Explaining why it is okay to be censored

Another courageous doctor speaks out!

https://www.bitchute.com/video/mQeF6z95ZSJP/

"Dystopian"

Sean Davis: "The unholy union between monopolistic tech oligarchs and corrupt media."

Tucker Carlson: "All of these people you vote for in the hope that they will protect you...all of them are AWOL."

Tucker Carlson: A lot of Americans are staying quiet right now, and, of course, that's the point of censorship: to keep people isolated and alone.

Tucker: If you are in the news business and Google tells you to do something, you do it. In all of human history, no single entity has had more control of information than Google does right now.

Tucker: Google finds it intolerable that Zero Hedge and The Federalist have unmonitored comment sections where readers can say what they want!

Glenn Greenwald:

That NBC has, and uses, the power to have sites it ideologically dislikes ideologically kicked off Google Ads is dystopian.

It's particularly chilling since NBC/MSBNC was one of the worst purveyors of deranged conspiracy theories over the last 4 years. https://

Read and watch more here.

Trump's effort to prevent online censorship

In Reason, Eugene Volokh writes in part,

I'm still doing some research related to President Trump's "Preventing Online Censorship" draft Executive Order, and hope to post more about this today. But for now, I wanted to post some background I put together earlier about 47 U.S.C. § 230 (enacted 1996), the statute that is so important to the order; I hope people find this helpful.

Section 230 makes Internet platforms and other Internet speakers immune from liability for material that's posted by others Congress enacted 47 U.S.C. § 230 (with some exceptions). That means, for instance, that

I'm immune from liability for what is said in our comments.
A newspaper is immune from liability for its comments.
Yelp and similar sites are immune from liability for business reviews that users post.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) are immune from liability for what their users post.
Google is generally immune from liability for its search engine results.
And that's true whether or not the Internet platform or speaker chooses to block or remove certain third-party materials. I don't lose my immunity just because I occasionally delete some comments (e.g., ones that contain vulgar personal insults); Yelp doesn't lose its because it sometimes deletes comments that appear to have come from non-customers; the other entities are likewise allowed to engage in such selection and still retain immunity. Section 230 has recently become controversial, and I want to step back a bit from the current debates to explain where it fits within the traditions of American law (and especially American libel law).

Historically, American law has divided operators of communications systems into three categories.

Publishers, such as newspapers, magazines, and broadcast stations, which themselves print or broadcast material submitted by others (or by their own employees).

Distributors, such as bookstores, newsstands, and libraries, which distribute copies that have been printed by others. Property owners on whose property people might post things —such as bars on whose restroom walls people scrawl "For a good time, call __"—are treated similarly to distributors.

Platforms, such as telephone companies, cities on whose sidewalks people might demonstrate, or broadcasters running candidate ads that they are required to carry.
And each category had its own liability rules:

Publishers were basically liable for material they republished the same way they were liable for their own speech. A newspaper could be sued for libel in a letter to the editor, for instance. In practice, there was some difference between liability for third parties' speech and for the company's own, especially after the Supreme Court required a showing of negligence for many libel cases (and knowledge of falsehood for some); a newspaper would be more likely to have the culpable mental state for the words of its own employees. But, still, publishers were pretty broadly liable, and had to be careful in choosing what to publish. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 578.

Distributors were liable on what we might today call a "notice-and-takedown" model. A bookstore, for instance, wasn't expected to have vetted every book on its shelves, the way that a newspaper was expected to vet the letters it published. But once it learned that a specific book included some specific likely libelous material, it could be liable if it didn't remove the book from the shelves. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 581; Janklow v. Viking Press (S.D. 1985).

Platforms weren't liable at all. For instance, even if a phone company learned that an answering machine had a libelous outgoing message (see Anderson v. N.Y. Telephone Co. (N.Y. 1974)), and did nothing to cancel the owner's phone service, it couldn't be sued for libel. Likewise, a city couldn't be liable for defamatory material on signs that someone carried on city sidewalks (even though a bar could be liable once it learned of libelous material on its walls), and a broadcaster couldn't be liable for defamatory material in a candidate ad.

...Under current law, Twitter, Facebook, and the like are immune as platforms, regardless of whether they edit (including in a politicized way). Like it or not, but this was a deliberate decision by Congress. You might prefer an "if you restrict your users' speech, you become liable for the speech you allow" model. Indeed, that was the model accepted by the court in Stratton Oakmont. But Congress rejected this model, and that rejection stands so long as § 230 remains in its current form. (I'll have more technical statutory details on this in a later post.)

Read more here.

What's next?

via Oregon Muse

A giant finger-wagging machine!

Ace of Spades links to a post by Matt Taibbi about the "liberal" drive for Chinese-style authoritarian censorship to make certain only the "experts" have the right to speak publicly. Taibbi uses a term originally coined by writer Thomas Frank: the new "utopia of scolding."

Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That's their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian's face, forever.

Taibbi continues:

In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.

When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against "expertise-deniers." For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp's decision to end some shutdowns was, "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice."

At the outset of the crisis, America's biggest internet platforms -- Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit -- took an unprecedented step to combat "fraud and misinformation" by promising extensive cooperation in elevating "authoritative" news over less reputable sources.

Ace ends this post by sharing this from a commenter at his blog:

38 It's over.
My leftwing neighbors had a huge party on Saturday night. No masks, no social distancing. At least 20 people at the party drinking, laughing and talking. And these are total Karen-esque asshole lefties. I could eavesdrop half the partygoers bashing Trump. AND YET they also were whining about the lockdown.

When even your own liberal base ignores the rules, there are no longer any rules. The lockdown is disintegrating.
Posted by: zombie

Read more here.

"...cull just the really bad opinions and then stop when just the good viewpoints are left."

From the Babylon Bee:

WORLD—There’s good news for the internet: studies show it’s now just a few bans away from finally only having good opinions on it. Much of social media had become dominated by racism, conspiracy theories, and people who are just plain wrong about things, but by simply kicking off people who pretty much everyone agrees is bad, studies show soon only good discussion will dominate the internet.

“There are literal Nazis on social media now,” said researcher Douglass Simmons, “but we have a tool the Nazis didn’t have: banning unpopular speech. By applying and expanding this tool, we can make the internet a place everyone—everyone who is left, anyway—can enjoy.” This new internet is made by a coalition of liberals and their natural ally: large corporations. Together they plan to work together to cull just the really bad opinions and then stop when just the good viewpoints are left.

As for the people with unpopular views, they’ll be further marginalized and, presumably, react by getting better opinions—though researchers admit it will be hard to know for sure as now no one will ever hear from them again.

The move to eliminate bad speech from social media has been mainly met with wide approval, but there were some detractors initially. After some more culling, though, the move was met with unanimous approval.

Hate speech and censorship

Emily Zanotti reports in the Daily Wire,

...According to the Daily Signal’s Kate Trinko, the group’s 2017 video starring Dr. Michelle Cretella, “pediatrician with many years’ experience and the executive director of the American Academy of Pediatricians,” was pulled off YouTube because, in the video, Cretella suggested that, “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.”

“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 group says.

...The Daily Signal admits that Cretella’s statement is controversial, but that doesn’t make it “hate speech,” even under a broad definition. It simply makes it … controversial. The topic itself — transgenderism and gender transition measures for children — is a hot topic, and Cretella’s point is that society views some bodily alterations with scorn and others with an open embrace. Cretella’s statement doesn’t even reference transgenderism or gender transition surgery specifically.

Read more here.

Google aiding Chinese military but not ours?

Billionaire investor (and Facebook board member) Peter Thiel has called for an investigation of Google by the FBI and CIA. Lucas Nolan reports in Breitbart,

Thiel noted “three questions that should be asked” by the federal government of tech giant Google.

Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?

Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?

Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?

Thiel added that these questions “need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I’m not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.” Thiel has been a long time supporter of Artificial Intelligence, joining Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman in pledging to commit a total of $1 billion to the non-profit group OpenAI in 2015.

Google has come under fire previously for its relationship with China, particularly the development of a censored Chinese search engine codenamed Project Dragonfly. During a speech before the Hudson Institute in 2018, Vice President Mike Pence criticized what he believes is China’s theft of U.S. technology, urging Gooogle to take action on the issue. Pence said during the speech that other business leaders are hesitant to enter the Chinese market “if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing’s oppression.”

Pence called on Google to listen to these other leaders and that “more must follow suit.” He also called on Google to end the development of its censored Chinese search engine project known as Dragonfly: “For example, Google should immediately end development of the ‘Dragonfly’ app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers,” said Pence.

Read more here.

"The garbage party's only free speech advocate!"

Kurt Schlichter writes in Town Hall,

Silicon Valley’s tech moguls, who advocated a free and open internet when it was to their advantage, have found, to their horror, that Normal people could use it to make themselves heard about the utter failure of our betters at home and abroad. That’s why we have seen the elite’s 180-degree pivot toward censorship and thought control on the web. The progressives never believed in free speech except to the precise extent it was useful to them; the tech titans’ alleged libertarianism extended only as far as them not being held accountable to the people through the people’s government, and no further. Now that they are in power, well, free speech is suddenly very, very bad. People are saying things the elite dislikes. That’s not supposed to happen.

