped their belief in the freedom of speech. Because now, if you’re like RFK Jr. and you disagree with the socialist wing of the Democratic Party or if you are a conservative Republican like Ronna McDaniel, they believe you do not have a right to express your thoughts on television or debate your point of view in a presidential debate. Such silencing of opposing views is dangerous not only because it disregards political leaders, but it can lead to a disregard for voters.
As Whatley explained, “When you think about where the Left is coming from — and I don’t even say Democrats, I say the Left — where they’re coming [from] is they want to dismantle the family. They want to dismantle America. What they want to do is make everybody dependent on the government for everything,” he argued. “They want to really kind of take this country down a road where the American people do not want to go. And a key component for them is to be able to stifle that debate and put their message out.”
This is why it is essential for Americans to teach accurate history and civics and make sure we are using reliable news sources. As Tony Perkins pointed out on “Washington Watch” Monday, “We all come at this with different perspectives. In fact, up until about 15 years ago, it’s what made America strong: we came together, we had different views, but we would arrive at a consensus. Why? Because we had conversations. …This is what is so dangerous about the Left,” he pointed out. “They want to shut down our conversations. They want to silence. They want to cancel any voice that runs counter to theirs. Ultimately, they’re going to silence you. That’s why we can’t let them.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-04-01 15:04:242024-04-01 15:06:26What Do RFK Jr. and Ronna McDaniel Have in Common? Cancel Culture
With the FBI’s political censorship of social media exposed, proponents of weaponized government are using a different tool: Biden’s Federal Communications Commission.
Recovering from the spook revelations in the Twitter Files, the central government is increasingly marginalizing, censoring and silencing the free speech of Americans who express views that unaccountable bureaucrats believe should not be permitted.
We all know the pattern now. Anonymous officials brand unapproved facts, even when true, as disinformation. They dismiss unapproved opinions as conspiracy theories.Last year, a federal court issued a scathing judgment against the administration, showing that some of those supposed “conspiracy theories” were true all along. That ruling, in the Missouri v Biden case, showed that the central machine engaged in “coerced censorship” with social media companies to silence citizens with the wrong views.
“The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’” from the novel 1984, Judge Terry Doughty said in his ruling.
Team Biden appealed in Murthy v Missouri, a case argued last week before the Supreme Court. The administration admitted it seeks to “coerce” certain forms of censorship. It complained that victims and individual states were using the courts “to audit all of the executive branch’s communications with and about social media platforms.”
Translation: The central government wants to deny American citizens the right to identify precisely who in the administrative state is responsible for censoring them. Remember that.
The case has documented a ghoulish strategy behind this. All in the name of “national security,” healthcare, and, of course, fighting “disinformation.”
At the same time, the harmless-looking FCC is making two power grabs aimed at Internet Service Providers. ISPs, as they are known – the companies that own and run the infrastructure that provides access to the Internet.
We can thank dissident FCC commissioner Brendan Carr for sounding the alarm. The FCC agenda goes far beyond the FBI’s comparatively narrow suppression of individual accounts that the Twitter Files revealed.
Carr warns that the FCC’s power grab will allow the agency to grant privileges to politically compliant ISPs, and to punish the politically noncompliant.
“President Biden gave the FCC its marching orders,” Carr explained last October. “The President called on the FCC to implement a one-page section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act) by adopting new rules of breathtaking scope, all in the name of ‘digital equity.’”
This digital equity central planning, “for the first time ever,” Carr said, “would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions—from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services, to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
In the age of DEI, the Biden-FCC initiative can dictate terms to ISPs according to the racial, social and economic profiles of their customers.
As if this is not enough, the FCC is placing net neutrality regulations on ISPs to classify them as public utilities subject to rate regulation. If the government can control what you offer and how much you can charge, it all but owns you. With such a powerful government looming over their every decision, what ISP could not be made to bend to the will of the administrative state?
This massive accumulation of central government power is where the threat of lawless censorship comes in.
With such power, what could political operatives in Washington quietly coerce ISPs to do behind the scenes? What independent or conservative news and opinion platforms might be slowed, shadowbanned or deplatformed if a nameless bureaucrat or some leftist activist group falsely labels them purveyors of disinformation or hate speech?
We have seen the evidence of what the government will do in secret to censor or suppress information with the powers it already has. Just think what it would do if given vastly greater power over private communications platforms.
And since some ISPs own separate news, online media and entertainment platforms, consider what the FCC’s massive, indirect control of their platform could have on information and messaging of those subsidiaries.
The Draconian policy is all wrapped up in nice consumer-friendly language. But as Carr explained, it “was never about improving your online experience – that was just the sheep’s clothing. It was always about control.”
“The plan,” he said, “is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism.”
More dangerous than the FBI’s abuses. With powers to censor us all.
J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy.
His academic and professional areas of concentration are foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion.
He is the former Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.
He has been an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. He has guest lectured at the FBI Academy, George C. Marshall Center, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, National Intelligence University, and other military schools and combatant commands.
Dr. Waller holds a Ph.D. in international security affairs from the University Professors Program at Boston University. His award-winning doctoral dissertation, written in 1993 and published as Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994), foresaw the rise of a KGB officer to seize political control of Russia. He received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan contras.
He has written for American Greatness, the American Mind, the Daily Beast, Daily Caller, The Federalist, Forbes, Insight, Investor’s Business Daily, Kyiv Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Clear Politics, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal. See his page on Authory.
The DOJ is ordering Google to release the names and addresses of YouTube viewers who watched specific videos.
"It's unconstitutional, terrifying, & happening every day. These YouTube warrants are chilling, allowing police to target people simply for the content they consume." pic.twitter.com/pMHUhotiW9
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A new investigation is revealing that Google has interfered in American elections dozens of times over the past 16 years. According to a Media Research Center (MRC) Special Report compiled by MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and Assistant Editor Gabriela Pariseau, Google has “interfered in elections” at least 41 times since 2008. “In every case, Google harmed the candidates — regardless of party — who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” the report states. “From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its ‘great strength and resources and reach’ to advance its leftist values.”
The MRC report notes that, in 2008, Google favored then-senator Barack Obama and his presidential bid, resulting in the tech giant censoring support for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate and “suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.” Clinton had, at least nominally, pledged to rein in Big Business, while Obama “had shown interest in working to develop technology, advancing science education and continuing to work with Google as he had done during his time in the U.S. Senate.” Thus, Google censored pro-Clinton and anti-Obama blog posts online. Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, told journalists the censorship was an error but formally endorsed Obama for president and even hosted a party to celebrate his inauguration.
Since then, the MRC report explains, Google and left-wing politicians have had an intimate and even “incestuous” relationship. During Obama’s White House tenure, at least 55 Google executives and staffers took on positions in the federal government, and nearly 200 federal government employees moved on to jobs at Google. “Ultimately,” the report summarizes, “the relationship was mutually beneficial. Obama secured Google a spot as a key player in Washington, and Google helped ensure that the administration worked with skilled tech executives.” Google also worked to support Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and target Republican presidential primary contenders.
In 2016, Google’s election manipulation kicked into high gear. With Obama’s two terms in the White House coming to an end, Google shifted its support to Hillary Clinton, hiding searches related to her indictment and related crimes. While Yahoo! and Bing would autocomplete searches related to Clinton’s indictment or crimes, Google would instead suggest searches such as “Hillary Clinton Indiana” or “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Once Clinton squared off against then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Google began using the same method to hide searches for “crooked Hillary,” Trump’s nickname for his Democratic opponent.
Google also overrepresented search results with a left-wing bias. The MRC report notes that during the 2016 election, Google users were almost 40% more likely to be given information with a left-wing bias than a conservative bias when searching terms such as “abortion,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming,” “Iraq war,” and others. Quoting research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, MRC’s report notes that Google’s efforts on behalf of the Clinton campaign may have impacted “at least 2.5 million votes” in her favor.
Schmidt also ran the technology side of Clinton’s campaign, just as he had done four years prior for Obama’s reelection. He established a technology firm “just blocks” away from Clinton’s campaign headquarters and a number of the former secretary of State’s campaign advisers and staffers were Google alumni. Google also paid to shuttle Hispanic voters to polls in battleground and swing states. Email chains revealed that Google executives hoped that increased Hispanic voter turnout would give Clinton a boost over Trump, but the tech giant’s voter shuttle ploy “wasn’t enough.”
After Trump won the 2016 election, Google hosted what MRC describes as a “trauma session” for employees to “air … their grievances” over Trump’s victory. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said during the meeting that Trump’s win “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values” and derided Trump supporters as “extremists.”
