Twitter is evil, in support of the jihad force and in support of the Marxist destroyers who are trying to sow chaos and foment revolution in the U.S. today. No one should be fooled into thinking it is a neutral platform. But what is mystifying is that so few people seem to care that half of the American body politic is being deprived of an opportunity to enunciate and defend its views on the primary means of social communication today. Anything that one does not value can be easily lost, and among those things in the U.S. now is the freedom of speech.
“Twitter censors Ram temple tweet, but allows Muslim protest tweet,” WebIndia123, August 6, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Twitter has censored a video showing a display of Lord Ram and the temple being built in Ayodhya as “potentially sensitive content”, while allowing without any caution a photo from a protest against Hindu shrine by an Islamic group with offensive slogans.
Jagdish Sewhani, the chairman of the Ram Janma Bhoomi Shilanyas Celebrations Committee of USA tweeted a nine-second video of a display in New York’s Times Square.
“I was so proud to see our Ram Mandir and Ramji in Times Square today. Let’s celebrate this once in a lifetime event tonight at 7.30 p.m.,” he said in a following tweet.
Twitter blanked out the video with the message: “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.”
The video display on Times Square had been turned off after being shown for a few hours on Wednesday morning following protests from Islamic groups and others.
However, Twitter allowed without any cautionary statement a tweet from the Indian American Muslim Council showing their protest in Times Square on Wednesday even though the image in it contained offensive words.
The counter protest was against a celebration held in Times Square for the laying of the foundation stone for the temple in Ayodhya at the site where Lord Ram is said to have been born.
Twitter has been accused of following ideological double standards favouring the liberals and the left, while censoring those on the right.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had himself posed with a poster with the incendiary communal message, “Smash Brahminical patriarchy”, while on a visit to India in 2018….
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2020-08-09 06:56:122020-08-09 07:01:40Twitter censors video supporting Ayodhya Hindu temple, allows photo from Islamic protest against Hindu shrine
The dialectical movement involves two moments that negate each other, something and its other. As a result of the negation of the negation, “something becomes its other; this other is itself something; therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum”.
Tucker Carlson speaks with Donald J. Trump, Jr. on Twitter’s dialectical negation of conservatives no matter what they say.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Vlad Tepes Bloghttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngVlad Tepes Blog2020-07-29 05:56:492020-07-29 06:07:03VIDEO: Donald J. Trump. Jr. on Twitter’s Dialectical Negation of Conservatives No Matter What They Say
She wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last. My latest in FrontPage:
President Trump on May 28 issued an executive order designed to prevent online censorship of voices that dissent from the hard-Left’s agenda, and since then Twitter’s Jack Dorsey seems determined to defy it and force a showdown. He has more than once flagged Trump’s tweets as supposedly inciting violence or committing some other transgression, and he continues his steady campaign to silence voices of freedom, including foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. His latest victim is the popular counterjihad writer Amy Mek, who had over 266,000 Twitter followers when she was summarily deplatformed.
Amy Mek’s RAIR Foundation reported recently that “on April 16, 2020, the @Amymek Twitter account was suspended (and still remains suspended) as 12 of her tweets were flagged for violating Twitter’s rules against ‘hateful conduct.’” The problem is that in these overheated days, virtually anything that Leftists don’t like is classified as “hateful conduct.” The twelve tweets in question all contained accurate information, as Amy herself documented in trying (to no avail) to get Twitter to reverse its ban. The issue with them was clearly not that they were spreading falsehoods or inaccurate information, but that they were telling truths that the Leftist elites would prefer not be known.
For example, on March 31, Amy tweeted: “INDIA: Coronavirus Jihad! Over 8K Indian Muslims & foreign nationals from Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh etc. attended a Coronavirus infected Islamic event at a Mosque in Delhi. Almost a dozen are dead & many infected – Jihadists have put many countries at risk.”
It was horribly hateful to suggest that an Islamic event was a source of the spread of coronavirus, right? Wrong. The day before Amy published her supposedly hateful tweet, Quartz India published a story entitled: “A religious congregation in Delhi could be the coronavirus hotspot India was trying to escape.” The next day, Al Jazeera published an article called “India tracks attendees after Muslim event linked to virus cases.” On April 2, the BBC published a backgrounder: “Tablighi Jamaat: The group blamed for new Covid-19 outbreak in India.” Even that far-Left propaganda organ known as the Washington Post put up a story on this issue: “India confronts its first coronavirus ‘super-spreader’ — a Muslim missionary group with more than 400 members infected.” Then two weeks later, on April 16, the BBC ran a piece entitled: “India coronavirus: Tablighi Jamaat leader on manslaughter charge over Covid-19.”