But it’s too late to shut us off from the web. Oh, they’ll try to stamp out the truth. They’ll demonetize Dennis Prager and bury search results for Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, and they’ll try to hide the veritas of Project Veritas. But they did their internet building too well – the conservative samizdat will endure in the corners and shadows of the electronic frontier until such time as the politicians representing our interest get fully woke and take action to protect our rights. I look forward to the day when tech titans tremble in their Birkenstocks at hordes of eager attorneys suing them under new laws mandating algorithm transparency and non-discrimination on the basis of political views. I yearn to see them try to explain to the SJWs clamoring to ban some patriot who dares believe that no man can ever have a baby that “We can’t censor him! We’ll be dragged into court tomorrow and slammed for punitive damages!”

...The point of it all is that it’s not argument but intimidation. They can’t win an argument. They can’t win the votes, not in Europe or Asia or South America or here. The liberal elite has failed to provide prosperity for anyone but themselves. The liberal elite has failed to provide peace for anyone but themselves – you don’t see a lot of them in uniform in Whocaresistan fighting the wars Bill Kristol advocated and Joe Biden voted for. The liberal elite provides only a system of interlocking and self-reinforcing grievances in which you, the Normals, are perpetually the oppressors, yet you’re the only ones being oppressed. No one wants that, except the SJWs who find meaning in fussy social media hate-mobs, so they try to jam their garbage ideology down your throat by threatening to kick you off Twitter, or by making it so you lose your job, or by preventing you from going out and eating tacos in peace, or by calling you all sorts of names ending with -ist and -phobe.

These are not the actions of winners. These are the actions of losers who see their power slipping away and will do anything to keep it.

Anything.

Yes, including violence. Just last weekend, we saw conservative reporter Andy Ngo sent to the hospital after being attacked by leftist thugs. There was no outcry in the mainstream media over it just as there is no outcry over “deplatforming,” censorship and cultural intimidation. No Dem candidate condemned it except Andrew Yang – a suck-up to the Chinese commies is that garbage party’s only free speech advocate. Irony lives!

Read more here.

"Who knew fascism could be so chirpy?"

Tucker: The big tech companies have launched their fiercest attack yet on your right as an American to follow your conscience and to say what you believe! Zuckerberg says the death of free speech in America is a really positive thing that we all need to get behind. Who knew fascism could be so chirpy? Zuckerberg is not simply censoring political opinions. He is prescribing which political opinions you're allowed to have! 34-year-old Zuckerberg is worth 72 billion dollars and is completely cut off from reality. Yet, he can single-handedly make our First Amendment irrelevant after 250 years! The media thinks that's great! Without free speech, however, there is no democracy!

Big Tech Dream

"The government is now an owned and operated subsidiary of Monster Tech."

The headline is a quote from Ace of Spades, who links to an article by Jeremy Carl in The Federalist which is headlined,

How The New NAFTA Trade Deal Lets Big Tech Squelch Conservative Speech.
Big Tech lobbyists orchestrated the quiet insertion of a seemingly innocuous provision into the deal that will allow them to silence conservative voices.

Read the whole thing here and urge your Republican members of Congress to remove the provision.

Phil Robertson commits the terrible crime of dressing a catfish

Facebook censored it, so we could all be "safe."

He will be able to remove hate speech before it is even posted!

Melissa Quinn reports at the Washington Examiner,

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted Tuesday it will be five to 10 years before Facebook has technological tools in place to flag and remove hate speech from the platform before it is posted.

Read more here.

Quick! Watch this before YouTube censors it (again)

"It's amazing to me how quickly YouTube went from "Broadcast yourself" to "Stifle yourself or be terminated!" It is happening to so many people that the words YouTube and censorship now go together like Islamic and terrorism, or migrant and rape or Marxist and dictatorship!

How Google and SPLC censor conservatives

In Pajamas Media, Tyler O'Neil gives us an update on Google's censorship of Dennis Prager's videos.

In October, the conservative educational nonprofit Prager University filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for "intentional" censorship of conservative speakers. PragerU told PJ Media that after five months, YouTube is still restricting its videos. PragerU will go before a California judge on March 15.

"There’s one thing we know and that’s that we’re being targeted by YouTube," Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer at PragerU, told PJ Media. "We tried the diplomatic approach for over a year and a half. We had email dialogue, phone call dialogue with them. I was even invited to New York to discuss the problem, where absolutely nothing got done."

After a year, PragerU had had enough and filed the lawsuit. After this, they had to wait six months before appearing before a judge.

More than 40 of PragerU's videos have been "restricted" by YouTube. "We have in writing from them that they’ve reviewed our videos and deemed them inappropriate. They’re not even hiding behind it," Strazzeri said.

"Restricted" videos cannot be viewed in specific "modes," such as "child mode," a version of YouTube supposedly tailored to children. The video company told PragerU they deemed the videos inappropriate for young people, because they discuss "mature topics."