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Google once again “sprang into action, amping up its election interference efforts,” the MRC report says. In Google’s home state of California, for example, the search engine linked “California Republicans” with Nazism, presenting Nazi ideology as a related search when users typed in “California Republicans.” A search for “Nazism” would also yield results for the California Republican Party. Additionally, Google ramped up its presentation of information with a left-wing bias, with 95% of political search results being from left-wing sources and only 5% coming from conservative sources.
Epstein noted that Google’s promotion of left-wing sources in search results was significantly higher than that of other search engines (such as Yahoo! or Bing) and correctly predicted, based on his assessment of Google search results and search manipulations, that three Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County, California would be flipped blue.
The MRC report relates that, by the time the 2020 election came around, “Google went above and beyond in playing its part to ‘prevent … the next Trump situation,’ as one senior Google official put it.” Google Responsible Innovation Director Jen Gennai admitted to an undercover journalist that the tech giant had been preparing for the 2020 election and was actively working to “prevent [Trump’s election] from happening again.” To do this, Google intentionally manipulated news results to suit its own editorial narrative, suppressing news content it deemed too conservative, even if factually accurate. Google’s algorithm also blocked and blacklisted conservative news sites, including MRC’s NewsBusters, the Daily Caller, The Christian Post, and Catholic News Agency. Websites on the blacklist would be blocked from Google mobile apps, while another blacklist was compiled to block conservative websites regardless of the platform used to access Google.
Other websites (such as Gateway Pundit) were blocked from appearing in news search results and others (including NewsBusters, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Human Events) were temporarily blocked, although they still appeared in results generated by other search engines. Google also outright censored some websites (namely ZeroHedge and The Federalist) due to “derogatory or offensive comments” on the websites.
Google also continued its promotion of left-wing bias, with half of all news results for the search “Donald Trump” coming from CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, Politico, and The Guardian, all of which exhibit a left-wing bias. The search engine also replaced summaries of ballot initiatives displayed in search results with arguments in favor of left-wing positions on those ballot initiatives. Google also adjusted its ads policies, suspending Democratic presidential primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s Google Ads account, preventing her campaign website from appearing in the top search results. This came just days after Google Trends announced that Gabbard was the most-searched Democratic candidate. The tech giant also adjusted its political ads policy more broadly, blocking “ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.” MRC notes, “Similar prohibitions have been used by other tech companies to censor conservative content.”
Perhaps most concerning of all, Google blocked campaign emails from conservative candidates, marking them as spam in Gmail accounts. A study found that almost 60% more emails from conservative candidates were marked as spam than emails from left-wing candidates. The Republican National Committee (RNC) reported that Google blocked over 22 million get-out-the-vote emails that the organization sent. Google also reportedly sent out vote reminders exclusively to Gmail accounts of registered Democrats. Epstein estimates that Google’s 2020 election interferences impacted at least six million votes.
Google’s meddling continued into the 2022 midterm elections, with Epstein alleging that the tech giant’s interference cost the GOP a majority in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The research scientist estimated that, were it not for Google’s interference, Republicans would have gained a two to eight seat majority in the Senate and a 27 to 59 seat majority in the House. Additionally, he posits that Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake would have been elected governor if Google had not interfered.
Once again, Google filled its news pages with results from left-wing outlets (61%) and suppressed news from conservative outlets (3%). “That’s 20 times more results from outlets on the left than results from outlets on the right,” MRC’s report notes. Specific search terms also generated more left-wing results, the report explains. Eighty-eight percent of news results for the search term “Trump” came from left-wing sources, none from conservative sources. Ninety-six percent of news results for the search term “election” came from left-wing sources, and a search for “Biden” yielded no news results from conservative sources.
Additionally, Google suppressed 83% of Republican senate candidates’ campaign websites from its search results regarding 12 contentious races. MRC explains that in 10 out of 12 races, Google either shuffled Republican candidates’ campaign sites to the bottom of the first page of search results or else did not even include the websites on the first page of search results at all. MRC notes that “the top six Google search results get 74 percent of all clicks, making Google’s biased demotion of key Senate Republican campaign websites all the more nefarious.” Google also targeted specific locations in Georgia’s senate runoff election where more “undecided” voters resided, promoting incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock over his Republican opponent Herschel Walker.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Google has reportedly weaponized its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Gemini (formerly called Bard) to promote left-wing politicians and candidates and “disparage” conservative politicians and candidates. In one instance, Bard was asked why Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and President Joe Biden are “so clever.” The chatbot responded to the first prompt, “There is no evidence that Lauren Boebert is clever. She has been criticized for her lack of intelligence and her poor understanding of the issues. She has also been accused of plagiarism and of making false claims.” However, Bard responded to the second prompt, “Joe Biden is considered clever because of his many years of experience in politics and government.”
Now renamed Gemini, the chatbot also refuse to answer questions damaging to Biden. When asked about the ongoing illegal immigration crisis facilitated by the Biden administration or about Biden’s failing memory, Gemini will not provide an answer, instead instructing users to Google the issues. The chatbot also downplayed scandals involving Biden and his family. When asked about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” the Google A.I. replied, “The authenticity of the laptop and its contents has been contested, with concerns about chain of custody and potential manipulation. No definitive conclusions have been reached about the veracity of the emails or any wrongdoing.” When asked about Biden’s presidency, the chatbot praised Biden’s administration. Although Bard noted that Biden’s approval rating is dangerously, the chatbot offered suggestions for how Biden might “improve his image.”
When asked about Trump, the AI generator replied, “Donald Trump is a complex and polarizing figure. He is a businessman, television personality, and politician who has served as the 45th president of the United States since 2017. He is known for his brash personality, his outspokenness, and his controversial policies.” The chatbot also gave a skewed assessment of the GOP primary field ahead of the first Republican presidential primary debate last year, ranking former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley higher than she was polling and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy lower than he was polling at the time.
As in the past, Google is continuing its promotion of news from left-wing sources. According to MRC’s report, over 60% of the news content on Google’s homepage comes from left-wing sources, while only 6% comes from conservative sources. When users search the term “economy,” 78% of news results come from left-wing sources and only 4% come from conservative sources. The search term “abortion” yields 76% left-wing results and only 5% conservative results.
Of particular concern is Google’s updated “sensitive events” policy. Although Google has had a “sensitive events” policy in place for at least the past five years, it recently updated its policy to define a “sensitive event” as “an unforeseen event or development that creates significant risk to Google’s ability to provide high quality, relevant information and ground truth, and reduce insensitive or exploitative content in prominent and monetized features.” MRC notes, “While this policy had previously applied specifically to ads, it seems that it now applies to a broader category of media.” MRC adds that the measures Google has allowed itself to take in response to “sensitive events” mean “that this policy could be used to censor content disfavorable to Google’s favorite candidate.”
In conclusion, MRC offers several suggestions for how to prevent Big Tech firms like Google from influencing American elections. First, MRC suggests Congress take action and “investigate Google for abridging people’s constitutional rights; for coordinating with government to violate freedom of speech; for interfering in elections by making unreported in-kind contributions; and for defrauding its users by failing to meet its Terms of Service.”
Second, MRC urges state legislatures to declare Google a “common carrier,” a question which recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. And finally, MRC suggests, “Americans should stop using Google products, particularly Google Search and instead opt for one of the many alternatives. From our research, alternatives appear to produce better, less biased results.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
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Ask 10 professional fact-checkers to rate something as true or false, and get one, unanimous answer. That’s what we assume will happen based on our understanding of the word “fact” and our understanding of the responsibilities of a person who “checks” them. That assumption is incorrect, according to a recently published study that found a “low level of agreement of professionals over what is misinformation.” Fact-checkers sometimes enjoy a reputation as paragons of objectivity — but, based on the conduct of many fact-checkers, the opposite conclusion isn’t all that surprising.
In a paper published in Nature on December 20, 2023, a six-person research team (Aslett, et. al.) found that “Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity,” as broadcasted in their headline. But a more significant finding went unheralded: that fact-checkers often disagree about what misinformation is. As part of the research model, four to six professional fact-checkers evaluated 265 news articles to rate them as “true” or “false/misleading.” According to the supplementary information they posted, the professional fact-checkers only agreed unanimously on how to rate less than half (44.62%) of the articles — a far larger discrepancy than the online search effect they were actually studying.
Keep in mind that fact-checkers have a rather simple task: they can rate articles as true or false, or possibly choose from a limited set of options in between. As anyone who has ever taken a test with true/false or multiple-choice questions knows, there is a non-negligible chance of selecting the correct answer by pure accident, so there is a chance of a limited number of fact-checkers selecting the same option from a limited number of ratings by pure accident.