Quartz India, Al Jazeera, the BBC and the Washington Post were not banned from Twitter. They no doubt didn’t even receive warnings. Only Amy Mek, a high-profile critic of jihad terror, ran afoul of Twitter’s Left-fascist censors, because only she had a prior reputation for being skeptical of the Left’s open-borders, internationalist, pro-jihad program.
Nor can her own critics argue that Amy got flagged for placing the virus-ridden Islamic event in the context of jihad, when the spread of the coronavirus from that event was clearly accidental. Amy compiled no fewer than 24 news articles about members of Tablighi Jamaat, the host of the event, deliberately attempting to spread the coronavirus among non-Muslims. So in what way was this not, as she put it, “coronavirus jihad”?
Amy provided similar documentation of all the claims that were made in her 11 other supposedly hateful tweets, but to no avail. Clicking on the links for the offensive tweets now takes you only to a note saying “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules” and giving a link to those rules, without bothering to explain exactly what rules were violated and in what manner.
And so it is clear. Amy Mek is not gone from Twitter for lying; Twitter has never flagged CNN or MSNBC, so clearly it has no problem with that. Amy Mek is gone from Twitter because she is the woman who knows too much – too much, that is, about the jihadist allies of the Leftists who are running amok in many of America’s major cities these days, too much about the insidious agenda of all too many of the adherents of the religion we must believe is peaceful on pain of charges of “racism” and “Islamophobia,” too much about the half-truths, distortions, and outright lies that pass for news and that the elites feed the masses today.
She was not the first, and will not be the last. I’ve said it before and will doubtless say it again: if this isn’t stopped and the speech of dissenters protected, America will cease to be a free society and slip rapidly into authoritarian and totalitarianism. And I’ll keep saying it until they silence me as well.
Late last Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump took a step that is emboldening conservatives everywhere. He finally struck out at giant tech and called them out for what they are — political censors.
Ever since his 2016 victory, the social media arm of the Marxist media has turned near-violent against Trump specifically and conservatives in general, zapping and deleting, suspending and deplatforming like crazy.
It’s all in an attempt to ensure that Trump does not get re-elected, and it can’t be surprising. This group hates America and pretty much everything it stands for.
They’ll drone on and on about constitutional rights when they can’t pervert them for, say, dreaming up the right to an abortion out of thin air and pretend that it’s there, right there, buried deep and mysteriously in the constitution, which it’s not.
But when it comes to something as straightforward as free speech, the howls from the lunatics on the Left become deafening. See, the tech tyrants are all for free speech, as long as they get to control it. They have set themselves up as the arbiters of truth — their truth — and you should be privileged and grateful for their service to you.
They go through and routinely screen and ferret out anything that is not liberal, Marxist propaganda and brand it as “violating community standards.” But they never tell the offending party exactly what standard was violated and what community established it.
The Marxist Left, like all divisions on the Left, need to control everything. They block and censor free speech — conservative free speech — because if the truth gets out there, someone like, oh, Donald Trump might become president.
At the conclusion of the 2016 election, during the transition away from an Obama White House and to a Trump administration, while he was still president, Obama even talked about — warned about — the role social media platforms had played in getting Trump elected, and said something had to be done about it.
Since the dominant media has been controlled for decades by the godless Left, it was only a matter of time until the forces of truth found a way to breathe. Truth is like water: It always finds a way. And the Left is like Hell, eternally raging against truth.
So no one could be surprised here that, when conservatives abandoned traditional media and took to the internet and social media, that the tech tyrants would eventually catch on and try to put an end to it. The approaching election has, shall we say, quickened their pace, which brings us back to Trump and last Thursday.
The executive order he signed goes after the tech giants where they live, which is behind a shield that protects them from being sued.
The shield is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted 25 years ago to protect what were then-fledgling companies from being sued for allowing all but the most offensive material on their platforms. The idea was pretty simple. Outfits like YouTube were seen as platforms, and that’s all. They didn’t make decisions about content.
But since Trump’s election, these giant corporations have gone nuclear, no longer being just neutral platforms but actually switching, in practice, to publishers — outfits that make editorial decisions about this is true and this is not, and then censoring what they declare untrue.
What ticked off Trump and then kicked off this whole much-needed action was that Twitter decided to do a “fact check” on a Trump tweet about how mail-in ballots could easily be used to produce fraudulent results. Twitter posted that’s not true — which by the way, it is — and that so ticked off Trump, that he signed his executive order striking directly at Section 230, saying it needs to be re-examined in light of current abuse of it.
In Twitter’s appendage to Trump tweet, it said to get the facts on mail-in ballots and provided a link to — of all things — a CNN story saying mail-in ballots were safe. In the process of saying they’re safe, they apparently forgot a story from a month earlier they had produced saying the exact opposite, highlighting a race where thousands of ballots had gone missing and suddenly showed up.
