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YouTube Censors, Amazon Deletes, Epoch Times Exposes

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One of the most reliable and comprehensive sources of alternative news is The Epoch Times. And one of the beats covered assiduously by The Epoch Times is the ongoing epidemic of online censorship. This week The Epoch Times exposed two serious new acts of censorship.

The first, in an act that rivals the arrogance of Twitter’s permanent expulsion of President Trump, is YouTube’s decision to take down an interview with President Trump that was posted on the Newsmax TV channel. As quoted in the Epoch Times report, “A Google spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email: ‘We have clear Community Guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, and we enforce our Community Guidelines consistently, regardless of speaker and without regard to political viewpoints.’”

This is a stunning degree of arrogance on Google’s part. It is also counterproductive. Every time Google, or any of the big media corporations, exercise this level of censorship, tens of thousands of Americans lose trust in them. Ultimately, what Google has done only serves to further divide the nation.

The second, equally arrogant but if anything more sinister, is Amazon’s quietly removing the book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” This book is critical of “transgender ideology,” and as a result, according to the arbiters of truth at Amazon, it had to disappear.

These acts stand out simply because of their brazen enormity. YouTube, still owning a near monopoly share of online video viewers, deletes an interview with a former U.S. President. Amazon, the juggernaut that has crushed millions of retail jobs, owning a near monopoly share of online retail purchasing, deletes a book that attempts to, gasp, suggest that encouraging prepubescent children to begin irreversible “gender reassignment” medical treatments may not be a good idea.

Silencing a former president. Silencing any challenge to “trans ideology.”

If the big tech companies that have overwhelmed our public square and public marketplace can do these things, what can’t they do?

Thank God for Epoch Times, Newsmax, OneAmerica, Andy Ngo, Project Veritas, and hundreds of others that are still fighting to preserve a balanced dialog in American society. But they are gnats fighting elephants.

EDITORS NOTE: This Winsotn84 Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ISSUE 1ST AMENDMENT: Google’s ‘Free and Open Web’ Promise Countered by Dem Donations

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Google (1.00) and its parent company Alphabet, Inc has long promised to provide a “free and open web” in their Mission Statement. One would be justified in wondering if this is how they really feel given that the company and its employees provided lopsided donations to massively partisan causes such as President-Elect Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Billions of cross-partisan consumers entrust their sensitive data to Google every day — via Google Search, YouTube, and many other services — but Google clearly doesn’t care to treat consumers equally.

The lopsided donations – many from Google employees – match Google’s online censorship. While certainly some liberal concepts and projects are canceled on Alphabet’s platforms, there is some compelling evidence that the search engine contains a “conservative blacklist”. More obviously, Google subsidiary YouTube (1.00) has started placing “fact-checking banners” under an overwhelming amount of videos, particularly those of conservatives contesting the 2020 election. In other cases, they’ve taken down videos and banned creators for “unspecified violations of Community Guidelines” or supposed “hate speech” when someone dares to question the liberal narrative.

If Google and other companies want us to trust them, they must stop funding partisan politics and start putting money into the things that improve their services. They should put their millions of dollars into a better user experience through hiring and training competent employees, or through developing new, useful products. Companies have control over an economic sphere that sorely needs improving, and that should be their focus — not controlling free speech in the way the left sees fit.

EDITORS NOTE: This 2ndVote column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

David Wood Video: YouTube Sides With Jihadis In Free Speech Controversy

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YouTube took down two of David Wood’s videos recently because he said that the Quran contains hateful verses. As far as YouTube is concerned, that is “hate speech.”

So here is a new video from David, which he kindly gave me to post at the Jihad Watch channel, explaining the controversy and its implications.

Watch it soon; it might not be up long.

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

VIDEO: YouTube Won’t Let a Medical Doctor Say This Sentence . . .

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“See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.”

Those are the words of Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician with many years’ experience and the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, in a Daily Signal video published in 2017.

It’s a sentence YouTube will not allow the doctor to say about children and gender identity issues.

The Daily Signal recently learned that our video of Cretella had been removed from YouTube. In its place, YouTube displayed this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >>

Over the past few months, The Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution. Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence.

In other words, we had two choices: censor the doctor’s words or have no video on the world’s biggest video platform.

This should horrify every YouTube user—and anyone who values the importance of a public square featuring a variety of perspectives.

Cretella’s words are no doubt controversial. She is no stranger to criticism, and neither is The Daily Signal. We welcome debate.

But we don’t want to be censored.

We agree with the spirit behind YouTube’s hate speech policy, which states, “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes” including “Gender Identity and Expression” and “Sex/Gender.” We believe transgender individuals, and any individual struggling with gender identity issues, should be treated with love and respect.

But we also believe that on a topic where medical treatments have such serious ramifications, from infertility to permanent alteration of body parts, it is worth having a robust, fact-driven discussion.

