Censorship

This needs to go to the Supreme Court over free-speech laws

This system, they contend, was not merely a passive conduit but was instrumental in relaying information that was ultimately suppressed by social media outlets. Astonishingly, CIS is alleged to have revealed that a striking 61% of cases funneled through this pipeline were either extinguished or labeled as misinformation.

The Republican inquisitors are zeroing in on whether the US government’s muscle was surreptitiously flexed to pressure social media platforms into submission. This, they imply, may have been a gambit to manipulate the information landscape during a politically charged season.

“Trying to shut down protesters’ use of Facebook is yet another example of the way that freedom of public assembly in NSW is being attacked by successive governments,”

Nowadays those administrators refer to speech as “harmful” or “violent.” Such labels cause students to feel that they are in danger and must be protected from the speech in question. Teaching people that hostile speech is something they have the resources to overcome on their own is far more empowering than teaching that they must be protected by their elders from ideas they cannot cope with by themselves.

The FBI — despite knowing the veracity of Hunter’s laptop in November 2019 — lied to and pressured Big Tech platforms to engage in censorship activities in the hopes that these companies would suppress reporting that would damage their preferred political candidate. The agency was all-to-comfortable slow-walking the IRS’ investigation in an apparent attempt to interfere in the election but was perfectly fine interfering in the election to benefit the “Big Guy.”

It’s the type of behavior not reminiscent of a constitutional republic but of a failed, third-world police state.

U.S. is helping Ukrainian intelligence censor and threaten journalists worldwide who undermine its wartime narratives.

Facebook eliminated or censored ALL of the top Pro-Trump pages in 2017 immediately after President Trump’s victory.

The censorship of Kennedy is a national disgrace. Despite the proven legitimacy of prior censorship of viewpoints like the lab theory and natural immunities, Google continues to silence those with opposing views.

YouTube is signaling that this election will be another exercise in corporate approved messaging and ideas.

If you want to use YouTube, you will now have to engage in self-censorship, eliminating views that Google disagrees with. You may be able to “Broadcast Yourself” but you must first “Censor Yourself” . . . or YouTube will do it for you.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/126845

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is reportedly making detailed plans for how he, as president, would reform federal agencies that conservatives increasingly see as unaccountable and politicized. He is especially targeting the Department of Justice and the intelligence community for trying to influence elections, investigating political opponents, and telling Big Tech platforms to censor speech.

The GOP presidential candidate wants to relocate the FBI and other “problematic” parts of the DOJ out of Washington, D.C. He also wants to make sure its Civil Rights Division is “actually policing discrimination” based on colorblind standards because “discrimination is discrimination,” no matter the race of the victim. DeSantis would also order federal agents not to participate in censoring “so-called misinformation” on social media and revoke security clearances from former intelligence officials who use their credentials for partisan ends.

Ordering faculty to ” stick to prescribed messaging” raises serious questions of academic freedom and free speech. Yet, while conservative sites have raised concerns, faculty members (including his colleagues at Mayo) are again conspicuously silent. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) should be pursuing this matter with vigor. The 1915 AAUP Declaration called for the protection of both free speech and academic privilege. The Declaration stressed the guarantee of “unfettered discussion” free of the “prescribed inculcation of a particular opinion upon a controverted question.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/126729

“Thirty-nine of its 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are ‘purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy,'” Atkinson wrote.

The signers allegedly described the conservative speakers as “white nationalist provocateurs.”

The 95-minute and wide-ranging interview, called “Rekindling the Spirit of the Classic Democrat,” was published on June 5 but is no longer available on YouTube. Peterson and Kennedy discussed topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, and YouTube cited vaccine misinformation as the justification for censoring the interview in its response to the DCNF.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/124673

The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom. It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.”

"We are restricting freedom but we are doing it for the common good.”

Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”

What is particularly chilling is how low the threshold is for denying free speech, according to O’Reilly. It now appears that “deep discomfort” is enough.

It is part of an unrelenting movement in Europe, particularly by the European Union, to rollback Western free speech values that once defined countries.

Ireland now stands on the precipice of freedom.

Ireland is declaring “no free speech for haters” and assumes the authority to define who are haters and who are not.

“Perhaps they are on the payroll of those who profit from this – so much of what they are doing is resulting in the creation of life-long surgical and pharmaceutical patients are doing so to great benefit of certain surgical clinics and pharmaceutical companies.”

“It is quite evident that those undertaking this crusade against this film have not had the courtesy of seeing it before taking such extreme actions to silence it,” the distributor continued.

In a June 16th ruling, Judge Indira Talwani said, “School administrators were well within their discretion to conclude that the statement ‘THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS’ may communicate that only two gender identities—male and female—are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent.”

On May 5, 2023, Morrison attempted an end-around to the rule by wearing the same t-shirt — this time, with the words “ONLY TWO” covered by a piece of tape with the word “CENSORED.” Once again, the school concluded he was bullying a “protected class.”

A sweeping law could see Australians jailed for three years for posting what’s deemed ‘offensive’ on Facebook in an attempt to protect minority groups.

Queensland’s Labor government has introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the maximum prison sentence for racist, anti-gay, anti-trans or seriously bigoted statements.

Making such statements already carry a maximum six-month jail term, but that would be increased to three years under the new bill.

What is there to mull?

Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years. This unprecedented breach was made possible by the wholly novel reach and breadth of the new digital social media landscape.

Attempting to censor Tucker's free speech is not helping Fox