Tech companies have to make a choice: They are either neutral, at which point Section 230 shields them from being sued, but they can’t censor people — or they can censor all they want, but then they can be sued for violation of free speech, interfering with businesses, meddling with elections and a host of other things. In short, they can’t have it both ways and Trump is calling them out.
United States Attorney General Bill Barr is now on the case, along with the Federal Election Commission, which under the executive order must now hear cases filed by citizens saying the tech giants have interfered in the election. Likewise, the Federal Communications Commission — the FCC — is debating how to react since people, citizens, can now bring their complaints against Silicon Valley to Washington D.C.
The issue isn’t denying the tech tyrants their right to do business as they want. It’s the manifest unfairness of allowing Lefties unfettered access to an audience of hundreds of millions, and yet swatting down conservatives at every turn. And those decisions are being made by Marxists for Marxists, which means believers and conservatives don’t have a prayer. But they do have Trump, who Thursday became the answer to their prayers.
Now here at Church Militant, we have up close and personal experience with this. A few months back, we suddenly — out of the blue — got a notice from the company we used to host our videos. The company’s name is Vimeo.
Vimeo told us they were canceling our contract and that was that. The reason? Because the Marxist-atheist Southern Poverty Law Center — the infamous SPLC — had labeled Church Militant a “hate group” and Vimeo does not do business with hate groups. And 72 hours later, that was that — poof. Access to our videos through Vimeo was a thing of the past.
Simon Rafe here on staff worked some magic behind the scenes and managed to seize and pull down all our inventory of thousands of episodes of premium programming and save it all, but it was touch and go for a while. As an aside, the next time you watch any premium program going forward, say a thank-you prayer for Simon.
This is the reality of the tech world today. It’s controlled by Marxists, just like every other cultural institution, including important parts of the Church.
If you remember, clergy like the lying, plagiarizing Fr. Thomas Rosica as well as Bp. Robert Barron spoke in broad terms about some kind of seal of approval from the Church for catholic social media websites, in effect, censorship by non-approval. That would create an ipso facto blacklist and that is exactly how various clergy would talk about us and others — as not credible, not worth listening to — because we would not be approved. Liberals love censorship.
Vimeo canceled us — as part of the larger cancel culture — because they did not approve of what we say, to which we say “too bad.” This is America, you Marxist morons. Its called “free speech.” You don’t get to censor us. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works. All ideas get a hearing and the truthful ones disprove the false ones and rise to the top. But that presumes an even playing field, a fair game, the rules equally applied.
There are a hundred good reasons Trump should be reelected. This makes it one hundred and one.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Church Militanthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngChurch Militant2020-06-07 08:58:392020-06-07 08:59:52VIDEO: The Vortex — Trump and the Tech Tyrants
Twitter has suspended UK’s courageous freedom fighter Katie Hopkins, who had a million followers on the platform, and one thing is certain: she will not be the last foe of jihad violence and Sharia oppression who is banned from Twitter. It’s all about silencing “hate,” you see. But the banning of Katie Hopkins illustrates yet again that for the Left, there is good “hate” and there is bad “hate.”
According to the UK’s Independent, “Twitter said that Ms Hopkins had been temporarily locked out of her account for violating the site’s hateful-conduct policy, which bans the promotion of violence or inciting harm on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender identity.”
Twitter has erased all but a handful of Hopkins’ tweets, so it’s impossible to tell what the offending tweets were, but it is abundantly clear at this point that for Leftist guardians of acceptable thought nowadays, virtually any dissent from the Left’s agenda will be read as “the promotion of violence or inciting harm on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender identity.” While “promotion of violence” is fairly easy to spot, “inciting harm” can be seen in any critical word. And then the offender has to go.
The crusaders against “hate” in this case were once again the usual suspects. According to the Independent, Twitter suspended Hopkins at the insistence of a Leftist/Islamic coalition of enemies of the freedom of speech: “The move came a little over a day after Rachel Riley, a co-presenter of Channel 4’s Countdown and an anti-racism campaigner, met Twitter representatives calling for them to review and remove Ms Hopkins’ account. The meeting was organised by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) campaign group, which called for Twitter to permanently delete the account.”
CCDH’s chief executive, Imran Ahmed, commented in the condescending tones of a man who knows the world is at his feet: “We are pleased that preliminary action appears to have been taken by Twitter against the identity-based hate actor, Katie Hopkins following productive discussions with Twitter’s UK office. There is a long road ahead before social media is made safe for dialogue, information exchange and the formation and maintenance of relationships.”
However, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even though he is that most useless and contemptible of creatures, a dead white male, Twitter agrees with him. Rachel Riley was pleased at the forcible silencing of Hopkins, but noted that Twitter had not done her bidding to her complete satisfaction. The Independent continued: “Ms Riley said she was ‘pleased to see that action appears to have been taken’, but added that she had also called for the removal of George Galloway’s account, which remains online.”
It isn’t hard to see why this is so. Galloway, unlike Hopkins, is a fervent Leftist. According to Discover the Networks, Galloway is an “admirer of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.” He is also the founder of Viva Palestina, touted as “a fundraising project for the Palestinian people,” which “since its inception…has given millions of dollars, as well as much non-cash assistance, directly to Hamas.”
So it is clear. Twitter claims to be against “hateful conduct,” but it really only hates some hateful conduct, not all of it. Katie Hopkins opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression? Why, that’s hateful conduct! She must be banned! George Galloway aiding a jihad terror group that targets Israeli civilians and celebrates when those civilians are murdered? Why, that isn’t hateful conduct, not at all, at least according to Twitter’s guardians of acceptable opinion. As far as Twitter is concerned also, hating Katie Hopkins, and showering her with abuse, is perfectly fine – I’ve witnessed it myself many times on that platform. But if someone uttered a cross word to George Galloway, it is certain that he or she would soon be free of the burden of limiting one’s utterances to 280 characters.
That is the lesson of the Twitter suspension of Katie Hopkins. If you also hold opinions that are unacceptable to the elites, you’re next. Twitter won’t tolerate “hate,” you see, which means it won’t allow anything but statements aligned with the views of the Leftist political and media elites. Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out, and at Twitter, it does look as if they’ve already slipped their chain.
It is impossible for most people to participate in the modern world without the internet and dominate platforms. It is the town square. Big tech and major social media platforms are banning and discriminating against those on the right. I have a message for Trump.
Send donations to Henrik or Lana:
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EDITORS NOTE: This column with video and images is republished with permission.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/lana-censorship.jpg360640Lana Lokteffhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngLana Lokteff2018-12-13 05:59:182018-12-13 06:00:16Video Message To President Trump: Pass Law Against Censorship & Political Discrimination
On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, at 1:00 pm (ET) at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. thought leaders and prominent voices in alternative media will gather for a panel discussion on social media neutrality and the fight for diversity of voices online. The event will feature several prominent online conservative and moderate voices who have been impacted by social media bias, shadow banning and other methods meant to silence voices and limit readers and viewers access to information. Panelists will discuss political bias by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and by search engines such as Google.
A Harvard University study published on August 16, 2017, analyzed both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 election cycle. The study clearly shows that modern conservatives in America today have wholeheartedly rejected the liberal mainstream media.
The 2016 election cycle was the first election cycle where conservatives used alternative media news sources to gather information rather than turning to traditional mainstream outlets.
Conservative Americans abandoned the mainstream media in 2016 and will not be returning anytime soon. This paradigm shift forced left-wing tech-giants to take action. Tech giants today understand they have the ability to influence what information consumers see through their complex, and non-public, algorithms. Often this power is abused. Several conservative outlets, and countless individuals have been targeted, shadow-banned, and silenced by these tech giants.
By silencing these voices, big-tech is limiting information available to the American public and is a direct assault on First Amendment rights. The time for transparency is now! Tuesday’s panelists include Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, Pamela Geller of The Geller Report, Margaret Howell of Right Side Broadcasting, Oleg Atbashian from The People’s Cube, Tech entrepreneur Marlene Jaeckel and special video remarks by Michelle Malkin and James O’Keefe.
The panel included testimony from Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, Pamela Geller of The Geller Report, Margaret Howell of Rightside Broadcasting Network, Oleg Atbashian from The People’s Cube, tech entrepreneur Marlene Jaeckel. Topics all involved the current tech climate, social media bias, shadow banning and other methods meant to silence voices and limit readers and viewers access to information.
Watch the full panel discussion:
EDITORS NOTE: Pamela Geller Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She is also a regular columnist for numerous publications. Geller’s activism on behalf of human rights has won international notice. She is a foremost defender of the freedom of speech. Her First Amendment lawsuits filed nationwide have rolled back attempts to limit Americans’ free speech rights and limit speech to only one political perspective, and exposed attempts to make an end-run around the First Amendment by illegitimately restricting access to public fora.
In Geller’s statements, she discusses how major social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube have created the “new town square”, which they now have a monopoly on, and are using their platforms to erase and hide any viewpoint or person that does not conform to their pushed “progressive” values. Geller tells the audience how Google’s advertising platform went from being 70% of revenue from the Geller Report to them blacklisting her from the platform simply based on her conservatives views. She outlines how they do not just target voices they disagree with, but they make sure that those voices are unable to sustain themselves: “If they kill your ability to make a living, it’s a form of murder.”
