Tag Archive for: social media

Who Told You That You Were Naked? Verification and the Blue Check Vacation

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If one didn’t know any better, one might think this was the day Don McClean sang about when he said it was the day the music died. Instead of saying “Bye, bye Miss American Pie,” we were all saying our farewells to the last vestige of a twenty-first century caste system: the venerable Twitter Blue Check.

Twitter head Elon Musk removed all legacy verification badges from user profiles, usually in the form of a blue check mark that signaled authenticity. Now anyone on the social media app (not just the notable and notorious) may have a blue check mark if they pay the $8 monthly fee to Twitter.

This move left many once-blue celebrities finding themselves naked and ashamed. Certified celebrity Alyssa Milano warned of the rampant impersonation that might ensue:

“So by revoking my blue check mark because I wouldn’t pay some arbitrary fee, someone can just be me and say a bunch of bul. l… Does that mean Twitter and

@elonmusk are liable for defamation or identity theft or fraud?”

Others, like “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander, had had enough already, and signaled the end of must-see-TV:

“Ok everyone. Twitter has removed my verification. I will no longer be posting on this app. Anyone who posts as me is an imposter. I wish you all well.”

Apparently, Twitter turned out to be the complete opposite of what Alexander expected it to be. Will the real B-list celebrity please stand up?

Bestselling author Stephen King, who has been critical of Musk’s plan to charge the $8 fee, was shocked to see that his blue check was still there:

“My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t.

My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t.”

Apparently, Musk has some penchant for charity and comped King’s account.

It’s true, I don’t fully understand this agony. I’ll never know the pain of losing my verification. On my own Twitter account, where I seldom tweet anything, I have never been counted among the vaunted verified aristocracy. Perhaps my snark at all this is due to envy. Regardless, the playing field in this particular social imaginary has been leveled. The social media bourgeoisie can still be bourgeoise if they pay the proletarian fee.

Whether the vacation of blue checks is right or wrong makes less difference than what this whole episode reveals about where our world is. It isn’t only Twitter celebrities that demand verification. It’s everywhere, stamped in our cultural clay. In recent years, especially here in the nation’s capital, it was vaccine passports and masks that served as verification that you weren’t a non-person. We still don’t leave the house without our driver’s license (even though we’ve still paid the fees and taken the tests even if the card is not on us). And have you ever tried to prove your identity to the DMV without bringing your electric bill that’s addressed to you? It’s enough to make us all doubt ourselves unless we have adequate documentation.

In Genesis 3, after the man and the woman had eaten the fruit and realized that they didn’t have any clothes on, they made garments from fig leaves — the couture of the day. Then when God came calling:

“…the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’” (Genesis 3:8–11, ESV)

Fig leaves make for poor clothing and serve even worse as a cover for our true natures. And perhaps celebrities and nobodies alike put a little too much trust in an icon of blue pixels to validate their standing. As exhibitionist as our world is today, most of us still don’t like being disrobed and left naked, and nakedness is at the heart of this pseudo controversy over a social media company’s labeling system. Too many have allowed artificial verification to be woven into their identities.

To verify something means to make certain that it’s true. Blue check or not, the last time I checked we were all created in the image of God. And that imago dei reflects the truth most brightly when it’s clothed not in a fig leaf, not in a blue check, but in the red blood of Jesus. Paul wrote to the Romans, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”

As they roam around in search of newfound verification, our disaffected checkless celebrities would do well to find that freedom of being brought to nothing. We all would do so well — and that’s verifiable.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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.

Damar Hamlin, Paul Pelosi, and the Culture of Cynicism

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Damar Hamlin is not dead. And Paul Pelosi was not engaging in funny business with his attacker.

Over the past few weeks, not everyone has agreed on those two points. Those who have reconciled the point with Hamlin seem to be more plentiful, and the consensus on the Pelosi opinion seems to be settling as well. Still, a cursory search of social media shows not everyone is convinced. But let’s back up a bit.

On January 2, 2023, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin dropped quickly to the ground after taking a hit in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals. He didn’t get up. Hamlin was hospitalized following a frighteningly long time on the field (the game was suspended), and a surprising nationwide prayer effort ensued. The social media rumor mill spun up immediately, with many attributing his cardiac arrest to his vaccination status. When that speculation didn’t lead to any conclusive ends, and public information about Hamlin’s case became scarce, another rumor began to circulate: Damar Hamlin was really dead. After all, even during his few public appearances following the incident, his face was obscured. It must be a body double, right?

