Tag Archive for: Censorship

Ten Topics You Rarely Hear Discussed Openly and Rationally on Mainstream Media

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Many of us are familiar with the ideological and political biases of mainstream media, in particular the media’s uncritical embrace of leftist commitments on issues like inclusive language, hate speech, transgenderism, abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, the Christian faith, education, and pandemic policies.

It’s par for the course.

Much of the mainstream media does not simply defend its favoured positions; it also refuses, all too often, to give a fair hearing to opposing viewpoints. The silencing, censoring, and exclusion of opinions that newspaper, radio, and TV editors deem politically incorrect impoverishes our public square by making open and candid discussion of a wide range of issues practically impossible.

This would not necessarily be the case in an ideologically and politically diverse media system, because the one-sided and exclusionary editorial policies of one media organ could be checked and balanced by the diverse biases and editorial policies of another. However, in practice, many mainstream media do in fact speak with one voice on lots of important issues, including issues that are by no means settled in the general population.

Sometimes the silencing of dissenting viewpoints is achieved through overt censorship – as we saw when Facebook suppressed arguments that entertained the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, or when Twitter censored pretty much any assertion that could be construed as even slightly unfavourable to Covid vaccines. But more often than not, it is achieved by refusing to give any airtime to arguments from “the other side.”

In many ways, this is more sinister than overt censorship, because it is subtle and may easily go completely unnoticed.

I have had personal experience of this “from the inside,” so to speak. I used to write occasionally for a prominent national newspaper in Ireland, as well as a regional newspaper in Spain. Soon after I began to seriously question Covid measures or the science behind lockdowns, my contributions at both newspapers ceased to be published, quite abruptly. There was simply no editorial interest in questioning the fundamentals of the national response to the virus.

The average newspaper reader or TV viewer knows nothing of this filtering process. They just pick up the newspaper or switch on the TV and assume that there are “serious” people and experts who will be given a platform to express themselves. They will naturally assume that if no credible voice defends this or that position, it must be because the position is weak or indefensible. It will not occur to the average reader or viewer that the reason there are no “credible voices” on the other side is because they have been filtered out in advance.

Mine is one of those voices. There are many others.

It is not that mainstream media never discuss contentious issues. Rather, media “debate” on contentious issues is often bland and uninspiring, due to its near total exclusion of reasonable voices from the other side. Officially sanctioned positions are echoed uncritically by talking heads on TV and radio, and the “other side” is dismissed as a bunch of crazies or “extremists” in op-eds and on chat shows, even though moderate dissenting voices are refused airtime or never invited to participate in the debate in the first place.

This is bad for citizenship and bad for democracy, because citizens are exposed to one set of pat answers on the issues of the day, and not taught to process complexity and nuance. Citizens who should be learning to think for themselves are instead encouraged to passively imbibe a set of one-sided slogans, slogans that most journalists do not even think to interrogate or put to the test, like “I’m personally against X, but would never impose my opinion on someone else,” or “I am spiritual but have no time for organised religion,” or “Populists are a looming danger to democracy,” or “We must do everything possible to combat misinformation and hate speech,” or “The unvaccinated are granny-killers.”

The top ten

Here are ten topics that most mainstream media cover from a broadly leftist-progressive perspective, with almost no consideration of dissenting arguments, no matter how evidence-based and no matter how qualified or credentialed their author happens to be. In other words, ten topics that most mainstream media cannot or will not discuss openly and rationally:

  1. The birth shortfall across a large part of the Western world and its contribution to the ageing of our populations – barely mentioned, let alone debated.
  2. The ethics of administering transgender hormone therapy to children and adolescents – seems to be taboo for many editors.
  3. Religious faith as a personal commitment and way of life – almost invariably, this is either ignored, treated superficially, or discussed as a wholly subjective “lifestyle option,” rather than a serious truth claim.
  4. The ethics of abortion and techniques of assisted reproduction and their impact on women’s lives – the pro-life perspective is almost never given a fair hearing.
  5. The difficulties and challenges surrounding the accommodation and integration of refugees – anyone questioning refugee policies is dismissed out of hand as “anti-immigration” or bigoted or racist.
  6. The evidential basis and ethical merits of Covid policies like lockdowns, mandatory masking and mandatory vaccination – government advisors were essentially given a free pass to say whatever they wanted, while dissenters were either silenced or dismissed as enemies of public health.
  7. The steep increases in excess mortality in 2021 and 2022, and its possible underlying causes – it has been reported on, but strikingly, not discussed to even a fraction of the extent that Covid deaths were.
  8. The claim that reducing our “carbon footprint” can reverse global warming, and that this will avert a global catastrophe – you will rarely if ever hear this topic treated in a rational, critical and scientific manner, just uncritical repetition of a set of pre-packaged climate crisis mantras.
  9. Populist and anti-establishment political movements – instead of engaging rationally with their claims, these movements are generally dismissed as “alt right,” “hard right,” or “demagogic” and anti-democratic.
  10. The perspective of stay-at-home mothers or women who choose to sacrifice their careers or accept more modest careers, in order to be more available to their children – apparently, most mainstream journalists are unable or unwilling to discuss such a choice sympathetically.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Adam Schiff’s Office Repeatedly Tried To Get Twitter To Censor Posts, Documents Show

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Staffers for Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California made repeated requests for Twitter to censor and suppress posts by users on the social media platform, according to documents published Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

Schiff’s office requested complete removal of “any and all search results about [Schiff staffer Sean] Misko and other committee staffers,” a request that Twitter denied as inconceivable under its rules, according to the documents. Schiff’s staff and the Democratic National Committee asked Twitter to remove an April 26, 2020 tweet containing an edited GIF of Joe Biden sticking his tongue out after then-President Donald Trump retweeted it, something Twitter staff also denied, the documents show.

“This is a pretty clearly edited GIF created with humorous intent,” former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote in an Apr. 27, 2020 email, the documents show. “Any reasonable observer could identify that it’s doctored. And there’s no nexus to harm to anyone involved. It’s not a violation of our rules.”