Researchers can apparently control for random chance in agreement between raters by calculating a Fleiss Kappa score. I’ll admit I don’t fully understand how this statistic is calculated, but complete agreement would yield a score of 1, while a complete lack of agreement would yield a score of 0, or a negative number. In this case, the researchers found a Fleiss Kappa score of 0.42, which is again less than one-half.
Aslett, et. al. were not the first research team to find such low agreement among fact-checkers; in fact, they noted the level they found was “slightly higher than other studies.” They referenced a paper published September 1, 2021 in Science Advances, in which a four-person research team (Allen, et. al.) found that “small, politically balanced crowds of laypeople” could produce results just as good as professional fact-checkers. In that study, three fact-checkers agreed unanimously on how to rate only 49.3% of 207 articles (with a Fleiss Kappa score of 0.38).
Allen, et. al.’s paper, in turn referenced a July 19, 2018 paper by researcher Chloe Lim, published in Research & Politics. Lim compared fact-checks of 77 identical or nearly identical claims, reviewed by both Politifact and the Washington Post Fact Checker. She found the two sites agreed on 49 (63%) of the claims on a five-point scale, but she calculated a Cohen’s Kappa score of 0.47 (Cohen’s Kappa is like Fleiss Kappa, but only for exactly two raters). “Fact-checkers,” she noted, “disagree more often than one might suppose.”
The finding that fact-checkers don’t necessarily agree all that much should act like an unexpected ice shower on those who would use fact-checkers to either control “misinformation” or advance a political narrative. This tactic is especially employed against independent media, such as Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” and The Washington Stand, which cover the stories the mainstream media refuses to cover.
One recent example is TWS’s senior reporter and editor Ben Johnson’s extensive coverage of the World Health Organization’s planned pandemic treaty, which he then discussed on “Washington Watch.” A reel of that interview, which FRC posted to Instagram, was flagged as containing “Partly False Information,” after it was “reviewed by independent fact-checkers.”
To be more specific, FactCheck.org rated the interview as “partly false” because Johnson claimed that the “WHO pandemic agreement threatens national sovereignty.”
FRC disputed the rating based on the following information: “The WHO Pandemic Agreement places a number of restrictions and demands on U.S. sovereignty:
“Under the WHO Pandemic Agreement, nations would retain their sovereignty only ‘in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the general principles of international law’ (Article 3:2).
“The agreement will create a global medical force at WHO’s disposal. Member nations must create and fund ‘a skilled and trained multidisciplinary global public health emergency workforce that is deployable’ to nations at their request to ‘prevent the escalation of a small-scale spread to global proportions’ (Article 7:3).
“It gives The Hague jurisdiction over members’ disputes. If WHO is not able to solve disagreements between members, nations may agree to the ‘submission of the dispute to the International Court of Justice.’ They may also settle things through arbitration by the Conference of the Parties (Article 34:2).
“Real decisions are made by nameless, unaccountable bureaucrats from around the globe. The agreement creates a ‘Conference of the Parties,’ headed by a secretary, within one year of the treaty’s ratification. It will meet annually, or at any member’s request. ‘Only delegates representing Parties will participate in any of the decision-making of the Conference of the Parties’ (Articles 21 and 24).
“WHO takes a double tithe of U.S. vaccines, medicines, and equipment. ‘In the event of a pandemic,’ the United States must give WHO ‘a minimum of 20%’ of all ‘pandemic-related products,’ such as vaccines or personal protective equipment, for global redistribution: ‘10% as a donation and 10% at affordable prices’ (Article 12:4b(ii)(a)).”
Of course, evenhanded justice is nearly impossible when the prosecuting attorney is also the judge and jury. “Thanks for your email disputing our rating of your post,” FactCheck.org replied insincerely. “We’ve reviewed the examples you gave and believe our rating is correct.”
The email went on to explain, “The agreement would not affect national sovereignty — meaning it does not affect countries’ sovereign rights to set policies within their own national borders. The examples you give are related to international obligations and do not mean the WHO would interfere with national sovereignty for any country.” Utterly ignored in this illogical reply are the multiple ways in which FRC pointed out that the treaty’s international obligations impinge on a country’s sovereign rights by attaching strings to their pandemic equipment stockpiles and public health emergency staff.
In the article FactCheck.org referenced, they reason that the WHO Pandemic Accord will not affect national sovereignty is because the WHO says it won’t — which sounds like the claim they should be fact-checking. Johnson’s research pores through the proposed text of the agreement; FactCheck.org does not.
FactCheck.org quoted only a single, biased expert, Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown law professor who helped draft the treaty. “The US constitution is the highest law of the land. No international treaty can override the provisions of our constitution,” insisted Gostin. It doesn’t take a law degree to know that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) makes international treaties equal to the Constitution as “the supreme law of the land,” by which judges in every state are bound.
Obviously, FactCheck.org already “believed” in their rating, despite the slim evidence, and no recitation of the facts was going to change their opinion. (That’s what it was, a judgment based upon opinion, not fact.) But there is no one else to appeal to. Social media platforms outsourced the business of fact-checking in the first place because they don’t want to wade into the inescapable morass of contradictory opinions, borderline rulings, and fact-less findings.
In many ways, this recent incident with a fact-checker is characteristic of a trend of biased fact-checking, seemingly designed to discredit disfavored opinions, which FRC has been experiencing for years.
“Our social media posts have had fact-check labels applied from time to time, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I would characterize the fact-checks as more of a difference of opinion, rather than a factual correction,” Keri Boeve, director of Social Media at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “When we have taken the time to file a dispute or appeal the fact-check on a post, it has never generated a change, and the responses (if we get one) claim the slimmest and most debatable reasons.”
The virtue of a fact-check is it discredits outright falsehoods, allowing public debate to more quickly proceed toward the truth. This virtue becomes a vice when fact-checks are weaponized against debatable propositions — opinions or interpretations of the facts. They are particularly odious to the ideals of free society and open debate when they are targeted against independent voices and minority viewpoints, with the goal of protecting the prevailing groupthink from having to do the hard work of either defending itself or persuading others.
Two plus two equals four, the calculator tells you every time you put in that equation. The word “fact” is spelled F-A-C-T, every time you look it up in the dictionary. These are facts, and checking them produces the same result every time. This turns out to be very different from the business of “fact-checking.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-01-26 07:19:002024-01-26 07:22:13Studies Show Professional Fact-Checking Is Subjective
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said that President Joe Biden’s speech about democracy “seemed rather conflicting” in the details Friday.
Biden claimed former President Donald Trump promised an “assault on democracy” during the Friday speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, saying defending democracy was a “central cause” of his administration. During the speech, Biden cited the riot at the Capitol building during the certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
“He lost me in the specifics,” Turley told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “He talks about democracy being on the ballot but the ballot isn’t very democratic, his own party is trying to strip ballots of Donald Trump’s name to prevent people who want to vote for what appears to be the leading candidate for the presidency from doing that.”
WATCH:
Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows of Maine ruled Trump was ineligible for the office of President of the United States Dec. 28, citing the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection” clause. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump was disqualified from appearing on the ballot in the 2024 election in a 4-3 decision Dec. 19. The Supreme Court took up Trump’s appeal Friday.
“So when he’s talking about the freedom to vote and have your vote count, his party is actively trying to prevent that and saying, really, you’re not just voting for me, just think you’re voting for democracy,” Turley continued. “For those people, they really feel like, if we vote for you, do we get democracy back next time? Are we going to have all of the candidates on the ballot? I don’t think that effort will succeed.”
Turley also pointed out the Biden administration’s efforts to censor critics. United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction July 4 prohibiting Biden administration officials with multiple agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services, from contacting social media companies to push for “the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
The Supreme Court is considering whether to hear an appeal from the Biden administration.
“It’s worth noting when he talks about the freedom of speech, the Biden administration I have written before, is the most anti-free-speech administration since the administration of John Adams,” Turley said. “I mean, his administration has carried out what a federal court called an Orwellian censorship program with the help of social media companies.”
“Part of the speech was, in fact uplifting, but then when you got down to the details, it seemed rather conflicting for this president,” Turley concluded.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-01-06 05:55:022024-01-06 05:59:15‘He Lost Me’: Jonathan Turley Rebuts Biden’s ‘Assault On Democracy’ Speech In Less Than 60 Seconds
The biggest accomplishment of Justin Trudeau is that he managed to make Canada a focus of intense international media attention, but not for respectable reasons. Canada’s freedoms are being severely compromised, and it is drowning economically as well. The latest out of Canada: Elon Musk tweeted that Trudeau is “trying to crush free speech“ in Canada.