Before the Hamlin incident, the slowly-emerging facts around the attack on then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband sparked its own slew of conspiracy theories on social media. Last fall, police responded to a 911 call about a home invasion at the Pelosi residence in San Francisco (Pelosi was in Washington at the time). When police arrived, Paul Pelosi was attacked by a man wielding a hammer. When initial public reports about the incident seemed hazy and incomplete, speculation and rumors ensued, often posed in the form of a question. Had Pelosi let the attacker in? Had he invited him? Did Paul Pelosi have an illicit relationship with the attacker? There were too many unanswered questions, went the narrative, and the official story didn’t add up.

Of course, as has now been shown neither conspiracy was true. Damar Hamlin is very much alive. Case closed. And the now-released video and audio of the Paul Pelosi incident show that, though the interaction was indeed weird (what home invasion isn’t a little weird?), Pelosi was most likely trying to keep the attacker calm — which ultimately failed when the police arrived.

Where do conspiracy theories like these emerge? What’s wrong with our society that people are so instantly cynical of anything and everything? Are we doomed to be a culture so enveloped in distrust that we can’t take anyone at their word?

Such an environment is not new. The prophet Jeremiah spoke about this as a warning to a people who weren’t following the Lord:

“Let everyone beware of his neighbor,
and put no trust in any brother,
for every brother is a deceiver,
and every neighbor goes about as a slanderer.
Everyone deceives his neighbor,
and no one speaks the truth;
they have taught their tongue to speak lies;
they weary themselves committing iniquity.
Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit,
they refuse to know me, declares the LORD.” (Jeremiah 9:4–6, ESV)

The further a culture strays from truth, the more it must search for it. Conspiracy theorists masquerade as the ultimate truth-seekers, except for the fact that they never arrive at the truth. Living in an age where flat earthers really do exist, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that any one of us might become swept up in a lesser conspiracy.

One contributing factor to this susceptibility is our appetite for immediate, omniscient knowledge about everything. Because he is a public figure, we take it for granted that we should know every detail about Damar Hamlin’s recovery. The fact that so many of us share much of our lives with the world on social media contributes — if we share everything about ourselves, then why shouldn’t we know everything about everyone else? The truth is, however, that social media personas are only part of the picture. The only way to fully know someone still requires some amount of physical proximity. That’s why most conspiracies are entertained from afar.

Even with the video evidence of Hamlin’s survival and Paul Pelosi’s genuine-yet-weird behavior during his attack, some will continue to refuse to acknowledge reality. Their never-ending pursuit of conspiratorial truth would come crashing down if they did. The cynic’s constant vigilance to see through everything and everyone causes them to miss what’s really present in front of them.

Jeremiah’s warning to his people was rooted in a refusal to know the Lord – a condition that’s not far removed from the conspiracy theorist’s refusal to ever arrive at the truth. Thankfully truth really does have an end in the person of Jesus Christ. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8, ESV). In him, we can find rest from the endless search to find a truth with endless depth.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hunter Biden Admits: Laptop is Mine

EDITORS NOTE: This 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.

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.

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

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

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

‘Screw Parental Interference’: Inside The Online Community Encouraging Kids To Transition

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In sequestered parts of the internet — blacklisted from Google searches — parents are discussing the spread of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), attributing their child’s newfound gender identity to online influence.

Reddit, a popular anonymous internet forum, harbors one such online community that promotes “affirming” a child’s gender confusion with or without adequate medical or psychological examination. The community, “r/trans,” allows self-identified minors to discuss cross-dressing, surgeries, and hormone replacement treatment with transgender individuals, most of whom identify online as adults.

Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who detransitioned after undergoing cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy, told the Daily Caller that she likely would not have transitioned if it weren’t for social media.

“My first exposure to transgender content was [online],” Cole said. “I saw female adolescents ages 12 to 19 talking about their transition. I feel like I wouldn’t have transitioned if I wasn’t exposed to that.”

At the age of 12, Cole began socially transitioning to a boy identity and told the Daily Caller that she began browsing Reddit communities.

“I was fed a lot of medical misinformation on [Reddit],” Cole said. “I was sort of pigeonholing myself into this ideology or community.”

Users of r/trans opt for a vocabulary outside of the day-to-day vernacular of most Americans. Fourteen-year-olds use slang such as “T,” which stands for testosterone hormones, or “MtF,” which stands for male to female.

A common post on the r/trans thread is titled “Do I Pass?” which features self-described trans-identifying individuals posting photos of themselves asking for affirmation from community members on whether they pass for the opposite sex.