Watch Geller’s entire statement below:
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/social-media-giants-e1504351022449.png368640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2018-02-09 06:15:212018-02-09 06:17:22VIDEO: How Social Media Monopolies Silence Conservatives, How Anti-Trust Laws Could Help
Good. I hope they win a massive settlement and drive them all out of business. Each one has been cutting off its platform to foes of jihad terror. In February, referrals from Facebook and Twitter to Jihad Watch dropped by 90% and have never recovered. Google has changed its search results so that when one searches for topics related to Islam and jihad, only results whitewashing Islam’s links to terrorism come up. Meanwhile jihad terrorists, as is clear from this case, have free rein. These monopolies need to be broken up, and the sooner the better, as they are actively working against the freedom of speech.
“Daughters of California man killed in Barcelona terror attack sue Google, Facebook and Twitter ‘for aiding, abetting and knowingly providing support and resources’ to ISIS,” by Julian Robinson, MailOnline, October 6, 2017:
The family of a California man killed in the terror attack in Barcelona is suing Facebook, Twitter and Google for their part in ‘aiding, abetting and knowingly providing support and resources’ to ISIS, it has emerged
Jared Tucker, from Walnut Creek, was one of 13 people who died when a van mowed down pedestrians on the Spanish city’s packed La Rambla on August 17.
The three daughters of the 42-year-old, who was celebrating his one year anniversary with wife Heidi Nunes-Tucker in Barcelona when he was killed, have now filed a lawsuit against the tech giants.
According to the New York Post, the complaint claims the firms have ‘for years knowingly and recklessly provided the terrorist group ISIS with accounts to use its social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.’…
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/isis-social-media-638x425-e1493981220888.png382638Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2017-10-08 06:30:242017-11-03 18:41:22Google, Facebook and Twitter sued for aiding and abetting ISIS
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/radical-islam.jpg355640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2017-02-09 09:15:202017-02-09 09:24:53Muslim in tweet ‘To infidels of the West’ Exposes the Truth about Radical Islam
The censorship and discrimination against voices of freedom, along with consistent failure to act against jihad advocates and recruiters, on increasingly important social media platforms has gone on long enough. We’re suing. Pamela Geller weighs in here. AFDI press release here.
“Federal Government Authorizes Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to Censor ‘Anti-Islam’ Speech; Lawsuit Filed,” American Freedom Law Center, July 13, 2016:
Today, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment.
Section 230 provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Jihad Watch.
As alleged in the lawsuit, Geller and Spencer, along with the organizations they run, are often subject to censorship and discrimination by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube because of Geller’s and Spencer’s beliefs and views, which Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube consider expression that is offensive to Muslims.
Such discrimination, which is largely religion-based in that these California businesses are favoring adherents of Islam over those who are not, is prohibited in many states, but particularly in California by the state’s anti-discrimination law, which is broadly construed to prohibit all forms of discrimination. However, because of the immunity granted by the federal government, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are free to engage in their otherwise unlawful, discriminatory practices.
As set forth in the lawsuit, Section 230 of the CDA immunizes businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from civil liability for any action taken to “restrict access to or availability of material that” that they “consider[] to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
Robert Muise, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, issued the following statement:
“Section 230 of the CDA confers broad powers of censorship upon Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube officials, who can silence constitutionally protected speech and engage in discriminatory business practices with impunity by virtue of this power conferred by the federal government in violation of the First Amendment.”
Muise went on to explain:
“Section 230 is a federal statute that alters the legal relations between our clients and Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, resulting in the withdrawal from our clients of legal protections against private acts. Consequently, per U.S. Supreme Court precedent, state action lies in our clients’ challenge under the First Amendment.”
David Yerushalmi, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, added:
“Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have notoriously censored speech that they deem critical of Islam, thereby effectively enforcing blasphemy laws here in the United States with the assistance of the federal government.”
Yerushalmi concluded:
“It has been the top agenda item of Islamic supremacists to impose such standards on the West. Its leading proponents are the Muslim Brotherhood’s network of Islamist activist groups in the West and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which co-sponsored, with support from Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton, a U.N. resolution which called on all nations to ban speech that could promote mere hostility to Islam. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are falling in line, and we seek to stop this assault on our First Amendment freedoms.”
AFLC Co-Founders and Senior Counsel Robert J. Muise and David Yerushalmi, along with the plaintiffs in this case, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, will hold a Press Call from 2:00-2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 13. To access this press conference call, dial (641) 715-3655 and enter code 111815.
