It is not easy to unseat an incumbent in Congress, but Will Rollins believes that he has hit on a guaranteed winner to galvanize Democratic support in California’s 41st congressional district.
He is pledging to push for greater censorship to stop those “profiting by spreading division based on lies.”
Of course, the former assistant U.S. Attorney suggests that he will know who is lying and who should be allowed to speak freely.
That, however, is a legitimate matter of debate and people of good faith can differ in how they view the crimes committed that day. What is far more serious is the embrace of censorship as a political cause.
Rollins pledged to stop people saying things that “erode our democracy.” His policy platform promises “accountability” for tech platforms that “spread conspiracy theories” and do not yield to demands for censorship. It appears to be a pitch to restore censorship systems on sites like X but also pledges to go after “media outlets.”
He is not alone in such efforts. Democratic members caused a firestorm previously by writing to cable carriers like AT&T to ask why they are still allowing people to watch FOX News. Rollins promises to crackdown on “propaganda networks to protect the public’s right to be informed.” He does not identify which networks would be targeted, but the assumption is that it is not MSNBC. (For full disclosure, I am a legal analyst on Fox News). However, he wants ramped up penalties for anything that he considers “harmful lies and conspiracy theories.”
For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied.
The preliminary injunction against federal censorship of social-media users has survived the Biden administration’s appeal and, despite a 10-day hold, will essentially continue. Next stop: the Supreme Court.
The latest ruling, 78 pages long, by a panel of Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, affirmed the core of District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 preliminary order, but the revised order has two big differences. The appellate judges exempted some defendants and narrowed Judge Doughty’s list of prohibited actions to just one modified but broad prohibition. We’ll have to see how that works out, but the court has certainly admonished Biden officials for censoring Americans’ speech by systematically leaning — sometimes very heavily — on the social-media companies.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which represented some of the plaintiffs, commented, “Today’s order should stop that conduct.”
Recall that Judge Doughty’s ruling in the suit filed by Missouri and Louisiana on behalf of its residents, along with several private individuals, including COVID-19 dissident Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. Doughty had agreed that the plaintiffs had shown that the federal government, through repeated contacts with social-media personnel, had perpetrated “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” He likened the Biden administration’s efforts to “an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”
The upshot of the ruling is that when the government “suggests” to Facebook or X that certain posted material is, well, unhelpful, concerning, or even dangerously misleading, it constitutes implicit censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Why? Because some government officials are in a position to punish (through antitrust action, civil-liability rules, or regulation) uncooperative parties. Therefore, even recommendations or pleas to remove or suppress posts necessarily carry a veiled threat. In the present case, the appellate judges write, the threats were sometimes stark naked.
It is well-established in law that what the government may not do directly — say, block expression — it may not do indirectly, such as by pressuring private companies to in effect censor.
The judges’ panel recapped the findings:
For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.
Enter this lawsuit. The Plaintiffs—three doctors, a news website, a healthcare activist, and two states—had posts and stories removed or downgraded by the platforms. Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Plaintiffs maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private communications and legal threats.
The judges pointed out in great detail that the “platforms were apparently eager to stay in the officials’ good graces” and did not just wait for suggestions about stifling dissent. That sounds like the Stockholm syndrome. But their efforts to please their overseers weren’t always enough: “The officials were often unsatisfied. They continued to press the platforms on the topic of misinformation throughout 2021.” A powerful thirst can be hard to quench.
The biennial Pentagon budget reauthorization usually presents ample opportunities for wasteful spending, as lawmakers slip provisions into routine legislation that compels the government to purchase unnecessary and overpriced military equipment.
But this year, lawmakers have also quietly pushed changes to the National Defense Authorization Act that aim to silence military personnel and purge the internet of certain information.
One particularly alarming provision comes from Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, which prohibits the Department of Defense from engaging with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights group advocating for the separation of church and state.
MRFF represents service members of all religions and denominations, helping them report instances of inappropriate proselytizing and the presence of religious symbols in official military affairs. The organization has previously succeeded in having crusader imagery removed from a Marine squadron and a Bible taken down from display at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming.