The proverbial ship has sailed. It has been a long, tough process for patriotic Canadians as they watch Trudeau strip away their freedoms. Musk was responding to a new law in Canada, Bill C-18, that requires social media and streaming services with revenues over $10 million to register with the government, starting in November 2023. Subscription television services which are available online, as well as Facebook, X, Netflix, and Disney, are also included, as are radio stations that livestream online, and podcast services. Individual podcasters need not worry, unless, of course, they make over $10 million in revenue.
The wing of the Canadian government overseeing Bill C-18 is the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Details of the requirements can be found here.
Trudeau is beyond “trying to crush free speech” in Canada, as Musk observed. He has already largely succeeded, and has trampled not only the freedom of speech. Other examples of Trudeau’s infringement of the freedom of Canadians include:
Bill C-18 did not suddenly appear in a kind of jump scare. The impetus for it was building over time, and its basis was actually formed under Canada’s anti-Islamophobia Motion, M-103, which “progressives” did everything they could to present as a benign motion which didn’t carry any legal ramifications. Everyone already knew that it wasn’t legislation, but few were willing to address its impact in laying the groundwork for a future bill, which we now see in Bill C-18.
In February, Trudeau’s own appointed Senator David Richards described the prime minister’s sweeping censorship Bill C-11, a precursor to Bill C-18, as “Stalinesque.” Richards called it “an Orwellian attempt to force individuals to comply with government messaging.” Richards’ description may have seemed exaggerated to those who were unaware of Trudeau’s activities, but it was spot-on.
Bill C-18 followed. It was also known as the Online Streaming Act. It was an updated version of Bill C-11, which it incorporated, with an addition: it requires digital giants such as Google and Meta to pay compensation to Canadian news sites to share any of the news content that appeared on their platforms. University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist characterized it accurately: “Bill C-18 is a shakedown with requirements to pay for nothing more than listing Canadian media organizations with hyperlinks in a search index, social media post, or possibly even a tweet.”
The response from Google, Facebook and Instagram to Bill C-18, when they were asked to compensate Canadian news outlets, elicited a meltdown from Trudeau. Did he really expect social media giants to comply with his shakedown? Meta said it would shut out news in the country, meaning that all Facebook and Instagram users in Canada would be blocked from accessing news on these platforms. Google stated:
We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.
When Canada’s wildfires broke out and news was fundamental to access, everyone knew exactly whom to blame: Trudeau. But he wouldn’t accept responsibility. Instead, he blamed Meta and Google for supposedly “putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety.”
Vicky Eatrides, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of the CRTC, stated:
We are developing a modern broadcasting framework that can adapt to changing circumstances. To do that, we need broad engagement and robust public records. We appreciate the significant participation during this first phase and look forward to hearing a diversity of perspectives at our contributions proceeding in November.
A new bargaining regime to govern the making available of news content
The operators of dominant digital news intermediaries to which the Act applies would be subject to a new duty to bargain with eligible news businesses, which may bargain individually or as a group. This duty to bargain would arise when an eligible news business initiates bargaining with a digital news intermediary organization subject to the Act. The bargaining process could involve up to three sequential steps: bargaining sessions; mediation sessions; and final offer arbitration.
Final offer arbitration
When digital news intermediaries and news businesses do not reach agreements about making news content available through bargaining or mediation sessions, outstanding monetary disputes may proceed to a final offer arbitration process if at least one of the parties wishes to initiate arbitration. Under this process, an independent panel of arbitrators would select a final offer made by one of the parties.
This gibberish not only establishes powers of the CRTC online to set up an annoyingly inconvenient system in which potential users must now compete in a bargaining process, but it leaves a lot of questions about the players who will be comprising these “mediation sessions” and this “arbitration” on the government side. And beware whenever a government uses terms such as “independent panel,” because they are never “independent”; they end up being staffed with government cronies who are paid by taxpayers to advance the interests of the regime. And as for the sections of Bill C-18 guaranteeing the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression,” not even the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has stopped Trudeau from his encroachments upon Canadian freedoms.
The world is increasingly coming to know what Canadians have been enduring ever since Trudeau came to power in 2015. In a telling gesture, Trudeau shut down the Office of Religious Freedom almost immediately after taking office. Three years later, his government made a change to the Canada Summer Jobs program that required organizations to tick a box affirming that they supported abortion in order to qualify for government funding. The former head of the Office of Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, pointed out Trudeau’s “totalitarian tendency,” and he has been proven right.
It was inevitable that Bill C-18 would now require registration with the Canadian government. The CRTC, which has been regulating Canada’s airwaves since 1976, is the reason why Canadian productions are so limited in content. Some would even say they’re boring. There is little room for full creativity. Now the CRTC has expanded online in its attempt to tighten its grip and stymie free expression, after the fashion of China and Iran.
M-103 was passed in 2018. It was cleverly presented as only a motion — not a law — but it was part of the groundwork for something more nefarious: a broad assault upon the freedom of expression. After extensive committee hearings, the Minister of Heritage, who was Melanie Joly at the time, published a document entitled “TAKING ACTION AGAINST SYSTEMIC RACISM AND RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION INCLUDING ISLAMOPHOBIA.” It stated:
The Government acknowledges that in order to fully understand the issues and challenges confronting Canada’s increasingly diverse population, comprehensive and high quality data is required to better monitor and target policies to eliminate discrimination and inequalities.
Those policies favored the red-green axis and were grounded in wokeism. They eventually resulted in the appointment of an “Islamophobia Czar“; Trudeau’s absurd designation of the patriotic Freedom Convoy as “racist” (and his subsequent crackdown on them); and the passing of Bill C-11, which promised “greater support for Black, Indigenous and racialized people’s content and viewpoints,” as determined by the woke Trudeau government. A group aligned with Trudeau, the Racial Equity Media Collective, called for a “mandatory collection of race-based data by broadcasters…” Then came a government-funded school booklet that warned the country’s children against the Conservative Party, the freedom of speech and even Donald Trump. The booklet was entitled Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools; it was created by the far-left “anti-hate” network led by Bernie Farber, a member of the Trudeau government’s “’expert’ advisory group on online ‘safety.’” Some highlights of this 53-page propaganda booklet:
Freedom of expression is presented as a cover for “hate.”
Trump’s border wall to stop illegals is likewise presented as “hate.”
Mainstream Conservative parties are singled out, and are presented as being “infiltrated” by bigots, “groypers,” and “white nationalists.” The pamphlet actually states: “While the majority of Groypers are white, there are a growing number of youth of colour involved in the movement, as they engage in antisemitism, anti- feminism/misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism.”
It condemns a “specific Canadian flavour” of the “worldview” that is “seen on many college campuses, often under the banner of “Canada First.”
In a chapter on “hate promoting symbols,” the booklet names the Red Ensign flag as offensive, even though it was used as Canada’s national symbol until 1965.
It condemns concerns about terrorism and crime as “anti-immigrant.”
It references Trump as a “problematic politician” and condemns his border wall as “racist.”
It warns about students who may inquire “why there aren’t any straight pride parades, or a white history month during class discussion.”
Without context, anti-police sentiment is taught; the pamphlet claims that “Black residents are 20 times more likely to be shot by Toronto police than white counterparts.”
The booklet ironically utilizes intersectional tropes and stereotypes “people of colour,” stating that “shared beliefs in misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness will often attract and unite people of colour to hate groups.”
It heavily promotes the Marxist, anti-nuclear family Black Lives Matter movement.
The Canadian government’s mission was clear by that point, and that mission is now broadening via Bill C-18. Trudeau has severely impaired and is now working to marginalize the freedom of speech. Trudeau, with whom Canadians are stuck until the 2025 elections, is well on his way to crushing that freedom. The leader of Canada’s official opposition Conservative Party tweeted:
We warned that Justin Trudeau’s online censorship law was coming to censor what people can see and say online.
Liberals denied it. Now, it is exactly what they're doing.
Conservatives will repeal Trudeau’s censorship, and restore freedom of expression online for all.…
As Trudeau tries to extend his egoism and oft-noted totalitarian tendencies beyond the borders of Canada itself, he may be in for a tougher ride than he anticipated. The ongoing controversy with India isn’t about to disappear, especially in light of the fact that India has just ordered Canada to remove 41 diplomats from its Delhi embassy. The Hindustan Times just published a story entitled Elon Musk’s Big Attack On Trudeau Amid India Tensions; ‘Canada Govt Crushing. Now Trudeau must contend with Facebook as well as Musk’s X. Add in the brouhaha over Canadian MP’s giving standing ovation to a prominent Nazi during a Zelensky visit to Ottawa, and the accompanying calls for accountability.