On Saturday June 18, 2016 we interviewed journalist and author Joe Newby. Newby is co-author with investigative journalist Adina Kutnicki of the upcoming book “BANNED: How Facebook Enables Militant Islamic Jihad.” He will discuss the book and the potential implications it has regarding the role of social networks on politics.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/islamic-state-social-media.jpg360640Wallace Bruschweilerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngWallace Bruschweiler2016-06-18 10:40:032016-06-18 16:32:22PODCAST: Orlando and the power of Social Media on Islamic Terrorism and Politics
Over at PJ Media, I discuss a new example of the double standard Twitter and Facebook employ regarding those whose views they dislike:
Obaid Karki, @stsheetrock on Twitter.
The antipathy of Twitter and Facebook to conservatives is well-established. The social media giants’ hatred presumably therefore also applies to opponents of jihad terror, who are universally classified as “right-wing,” however absurd the label.
But do Twitter and Facebook draw the line at death threats against them?
The question arises because of one Obaid Karki, @stsheetrock on Twitter, who describes himself thusly:
I Ain’t Anglosexual Liberal Hippie, Neither Wolf nor Dog, I am a coyote. A Paulite Picassoic Provocateur Constitutionalist Libertarian.
Any doubt that he is quite spectacularly insane will be removed by a perusal of one or both of his incoherent and gleefully obscene websites. Karki is engaging in some bizarre parody of a deranged imam, or perhaps he is trying to make some other kind of inscrutable humor. One of his websites is titled “Obaid Karki St.Sheetrock’s Painfulpolitics Offensive Comedy Hepcat.” The offensive comedy is there, in spades.His other site is called “Suicide Bombers Magazine”, and bears this heading: “Dislaimer: we swear on Elvis’s pickled penis that ‘non-sapient beings’ I mean animals harmed during IED kahbooom.”
Hmm.
But just because Karki is insane or possibly joking doesn’t mean that he can’t be dangerous — especially if he is also making specific calls for people to be murdered.
Robert Spencer mustn’t [be] featured but lynched from his scrotum along with Zionists scumbags, Pamela Geller, Pat Condell, Daniel Pipes, Debbie Schlussel and JIHADWATCH Jackass duo Baron Bodissey & Geert Wilders for inspiring Anders Behring Breivik to [kill] innocent students in 2011.
Actually, neither Bodissey or Wilders run Jihad Watch — I do — and I didn’t inspire Breivik to do anything, but there is no arguing with a crazy person. But what is interesting about Karki’s post, aside from his loony language, is that he posted this call for me and others to be lynched on Twitter, which has a clearly stated policy against death threats.
Per “The Twitter Rules”:
Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.
I therefore duly reported Karki’s threat, but as of this writing, it has not been taken down (in fact, Karki has since posted it again, and has posted variants of it several times).
Maybe Twitter is just slow to deal with the large number of complaints it receives? To buy that argument, you have to buy that they have a two-year backlog.
Robert Spencer must be arrested and lynched along the Zionists Dumbasses Daniel Pipes, Geert Wilders and JIHADWATCH …
You can see from this 2014 Twitter exchange linked above that several people claimed they reported Karki for this threat, as did I.
Not only does Karki still have his Twitter account — while many conservatives have lost their accounts for far less— but the 2014 threat remains there.
Hold on — I misspoke above.
I meant to say you would have to buy that Twitter has a three-year backlog of death threats to police.
Robert Spencer must be shot head not only for comparing Alnoor 24:35 to Corinthians 11:14-15 satanically but for …
So now you have an example of how Twitter responded to death threats against a political opponent.
How about Facebook?
Not only is Karki on Twitter, but he also has a Facebook page containing the same lurid and paranoid content — including the threats. He did claim he was temporarily barred this Sunday:
At least the social media titans are consistent. The site Epoch Times reported last March:
[W]hile Twitter says it is making strong efforts to shut down terrorist accounts, activists say that not only is the microblogging company not taking down the accounts that matter, but it has even been shutting down accounts of users trying to report terrorists.
The age of Obama has featured a rapid decline in appreciation for the freedom of speech. College students and — in many, many cases — their professors routinely avow that “hate speech is not free speech.” They cannot grasp that if they get their wish allows whatever the government subjectively deems “hate speech” to be criminalized, and the foremost protection against tyranny will have been removed.
What illness has overtaken the people who run Twitter — and Facebook? What illness has overtaken mainstream media reporters and so much of the Western intelligentsia? Why are they so willing to abet evil?
“Hackers Say Twitter Isn’t Telling the Whole Story About Anti-Terror Fight,” by Joshua Philipp, Epoch Times, March 4, 2016:
Online activists have added fuel to the controversy over the effectiveness of Twitter’s attempts to fight ISIS supporters who use its services to spread terrorist propaganda and recruit new members.