Nonetheless, Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein expressed concern that the post represented a “slippery slope,” the documents show. Lowenstein expressed concern to Twitter staff that even if the edited content in the April 26, 2020, tweet was not in violation of Twitter policy, Twitter needed to lay out clear rules so it could act quickly on “more malicious and less obvious[ly]” edited content.

Taibbi previously reported on January 3, 2023, that Schiff’s office had lobbied Twitter to ban investigative journalist Paul Sperry and remove content pertaining to Schiff staffers in a November 2020 request. Twitter initially declined to ban Sperry, although he was ultimately suspended in August 2022.

Although Twitter pushed back on requests for outright bans, it did regularly deamplify, or reduce the reach of, accounts that promoted content related to QAnon, according to the documents. While Schiff’s office “greatly appreciate[d]” the efforts to deamplify users content, it was concerned that deamplification might “inadvertently impede” law enforcement’s ability to find threats posed to Congressional staff.

Previous releases of documents, dubbed “The Twitter Files” by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and the reporting journalists, have shown an extensive and close relationship between Twitter and intelligence agencies like the FBI, which regularly queried the social media platform to remove content.

Schiff’s office did not immediately respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Adam Schiff’s Office Asked Twitter To Ban Investigative Journalist, Docs Show

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Gov. Newsom Claims State That Bans Cars and Speech Offers ‘Freedom For All’

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You can do anything in California except open a business, walk down the street, or buy a home.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, the democratic choice of the enlightened ballot harvesters of California, desperately wants to be president. Despite pledging not to run against Biden, he’s continuing to posture by announcing an “anti-Jan 6” march (whatever the hell that is) for his inauguration. The one-party governor of one of the most corrupt states in America then spent his speech ranting about Republicans in other states.

California’s unelected governor wants to reframe freedom to mean mandatory masks and car bans. Not to mention state censorship of online speech.

Freedom is slavery, slavery is freedom.

Gavin Newsom triumphantly marched toward California’s statehouse to deliver an inaugural speech that celebrated California’s freedoms and the state’s resistance to forces that “want to take the nation backward.”

“More than any people, in any place, California has bridged the historical expanse between freedom for some, and freedom for all,” he said under cloudy but dry skies for the first time in days.

“Freedom is our essence, our brand name – the abiding idea that right here anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything.”

Except work freelance, drive a truck, buy a car, get disposable utensils, buy a fur coat, install a gas stove or any of the tens of thousands of things that the Democrat one-party system has banned in some or all of the state.

You can do anything in California except open a business, walk down the street, gas up your car or buy a home. It’s the land of dreams, the hotel you check into and then escape through the back window.

California is so incredibly free that, like North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, everyone is running away.

Gov. Newsom has the unique honor of presiding over a population loss every year in office.

“California’s population continues to dwindle. The state’s population declined by 114,000 people from about 39,143,000 in 2021 to 39,029,000 in 2020, new estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau show. It marks the third straight year that California has reported a loss.”

While Texas and Florida, the states he’s attacking, are gaining people, the only folks California is gaining are coming illegally over the border.

That and sex predators.

Unlike other states, Newsom said, California safeguards freedoms like “the freedom for teachers to teach, freedom from litmus tests about their political party or the person they love.”

California safeguards the right of teachers to “love” the kids of their choice. Republican teachers however get fired.

“They make it harder to vote and easier to buy illegal guns. They silence speech, fire teachers, kidnap migrants, subjugate women, attack the Special Olympics, and even demonize Mickey Mouse,” he said about conservative leaders like DeSantis. “All camouflaged under a hijacking of the word ‘freedom.’”

Whereas in California, Mickey Mouse can expose himself to children. Freedom!

In California, public school teachers, whose insane salaries are subsidized by property taxes no new residents can afford to pay unless they’re millionaires, can groom 9-year-olds. Freedom!

In California, vagrants and junkies have a right to camp in front of your home, but you have to wait 3 years to get a permit to have any work done. Freedom!

In California, a race riot is a civil right while trying to defend yourself against them is a crime. Freedom!

In California, shoplifting is legal, but opening a business isn’t. Freedom!

Wait, why is everyone fleeing the land of the fee and the home of the slave? Wait for the reparations. Stay for the car ban. Or the mandatory ethnic studies. And the race riots. And the tax hikes.

Big population drops in L.A., San Francisco transform state – Los Angeles Times

Why are you leaving the home of freedom? Why?

Do you have something against systemic racism, child abuse, mentally ill vagrants smoking crack, high taxes, and no legal rights whatsoever, you reactionary bigot. You’re taking the nation “backward”.

And California is going backward. Instead of, Go West, Young Man, it’s now Go East.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Official Warns of Risks Posed by Heavy Electric Vehicles

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The FBI’s Twitter Censorship an ‘Apparent Violation of the Law’: Expert

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The federal government made an “apparent violation of the law” by pressuring social media outlets to ban or suppress American citizens’ accounts, or to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story as a foreign intelligence operation, an expert has said. Meanwhile, the federal government exploited the same online platforms to spread U.S. government propaganda, new disclosures from Twitter have revealed.

The seventh and eighth batches of the “Twitter Files” focused on the FBI’s suppression of the explosive contents of Biden’s laptop, which threatened to link 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to a murky web of foreign influence-peddling, as well as military intelligence campaigns using fake accounts to echo the Pentagon’s party line. Previous accounts showed how the FBI established a one-way portal to Twitter to request officials place certain accounts under a “shadow ban” or remove whole posts altogether — requests often received, and honored, by a plethora of former FBI agents and other government officials burrowed deeply into every level of the platform.

“The FBI was abusing its authority to target and abuse the First Amendment rights of American citizens and seems to me an apparent violation of the law,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm on Tuesday. “When you have collusion to suppress the civil rights of U.S. citizens” between the government and the private sector, “that violates federal law.”

The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million in taxpayer funds as reimbursements for processing its ban requests. “We have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” wrote a Twitter official in early 2021. That means “American taxpayers paid Twitter via the FBI to censor themselves and help Joe Biden win” the 2020 election, noted Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Social media officials engaged in “surveilling, sharing information about the typically constitutionally protected activities of U.S. citizens, and then censoring U.S. citizens at the behest of the FBI,” said Fitton. “If you get paid to do things like that, it sounds to me like you’re operating as an FBI informant or asset.” Freedom of speech is “a God-given right, and the FBI just can’t go in and ask someone to suppress it,” Fitton told Backholm.