Other popular threads seek advice from other r/trans members. In one post, a user who identifies as a 14-year-old biological male solicited advice on how to come out as transgender now that the user is “forced to reintegrate back into society for high school.”

Another purported minor, who claims to be a middle schooler and biological female, sought advice on chest binding.

“This year I am going into a whole new school (I’m in middle school) and I’m trans [female to male], my mom won’t let me cut my hair and she won’t buy me a binder. I’ve tried the sports bra tricks, didn’t bind well, and I don’t own a beanie to do the beanie trick. I need some advice.”

Cole told the Daily Caller that she was caught in a similar online community that praised her for each step in her physical transition.

“Initially, I wasn’t really interacting with other transgender people online directly,” Cole said. “When I reached more milestones in my transition … with each milestone, as they got more and more extreme, I got more praise. Both from people who call themselves ‘allies’ and other transgender people.”

A self-described “minor,” who claims to be a 16-year-old, discussed starting testosterone soon. The biological female sought advice on how to easily procure the hormone treatment.

Click here to view Reddit r/trans screen shot

Several of the threads allegedly posted by minors included comments from older users encouraging kids to cut parents out of their lives. A self-described high school freshman, who appears to be a biological female, solicited advice on whether to get a male-styled haircut despite the student’s mother’s wishes.

“I would be surprised if the grounding lasted more than a couple weeks. 4 years of grounding for cutting your hair once is ‘I’m cutting you out of my life as soon as I turn 18’ territory,” one user responded.

Users on the board overwhelmingly supported the student, encouraging the teen to get a haircut.

“Cut it, and style it however you want in spite of that ridiculous ultimatum. Then just preemptively learn to pick a lock … and sneak out with friends,” another user suggested.

“Off with her head,” a self-described trans woman said. “In this instance, her head is your hair. Cut that stuff off and feel good about yourself. Screw parental interference. They only know so much about you.”

Other advice included cutting a portion of hair to “hide it” at home and “put it up in a bun at school.” Another user suggested “falling asleep” with a wad of chewed bubble gum to get a haircut.

The r/trans thread also applauds minors taking medical steps to transition physically. A self-described 14-year-old posted in all capitalized letters, “GUYS I DID MY FIRST [TESTOSTERONE] SHOT TODAY!” The biological female received cheers and congratulatory messages from fellow users.

One user asked what country the 14-year-old lives in. “America in California,” the user responded.

Click here to view Reddit r/trans conversation with 14-year old girl

Other purported minors posted about their discomfort dealing with gender dysphoria. A 14-year-old biological male questioned whether 6’1″ was too tall to pass as a female, and a young biological female questioned whether or not to use the men’s bathroom at school.

One thread, allegedly written by a minor, solicited advice on how to purchase female clothing when the biological male’s parents have access to their bank account.

Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist with 30 years of experience and a transgender woman, told the Daily Caller that it’s undeniable that troubled adolescents are being influenced by social media communities.

“Many adolescents are spending a lot of time on these sites and they are influenced by them,” Anderson said. “It is influential in particular to kids who may be susceptible to others … or who are troubled and sincerely looking for answers.”

Cole described being “bombarded” with LGBT content at the age of 11, when she first obtained an Instagram account. She said she consistently saw content that downplayed femininity and motherhood in favor of content that was “super sexualized.” She credits Reddit and Instagram with promoting gender ideology.

Cole desisted from her transgender identity and said the same online communities that once love bombed her, now spew vile attacks at her character.

Cole’s experience appears common in anecdotal stories of parents with transgender teens worldwide. Dr. Lisa Litman, the scientist who coined the phrase “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, found that parents began reporting a correlation between children participating in online discussion groups and young adults who experience ROGD, despite having “no histories of childhood gender identity issues.”

A quick search of the words “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” shows only articles that discuss the controversy of ROGD and videos from activists on why the theory is false. Dr. Litman’s study on ROGD is not one of the primary results.

R/trans is only one of many online forums where children go to discuss their ever-changing gender identities.

Reddit did not respond to the Daily Caller’s multiple requests for comment.

AUTHOR

CHRISSY CLARK

Education reporter.

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

‘My Son Hunter’: An imperfect but necessary indictment of media’s corruption

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This satirical film reveals a disturbing truth about modern mainstream journalistic standards.

We all love the literary motif of the unwilling prostitute who, at the end of the story, does virtuous deeds to save herself and others. In Crime and Punishment, Sonya is instrumental in Raskolnikov’s redemption. Director Robert Davi uses the same formula to tell the story of President’s Biden son in My Son Hunter.