“It is unprecedented in American history that Congress has ever tried to basically extinguish or assassinate a civil rights organization,” said Mikey Weinstein, an attorney, and former Air Force officer who founded the group in 2005.
Under this provision, not only is Defense Department staff prohibited from communicating with MRFF or Weinstein, but the military is also barred from taking any action in response to “any claim, objection, or protest made by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation without the authority of the Secretary of Defense.”
Meta claims that over 10 million people had signed up for its Twitter competitor, Threads, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed as a “friendly” alternative to the little blue bird.
“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” wrote Zuckerberg in his first post on the app, which is a “text-based conversation app” where users can publish posts up to 500 characters long, and allows people to post links, photos and videos.
Threads is directly linked to Meta-owned Instagram, which has over 2 billion users. The Twitter competitor is being rolled out in over 100 countries for iOS and Android.
“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Wednesday post, casting the service as a more wholesome substitute to Twitter. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
Meanwhile, data privacy and censorship concerns have emerged, with former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey highlighting the vast amount of data collected by Threads.
Within a few hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.
…
Meta is already too powerful. One company controls what much of the public is allowed to see. And if Threads succeeds, it will have 80% of the global market outside of Russia and China, according to one industry insider. As such, it’s reasonable to expect that Meta will censor precisely the same way the large news media corporations, including the New York Times, and corporate advertisers want it to. More censorship is what the mainstream news media, big corporations, and their celebrity pitch people have been demanding.
…additionally, Unlike Twitter, Threads collects data about “Health & Fitness,” “Financial Info,” “Sensitive Info,” and “Other Data.”
What’s ‘other data’?
Shellenberger further noted that within hours of launching, Threads was already secretly censoring users and not offering them the right to appeal.
Beltway lawmakers are setting up a smokescreen to curtail rights.
Unfortunately, the ongoing TikTok hearings in D.C. have very little to do with protecting the rights of Americans from potential Chinese Communist Party data harvesting, and lots to do with protecting the Uniparty’s dominance over the communications and surveillance space.
But there are right ways to go about minimizing this “digital opium” and its impact on our lives, and other means that will allow the American government to leverage the situation to further curtail our individual rights.
And unsurprisingly, the latter idea is making lawmakers in the beltway beyond giddy this week.
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TikTok is indeed a pestilence upon our society.
But there are right ways to go about minimizing this “digital opium” and its impact on our lives, and other means that will allow the American government to leverage the situation to further curtail our individual rights.
And unsurprisingly, the latter idea is making lawmakers in the beltway beyond giddy this week.
The Dossier is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe
This bill is no mere “TikTok ban,” it is a mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul.
The RESTRICT Act goes far, far beyond potentially banning TikTok. It gives the government virtual unchecked authority over the U.S. communications infrastructure. The incredibly broad language includes the ability to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk” to “national security” today and in any “potential future transaction.”
The Senate legislation currently has 19 cosponsors, all of whom are Uniparty members in good standing. It is fully “bipartisan,” consisting of 9 democrats and 10 republicans.
This video is the first installment of an art project I’ll be doing called The Disappearing of Julian Assange:
In my wallet, I keep a folded print-out of an image of Julian Assange. The photo was taken on October 27, 2021. It is blue, blurry and velvety soft, a photo of the cctv feed of the prisoner’s dock at the moment he suffered a stroke.
This is the last known image of Julian Assange.
The disappearing of the image of Julian Assange has been slowly taking place since he entered the Ecuadorian Embassy 13 years ago. Internally, he was the most surveilled person on the planet, but publicly, photos were rare.
And then, for the last three years, he has been held in a maximum security prison where the taking of images is strictly forbidden.
For me, the irony of the last known image of Julian Assange being of his brain mid-explosion is a powerful visual metaphor for how he himself, the idea of Julian Assange, Wikileaks, journalism, a free press, and all he stands for, is being surgically wiped from the public’s consciousness in a deliberate inducement of global aphasia.
This is censorship via amnesia.
This is the psychological disappearing of Julian Assange.
And this is why I carry this photo in my wallet. Because I refuse to forget.
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests.
Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Timeshas claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”
Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.
MCViewPoint 