Yet the effort has not lightened. In a January 2020 email from Carlos Monje Jr., Twitter director of Policy and Philanthropy, he stated, “a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our” policies, “including by whispering to congressional staff.”

That coordination is par for the course for the Left, former FBI Special agent Jonathan Gilliam told Backholm on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “The Democrat Party and the leftist socialists in this nation are very oppressive; they want to make people think the way they do, and they want to block people from spreading information that they don’t agree with.” FBI officials “moved from an observation platform to actually telling social media platforms what they would like to be pulled off. In effect, they were dictating [to] these social media platforms — and it’s not just Twitter.”

“Twitter [has] the same ideological stance as these leftists in the government [who] were basically doing the government’s bidding to oppress the First Amendment and to censor free speech,” he said.

Journalist Michael Schellenberger focused on the federal government’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story across social media platforms, beginning when the FBI intercepted the computer from repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac on December 9, 2019. Arrests and prosecution did not follow bur rather “an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” he wrote. “[D]uring all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed [high-ranking Twitter official] Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.”

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies held weekly meetings with Twitter, Roth revealed in December 2020, where “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” U.S. officials claimed the misinformation would be the work of APT28, a Russian intelligence unit. These alleged forthcoming foreign leaks were “discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Nor were the FBI “warnings” limited to one social media platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the intelligence community similarly “warned” his security team of a coming “dump.”

The FBI also surveilled Rudy Giuliani, who had received a copy of its contents and prepared to publish them before the 2020 election.

Just one month before the New York Post’s publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the feds had Roth and other social media figures take part in a “tabletop exercise” about a potential foreign intelligence agency’s “Hack-and-Dump” operation related to Hunter Biden. Formerly confidential documents about the exercise, run by the Aspen Institute, show social media agents reacted to a theoretical dump of documents from “Bidencrimes.info” implicating Joe Biden in illegal activity related to his son’s employment by Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The scenario shows the forces of the intelligence community, MSNBC, NPR, and social media squaring off against a misinformation campaign emanating from Rudy Giuliani, Fox News, and Mike Pompeo.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October, Yoel Roth said it “set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.”

Internal documents show Roth admitted the New York Post story isn’t “clearly in violation of anything” in Twitter’s policy. But, he said, the platform came to believe the “suggestion from experts” of an elaborate conspiracy theory: “there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware.”

On that basis, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, likely changing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. “So on top of the suppression of civil rights, you have potential election interference,” Fitton told Backholm. Enough Biden voters in swing states say they would have voted for another candidate had they known about the laptop story that it would have reelected President Donald Trump to a second term, according to a Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll.

“They were grooming Twitter employees throughout the autumn of 2020 to immediately recognize our story … Russian disinformation, hacked material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, author of “The Laptop from Hell,” told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night. “And they sweetened the pie by giving Twitter $3.4 million of taxpayer money.” The federal government set up “an entire censorship regime … to ensure no derogatory material about Joe Biden from the laptop would ever see the light of day before the election. It was strangled at birth.”

“Unfortunately, half of the country believes that, because their media organs of choice have completely ignored the Twitter files,” Devine said. Legacy media outlets instead “peddled lies from the intelligence community from the very beginning of the Trump campaign, the Russian collusion lies that just now blended into these lies about the Hunter Biden laptop also being Russian disinformation. And it all helps one side of politics, which is the Democrats.”

Twitter Files #8, released on Tuesday by Lee Fang, revealed the U.S. government used a “vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda” to promote official U.S. policy, and possibly spread misinformation about its enemies, on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter “whitelisted” a handful of accounts, which military officials in time presented as legitimate accounts of people living in the Middle East, not intelligence assets recycling propaganda. Twitter officials were “well aware” of at least 157 such accounts, many of which it “discovered” on its own. A separate investigation found the network extended beyond Twitter onto other social media platforms, where phony accounts, complete with artificially generated photos accused Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” and other war atrocities propaganda.

Gilliam sees little hope for change on social media at large, “as long as the leftists are in charge” of the government and social media platforms. “And the Republican Party is full of careerists that don’t do anything.”

Yet Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) promised that the incoming Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee will investigate the FBI’s actions thoroughly. “Thankfully, we now have evidence and facts to be able to bring in these individuals and depose them,” Congressman Steube told Backholm Monday. “And we’re looking forward to doing that.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: LinkedIn Joins the Social Media ‘Cabal’ Censoring the Truth about 2020 Election, Covid Vaccines and Biden 

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. 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.

Musk’s Twitter Buy ‘The Best $44 Billion I’ve Seen Spent in My Lifetime’: Congressman

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If Elon Musk won’t suppress the news, CBS, ABC, and NBC News are more than happy to. While the Twitter files continue to drip out damning evidence of the company’s pre-Musk bias, three of America’s biggest outlets refuse to cover the story that’s riveting people the world over. In an ironic twist, the media is so beholden to Big Tech that it is suppressing a story about suppression. But don’t think the truth won’t get out, Congressman Pat Fallon (R-Texas) warns. The GOP is weeks away from House control, and no amount of coordinated media blackouts will protect Silicon Valley then.

“Get ready for Republican oversight” was the message of incoming soon-to-be committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.). Like the rest of his conservative colleagues, he’s ready to dive into the last two years of criminal mismanagement under Democratic rule — on everything from the border and COVID to Afghanistan, energy, and Hunter Biden. But this latest wrinkle, this proof of widescale, devastating, conservative censorship will be priority #1.

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) may have been unsurprised by the revelations at Twitter, but he’s outraged nonetheless. “…[O]ur worst fears and suspicions have been confirmed,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “Really. I mean, you had the head of their legal department, Vijaya Gadde, admitting that the FBI told him, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to get probably a hack and leak story in October dealing with Hunter Biden. So just be aware of that and take action.’ That’s very troubling.” Add that to the suspicions that Google “magically” made 70% of GOP campaign emails redirect into spam, and Fallon warns that this is a much bigger, more sinister problem than people realize.