Grace struggles to pay for her college tuition, so she is a favourite escort of powerful men. As she encounters Hunter Biden in a world of cocaine, wild sex, and rampant corruption, she offers him a path to redemption — and of course, he rejects it.

Now, Davi is no Dostoevsky — nor does he intend to be. My Son Hunter is first and foremost political satire, all-too-frequently engaging in cheap shots. But it does take a stab at Dostoevskyan psychological profundity, and in that endeavour, it partly succeeds.

The shadow of successful Beau Biden — Hunter’s deceased brother — looms large over Hunter, who struggles to find meaning in life. Very much as Raskolnikov, he comes across as a pathological narcissist who engages in criminal activity as a way to prove to himself that he is so great so as to be above the law.

Overblown

Unfortunately, My Son Hunter often goes overboard and loses effectiveness. I lost count of the number of times Joe Biden sniffs the hair of women in the film. Is that necessary? That portrayal runs the risk of playing into the left-wing narrative that criticisms of the Bidens focus on petty things that can be easily dismissed.

The stakes are high, so a more focused and incisive portrayal was needed. Say what you want about Oliver Stone’s leftist politics and penchant for conspiracy theories, but he surely can strike an opponent in his films — Richard Nixon and George W. Bush being the most notorious cases.

The story of Hunter Biden lends itself to Stone’s sober cinematographic style, but My Son Hunter misses an opportunity, to the extent that it aims for low-hanging fruit. Yes, the Bidens are corrupt, but one is left wondering: can they be that corrupt? While the dialogues between Joe and Hunter are clever and amusing, the perversity defies credibility. Perhaps Davi was deliberately aiming more for Saturday Night Live’s lampooning style all along. If so, the film works at some level, but never entirely.

I would have personally enjoyed a more sober style because there is a far darker theme in the film. My Son Hunter is not about the moral failings of a privileged, corrupt drug addict. It is not even about crony capitalism and globalist elites. The real central theme is the media’s rot.

Media manipulation

Two scenes are particularly frightening. At the beginning of the film, Grace is at a Black Lives Matter protest, and records some of her comrades engaging in violent deeds. A fellow activist says: “You can’t post that video… it will make the protest look bad… Those people are too ignorant to understand complex moral issues. You have to withhold things for their own good. We choose truth over facts.” Grace acquiesces.

Towards the end of the film, Grace summons a journalist to expose Hunter’s corruption. The man tells her: “Even if what you are saying is true, it’s not news. We have the chance to take down a fascist dictator [Trump]… I’m sorry Grace, this one is not for me.” We now know that Twitter and Facebook — with their disturbing algorithms — were not the only ones trying to bury Hunter’s laptop under the sand.

As Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged, the FBI itself pressured him to do so, because they did not want the bad Orange Man to win the election — all with the excuse that the whole story was Russian disinformation. Later on, both the Washington Post and the New York Times had to reverse their stance and admit that, in fact, the laptop does contain compromising emails.

Plato infamously recommended telling people the Noble Lie. Very much as the Black Lives Matter activist in this film, Plato believed such lies were for people’s own good, as they were too stupid to understand things. In his seminal study of totalitarianism, Karl Popper persuasively argued that Plato’s plan became a central tenet of totalitarian regimes. That is the real fascism.

While being far from a perfect film, My Son Hunter provides meaningful insight on this issue, and hopefully it might become an important step towards much-needed media accountability in this woke age.

For the time being, we need to be realistic. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make an Oliver Stone-like blockbuster about the corruption and hypocrisy of the Left.

Rather, keep an eye out for low-budget productions like My Son Hunter that are bypassing the Hollywood production and distribution system. These include Uncle Tom I and II, various Christian films, such as Run, Hide, Fight.

They will not be great works of art, but at least they will be something. And from there, the quality of such films may gradually improve, until we again see mainstream studios portraying corrupt politicians from both sides of the political spectrum.

AUTHOR

Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade

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

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

EDITORS NOTE: The Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Twitter Unanimously Approves Elon Musk’s $44 Billion Purchase Bid

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Twitter’s board unanimously recommended Tuesday that shareholders approve billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy the social media site for $44 billion.

Musk told Twitter employees earlier in June that he still planned to move forward with the purchase, despite shares in the company remaining significantly lower than his offer price, The Associated Press reported. He noted on Tuesday that approval of the purchase by shareholders was one of a number of unresolved matters halting his purchase, the outlet continued.