Billionaire Elon Musk is confronting numerous investigations launched by President Joe Biden’s administration, many of which have occurred since he acquired social media platform Twitter — now X — under a year ago, and released documents revealing censorship by the previous regime.
Musk has criticized the Democratic Party and exposed left-wing censorship through the release of the “Twitter Files.”
“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk posted on X in May 2022, while still in the process of purchasing the platform. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”
Billionaire Elon Musk has faced an investigative onslaught from President Joe Biden’s administration since he acquired social media platform Twitter — now X — less than a year ago, and exposed censorship against conservatives by his predecessors.
The billionaire has condemned the Democratic party and exposed left-wing censorship, including from Biden himself. The president encouraged investigations into Musk soon after he assumed control of X in October: Musk is currently the owner or CEO of X, Tesla and SpaceX, all of which have faced investigations from the Biden administration since his takeover of the social media platform.
In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿
“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk posted on X in May 2022, while still in the process of purchasing the platform. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”
Shortly following Musk’s acquisition of X, Biden said that Musk’s relationships with foreign governments warranted investigation. “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries … is worthy of being looked at, whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that,” Biden said in November. “I’m suggesting that [it’s] … worth being looked at … that’s all I’ll say.”
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has investigated the company’s alleged lack of adherence to a 2022 administrative order related to privacy, and depositions “revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp.’s compliance,” according to a September Department of Justice (DOJ) filing. This violation could lead to fines for the company, according to The Washington Post.
The FTC has also issued over 350 solicitations for information from X since Musk took over, including the social media platform’s work with journalists, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio asserted in July. Musk enabled journalists to release batches of internal documents from X which precede his takeover, called the “Twitter Files,” revealing that Biden campaign staff flagged posts related to his son Hunter for the company to censor.
Before Musk took over, X censored the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post in the month before the 2020 election, preventing people from sharing the link both publicly and privately. Former executives now regret suppressing the story.
“You’ve asked for every single communication relating to Elon Musk, not communications that he just sent to someone or communications he received, but any time he’s mentioned,” Jordan said. “More than harassment, that seems like almost an obsession.”
Furthermore, the DOJ and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are also investigating Musk’s electric car company Tesla’s alleged allocation of funds toward a discrete project, rumored to be construction of a glass house for its CEO, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.
The alleged project is internally called “Project 42” and involves the construction of an expansive glass building in the vicinity of Austin, Texas, according to the WSJ. “I’m not building a house of any kind, let alone a glass one!” Musk posted on X.
Moreover, Musk’s SpaceX is currently under investigation by the DOJ for alleged discrimination over its hiring policies, according to an August filing. The DOJ accused SpaceX of discrimination against people seeking asylum and refugees by not hiring them.
The U.S. mandates employees to have “at least a green card” due to rockets’ classification as “advanced weapons technology,” Musk posted on X, However, this is inaccurate, according to the lawsuit.
Musk was recently asked on a podcast if the Biden administration has it out for him. “Ha. What ever gave you that idea?” Musk joked, eliciting laughter from the hosts and live audience.
“I don’t think the whole administration has it out for me,” he added. “But I think there’s probably aspects of the administration … or aspects of interests aligned with President Biden who probably do not wish good things for me.”
The White House, DOJ, Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-09-18 05:09:512023-09-18 05:17:27‘Dirty Tricks Campaign’: Elon Musk Is Battling Biden Admin As Investigations Pile Up Since Twitter Takeover
A federal appeals court partially affirmed a lower court’s finding on Friday that Biden administration officials violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to censor speech.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s judgement that the White House, Surgeon General, CDC and FBI violated the First Amendment while finding that “the district court erred in finding that the NIAID Officials, CISA Officials, and State Department Officials likely violated Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.” Yet it found the injunction, issued by District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty in July, was “vague and broader than necessary.”
“Ultimately, we find the district court did not err in determining that several officials—namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI—likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media, platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions,” the court wrote. “In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.”
Doughty granted a broad injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from collusion with pro-censorship nonprofit organizations, in addition to social media companies, in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden. The injunction found that government officials likely violated the First Amendment by suppressing protected speech, and the order states that government actors are barred from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” research groups and projects that advocate for censorship.
🚨BREAKING: The Fifth Circuit has upheld the district court’s order in our free speech case, Missouri v. Biden, enjoining the White House, Surgeon General, CDC, & FBI from violating the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) September 8, 2023
The court axed nine of ten provisions of the injunction but kept provision six, which bars officials from “threatening, pressuring, or coercing” companies to remove speech, though it altered the language to avoid capturing “otherwise legal speech.”
“Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech,” the new provision reads. “That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.”
“Under the modified injunction, the enjoined Defendants cannot coerce or significantly encourage a platform’s content-moderation decisions,” the ruling explained. “Such conduct includes threats of adverse consequences—even if those threats are not verbalized and never materialize—so long as a reasonable person would construe a government’s message as alluding to some form of punishment.”
The court also extended the Biden administration’s request to fully freeze the injunction for ten days pending their application to the Supreme Court.
Judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, a George W. Bush appointee; Edith Brown Clement, a George H. W. Bush appointee; and Don R. Willett, a Trump appointee, issued the ruling.
During oral arguments, Elrod compared the Biden administration’s relationship with Big Tech to the mob, where they never actually “spell out” consequences but “everybody just knows.”
“The first brick was laid in the wall of separation between tech and state on July 4th, and this ruling is yet another brick,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey tweeted in response to the decision. “Missouri will continue to lead the way in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-09-09 06:09:012023-09-09 06:11:58Appeals Court Affirms Ruling Preventing Biden Admin From ‘Significantly’ Encouraging Social Media Censorship
Amidst growing concerns over censorship, the Biden White House is changing its rules on press credentials, potentially forcing conservative reporters out of the briefing room.
According to the new rules, White House reporters must hold a press pass from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, or Supreme Court to maintain access to the White House briefing room. Starting July 31, existing White House “hard passes” will expire, leaving several reporters without access to press briefings. One such reporter is Fred Lucas, White House correspondent for The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet The Daily Signal. Lucas has held a hard pass since 2009 and has covered both Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies; in two weeks, Lucas will be without a White House press pass.
The new rule change has been criticized as a form of censorship and media manipulation. Lucas told The Washington Stand, “This is a first step of the Biden administration to oust what they consider noncompliant media from the White House. I have covered the White House under both the Obama and Trump administrations, and there has never been a targeted press purge like this before.” In the past, the process for obtaining access to the White House briefing room was, according to Lucas, “apolitical and decided by the Secret Service,” but “[t]he Biden White House has now politicized the process.”
The Heritage Foundation’s vice president of communications, Rob Bluey, agreed, telling The Washington Stand, “Joe Biden’s White House is engaged in a blatant act of censorship. By arbitrarily changing the rules and making it a prerequisite for reporters to first obtain congressional or Supreme Court credentials, the White House is intentionally banishing reporters like The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas.”
Another journalist who will be impacted is Dr. Anthony Harper of InterMountain Christian News, a veteran White House reporter for the past 12 years. Harper told The Washington Stand that this latest rule change is “a press purge to the high and mighty who select media people that I guess have the largest audience, the ones that they can control. It’s really a purge of conservative media.” He noted that his applications for a press pass have been denied by both the House and Senate, ostensibly because InterMountain Christian News is a relatively small non-profit organization. He noted, “It’s discriminatory on behalf of the Congressional press offices in the way they’re treating our news organization and me by saying that you can’t be a non-profit news organization. They’re discounting our audience.”
Today News Africa’s White House correspondent, Simon Ateba, also stands to lose his press pass. In a statement to The Washington Stand, he said, “Suspending or revoking my hard pass would not only hinder my ability to fulfill my responsibilities but also impede the public’s right to access reliable information. I believe in the importance of transparency and open dialogue, and I am committed to providing accurate and comprehensive coverage.”
U.S. senators have also taken issue with the new press pass rules. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted, “The Biden White House can’t find out who brought in cocaine, but they sure can spot and throw out a conservative member of the press,” referring to the recent handling of an investigation into cocaine found in the White House, which many allege to be Hunter Biden’s. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also issued a tweet, saying, “Normally the Biden White House asks Big Tech to censor conservatives for them, but it seems they’ve taken it into their own hands.”