While Twitter says it is making strong efforts to shut down terrorist accounts, activists say that not only is the microblogging company not taking down the accounts that matter, but it has even been shutting down accounts of users trying to report terrorists.
In January, a Florida woman, Tamara Fields, filed a lawsuit against Twitter, alleging that it breached the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act by “spreading extremist propaganda,” which caused an attack in Jordan that killed her husband, a private contractor, Lloyd “Carl” Fields Jr.
Facing bad press and a lawsuit, Twitter published a blog post on Feb. 5, saying that since mid-2015 it suspended 125,000 accounts for “threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.”
Members of the online anti-terrorist community were quick to fire back, however. They say that Twitter is taking credit for their work, and there are still many holes in its efforts to keep terrorist recruiters off its services.
Several hacker groups, including Anonymous, have rallied against ISIS under an online campaign they call #OpISIS. While most participants keep their identities hidden, most of their activities are public. They often publish lists of ISIS supporters and recruiters, and call on the community to report the accounts.
Through this campaign, Anonymous claims by Nov. 23, 2015 to have taken down more than 11,000 Twitter accounts linked to ISIS, according to a tweet from OpParisOfficial.GhostSec, another hacker group, claims it has reported 19,568 Twitter accounts promoting terrorism.
GhostSec was credited with helping prevent a terrorist attack in Tunisia, and may have helped stop another attack in New York City in 2015, according to Michael Smith, principal of national security company Kronos Advisory. Smith was GhostSec’s go-between for law enforcement and intelligence officials.
“Who suspended 125,000 accounts? Anonymous, Anonymous affiliated groups, and everyday citizens,” says a statement from WauchulaGhost, an anti-terrorist hacker with the hacker collective Anonymous, but was formerly with GhostSec.
“You do realize if we all stopped reporting terrorist accounts and graphic images, Twitter would be flooded with terrorists,” WauchulaGhost says.
After Twitter made its announcement claiming to have shut down ISIS accounts, many participants in #OpISIS saw a very different development. Twitter began banning accounts of users who were trying to report online terrorism.
Members of the community have taken this as a slap in the face. While Twitter is telling the public it’s working to stop ISIS recruitment on its services, it has been suspending accounts of the community who are doing the actual footwork.
Sometimes the accounts get hit one-by-one, other times in groups. Members of the community sometimes rally behind account holders, and Twitter gets them back up and running quickly. Other times, the accounts may stay suspended.
For instance, on Feb. 28 close to 15 Twitter accounts of users involved in the anti-terror campaigns were suspended, including some of the top accounts involved in #OpISIS, including WauchulaGhost’s. Their supporters barraged Twitter with tweets, and most of the accounts were back online about two hours later.
WauchulaGhost said he’s still not sure what happened, noting, “I never received an email from Twitter.”
After one week, Twitter had not responded to an email inquiring why it banned the anti-terror accounts.
Some members of the community say Twitter is suspending accounts in its new campaign to stop online bullying—but that explanation has raised the question of why calling out users spreading terrorist propaganda and trying to recruit terrorists is categorized as “harassment.”
“I can say they are suspending a lot of accounts for harassment. Good accounts not Daesh accounts,” WauchulaGhost said in an interview on Twitter. “Even a lot of our (Anonymous) accounts are being suspended for harassment.”…
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/islamic-state-flag-with-twitter-logo.jpg367640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2016-03-06 04:56:352016-03-07 06:45:09Twitter ‘Not’ taking down Islamic State accounts, but banning users who report terrorists
A friend sent me this video titled “It’s Time to Pray.” There is a growing anti-government movement in America. With the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage individual states are passing legislation to stop issuing marriage licences. Senator Rand Paul has called for government to get out of marriage.
For Christians it is the time to pray. Please watch this compelling video:
Please go to Twitter and post these hashtags: #PrayUSA, #Call2Fall, #Pray714 #300Christians #just6.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/prayer.jpg417640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-02 05:47:152015-07-02 05:50:05VIDEO: It’s Time to Pray — #PrayUSA #300Christians #Just6
A Brookings Institution examination of a complete data set of 20,000 ISIS Twitter accounts ranked Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and US as the top four locations of twitter users, The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter.The authors of the ISIS Twitter census are J.M. Berger and Jonathan Morgan. Berger “is a non-resident fellow with the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings and the author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam (Potomac Books, 2011) and ISIS: The State of Terror (Ecco, 2015).” Morgan “is a technologist, data scientist, and startup veteran. He runs technology and product development at CrisisNET, Ushahidi’s streaming crisis data platform, and consults on machine learning and network analysis. Morgan is also co-host of Partially Derivative, a popular data science podcast.” The Brookings ISIS Twitter project was “commissioned by Google Ideas and published by Brookings”.