The Tesla billionaire’s offer would net a profit of $15.22 per share for investors if it closed now, the AP noted. Musk offered to pay $54.20 per share, despite them falling short of this number upon opening bell Tuesday, the outlet reported.

Twitter’s board of directors said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it “unanimously recommends that you vote (for) the adoption of the merger agreement.”

Musk has previously said that Twitter “will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” He then offered to buy the entirety of the company in order to “unlock” the “extraordinary potential” of the social media platform. Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has praised Musk’s decision to purchase the platform and has also said that he will “never be CEO again.”

AUTHOR

KAY SMYTHE

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Rape Office’: Elon Musk Hammers NBC’s Many Scandals

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

Trump’s Truth Social Goes Live, SOARS to Number ONE on App Charts

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Fantastico! Make free speech great again.

TAKING BACK THE TRUTH: Trump’s Truth Social Goes Live, Already Number 1 on the App Store

By Hannity.com, February 21, 2022

Led by former Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump Media & Technology Group has high hopes for the launch, anticipating some big numbers within the first month.

“This week we will begin to roll out on the Apple App Store. That’s going to be awesome, because we’re going to get so many more people that are going to be on the platform,” Nunes said in a Sunday appearance on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.

“Our goal is, I think we’re going to hit it, I think by the end of March we’re going to be fully operational at least within the United States,” he added.

Truth is positioning itself as a champion of free speech with one of the biggest draws being the former President, himself.

https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1495768091229368320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1495768091229368320%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgellerreport.com%2F2022%2F02%2Ftrumps-truth-social-goes-live-soars-to-number-one-on-app-charts.html%2F

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

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Myth vs. Fact: The EARN IT Act

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Countering Myths About the EARN IT Act.

Contact your Members of Congress and urge them to COSPONSOR and support the EARN IT Act!

Why Tech Companies Should Support the EARN IT Act

Living in a world that is so heavily fixated on technology comes with its own consequences. Recent generations have grown up in the digital realm and most children are now immersed in it from a very early age. As it stands right now, children face an ever-increasing risk of being groomed and exploited online as perpetrators use social media platforms—among other digital mediums—to target and groom children. This and other factors have played a significant role in the exponential growth of the amount of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) circulating online.

Common misunderstandings and myths about the EARN IT Act are explained below, but the simplest way to understand the EARN IT Act is to note what it actually does:

  • The EARN IT Act allows survivors of child sexual abuse material to restore the privacy they have lost because their abuse was uploaded to the Internet.
  • The EARN IT Act clarifies that there is not now—nor has there ever has been—immunity for digital platforms that knowingly disseminate child sexual abuse material.
  • The EARN IT Act changes the term “child pornography” in federal statue to “child sexual abuse material” to ensure that it is treated as evidence of a crime.
  • The EARN IT Act creates a new online child exploitation prevention committee with oversight from Congress.
  • The EARN IT Act clarifies the right of consumers in regard to holding technology companies accountable for knowingly disseminating child sexual abuse material.

Understanding the Scope of the Problem the EARN IT Act is Addressing

In 2008, there were over 600,000 reports of CSAM made to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). These numbers were significant enough for the organization to call the problem what it was: an epidemic. Horrifically, the number of reports of CSAM received by NCMEC has multiplied exponentially in the decade since and the organization reported receiving over 70,000,000 reports of CSAM in 2019 alone.

Some of the most popular social media platforms—such as Instagram and Twitter—are furthering the problem by not reporting abuse found on their websites, and technology companies have long attempted to use Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) to hide from accountability. CDA 230, which was implemented in 1996, was intended to help foster growth in the early stages of the Internet but has since been wrongly interpreted by Interactive Computer Services (ICS) as an excuse to not work proactively to prevent exploitation found on and/or perpetrated via their online products. CDA 230 was never intended to protect sex traffickers or child predators online nor was it meant to allow CSAM (sometimes inaccurately referred to as “child pornography”) to run rampant in online spaces.

The EARN IT Act Means Clarity for Tech Companies and a Path to Justice for Survivors

Since its introduction, lobbyists representing portions of the technology industry have attempted to make misleading claims about the intent and impact of the EARN IT Act with hopes of preserving profit margins for tech behemoths that don’t want to spend money to make their online products safer. The claims they make are alarmist red herrings and do not actually address the structure or contents that make up the EARN IT Act. Below are several of the most common false claims/myths about the EARN IT Act and the reality behind them that show why the EARN IT Act is actually a good thing for consumers and the technology industry itself.