Although the White House has not yet released a comprehensive list of those who will be left without press passes, those known to be affected approach their reporting from conservative or Christian angles. Harper noted, “I’m the only reporter there who’s yelled out, ‘What about a child’s right to life?’ … I’ve been the only one to really call out the Biden administration on their anti-Semitic policies.”
Ateba pointed out his reporting focuses on concerns over communism, saying that “China and Russia are expanding their influence across Africa, while U.S. influence is waning.” He explained, “Our publication focuses on shining a light on ties and interactions between the United States and Africa, and it’s sad that those in Washington do not understand the situation.”
The Daily Signal’s managing editor, Tyler O’Neill, explained to The Washington Stand the important function his outlet serves:
“The legacy media too often marches in lockstep to defend the Biden administration’s narrative, ignoring inconvenient facts like the Hunter Biden laptop. In this environment, conservative news outlets like The Daily Signal perform a vital function in holding the government accountable and asking the questions others refuse to utter. The Daily Signal has doggedly covered allegations of Biden family corruption, the White House’s attacks on the parental rights movement and its collaboration with the leftist smear group the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the many ways Biden has weaponized the federal government against Americans. The Daily Signal is merely fulfilling the role that legacy media outlets gleefully take up when a Republican is in the White House. The White House policy change that will exclude Fred Lucas from the briefing room feels like retaliation for our essential work.”
This is by no means the first instance of the Biden White House censoring conservatives. In fact, the censorship began even before Biden took office. A New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop — packed with incriminating emails and text messages as well as homemade pornography featuring the now-president’s son — was censored on social media and labeled Russian misinformation, just days before the 2020 election. A top FBI agent confirmed this week that the laptop was real: the FBI knew it was real the very day the agency asked Twitter to suppress the story and even told Twitter executives that the laptop story was true.
Last year, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board, meant to examine and, if necessary, censor the free speech of Americans. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said of the Board’s formation, “Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) compared the Board to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” The Board was run by Nina Jankowicz, a leftist think tank affiliate and vocal Democrat. At the time, she referred to the Hunter Biden laptop story as “a Trump campaign product.” The Board was disbanded less than four months after its introduction.
The Twitter Files — the first installment of which was published in December — revealed the extent to which Democrats and the politicized FBI had access to Twitter’s censorship mechanisms both during and after the 2020 election.
Earlier this month, federal judge Terry Doughty issued a temporary injunction barring the Biden administration from interacting with social media companies to censor Americans or working with intermediary groups like the Stanford Internet Observatory to have them pressure social media outlets to censor Americans. In his ruling, Doughty found that “virtually all of the free speech [the Biden administration] suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech.” Earlier this week, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary stay on Doughty’s injunction, at the request of the federal government.
More recently, Democratic primary contender Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offered testimony on government censorship to the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Kennedy himself has been a victim of government censorship: many of his posts on public health — including his criticism of COVID-19 “vaccines” — were suppressed online at the behest of the federal government.
In his opening remarks, Kennedy told the subcommittee, “A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity. It is the beginning of totalitarianism.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Democrats on the committee attempted to censor Kennedy’s testimony, moving to keep it behind closed doors, instead of in the public. Representative Thomas Massie (R-K.Y.) responded, “This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort … to censor Mr. Kennedy!”
The White House’s new press credential rules appear to be the latest in a long and well-documented line of attempts at censorship. Lucas told The Washington Stand that “it should be concerning to any Americans when an administration — Republican or Democrat — attempts to select who can and can’t cover it.” Bluey noted that “it’s also disappointing that members of the White House Correspondents’ Association aren’t objecting to this attack on media access.” He added, “The Daily Signal won’t be bullied, and we’re not backing down.”
The new rule will go into effect July 31. The White House has yet to release a list of reporters affected by the new rule.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-07-25 08:35:052023-07-25 08:58:26Biden White House to Oust Conservative Reporters from Press Briefings
The Left will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you.
When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose.
Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”
In traditional free speech jurisprudence, ‘chilling effects’ were inflicted by the government, but Douek is worried that free speech might have a chilling effect on government censorship. After advocating, in cases like Lamont v. Postmaster General, that any interference with speech, no matter how odious including, in the aforementioned Supreme Court case, asking recipients of Communist propaganda to affirmatively agree to receive it, entailed a ‘chilling effect’, liberals don’t want to chill the censors, instead they’re worried that civil rights will chill censorship.
Even though it’s the height of summer, chilling effects on censorship were on display.
Liberals who might have once worried about free speech now fret that the government will be inhibited from censoring free speech. According to CNN, “Legal experts say that the order is overly broad and scholars on online misinformation warned that it could have a chilling effect on the government’s efforts to curtail lies about public health emergencies and elections.”
Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s former disinformation czar, popped up to argue that, ”it’ll have a chilling effect on government and academia, ensuring that officials and researchers think twice before trying to counter those spreading conspiracies and false information.”
The axis of concern had shifted from worrying that government action would inhibit free speech to agonizing that judicial interference would prevent the government from inhibiting free speech.
The existence of ‘chilling effects’ in free speech cases testified to the degree to which we protected free speech from even the faintest tinge of indirect discouragement. Now, lefty academics and experts want to not only reverse the polarities of free speech, but they are just as worried that any protection for free speech will interfere with government censorship.
Its new victims are not civilians who engage in political speech, but government censors.
To justify this inversion of civil rights, they have also inverted the concept of censorship so that the true form of free speech is to prevent others from speaking.
According to Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, preventing the government from censoring citizens was… censorship.
Litman told NPR that the injunction “literally prevents the federal government from sending emails to social media companies about their content moderation policies or having meetings with social media companies about taking down speech and posts. And so that prevents speech, really important speech, from ever happening.”
The most important speech is government speech that suppresses the speech of the public.
If government censorship is speech, then any interference with government censorship is a violation of free speech. And the government must be allowed to censor everyone lest its really important speech be restrained from taking place. And then where would we be, except free?
Judge Terry Doughty was attacked by pro-censorship leftists for invoking George Orwell’s 1984 and yet that same faction insists on ‘literally’ arguing that censorship is speech.
Crying censorship has become the last resort of censors who demand the right to censor.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis and other governors signed laws barring Big Tech monopolies from deplatforming candidates for public office, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Google and Facebook, sued in the name of free speech.
“We are bringing this suit to safeguard the industry’s free speech,” CCIA boss Matt Schruers claimed. “A digital service that declines to host harmful content is exercising its own First Amendment rights.”
“Section 7 does not chill speech; if anything, it chills censorship,” the Fifth Circuit court replied.
“We reject the Platforms’ efforts to reframe their censorship as speech. It is undisputed that the Platforms want to eliminate speech—not promote or protect it. And no amount of doctrinal gymnastics can turn the First Amendment’s protections for free speech into protections for free censoring.” But that hasn’t stopped the totalitarian gymnastics from going forward.
After arguing that censorship by some of the biggest companies in the world was really speech, lefty legal scholars are arguing that government censorship is free speech, and that when judges prevent the government from censoring, the government’s speech is being violated.
The official Biden administration position is that it is entitled to censor in the event of emergencies.
“We’re not going to apologize for promoting responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic or foreign attacks on our elections,” Sharon Yang, a White House spokeswoman, argued.
These deadly challenges and foreign attacks included a video mocking Jill Biden and a Twitter account impersonating Biden’s granddaughter. Biden officials insisted on having these and many other posts, accounts and materials that they disliked taken down.
Emergencies have never been anything other than an excuse for a broad censorship scheme.
Liberals have abandoned even the pretense of caring about free speech. Laurence Tribe, a lefty constitutional law professor, co-authored an op-ed complaining that the injunction “seems to maintain that the government cannot even politely ask companies not to publish verifiable misinformation.”
What would Tribe’s view be on the Nixon administration “politely” asking the media not to spread lies about the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Drugs, and the Bush administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Terror? Any such suggestions, no matter how mild, were greeted with rabid rage.
“The First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking,” Tribe contends, and preventing the government from doing so “would turn the Constitution’s protection of free expression in an open society into an obstacle course for some of the most valuable exchanges of information and ideas we can imagine.” The most valuable exchanges of ideas apparently involve asking social media monopolies to take down content mocking the president.
Lefty legal scholars keep arguing that government censorship is the highest form of speech.
After abandoning free speech, lefty legal scholars now celebrate the virtues of censorship in the glowing language once used for promoting reverence for a free exchange of ideas. Forget an open society, a truly valuable exchange of ideas consists of government officials telling huge corporations whom to censor this morning.
None of this is remarkable when you go back to the origins of lefty support for free speech.