Cretella is a doctor. She is making a point in that sentence that may not be popular but remains true: There is no society-wide push right now to allow patients suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder to amputate limbs.

Furthermore, just this May—18 months since Cretella’s video was published—the World Health Organization removed transgenderism from its list of “mental disorders,” moving it to a section about sexual health.

But as of July, Cretella’s sentence—which did not even state transgenderism was a result of mental illness, but simply pointed out that our culture sees amputation of body parts differently depending on the body parts in question—is apparently so outrageous YouTube can’t fathom allowing it on its platform.

That is unbelievable.

We are especially disappointed with YouTube’s decision because other social media platforms have allowed the video on their platforms. In fact, the video has more than 70 million views on Facebook. It might have even more if Facebook hadn’t temporarily removed it in July 2018. After our appeal to Facebook, it was quickly restored and remains on The Daily Signal’s page today.

Here at The Daily Signal, the multimedia news arm of The Heritage Foundation, we believe that private companies, including YouTube, should be allowed to set and enforce their own rules.

But we also believe consumers have a right to protest. And if you are upset that YouTube—the biggest video platform in the world—is refusing to let a doctor speak without censorship on gender identity and children, please reach out to YouTube and its parent company, Google.

Tweet at them: @YouTube and @google. Leave a message on Google’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Google/) or YouTube’s (https://www.facebook.com/youtube/).

Make it clear that while we may often be silent, many, many people want to have a free debate on controversial topics.

Join us in calling on YouTube to reverse this decision and allow this doctor to speak her mind freely on this vital issue.

This is not about how you think children experiencing gender identity issues should be treated, but whether you think there should be an open conversation on this topic, so that parents can make informed decisions about what’s best for their child.

Censoring a medical doctor doesn’t put YouTube on the right side of history. It just shows that it’s a big tech company prioritizing the preferences of the activist left over free speech for all.

This article has been corrected to reflect that Cretella is the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians.

COMMENTARY BY

Katrina Trinko

Katrina Trinko is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast. Send an email to Katrina. Twitter:

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A Note for our Readers:

With the demand for socialism at an all-time high among our young people—our future leaders and decisionmakers—the experts at Heritage stopped and asked a question that not many have asked:

Is socialism really morally sound?

The researchers at The Heritage Foundation have put together a guide to help you and our fellow Americans better understand the 9 Ways That Socialism Will Morally Bankrupt America.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal video with commentary is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Facebook and YouTube still feature Videos by Leading al-Qaeda Jihadis

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Google/YouTube labels Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager “Nazis,” and buries content that portrays Islam in a negative light, even if it’s accurate, but jihad terror preaching is OK with them. Likewise Facebook, which recently agreed to turn over data on “hate speech” suspects to the French government. Since foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression are routinely defamed as purveyors of “hate speech,” what Facebook is essentially doing by targeting such people while allowing jihadis to post freely is aiding and abetting the global jihad. If free societies and free people survive this sorry age, and an accurate history of it is written, Mark Zuckerberg will be portrayed as the enemy of freedom that he is.

“Al Qaeda’s Master Terrorists Are Still on Facebook and YouTube,” by Michael Weiss and Moustafa Ayad, Daily Beast, June 27, 2019:

In 2006, Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish was repatriated to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo Bay after he’d served more than five years as an enemy combatant for training with al Qaeda, and fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan against the United States. Released as part of the Obama administration’s plans to shutter the offshore prison, Rubaish was admitted to Riyadh’s rather lackluster “deradicalization” program.

Then, sometime in  2009, he escaped the program and Saudi Arabia with 11 other jihadists.  They all turned up in Yemen and Rubaish soon emerged as the mufti, or Islamic jurist, for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) where he spent the next six years appearing in propaganda videos for the group’s media outlet Al-Malahem, as well as releasing a number of fatwas and articles for other al Qaeda outlets including the English-language Inspire magazine.

Rubaish was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2015.  But his ideas and legacy live on through his sermons and speeches, still hosted on Facebook and YouTube.

Rubaish is joined in digital preservation by other leading lights in jihadist proselytization and virtual recruitment such as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the strategist behind the expansion of al Qaeda into Yemen, who helped invent what’s now commonly known as the “lone-wolf” terror attack; Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the leader of AQAP and the second-in command to Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s global head; and Anwar al-Awlaki, the main cleric for AQAP who is considered by counterterrorism experts to be, even from beyond the grave, one of the primary drivers of those lone-wolf attacks.

Taken together, Rubaish, Suri, Wuhayshi and Awlaki can still be found in 105 videos on both social media platforms, despite corporate avowals that this stuff was fast becoming a thing of the past. Yet we identified the videos through simple searches in Arabic using only the names of these prominent jihadists….

Contacted yesterday, Facebook said it was looking into the videos that we highlighted on its platform; YouTube did not respond to our queries in time for publication….