“Now we’ve confirmed that Twitter, I suspect Facebook, and other Big Tech firms are doing the same thing. We’ll get them under oath, because they claim that they’re not biased — which I find laughable, being that I’ve been… a victim of their shadow-banning for years. So let’s ask them… and see what they say. And if they want to commit perjury, well, then, they’re going to have to pay the consequences — and then they might do a perp walk after all.”

Perkins pointed out that while Twitter might be a private company, “they’ve become the public square. … They’re like a public utility… like a telephone company. And can you imagine the telephone company refusing to do service with one person because they don’t like their politics? But that’s essentially what we have with Big Tech.” And worse, he explained, since the Biden administration was colluding with these platforms to squelch “disinformation.”

“If you’re on the government clock,” Fallon argued, “… and using taxpayer resources to meddle in politics and campaigning — you’re breaking federal law. And it seems to us [from] what we’ve uncovered thus far, that’s exactly what went on. That’s why another [reason] we need to call some of these former executives and current executives of Big Tech [before Congress and ask], ‘Have government officials [been] pressuring you and telling you to edit political free speech?’”

Asked if Twitter violated election laws, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from 2006-2007, replied, “The answer to that is yes.” But, he told Perkins, “In September of last year, the Federal Election Commission, which has authority over investigating violations of our federal campaign finance laws, actually dismissed complaints that have been filed against Twitter — not only for shadow-banning Republican elected officials and candidates, but also for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

Twitter executives claimed they hadn’t coordinated with the Biden campaign. But also, von Spakovsky, explained, Jack Dorsey’s team insisted they had “a bona fide commercial reason for suppressing the Hunter Biden story, which was their internal policy against publishing hacked materials.” But now that we know they were lying, the FEC needs “to reopen that file, reconsider the case, and potentially make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for any Twitter executives who committed perjury in their testimony to the FEC,” he insisted. After all, it’s “a potential violation of campaign finance law,” the former commissioner pointed out.

The lawyers who filed the original complaints need to go back to the FEC and say, “You might need to reconsider your decision to close the file based on this newly uncovered evidence,” von Spakovsky urged. At the end of the day, the FEC has civil authority, “so they can impose fines and … penalties on anyone violating campaign finance laws, including a corporation.”

In the meantime, expect an intense, in-depth investigation of Twitter and all of the social media platforms suspected of cracking down on conservative or politically inconvenient messaging. “This is the best $44 billion I’ve seen spent in my lifetime,” Fallon insisted. “I mean, thank you, Elon Musk. It’s like the Wizard of Oz, and he’s pulled back the curtain, and we find that all of our suspicions have been confirmed.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ex-Twitter Manager Slapped With Three-Year Prison Sentence For Spying For Saudi Arabia

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washing Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. 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.

Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth

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Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.

Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.

The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.

Sound and fury

Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,

The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.

Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.

Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:

  • First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
  • Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
  • Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.

Thin ice

While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.

For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.

The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.

But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.

If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.

We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”

Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.

It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.

In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

RELATED VIDEO: Lib Gets OWNED When GOP Rep. Uses Her Own Testimony Against Her In Real-Time

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Musk Releases Details On How Twitter Censored The Hunter Biden Laptop Story

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This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

Matt Taibbi, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, released what Elon Musk has referred to as “The Twitter Files,” Friday afternoon detailing how the social media platform suppressed a New York Post story regarding a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

The NYP story revealed an email — which was verified soon after by the Daily Caller News Foundation — that connected President Joe Biden with an executive at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, with the executive thanking the president’s son for “giving me an opportunity to meet your father.” Taibbi alleged that former head of legal, policy and trust Viyaja Gadde played a “key role,” in the decision to suppress the story, which was made without the knowledge of then-CEO Jack Dorsey, but without any government involvement.

Taibbi tweeted an email indicating that Twitter’s trust and safety team initially explained to other employees that it made the decision to suppress the story — the company even went so far as to prevent it from being sent in private messages — because it violated Twitter’s policy for sharing “hacked materials.” Taibbi tweeted two additional emails that show Twitter employees discussing posts flagged by the Democratic National Committee and Biden staff, and communication on how to moderate the posts.

Democratic Rep. Khanna of California reached out to Gadde personally after the story was suppressed, concerned that Twitter’s actions were a “violation of the 1st Amendment [sic] principles,” according to Taibbi. Carl Szacbo, general counsel at trade association NetChoice that advocates for limited government intervention online, sent a letter to Twitter’s head of Public Policy, Lauren Culberston, noting that while members from both parties were frustrated with Twitter’s response to the situation, the three Democratic lawmakers they had polled were in agreement that social media companies needed to moderate more, arguing that “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

Sharing the NYP story was banned on Twitter from Oct. 14-16, 2020, a move that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, described as a mistake in an interview on Nov. 30, 2022. Dozens of former intelligence officials criticized the NYP story in October 2020 as likely linked to Russian disinformation in an open letter, according to Politico; however, the veracity of the laptop’s contents has been confirmed by several major news organizations since the DCNF.

Facebook also prevented users from sharing the story, which alleged that the laptop’s hard drive contained video of Hunter Biden using drugs while engaging in sexual activities.

Months before the NYP story, tapes leaked by Andriy Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament with connections to Russia’s intelligence, alleged that Joe Biden had pressured the former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma, where his son was a member of the board, when he was the Vice President.

Twitter did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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‘The People Have Spoken’: Musk Announces Mass ‘Amnesty’ For Most Banned Twitter Accounts After Poll

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Twitter owner Elon Musk announced Thursday that an “amnesty” for most banned accounts would start next week, following a poll posted Wednesday afternoon.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk posted on the social media site Thursday, before adding the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” He announced the decision just over two hours after the poll on the amnesty closed.

Over 3.1 million people voted in the poll Musk posted Wednesday, with 72.4% voting in favor of the “general amnesty” for account that had not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The Tesla CEO reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account Saturday, following a similar poll in which 51.8% of users voted for Trump’s reinstatement.

Some suspended accounts that could be reinstated include those of Dr. Robert Malone, who was suspended for supposed misinformation, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Musk hinted at future plans for Twitter in a response to a Wednesday afternoon tweet by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

“Please limit content moderation to illegal content (or, at most, a narrow interpretation of moderation under Section 230) and give users the tools that enable the freedom to choose what content they see,” Fitton tweeted.