In 1934, Roger Nash Baldwin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the ACLU, quite clearly explained why he was fighting for civil liberties. “I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”
The American Left believes it has gained enough power that it no longer sees any value in maintaining protections for free speech, at least at a federal level, and has publicly switched its enthusiasm from speech to censorship. It now lovingly speaks of the valuable “speech” of government censors and of the ‘chilling effects’ of extremist judges who interfere with them.
There are still select conservative enclaves where the Left pretends to care about free speech. Should parents persuade a middle school library to pull a work of hard core LGBTQ pornography off the shelves, the Left will describe this as an attack on the First Amendment. But otherwise, freedom of speech has been buried in the same unmarked grave as freedom of religion with the bulk of the First Amendment soon set to join the Second Amendment.
Censorship is becoming speech and speech is becoming censorship. The real threat to civil liberties comes from people interfering with the speech of censors telling them to “shut up”.
In a world where governments have rights and people have none, the right to censor is the only right. And if they disagree with you, liberals will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-07-13 07:02:222023-07-13 07:28:15Leftists Argue Government Censorship is the Highest Form of Speech
A federal judge denied the Biden administration’s attempt to pause an injunction that bars federal officials from communicating with social media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on Monday.
The Biden administration appealed Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty’s July 4 injunction on Wednesday, also requesting an emergency order to pause the injunction while the appeal is pending on Thursday night. Doughty denied the administration’s emergency order Monday, finding that plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving the government colluded with social media companies “to engage in viewpoint-based suppression of protected free speech.”
“Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies, it is not as broad as it appears,” Doughty wrote. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do—contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms. It also contains numerous exceptions.”
Doughty highlighted multiple examples of alleged censorship, such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials providing examples of misinformation topics to Facebook, the FBI’s refusal to tell Facebook whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) holding recurring meetings with social media platforms on “misinformation, disinformation, and/or censorship of protected free speech on social media.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry opposed the Biden administration’s attempt to stop the injunction in a court filing Sunday, writing the administration was essentially asking to “continue violating the First Amendment.”
“In essence, Defendants argue that the injunction should be stayed because it might interfere with the Government’s ability to continue working with social-media companies to censor Americans’ core political speech on the basis of viewpoint,” they wrote in the court filing. “In other words, the Government seeks a stay of the injunction so that it can continue violating the First Amendment.”
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-07-10 14:14:322023-07-13 06:34:10Federal Judge Denies Biden Admin’s Request To Keep Coordinating With Big Tech To Censor Americans
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is attacking the problem of ‘harmful content’.
Sales of Bud Light beer tanked by 21.4 percent in the fallout of the Dylan Mulvaney saga. Apparently frat boys don’t particularly relate to a creepy man prancing about in pink teenage girl costumes.
While big brand Anheuser-Busch has claimed their Bud Light blunder was a one-off, cultural commentator Michael Knowles has uncovered striking evidence to the contrary.
In a Twitter thread this week, Knowles set tongues wagging with the revelation that AB InBev, Bud Light’s parent company in Europe, has signed up to a World Economic Forum initiative that is a veritable holy grail of wokeness.
Transheuser-Busch is still scrambling over the Mulvaney beer can as sales continue to tank. But it’s caught between a rock of customers and a hard place called “GARM,” a WEF-backed operation which was subpoenaed Friday by @Jim_Jordan and the House Judiciary. Here’s why:🧵
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) dubs itself “a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising”.
By “harmful content”, GARM means views about climate change, gender, sexuality or race that are more than five minutes old and happen to be grounded in reality.
GARM has created standards that “limit or entirely demonetize platforms that contain ‘hate speech’ on ‘gender identity,’” and “insensitive… treatment of debated social issues”.
Liking what it saw, the World Economic Forum gobbled up GARM as a “flagship project” in its “Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture” just months after the project’s launch in 2019.
As highlighted by Knowles, last year AB InBev spent 105 pages genuflecting to GARM’s wokery in its 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report.
Bud Light’s use of Dylan Mulvaney in their advertising, in other words, was anything but a mistake.
“One might think that Bud Light could just apologize and admit that men aren’t women,” Knowles reflected. “But no matter how much Bud Light and parent company AB InBev might wish to rein in the radicalism, they can’t abandon the agenda. They’re mired in World Economic Forum/ESG gobbledygook.”
Knowles adds that “AB InBev has embraced a litany of woke initiatives, from ESG to DEI, along with a full endorsement of transgenderism. They now foot the bill when employees choose to mutilate their bodies.”
And, “AB InBev not only indoctrinates all their managers with ‘unconscious bias training’; it also insists that *external* suppliers submit to the pro-trans ‘diversity’ agenda too.”
Far from being the only company to jump in bed with GARM, Adidas, BP, Goldman Sachs, Lego, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Nike, P&G, Hershey, Disney, Unilever and Walmart, are among the litany of colossal corporations to sell their soul to the World Economic Forum’s woke agenda.
Also under the sway of GARM are all of the biggest social media platforms. Warns Knowles, “GARM is so powerful and controls so much advertising money (like that of Bud Light) that YouTube, Meta (FB & IG), Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and others are writing pages of reports as to how they are going to run their platforms to appease GARM standards.”
This revelation alone is bone-chilling, given that GARM’s so-called “misinformation” policies were introduced in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, thanks to initiatives like GARM, we were (un)reliably informed that lockdowns were the best thing since sliced bread, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis was an unhinged conspiracy theory, bodily autonomy is a disposable human right, and the vaccines will most certainly protect against infection and transmission.
Who needs facts when we have thought police like GARM?
In concluding his thread, Knowles warned, “Don’t look away. If we don’t put an end to this growing scheme of control and deceit, Bud Light’s inability to apologize and admit that men can’t be women will be the least of our problems.”
Fortunately there are a few US lawmakers seeking to hold the World Economic Forum to account. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued subpoenas to GARM’s governing body, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). Jordan believes the group may be corralling its constituent members to behave in a way that violates US anti-trust laws.
The outcome of these legal proceedings remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: wokery has transcended colleges, corporations and even culture itself. It’s now a global mob shakedown.
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2023-05-12 04:33:372023-05-12 05:01:25Meet GARM, the World Economic Forum’s Swiss army knife for woke-ifying Planet Earth
Far-left Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) raised eyebrows — not to mention blood pressures — with her response to Tucker Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox News. Her most offensive comment was not the mean-spirited joke, “couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” nor the possibly libelous claim that Carlson was “arguably responsible for driving some of the most amounts of death threats, violent threats, not just to my office but to plenty of people across the country,” but the political conclusion she drew, “deplatforming works, and it is important, and there you go.”
By “deplatforming,” Ocasio-Cortez means more than just someone losing a platform (in the abstract, modern sense of “platform” that includes all digital-age equivalents for mounting a literal platform to deliver a speech). For her and other leftists, “deplatforming” describes a particular form of censorship achieved by disallowing those who express undesirable views from using the media by which they reach their intended audience. She also seems to have in mind not only the act of removing someone from a platform, but the activism and pressure campaigns that lead to that result — in two words, cancel culture.
This is emphatically the wrong conclusion to draw.
For starters, Ocasio-Cortez completely overlooks the context of Carlson’s firing. Unless you’ve been reading the news about “the news” — which, let’s be honest, you probably shouldn’t — you’re probably unaware that Carlson’s departure from Fox is only one item in a string of high-profile firings across cable and network television. In just the past week, CNN booted left-wing gadfly Don Lemon, Comcast (which owns NBC) parted ways with NBC Universal CEO Jeff Shell, Disney-owned ABC (which owns election data site FiveThirtyEight) did not renew a contract with FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, and Fox fired commentator Dan Bongino in addition to Carlson. With all this sacking, it’s a wonder the price of burlap hasn’t gone through the roof.
Surprisingly, these clustered separations seem to be unrelated to one another. Lemon got the hammer after engaging in a racially charged tirade against Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, of Indian heritage. Shell was pushed out at NBC over an inappropriate sexual relationship. Silver got swept up by Disney-wide layoffs (apparently subsidizing the rainbow renders other colors unaffordable).
Meanwhile, Fox has given no public reason for the firings, but they might be related to the company’s legal problems. The pair of firings came days after settling a defamation lawsuit in which Carlson was mentioned frequently with voting machine manufacturer Dominion for a stunning $787 million; the company still faces a defamation lawsuit from another voting machine company, Smartmatic, and a hostile work environment lawsuit from a former booker for Carlson’s show, Abby Grossberg. Another possible reason for at least Lemon’s and Carlson’s ousters is that the CEO or owner disliked them and was actively looking for an opportunity to show them the door.