Myth #1: The EARN IT Act is an attack on end-to-end encryption and user privacy

Truth #1: Many tech companies are pushing back on the EARN IT act, claiming that it is an invasion to user privacy and will bring on more trouble involving mass surveillance.  However, this is not the case. The EARN IT act would implement new ways to combat CSAM on their platforms as technology continues to advance. Furthermore, tech companies are already capable of acquiring information on what is said and done on their programs, so why not implement the same technology to recognize and report CSAM when detected? Many of the safety features on these platforms would be directed toward helping children without infringing upon any freedoms of adults. It would hold these companies accountable for what is being shared even if the content came from a third-party user. This bill will incentivize tech companies to report and eliminate any CSAM they come across it on their platforms and is not an attack on end-to-end encryption and user privacy.

Myth #2: The EARN IT Act will eradicate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230)

Truth #2: Far from harming CDA 230, the EARN IT Act actually helps clarify its original intent. CDA 230 does not give technology companies immunity from accountability for participating in and/or profiting from crimes such as sex trafficking and CSAM. CDA 230 was created at a time when the internet was still in its developing stages and Congress was attempting to foster its growth, but it never gave technology companies the right to knowingly ignore or facilitate crimes such as sex trafficking and CSAM as they have tried to claim.

Mary Leary, professor of law at the Catholic University of America put it this way in a virtual Congressional Briefing: “The EARN IT act, I would argue, actually restores CDA 230 to the original intent of Congress as a component of an ecosystem that will better protect children.”

Today, there is widespread access to the internet and children are facing the consequences of online spaces which have not been built as adequately secured and protected environments. The EARN IT Act is not a threat towards CDA 230 but is, instead, a measure which will clarify the law and allow CDA 230 to operate as it was originally designed to do.

Myth #3: The EARN IT Act is an undemocratic way for the government to control the technology industry via burdensome regulations

Truth #3: The EARN IT Act is being introduced and vetted—and is built to be implemented—via established Constitutional processes. If passed, it includes the building of an Online Child Exploitation Prevention Commission made up of a diverse group of survivors of CSAM, technology industry representatives, law enforcement officials, privacy experts, and more. Because technology is always growing and morphing, the Commission will help guide and direct businesses and corporations in terms of policy. The Commission’s goal is to develop recommended best practices that interactive computer service providers can use to prevent, reduce, and respond to online child sexual exploitation, such as enticement, grooming, sex-trafficking, and sexual abuse, as well as the proliferation of online child sexual abuse material.

These best practices are recommendations, not mandates, and will be vetted and voted upon using established democratic processes in Congress. Technology companies would have the option to adopt those practices, but there is not punishment prescribed if they choose not to do so. In this regard, the EARN IT Act just clarifies that survivors do in fact have a path to justice available to them.

Myth #4: The EARN IT Act will threaten online speech and privacy rights for LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities

Truth #4: First things first, sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material never have been, are not now, and never should be protected categories of free speech. Secondly, the EARN IT Act does not contain—and is actually designed to prevent—any development of measures that would identify or target or collect data about users or groups of users. As noted previously, the EARN IT Act establishes a diverse commission which will develop recommended (again, not mandated) best practices that will then have to be democratically vetted and voted on before they are made official as recommended best practices. This design is intentional for, among other things, preventing the EARN IT Act from being quietly co-opted to target any person or group. In fact, because they are disproportionately affected by online sexual abuse and exploitation, the EARN IT Act will make the Internet a safer space for LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities.

Myth #5: The court’s decision to allow Doe v MindGeek to progress past the motion to dismiss shows that the EARN IT Act isn’t necessary

Truth #5: The judge’s ruling in Doe v MindGeek was important and precedent-setting, and the fact that it was precedent-setting is a case-in-point for why the EARN IT Act is still necessary. The judge ruled correctly that CDA 230 was never meant to protect technology companies from being held accountable for knowingly possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material, but there have been too many erroneous rulings on that matter in previous cases due to confusion in the courts. The EARN IT Act is designed to, among other things, address that confusion by clarifying the original intent of CDA 230 so that survivors are able to have a path to justice that has been closed on them incorrectly and unfairly in the past. The EARN IT Act is a democratic way that Congress can help ensure accurate and consistent application of existing laws moving forward.

The EARN IT Act Respects People, Incentivizes Technology Companies to Put Customers First, and Prioritizes Justice for Survivors     

We believe that technology companies and the tech industry at large should want to support the EARN IT Act if they truly have their customers’ best interests in mind. The EARN IT Act will help prevent the continued proliferation of CSAM, restore the intended protections of CDA 230, clarify the right to justice for survivors of CSAM, and empower consumers. These outcomes are beneficial to U.S. citizens and businesses alike. That is why the EARN IT Act is a bipartisan bill that should be easy to support.