“That’s the general idea,” Musk replied.

Musk closed the deal to purchase Twitter on Oct. 27, seeking to restore free speech to the site, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Tesla CEO did indicate there was one type of post whose removal he considered urgent.

“Removing child exploitation is priority #1,” Musk tweeted early Thursday morning. “Please reply in comments if you see anything that Twitter needs to address.”

His takeover prompted multiple advertisers to pause spending, while Democratic senators pushed for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the social media site.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

HAROLD HUTCHISON

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Musk Saw That As Problematic’: Babylon Bee CEO Reacts After Twitter Reinstatement

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Government Officials Have A Special Portal To Flag Facebook Posts For Censorship

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The Department of Homeland Security has left open a special feature that allows government officials to flag Facebook posts for misinformation after scrapping a controversial advisory board tasked with developing guidelines for social media censorship, the Intercept reported Monday.

DHS announced plans for a Disinformation Governance Board to “develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May, according to The Hill. While DHS shuttered the initiative after an onslaught of bipartisan opposition decrying the potential censorship, the Intercept found through an analysis of public and leaked documents that government efforts to police tech companies goes on.

Those activities include a Facebook portal only accessible by government and law enforcement representatives to formally request the platform kill or label alleged misinformation, according to the Intercept. A leaked set of slides contains instructions on how to operate the system, and the URL to access the site — facebook.com/xtakedowns/login — was still active at the time of publication.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” a DHS official told a Microsoft representative in February, according to the Intercept.

The U.S. government has for years discussed the scope and scale of online content moderation the government should engage in, as well as how to compel social media platforms to flag or remove “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” the Intercept reported, citing meeting minutes and records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt.

The department now considers rooting out misinformation online as a critical element of its overall mission, according to a draft of the 2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review reviewed by the Intercept.

While the document highlights counter-terrorism as DHS’s primary objective, it acknowledges that “misinformation and disinformation spread online” can exacerbate terrorist threats from “domestic violent extremists,” according to the Intercept. It calls for DHS to use advanced computer analytical software and hire experts “to better understand how threat actors use online platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to inspire or incite violence.”

However, DHS has defined the “critical infrastructure” threatened by domestic terrorists to encompass trust in government, public health and election security, according to the Intercept.

“No matter your political allegiances, all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the government’s preferred decisions about what content we can see online,” Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Intercept.

Agencies under DHS — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology Directorate and the Secret Service — all have directives to combat misinformation online, the Intercept reported, citing a DHS Inspector General report from August.

Meta and DHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: GOP Senators Release Documents Showing Biden Admin Lied About Disinfo Board

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Credentialism, Crisis and Censorship: How the Left Eliminated Debate

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Everything that progressive fascists believe is now an official fact.

“The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” authored by a CBS reporter and a political activist, is the latest effort by leftists to wrap themselves in the banner of truth.

Media bias has shed its protective coloration of neutrality and blares that its side, leftists, represent the truth and conservatives the ‘lie’. The title of the “The Big Truth”, an otherwise forgettable exercise in virtue signaling, is interesting only because it so perfectly encompasses a media feed that is a mad libs game of “X Republican lied, Y Democrat hopes truth will win out.”

The problem is that this isn’t just propaganda distilled to its raw essence so that every media headline now reads like the title of Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”.

The problem is that the leftists created the infrastructure of a new truth using the three Cs, credentialism, crisis and censorship, to eliminate debate and the marketplace of ideas.

Credentialism has experts, activists, academics, members of leftist think-tanks and non-profits, wrongly described as non-partisan, and other interested figures with degrees, declaring that a leftist narrative, global warming, systemic racism, transgenderism in children, or election results is a fact backed by studies and research. A crisis is declared accompanied by dire warnings that questioning their manufactured truth will cost more lives. In the final stage, censorship, internet monopolies, allied with the media and politicians, suppress disagreement as misinformation.

Before, in between and after the media serves as the connective tissue, promoting partisan hacks as experts, hammering home the crisis and pressuring tech firms to censor dissent.

While pandemic lockdowns will quickly come to mind, the model was operating before then and has come to be used on virtually any issue from refugees to questioning elections (won by the media party) to crime and school sexualization. Everything the Left believes is now a fact and a crisis, disagreeing with it is disinformation, treason and terrorism. The crackdown swiftly follows.

Facts, we are often told, cannot be debated. And since everything the Left believes is a fact, there is no longer any room for debate. Reasonable and intelligent people of good faith, the media tells us, would never disagree with these facts. Only bigot, trolls and extremists peddling disinformation, dissent. And since they disagree with the truth and the facts, they’re liars.

And censoring “extremists” and “liars” has become the new civic duty of internet monopolies. This is the ubiquitous progressive fascism of cancel culture, censorship and endless battles against misinformation that have come to define what used to be the marketplace of ideas.

Questioning the credentials of the experts is an attack on science, facts and the very idea of truth. Civil society, the experts tell us, can’t exist unless we trust them. Anyone who disagrees is out to undermine society and tear apart the official artificial truth that is meant to bind us in the digital Mordor being built by mighty tech monopolies one server farm and fact check at a time.

Add on the second C, crisis, and there isn’t even any time or space to debate the ethics of silencing political dissent while people are dying from cow flatulence, law enforcement or an inability to speedily sexually mutilate children. Censorship becomes more urgent than ever.

Declaring that their opinions are “truth” and that any disagreement is a “lie” is a crucial element.

The media’s narrative is more than just propaganda. The rhetoric you used to hear from Franken, Stewart and Colbert has become a crucial part of a massive censorship scheme. But by focusing on the negative, the censorship of dissent, it’s easy to miss what has actually happened, which is a manufactured consensus tying together the government, the media, think-tanks and non-profits, academia and internet monopolies in one totalitarian system.

Progressive fascism suppresses disagreement in order to unilaterally impose its official “truths”.

At the heart of the debate is the question of what truth is and how we arrive at it. Media bias and debates over what objective journalism is run up against the “new truths” every time.