The most-watched video is his half-hour history on the invasions and subsequent injustices that the Muslim world has faced; it seems to have been recorded somewhere in Europe, as he refers to the “Christian world here in Europe.” Suri has Spanish citizenship and between 1994 and 1996 he lived in the London suburb of Neasden. Following the London bombings of 2005, he released a statement praising the selection of mass transit as a major, legitimate soft target….

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

Google Allegedly Monetizing Child Erotica on YouTube

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The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is calling on YouTube to remove all pornography from its platform, following yet another disturbing account of apparently monetized child erotica on YouTube. This is one of the reasons Google has been placed on NCOSE’s 2019 Dirty Dozen List which names 12 mainstream facilitators of sexual exploitation.

Prominent YouTuber MattsWhatItIs made a video on February 17th, explaining his discovery.

In the description, he writes:

Over the past 48 hours I have discovered a wormhole into a soft-core pedophilia ring on Youtube. Youtube’s recommended algorithm is facilitating pedophiles’ ability to connect with each-other, trade contact info, and link to actual CP in the comments. I can consistently get access to it from vanilla, never-before-used Youtube accounts via innocuous videos in less than ten minutes, in sometimes less than five clicks.. Additionally, I have video evidence that these videos are being monetized by Youtube, brands like McDonald’s, Lysol, Disney, Reese’s, and more… Youtube is facilitating this problem. It doesn’t matter that they flag videos and turn off the comments, these videos are still being monetized, and more importantly they are still available for users to watch.

This is not the first time YouTube has come under fire for hosting sexually exploitive content. In April 2018 it was criticized for allowing a pornographic ad to appear on a trending YouTube video, and in November 2017 it was revealed that YouTube’s flagging system to prevent child victimization on its platform was reportedly malfunctioning for a year. Even the YouTubeKids app has been infiltrated with disturbing and often sexual content.

It’s an open secret that Google’s YouTube is a hub for child erotica and is used by pedophiles to network. It’s time for YouTube to make solving this issue their number one corporate priority. Too often, YouTube waits for users or the media to flag degrading and exploitive content on its platform. And then once the media buzz dies down, YouTube reverts to its whack-a-mole approach instead of making sustained improvements.

We know that the technological solutions exist that would be able to prevent this material from being posted and it would save countless man-hours that YouTube currently uses by employing human reviewers.

For instance, Dr. Michael Holm, Chief Data Scientist at Picnix, Inc., asserts “Our team is fully capable of delivering an effective, scalable AI solution for pornographic video detection, building on our seminal patent pending Iris Program (www.meetiris.ai).”

We implore Google and YouTube to collaborate with this company, and others, to find real solutions instead of putting a bandaid on it and waiting for the next blow up.

Tweet at YouTube telling them to remove all exploitative content from their platform.

Sign the petition for YouTube to remove pornographic content from their site.

VIDEO: How Social Media Monopolies Silence Conservatives, How Anti-Trust Laws Could Help

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The Social Media Neutrality Panel was held on February 6th, 2018 at the Newseum in Washington D.C.

Rightside Broadcasting Network reported:

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:

Federal Government Authorizes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube to Censor ‘Anti-Islam’ Speech

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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.

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The Truth-Telling Video About Jihad That YouTube Doesn’t Want You To See

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Washington, D.C. – For ten years the world’s largest and most powerful Sharia-supremacist organization – not the Islamic State, not al Qaeda, not even the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – has worked to compel the entire world to observe Sharia blasphemy restrictions.  In 2010, with help from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they succeeded in getting the UN Human Rights Council to adopt Resolution 16/18 which effectively calls on every nation to prohibit expression that offends Muslims and to punish those who do so.

The European Union adopted highly restrictive “hate speech” bans.  A number of the continent’s most prominent freedom-fighters have been prosecuted under these laws.

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that, notwithstanding the First Amendment, the U.S. government would use “old-fashioned techniques of shaming and peer pressure” to discourage such expression.

In response at least in part to such official pressure about offending Muslims, perhaps combined with corporate preferences, social media giants including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube recently announced the implementation of new “hate speech” prohibitions on their platforms.  Ostensibly, they would impede the extensive use IS and other terrorists have been making of their services.

It was predictable, however, that these new media organizations would wind up censoring those whom Islamists abhor – especially, those who tell the truth about and, therefore, help impede the Shariah-supremacists’ global jihad movement and agenda.

A case in point was the recent removal by YouTube of a powerful new video produced by the Center for Security Policy’s Counter Jihad Campaign.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS POWERFUL VIDEO

Everyone in America should see this video – and demand that YouTube reinstate it at once.  The Center will be redoubling its efforts to prevent this sort of suppression of free, and necessary, speech.

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY

The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public.

For more information please visit www.securefreedom.org.