Quote from Professor Hany Farid, University of California, Berkeley

Take Action

If you are moved to create an environment that protects children from sexual exploitation online, you can click here to send a message to your members of Congress to support the EARN IT Act. It only takes a little bit of your time to reach out and make a big difference for children.

Contact your Members of Congress and urge them to COSPONSOR and support the EARN IT Act!

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

Twitter Is Allowing Iranian Government Officials to Issue Death Threats Against Trump

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My latest in PJ Media:

Everyone knows that one Donald J. Trump of Palm Beach, Florida is the source and summit of evil in the modern world, but he has been banned from Twitter for over a year now, so the republic (you know, that thing the Democrats constantly refer to as “our democracy”) is safe. Twitter is nothing if not consistent: Trump is so extremely evil that Twitter is permitting official accounts of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the world’s premier regimes of color, to threaten to murder Trump and officials from his administration without being banned or even suspended. Death threats are ordinarily not permitted, but when they’re against Trump, they serve wokeness; what could possibly be wrong with that?

On New Year’s Day, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted: “Martyr Soleimani is an eternal reality that will live on forever. His assassins – including Trump & the like – will go down in history’s garbage bin, but of course after receiving retribution in this world for the crime they committed.” That “retribution in this world” bit was a clear threat, but Twitter did nothing to restrict Khamenei’s account.

Nor did Twitter do anything to the account of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps when it tweeted: “The Islamic Republic of Iran considers vengeance against those responsible for the Baghdad crime to be the right of all believers; whether they are drops in the ocean or bits of sand in the desert they’ll seek vengeance next to the criminals’ homes.”

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) commented: “So, the leftist oligarchs at Twitter will allow the [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] to tweet death threats at President Trump, but will deplatform him for calling for a peaceful protest? Last I checked, making death threats is inciting violence.”

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), skewered Twitter’s hypocrisy: “In Twitter’s safety rules and polices, they say, ‘You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people.’ If this is the case, why is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, allowed to threaten to kill President Donald Trump? Not only is Twitter exclusively censoring conservatives, but now they are letting Iran’s armed forces issue death threats to a former sitting president. Twitter needs to consider following their own policies and immediately remove this tweet.”

When contacted by the Washington Free Beacon, “Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on why the tweet remains active and whether that tweet violates the company’s guidelines.” That’s not surprising. What could they possibly say? Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who was recently banned from Twitter herself, called Twitter “an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.” When Twitter allows Iranian officials who shout “Death to America” a platform to threaten an American and bans that same American on false pretenses, it’s hard to say that Greene is wrong.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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GOVT CENSORSHIP: Biden Tells Social Media Platforms to Crack Down on Free Speech

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Iranian athletes call for canceling February match after pro-regime ‘Death to America’ chant

US warns of ‘severe consequences’ if Iran carries out revenge attack over Soleimani  

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

Trump to Launch His Social Media App in February

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The mainstream social media platforms are ruthlessly censoring conservatives. As such, President Trump’s social media platform could be a game changer. It will enable conservatives to have the ability to express their views to a large audience. President Trump’s 150 million plus social media supporters must (and will) support his social site. Expect alternative social media platforms to explode in popularity between now and 2024.

I predict this will be YUUUUGE. I am all in.

Trump to launch his social media app in February, listing shows

By Yahoo, January 6, 2022

By Krystal Hu and Helen Coster

(Reuters) -Former President Donald Trump’s new media venture plans to launch its social media app Truth Social on Feb. 21, according to an Apple Inc App Store listing.

TRUTH Social, the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) alternative to Twitter, is available for pre-order before going live on the U.S. Presidents’ Day holiday.

Similar to Twitter, the app offers features to follow other people and trending topics, according to demo photos. Its message equivalent of a tweet will be dubbed “truth”.

The app’s launch would come 13 months after Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook and Twitter banned Trump for encouraging his supporters to participate in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol based on unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Marking the one-year anniversary of the attack, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday that his predecessor’s false claims could unravel the rule of law and subvert future elections.

TMTG and Apple did not respond to requests for comment, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that Feb. 21 is the planned launch date of the app.

The launch is expected to be the first of three stages in TMTG’s development. The second would be a subscription video-on-demand service called TMTG+ with entertainment, news and podcasts, according to the company website. A November investor presentation indicated that TMTG also wants to launch a podcast network.