A simple bit of factual objective reporting might be that Bob X shot Jack Y in the head in the middle of Main Street. Caught on camera, what went on down is the indisputable truth. The new truth, the one that increasingly shows up in media coverage, is that systemic racism, income inequality and the lack of gun control laws led to a shooting on Main Street. Bob and Jack, like all individuals, are mere bit players in the larger leftist sociopolitical dramas of class and race.

The school shooter is an afterthought in the scramble to call for new gun control laws, the rapist is just a figment of abortion laws and misogyny, hurricane victims have to make way for reports about global warming. The traditional leftist belief that people are just pawns of the academic phenomena pervades the media because it represents the new truth.

The new truth treats a worldview as a fact. Individuals in the media have become types, irrelevant as people, vital only in that they convey the larger leftist worldview. A school shooting victim who advocates for gun control can easily gain a national profile, but one who calls for locking up criminals never will.

Journalists used to think that truths were personal, not political. The new truth has reversed everything with the ultimate truths being political and personal truths relegated to the anecdotal.

Who, What, When, Where, and Why has been reduced to only the last W. Only the ‘Why’ matters and the answers are always political. The ‘Why’ is systemic racism, global warming, a lack of gun control laws, the patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, colonialism, and the rest of the attacks on civilization. The other four Ws are just there to provide examples to illustrate the fifth.

The media wraps itself in the banner of the truth because it’s retreating from the facts. Its fact checks, a crucial tool for both credentialism and crisis, will often deem things that are true to be false because they lack context. And given enough of the right context, things that are factually false can be made to seem true and things that are factually true can appear false.

Credentialism makes narratives seem to resemble facts. But the narrative is a belief system that contends that leftist ideas are absolutely true in some higher sense, despite failing to work in real life. It’s the ‘truthiness’ that Colbert made his career mocking, with activists in expert drag to make it seem as if it’s the product of objective research rather than feelings.

The Left is not a movement of facts, no movement is. People are not passionately driven to fight and die, to uproot lives and transform society by objective facts and research studies. They fight out of love and hate, a desire for independence, tribalism, greed, ego, idealism and a search for meaning and a thousand other intangibles that are part of human nature, not for facts.

Emerging in an era where scientific discoveries were changing the world, the Left has always garbed its prejudices, biases, drives and malice in the veneer of academic theory. Its genius has been to bridge the lower realm of the peasant revolt with the intellectualism of the salon, the mind and the heart, claiming the sanction of both reason and empathy when it has neither.

The new truth is more of the same. Its truth is the conviction that the holistic leftist worldview is factually accurate in all of its details. The expert credentialism deployed to create facts and then fact checks is just apologia for an ideological movement. What used to be propaganda, activists in expert drag, has morphed into full progressive fascism that is out to impose its truth on you.

And to silence everyone who disagrees.

AUTHOR

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Elon Musk Finally Takes Over Twitter, Fires Top Executives

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After a months long legal battle, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk officially reached a deal with Twitter on Thursday to become the sole owner of the social media giant in a historic shakeup of the tech industry, according to multiple sources.

The deal, initially agreed upon in April, takes Twitter private at $54.20 per share, a roughly $44 billion transaction that the tech mogul has previously attempted to escape over claims that he was misled about the number of spam or “bot” accounts on the platform. As one of his first moves, Musk reportedly fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety, The Washington Post reported.

Gadde oversaw many content moderation decisions, drawing criticism from conservatives and Republicans for a censorship-heavy approach, and was heavily involved in the decision to kick off former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

While Musk’s exact plans for the platform are not yet known at time of writing, he has made several public comments, primarily on Twitter itself, stressing the importance of the medium as a forum that protects “free speech,” according to The Washington Post. However, Musk has clearly stated that he intends to reverse the ban on former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, a decision he characterized as “flat out stupid,” at an event hosted by the Financial Times.

“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” Musk tweeted on April 27, weeks after the initial deal was made. “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”

Musk has also reportedly told investors supporting his bid to purchase the company that he intends to lay off roughly 75% of the tech giant’s staff, cutting the company to just 2,000 workers, The Washington Post reported. Musk has publicly commented that he believes the company is overstaffed, but former Twitter employees and tech analysts have criticized the move as being too drastic, potentially exposing the company to security and moderation issues.

Musk has been vocal about his intention to use Twitter as a stepping stone to create an app known as X, which he describes as “the everything app.” When a Twitter user claimed that it would have been less difficult to simply build X from scratch, Musk countered that the purchase would shave 3 to 5 years of development time, although he hedged the claim by admitting “I could be wrong.”

Critics have argued that a Musk takeover will cause the platform to be more prone to spreading misinformation and incentivize or encourage dangerous practices that will harm women and people of color on the platform, The Hill reported. Angelo Carusone, president of left-wing media watchdog Media Matters, compared Musk’s attempted acquisition to the formation of Fox News, an organization he characterized as having a “distorting effect” on U.S. media, in an interview with The Hill.

“Elon Musk is about to rip open Pandora’s box and flood the internet once again with hate, misogyny, racism and conspiracy theories,” said Bridget Todd, communications director of feminist advocacy organization UltraViolet in an Oct. 4 statement. “We should all be terrified.”

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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Federal Court Upholds Texas Social Media Bill, Rules Corporations Do Not Have ‘Right’ To Censor

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The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals preserved Texas state law Friday that would stop large social media platforms from restricting particular opinions.

Texas’ HB 20 was signed last year and generally prohibits platforms with over 50 million monthly U.S. users from censoring them based on their viewpoints. The Computer Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the NetChoice organization, representing social media companies, argued that aspects of the law were unconstitutional but failed to convince the court.

“In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment,” the court’s majority decision said. “That Amendment, of course, protects every person’s right to ‘the freedom of speech.’ But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech.”

The appeals court must give the district court that previously decided the case written instructions for the law to become effective, according to Politico. A 5-4 May U.S. Supreme Court ruling had halted the law from going into force after an emergency request by the CCIA and NetChoice.

Appealing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the circuit court’s decision Friday, tweeting, “#BigTech CANNOT censor the political voices of ANY Texan! The 5th Circuit ‘reject[s] the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”

CCIA President Matt Schruers decried the ruling, stating, “Forcing private companies to give equal treatment to all viewpoints on their platforms places foreign propaganda and extremism on equal footing with decent Internet users, and places Americans at risk,” according to The Hill.