"However, there are millions — that’s not an exaggeration — of other videos on the same topic that are not restricted. Sometimes either an identical title from a Left-leaning perspective and theirs won’t be restricted and ours will be," Strazzeri told PJ Media.

Ironically, there are many YouTube accounts that copy a PragerU video — in its entirety — and do not find their copycat videos restricted, even though PragerU's original video was.

For instance, on December 4, 2017, PragerU released a video with author and film producer Dinesh D'Souza on the true nature of fascism.

Six days later, a user named Jack Kern published an identical video.



People using YouTube in a restricted mode cannot watch the PragerU video, but they can watch the exact same content from Jack Kern. The PragerU video has more than 893,000 views, while Kern's video has a mere 40 views. It seems YouTube is specifically targeting PragerU because it has a wide audience.

The issue goes far beyond PragerU, however. Google dominates Internet search traffic with over 75 percent of the market. This dominance has a cultural impact, as "Google" itself has become a verb meaning "Internet search."

Read more here.

Cascading waves of hysteria

Mark Steyn writes today, "~I commented recently on Tucker that I preferred the Internet of a decade ago to the increasingly totalitarian social-media cartel of today: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, feels the same way:"

I think that the old blogosphere was superior to "social media" like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn't need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.

Mark continues, "The Internet of the post-9/11 years already seems like a lost Golden Age. Twitter in particular seems to have no purpose other than cascading "waves of hysteria". I mentioned on air both Facebook's viral snuff videos, and the suicide of a Canadian porn actress after a Tweetstorm of homophobia accusations from LGBTQWERTY types who subsequently gloated over her passing. "Social media" plays a role in more deaths than, say, America's supposedly all-powerful "white supremacist" movement. But, unlike the latter, nobody seems bothered about the former."
Read more here.

"the enlistment of every powerful corporation into the left-wing hive-mind"

Ace has this headline today,

Orlando Nightclub Shooting Victims' Families Sue FaceBook, Twitter, Google for Providing "Material Assistance" to ISIS and Other Terrorist Groups

I agree with his analysis:

This may sound like a nice bit of payback against these villains, but in fact this will just push these organizations to perform even more censorship, and they'll be able to tell shareholders (truthfully) that their fiduciary duty requires them to censor any posts from an "extremist," or any post which could spark "extremism."

The theory that we're all on the hook for something some other asshole says is what drives this censorious, ceaseless Social Justice Warrioring, and the enlistment of every powerful corporation into the left-wing hive-mind.

Read more here.

Countering the feelings revolution

Bookworm writes,

Facebook just announced that it will start cracking down on what it calls “fake news.” We know what that means: It will block anything that does not toe the Democrat party line. To this end, it’s teaming with such hard-Left luminaries as Snopes, the Associated Press, and ABC to identify what constitutes “fake news”:

Technically speaking, Facebook is a private corporation and can do whatever the heck it wants. In reality, though, Facebook is a major news purveyor, much in the way the big broadcasters are (or used to be). It might be useful to have the FCC investigate whether it can block Facebook’s plan to censor political content it does not support.

Government action is always slow, though. What’s also slow is the lead-time needed for conservatives to build up another social media outlet through which they can disseminate information and news of interest to conservatives. In the meantime, I suggest that everyone start following the reverse “Oprah Rule.”

What’s the “Oprah Rule”? I have a hard and fast rule that if Oprah ever recommends a book, I will not read that book. Not only do our reading tastes differ, I consider her a significant factor in America’s dumbing down. Her doe-eyed emphasis on feelings helped turn from a somewhat logical and rational nation into one that’s entirely guided by self-referential emotion. To the extent the Left uses feelings to silence anything with which it disagrees, she was the on-ramp for the feelings revolution. I don’t want to give any monetary support to books that please this purveyor of mindless emotion. I also don’t want libraries to have one more person making the book look popular or successful.

If that’s the Oprah Rule, what’s the “reverse Oprah Rule”? The reverse of the Oprah rule is that conservatives should make a point of reading, sharing, liking, linking, and doing anything else they can when they spot a reputable conservative news site labeled as a “fake.” Conservatives need to do their own little Cloward-Piven against the Facebook system. If this works, not only should it overwhelm the system, it should also send some useful revenue towards conservative news sites. In keeping with that, I hereby volunteer to have my posts put at the head of the line for being labeled as “fake” news on Facebook.

So if you see the word “fake” on something from Breitbart, or the Daily Caller, or the Daily Signal, or FrontPage Magazine, or Project Veritas, or National Review, or on any reputable purveyor of conservative thinking, press that “like” button, “share” the story, go to the source website (which brings revenue to the site), share the news on your blog, tweet it, and do whatever else you can think of to offset Facebook’s censorship. Meanwhile, it’s time for some technologically sophisticated conservatives to create a social media outlet in which conservatives will not be smeared, downgraded, or censored.

Read more here.