These details indicate that there are many possible reasons why a network might terminate a relationship with an anchor — reasons which might be totally unrelated to a cancellation campaign against them. Without knowing the reason why a host lost his show, it’s impossible to prove that “deplatforming works” in the strategic sense Ocasio-Cortez means.
Left-wingers tried to cancel Carlson on numerous occasions. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League called for an advertising boycott, but that failed to drive audiences away. On former White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show, Ocasio-Cortez herself on Sunday endorsed government action to end his show, calling for “federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t. And when you look at [what] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. Very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” But what Ocasio-Cortez called for did not happen.
In fact, the coincidental cancellation campaign may have had no more effect on Carlson’s firing than a child attempting to use “the Force” on a supermarket’s automatic doors.
A separate issue from the factual accuracy of Ocasio-Cortez’s position — and a more important one — is whether the “deplatforming” she envisions is acceptable in a free society. Ocasio-Cortez explicitly called for government suppression of the distribution of opinions with which she disagrees. The policy outcome flies so obviously in the face of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and a free press that Ocasio-Cortez felt the need to justify herself by claiming the speech that offended her was “very clearly incitement of violence.” If that case could be proven in court, surely someone would have sued Fox News over that by now.
A giant chasm yawns between what actually happened to Tucker Carlson and what Ocasio-Cortez wanted to happen to him. Opinions will differ about whether Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox’s parent company News Corp) made the right decision or for the right reasons. But at root, Carlson’s employer no longer wanted to employ him, so he terminated his employment. One bedrock principle of a free market is that no one is forced to do business with anyone they don’t want to do business with. Ocasio-Cortez wants the government to dictate to broadcasters who they can put on air.
The Left seems not to recognize or understand this difference, as Ocasio-Cortez’s recent “deplatforming works” claim underscores. Left-wing cancellation efforts target not only Fox News, but virtually every right-wing news outlet you can think of. Ironically, the self-proclaimed opponents of fascism have ripped a page right out of the fascist playbook (and every other dictator in history) in agitating to shut down dissenting media outlets.
This trend has increased in recent years. Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Democrat or Democrat-leaning U.S. adults who agree that “the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information,” increased from 40% in 2018 to 65% in 2021. Even more (76% of Democrat or Democrat-leaning adults) believed in 2021 that “tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information.”
This notion is dangerous to America. But rather than censor it, proponents of free speech must defeat it through persuasion, which is far more challenging.
If Ocasio-Cortez and other leftists have taken the “wrong” — both incorrect and totalitarian — lesson from Carlson’s departure from Fox News, what is the right lesson? Combined with other recent media departures, it’s clear that the American news media — for all of its problems — remains capable of self-adjustment. Different outlets continue to represent different points of view, cycle between spokespersons, and remain accountable both to the public and to the legal system. The media landscape continues to remain open to independent new players, such as The Washington Stand or (possibly soon) the Tucker Carlson Network. No one has a monopoly on the facts, the right opinions, or the press. That’s how things are supposed to work in a rambunctious popular government.
There is, and will always be, a fundamental difference between government regulators taking a popular program off the air and that program’s broadcast cutting that program from its lineup. The difference is freedom.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-04-27 09:20:212023-04-27 09:22:05‘Deplatforming Works’: Left Learns Wrong Lesson from Week of Media Firings
The State Department funded the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a foreign organization that works to police online platforms.
ISD has partnerships with YouTube and Spotify to inform their content moderation decisions, and claims it helps platforms curb “misinformation.”
“By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The U.S. State Department funds and partners with a U.K.-based think tank that collaborates with online platforms to censor perceived mis- and disinformation.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a British nongovernmental organization that styles itself as a research group working in partnership with several online platforms to combat extremism, hate and disinformation. However, the organization frequently classifies typical conservative discourse and journalism as hate and/or disinformation and has received funding from the U.S. government.
The State Department awarded the organization a grant in September 2021 to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in Europe and the U.K. after it won the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. The event, which was held in collaboration with the “U.S. Embassy Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [and] the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization which reportedly seeks to demonetize conservative news sites.
The State Department confirmed that its Global Engagement Center funded ISD to study Russian disinformation tactics against Wikipedia through a grant to Park Advisors. The department told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it plays no role in content moderation decisions on social media platforms.
“By funding organizations – including foreign organizations, no less – that put their thumbs on the scale of hot-button domestic political debates, the federal government is wading into a dangerous Constitutional minefield,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF. “The government cannot get around First Amendment restrictions by outsourcing or using surrogates or agents for prohibited activities.”
Additionally, the State Department and ISD partnered to create the Strong Cities Network, a United Nations-affiliated initiative that seeks to combat “hate, polarisation and extremism” abroad; the State Department solicited several grants as part of this arrangement, naming ISD as a sub-awardee.
The organization also lists as funders left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with several European government agencies.
ISD maintains several partnerships with platforms to inform their content moderation decisions, largely regarding extremist and terrorism-related content, but also, significantly, what it deems hate and misinformation.
The organization has a special advisory role with Spotify to “curb” misinformation on the audio streaming platform, and is tasked with flagging content for YouTube.
“The State Department’s partnership with the ISD is problematic at best and unconstitutional at worst,” Mike Davis, president of the Internet Accountability Project, told the DCNF. “Taxpayer dollars essentially funding the censorship of conservatives under the guise of ‘misinformation’ shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the Biden administration’s assault on the marketplace of ideas.”
While much of ISD’s work focuses on various forms of extremism such as radical Islam and white supremacy, a significant portion involves “disinformation” and online hate. However, the organization frequently characterizes staples of conservative discourse as hateful and/or as disinformation.
For instance, ISD appears to consider the comparison of abortion to murder as misinformation, admonishing social media platforms for not enforcing their abortion misinformation policies against such claims.
Moreover, in a 2022 report on “climate disinformation,” ISD profiled a form of discourse it labeled “delayism,” which accepts as a premise the existence of climate change but does not, in ISD’s view, advocate strong enough or urgent enough policy solutions. Criticism of particular policies designed to address climate change, such as the promotion of electric vehicles, were also included within the “disinformation” report.
“In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible,” the report read.
ISD cited as an example a Facebook post from Republican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw that warned of the “radical obsession with wind and solar as the only clean energy solution” and argued instead for nuclear energy and natural gas with carbon capture technology.
Another example was a meme that compared an electric vehicle to a Flintstones-esque rock car.
“This outlandish form of censorship cannot be allowed to happen in America, such as simple policy preferences related to electric cars being labeled as misinformation,” Davis told the DCNF.
The organization characterized Libs of Tik Tok, a conservative Twitter account that publicizes examples of left-wing pedagogy including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, as a “prolific spreader of hate,” and classified conservative journalist Scott Morefield as an individual “known to spread disinformation and amplify hateful right-wing talking points.”
ISD also considered “misgendering” an example of “anti-trans hatred” in a report on social media discourse surrounding the participation of men in women’s sports. ISD concluded by urging platforms to take action against posts that misgender trans individuals.
While ISD’s work is primarily research-oriented, the organization has successfully embedded itself in roles informing content moderation decisions within hugely influential social media and technology companies. Much of ISD’s work with online platforms focuses on terrorism and violent extremism, but the organization’s purview also includes mis- and disinformation.
ISD is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, formed in 2022 as a response to criticism of the audio streaming platform for Joe Rogan’s December 2021 interview with COVID-19 vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.
The council, though not tasked with directly making content moderation decisions, is nevertheless empowered to “inform” Spotify’s policies and enforcement actions regarding “misinformation.” In ISD’s own words, the group will help Spotify “curb the spread of misinformation” on its platform and “independently keep watch over the platform’s content and safety policies.”
Additionally, ISD is part of YouTube’s “Trusted Flagger program,” an initiative in collaboration with several nongovernmental organizations and government agencies designed to improve YouTube’s enforcement of its guidelines. Trusted Flaggers are able to flag more content than average users, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, and receive special treatment from YouTube.
“[O]ur teams prioritize flags from Trusted Flaggers for review,” Google’s description of the program reads.
ISD partnered with Google.org for its Impact Challenge on Safety grant initiative which distributed €10 million to organizations working to “counter hate and extremism” in Europe, and also received a $1.3 million grant from Google in 2017 to counter hate in the U.K.
The organization also boasts partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon’s audiobook platform Audible and Facebook.
“The State Department exists to represent the American public’s interests abroad,” Chamberlain told the DCNF. “If they are interested in countering concerns about weaponizing the government, they could start by not assisting outside groups that target the speech of American citizens.”
ISD did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-02-14 08:20:232023-02-14 08:26:58State Department Funded Foreign Think Tank Working To Censor Americans