The Supreme Court could still be asked to directly consider the law’s validity, the outlet reported.

In May, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a block on enforcing parts of Florida Senate Bill 7072, which would require social media platforms to explain the reasons for individual acts of supposed censorship, deplatforming and shadow banning and stop them from censoring a “journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast,” according to The National Law Review.

“We are disappointed that the Fifth Circuit’s split decision undermines First Amendment protections and creates a circuit split with the unanimous decision of the Eleventh Circuit,” NetChoice Vice President and General Counsel Carl Szabo said in a Friday press release. “We remain convinced that when the U.S. Supreme Court hears one of our cases, it will uphold the First Amendment rights of websites, platforms, and apps.”

NetChoice declined the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. The CCIA did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

TREVOR SCHAKOHL

Legal reporter. 

RELATED ARTICLE: Facebook Spied On Conservative Users’ Private Messages, Fed ‘Leads’ To The FBI: REPORT

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Google Search is Bad. On Purpose.

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Charlie Warzel of Galaxy Brain has an Atlantic essay on Google that’s far short of Galaxy Brain. It recapitulates the now famous thread on why searching Reddit is better than searching Google, and offers random speculation on what’s wrong with Google Search and whether it might not be “leaving us behind”.

It’s packed with so many Google apologetics, I certainly hope that Google paid for it, e.g.

Google search might be worse now because, like much of the internet, it has matured and has been ruthlessly commercialized. In an attempt to avoid regulation and be corporate-friendly, parts of it might be less wild. But some of what feels dead or dying about Google might be our own nostalgia for a smaller, less mature internet. Sullivan, the Search liaison, understands this longing for the past, but told me that what feels like a Google change is also the search engine responding to the evolution of the web…

Haynes agrees that ads’ presence on Search is worse than ever and the company’s decision to prioritize its own products and features over organic results is frustrating. But she argues that Google’s flagship product has actually gotten better and much more complex over time. That complexity, she suggests, might be why searching feels different right now.

Nah.

The problem with Google Search can be easily summarized as a lack of competition. Aside from Bing and satellite search sites like DuckDuckGo that use Bing’s search index, there’s nothing.

Google so thoroughly dominates search that there’s no competition. And so no incentive for it do anything except monetize search up to its eyeballs.

Alphabet doesn’t need good searches. Its searches are so bad because it stopped having any interest in having you find things a while back. What it wants you to do is…

  1. Click on its services
  2. Click on its ads
  3. Search in predictable ways so that it can sell ads

Helping you find things is not on the list because Google does not make money if you spend 2 seconds clicking on the first search result and find what you’re looking for.

Google makes more money when you can’t find things than when you do. It makes more money when it serves you bad results. It makes more money when it ignores what you searched for and instead serves up the results that make it money.

This is the definition of why monopolies are terrible. But Google has a monopoly on internet search for reasons I’ve gone into before. And so internet search is terrible and as Google, like most big companies, gets hungrier, they’re going to get worse.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Only Internet Fascism Can Save Democracy

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Won’t someone save democracy from the people?

Free speech on the internet endangers democracy, Barack Obama told Stanford University.

The widely hailed speech at Big Tech’s favorite university claimed that autocrats are “subverting democracy” and that democracies have “grown dangerously complacent.” In the slow parade of teleprompter clichés he even  warned that “too often we’ve taken freedom for granted.”

To Obama, the threat to democracy doesn’t come from government power, but the lack of it.

“You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” he summed up.

Like every Obama speech, “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm” didn’t offer anything new, just a distillation of familiar talking points and misplaced assumptions.

The assumption at the heart of Obama’s speech and that of the range of arguments depicting free speech as a cultural and national threat is that the purpose of discourse is state power.

Obama, like many post-liberal lefty critics of free speech, reduces speech to its social impact and its social impact to its political impact. This holistic integration is so fundamental to Marxists and many lefties that they don’t even think twice about the idea that everything we do is reducible to a move on the great abacus of social justice. The food you eat, the car you buy, and the words you say have the potential to either save or damn the planet and humanity.

This quasi-religious conception of mass social mobilization pervades American society. It’s the precondition for wokeness because the only possible moral justification for terrorizing random people on social media is the conviction that governance isn’t political, it’s social, and that the only way to avert climate change and social inequality is by controlling what everyone believes.

Wokeness collapses the distinction between the private and public spheres, and between government and individuals. In a national social crisis, the only conceptual framework through which the Left ever really governs, there’s no time for such liberal niceties as private spheres.

Obama’s speech neatly illustrates the fascism at the heart of this panopticon political project.

Introduce disagreement and you “raise enough questions” that people “no longer know what to believe” and then “lose trust in their leaders”, “mainstream media” and even “truth”. Stripped of all the Brookings Institute globalist prose, what Obama is really saying is that individual disagreement undermines the state. And that truth is dependent on public faith in the state.

This is a value system utterly at odds with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, one which envisions an intimate link between individual speech and state authority that would have horrified King George III, but absolutely delighted Hitler or Stalin.

It assumes that there can be no other legitimate points of view other than the official one and that there should be no leaders except those who share them. Limiting the range of opinions is necessary to protect state power because there is no distinction between them and the state.

Or as a certain Austrian artist once put it, “One people, One state, One leader”.

When he was promoting his last book two years ago, Obama made the same arguments. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”

The assumption that the democratic process leads to truth rather than choice, absolute rightness rather than people power, is an undemocratic paradigm. Its inevitable conclusion becomes that of Obama, that democracy must be protected by controlling the people.

Not only elections, but ideas, are too important to be left to the public.

Obama doesn’t want a marketplace of ideas because people might get the wrong idea and vote him and his political allies out of office. The explicit goal of internet censorship is to control election outcomes by filtering what information the public is able to access.

Like the provenance of a certain Delaware artist’s laptop.

Narrowing the range of acceptable information in order to narrow the range of acceptable opinions, candidates and political systems is the first fundamental trick of tyrannies. It takes a certain chutzpah and a stock of Orwellian buzzwords to redefine that as protecting democracy.