The Brookings Saban Middle East Center think tank has had a close relationship with the Obama National Security Council. Use of social media by Islamic extremist groups like ISIS figured prominently in President Obama’s recent, Summit to Counter Violent Extremism. See our March 2015 NER article, ‘Did President Obama’s Violent Extremism Conference Fail?‘
Notwithstanding the provenance of the Brookings Twitter Census report, the data and methodology are credible and revealing of how ISIS and supporters use social media. The authors noted three classes of Twitter users as a precaution interpreting the study results:
Covert supporters of ISIS:
Users who took medium to strong steps to conceal their support due to fear of prosecution or suspension by Twitter. Users who took only casual steps to disguise their support were generally detectable.
Pro-ISIS intelligence operatives:
Some users who follow accounts related to the enemies of ISIS, such as rival jihadists, would be coded as non-supporters under the conservative criteria we employed.
Anti-ISIS intelligence operatives:
These are accounts created to appear as ISIS supporters in order to allow ISIS’s enemies to monitor its activities, which would be coded as supporters (if done effectively).
Locations of ISIS Twitter Accounts. Source: The ISIS Twitter Census, Brookings Institution, 2015.
Here is the Twitter Census Data Snapshot drawn from the Brookings study:
Best estimate of total number of overt ISIS supporter accounts on Twitter: 46,000
Maximum estimate of ISIS supporter accounts on Twitter: 90,000
Number of accounts analyzed for demographics information: 20,000
Estimated percentage of overt ISIS supporters in demographics data set: 93.2 percent (+/- 2.54 percent)
Period over which data was collected: October 4 through November 27, 2014, with some seed data collected in late September 2014
Top Locations of Accounts: “Islamic State,” Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, U.S.
Most common year accounts were created: 2014
Most common month accounts were created: September 2014
Number of accounts detected using bots and deceptive spam tactics: 6,216 using bot or spam technology for some tweets; 3,301 accounts were excluded from the Demographics Dataset for primarily sending bot or spam content
Average number of tweets per day per user: 7.3 over lifetime of account, 15.5 over last 200 tweets by user
Average number of tweets per user (Over lifetime of the Account): 2,219
Among the principal findings from the Brookings Twitter Census were:
From September through December 2014, the authors estimate that at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIS supporters, although not all of them were active at the same time.
Typical ISIS supporters were located within the organization’s territories in Syria and Iraq, as well as in regions contested by ISIS. Hundreds of ISIS-supporting accounts sent tweets with location metadata embedded.
Almost one in five ISIS supporters selected English as their primary language when using Twitter. Three quarters selected Arabic.
ISIS-supporting accounts had an average of about 1,000 followers each, considerably higher than an ordinary Twitter user. ISIS-supporting accounts were also considerably more active than non-supporting users.
A minimum of 1,000 ISIS-supporting accounts were suspended by Twitter between September and December 2014. Accounts that tweeted most often and had the most followers were most likely to be suspended.
Much of ISIS’s social media success can be attributed to a relatively small group of hyperactive users, numbering between 500 and 2,000 accounts, which tweet in concentrated bursts of high volume.
Based on their analysis, the authors concluded:
Recommend social media companies and the U.S government work together to devise appropriate responses to extremism on social media. Approaches to the problem of extremist use of social media, Berger and Morgan contend, are most likely to succeed when they are mainstreamed into wider dialogues among the broad range of community, private, and public stakeholders.
Our assessment is that given the close Brookings Middle East Center liaison with the Obama National Security Council and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Richard Stengel, the latter tasked with social media counter messaging, that little follow will occur. That is reflected in Google sponsorship of this Brookings Twitter Census report and overarching concerns of social media like Facebook, Google YouTube, Twitter and Instagram about maintaining Constitutional guarantees of free speech. These social media would prefer to establish their own criteria for suspending terrorists and supporters accounts. Monitoring and development of metadata from ISIS Twitter supporters in the West, especially in the US and the UK, should be left to counter terrorism intelligence echelons or private groups like SITE Intelligence Group and effective individuals like our colleague Joseph Shahda. Congressional Homeland Security and Select Intelligence Committees should hold hearings and investigations into current terrorist social media surveillance, especially for those US ISIS accounts identified in the Brookings ISIS Twitter Census. Shahda commented after reading:
The only way to stop the terrorists propaganda and recruitment is to keep shutting down all their means of communications which means all their social media (Facebook, Twitter) accounts as well as their websites.
EDITORS NOTE: This column with graphics originally appeared in the New English Review.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Forbes-_ISIS_Twitter_-statista-graphic--e1426002437580.jpg456640Jerry Gordonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Gordon2015-03-10 11:54:252015-03-10 13:55:50Brookings Study of ISIS Twitter Accounts Reveals U.S. among Top Targets