TMTG is valued at $5.3 billion based on the stock price of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which rose 20% after Reuters reported the app’s listing on the App Store. TMTG agreed in October to merge with the blank-check firm at a valuation of $875 million.

Trump supporters and retail investors have snapped up Digital World’s stock, betting that Trump’s popularity with his Republican political base will translate into commercial runaway success.

The blank-check acquisition deal faces regulatory risk. Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren asked Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler last month to investigate the planned merger for potential violations of securities laws around disclosure. The SEC has declined to comment on whether it plans any action.

TMTG last month raised an additional $1 billion from private investors.

Trump canceled a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida that had been scheduled for Jan. 6, marking the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack. He said he will instead deliver remarks at a rally in Arizona on Jan. 15.

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

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POLL: Majorities Of Both Parties Say The Media Isn’t Trustworthy

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Huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents say the U.S. media is biased and its main goal is to advance its own agenda, according to a Thursday poll from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States.

More than 76% of poll respondents stated that the media is primarily focused on advancing their own political opinions and agenda, with 62.7% of Democrats, 76.1% of Independents and 90.3% of Republicans agreeing.

The poll surveyed 1,084 likely general election voters between Dec. 4 and Dec. 7. and reported a 3% margin of error. Trafalgar employs a number of methods for conducting its polls, including live phone calls, automated calls, emails, text messages, and two other proprietary methods it does not share publicly.

“Thanks to the decentralization of the news through the internet and social media, the mainstream press outlets no longer have a monopoly on controlling the news,” Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Action, said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been slow to adjust to this reality and don’t seem to realize that the average American can now see in real time the difference between the actual facts of a story versus what the mainstream media says. People are realizing the open bias and partisanship of the press, and it is making them increasingly cynical.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CHART ON MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOCUS BY THE TRAFALGER GROUP

The Trafalgar Group was one of only two polling firms that accurately predicted Trump’s victory in the presidential election of 2016. The firm was also among the few that predicted Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ win in 2018, as well as Republican victories in Virginia in November.

The poll is only the latest indicator of Americans’ loss of trust in the media. A June survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that the U.S. ranked the lowest in trust for the media among 46 nations with developed media industries.

“This is an extraordinary (though unsurprising) finding,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said after the report’s release. “Most amazing is that the corporate sector of the US media is failing in every respect: financially, culturally, collapsing trust.”

The poll also shows a dramatic drop from the “new low” for trust in the media established in January 2021, when just 46% of Americans stated the media was trustworthy. The Trafalgar poll now puts that number at 23.7%.

COLUMN BY

ANDERS HAGSTROM

White House correspondent.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Twitter Suspends Conservative Satire Site

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In case you hadn’t heard, Twitter recently suspended our account. In an email to us, they claimed we violated their rules against “platform manipulation and spam.” The email included a warning that that if we tried to open another account, that new account would be suspended, too.

We published screenshots of the email and our suspended Twitter page, and called on our followers to make some noise. We started trending almost immediately and Twitter responded by reinstating us, saying we’d been suspended “by mistake.” So we’re back on Twitter, at least for the time being. But we share the concerns of others who’ve rightly observed that these “mistakes” tend to work in one direction.

We’re grateful to have followers who aren’t afraid to speak up and hold these big tech companies accountable. But there are no guarantees. We couldn’t be sure they’d reinstate our account. And we can’t know if they will the next time they make a “mistake.” But we can do our best to prepare for a worst-case scenario. At least we can if we have your help.

When we first launched our subscription service, the primary reason we gave for supporting us was to help us become less dependent on big tech companies. We explained:

We depend on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic, and Google Ads to monetize it. Without these networks, we’d have no revenue to cover our expenses. And as you’re probably aware, none of these companies are friendly to Christians or conservatives. In fact, that’s a severe understatement. The control these companies exercise—and the outright hostility they display toward those with more traditional views and values—has us deeply concerned about our future as a publisher of Christian satire. But here’s the thing: If just a small fraction of our readers become paid subscribers, we’d have enough funding to survive without running ads, effectively eliminating our dependence on these big tech companies.

The more subscribers we have, the less we have to worry about our dependence on Twitter and the other big tech companies. If you want to see us prevail against Twitter, Snopes, and anyone else who might seek to discredit or deplatform us, please consider becoming a subscriber. Your support will make a difference.

From our whole team, thank you for your consideration and support.

Seth Dillon
CEO

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