Obama complains, “China’s built a great firewall around the Internet, turning it into a vehicle for domestic indoctrination” and proposes a democratic firewall around the internet under a “regulatory structure” to be designed with “communities of color” to slow “the spread of harmful content.” The democratic people of color firewall will be so much better than China’s firewall.

Pro-censorship elites have the same assumptions as China about the interaction between speech, society, and the state which is why they, like Obama, arrive at the same conclusions. They can dress up those conclusions in buzzwords about “democracy” and “people of color”, but those are differences of style, not substance. The trains all end up at the same station.

Obama speaks about “bugs” in the Constitution. While he is always happy to critique America, the particular totalitarian bug here is deeply embedded into the leftist worldview which denies that people have individual agency, insists that everyone is a prisoner of their social context, and contends that the purpose of the society and the state is an enlightened intertwining. The bug, which is really more of a feature, directly leads to the same outcome as in China or Stanford.

A free society requires healthy breathing spaces between politics and life. The difference between a politicized society and a tyranny is only time. The question at the heart of this debate is “What is discourse for” which is really the question of, “What are people here for?” To believe, as the Left does, that people primarily exist as vehicles for political change is to enslave them.

That’s why every leftist revolution invariably slides toward tyranny along the same worn tracks.

The Founding Fathers believed that people would self-define their purposes. That was why America’s revolution uniquely led to freedom and why leftist revolutions lead to tyranny.

America defined freedom as individual power while lefties define it by the power of the state.

Obama is simply replaying what happens when liberation is treated as a collective enterprise, a journey toward rather than from, that can only be achieved collectively, through the exercise of state power rather than individually through personal choices. The internet, once individualistic, has become collective, and social media, the ultimate embodiment of that collectivism, has become the battleground between individualist expressers and collectivist censors.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter’s Plan Bee: Censorship

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“This is real life.” To Babylon Bee creator Adam Ford, it was important to make that distinction, since even the world’s greatest satirists couldn’t imagine a scenario like this one. Twitter, king of conservative censorship, wielder of the all-powerful on/off switch, had done it again. In the growing genre of it-sounds-like-fake-news-but-isn’t, Big Tech’s thought police locked the Bee’s account for recognizing something all of us have been tested on since high school: biology.

The offending post was meant to be a mockery of USA Today, which last week decided to name a female-identifying man, HHS’s Rachel Levine, as one of the newspaper’s “Women of the Year.” The announcement, which was second in absurdity only to Joe Biden appointing him in the first place, showed what kind of outrageous, science-defying dogma is being pushed on unwilling Americans. The Bee, seizing the moment to make a point as only it can, declared Levine its first-ever “Man of the Year,” writing: “Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services… He often wears a dress, which some people think is weird — but he doesn’t care one bit. Come on! Men in India wear dress-type garments, don’t they?”

Apparently, the sarcasm hit a nerve at Twitter, and the Silicon Valley titan — who has a reputation for pulling the plug on uncomfortable truths — let Bee CEO Seth Dillon know that its post violated the company’s “hateful content” policy. In a message to fans, Dillon confirmed, “We’re told our account will be restored in 12 hours, but the countdown won’t begin until we delete the truth that violates the Twitter rules.” But, he vowed, “We’re not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

Of course, the irony of this whole uproar is that USA Today is the one “harassing other people on the basis of… gender.” What does it say to billions of real women — that they’re completely indistinguishable from men? That the sum total of being a woman is throwing on a dress and some make-up? The so-called “party of women” is now a party of make-believe. It’s one reason feminists, who stood outside the NCAA swim meet this weekend, now say they’re “politically homeless.” “I was historically liberal,” one woman vented outside of the girls’ collegiate championship where Lia Thomas was racing. Now? “I don’t think the Democrats care about women and girls. They [want] to put men in [women’s] prisons and men on [girls’] sports teams… I think that we’re going to have a lot of people walking away, really.”

The same Left who preaches that we shouldn’t judge people by their appearance in the race debate suddenly wants to define an entire gender by it. Forget the 6,500 genetic differences between the two sexes. Change your name and you can race as women, compete for jobs as women, win awards for women — erase women. And Babylon Bee doesn’t want any part of it. That would be “ideological surrender,” Dillon told NRO. Twitter could easily take down the tweet themselves, he pointed out, but instead, they want you to “bend the knee and admit wrongdoing by deleting the tweet yourself.”

“It’s not just that expressing these views is not allowed, you have to deny that you meant it. They want you to concede something. They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold,” Dillon shook his head. In this case, it’s not even an ideological position that Twitter demands submission to — it’s an outright lie. “We stated the fact that a man is a man and got [punished] for it,” Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann tweeted. “We are living in a clown world.”

And from college pools to classrooms, Americans are refusing to play along. They feel confident confronting this culture of delusion because teams like the Babylon Bee are brave enough to do it too. Deep down, Twitter feels incredibly threatened by the growing number of people willing to challenge the woke agenda. If they can shut down the ring leaders — the Christians with the biggest microphones — they think they’ll have a much better chance of forcing the rest of us in line.

At FRC’s ProLifeCon earlier this year, Mann was frank about the hurdle of censorship. Big Tech, Big Government, the mainstream media, the fact-checkers, “They all kind of work together to silence us… And that’s obviously really scary for us,” he admitted, because that’s how they can “deplatform us.”

At the end of the day, though, the more cowardly we are as a movement, the more likely it is that the cancel culture will take over the marketplace of ideas. “And we don’t want that to happen. So I think we need to be more bold… and more open about [our] beliefs…” The best way you can help, Dillon agrees, is “never censor yourself. Insist that 2 and 2 make 4 even if Twitter tries to compel you to say otherwise…. Continue to say what’s true even if it has consequences. Make them ban tens of millions of us.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Senior Writer

Suzanne Bowdey returned to FRC in 2006 after a three-year absence. In her role as Senior Writer, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, religious freedom, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to the Christian Post. As part of the team that plans FRC Action’s Pray Vote Stand Summit (formerly the Values Voter Summit), she oversees the event’s schedule, speakers, and select publications.  Since 2020, she has also produced FRC’s weekly broadcast, “Pray Vote Stand.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.