Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

9th Circuit: Feds Free to Censor ‘Anti-Vaccine’ ‘Misinformation’ Via Pressure on Social Media Companies

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2024

What a wild coincidence: one branch of government (judiciary) doesn’t mind another branch of government (executive) doing whatever it likes extraconstitutionally.

That’s called Democracy™, boys and girls, and it’s sacred.

The Daily Bell

By Ben Bartee –

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

What a wild coincidence: one branch of government (judiciary) doesn’t mind another branch of government (executive) doing whatever it likes extraconstitutionally.

That’s called Democracy™, boys and girls, and it’s sacred.

Via Reuters (emphasis added):

“Meta Platforms defeated an appeal by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenging its censorship of Facebook posts that spread misinformation about vaccines’ efficacy and safety.

In a decision on Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, said the nonprofit did not show that Meta worked with or was coerced by federal officials to suppress views challenging “government orthodoxy” on vaccines.

Children’s Health Defense sued in 2020, saying that Meta had violated its constitutional rights by flagging “vaccine misinformation” as false, and taking away its right to advertise on Facebook.”

Not being a legal scholar, I’m sure there’s a good answer to this, but I’m not clear: why would CHD sue Meta and not the government for violating its First Amendment rights, when it was at the government’s behest that Meta acted?

Via Children’s Health Defense (emphasis added):

“CHD’s suit accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies of “privatizing” the First Amendment by teaming up with Facebook to censor speech which, “under the Bill of Rights, the Government cannot censor.”

According to the lawsuit, filed in August 2020 — and amended in December 2020 — the CDC and the World Health Organization “collaborated closely with Facebook to suppress vaccine safety speech by using a ‘warning label’ and other similar types of notices which, while purporting to flag misinformation, in reality censor valid and truthful speech, including content posted by plaintiff on its Facebook page regarding vaccines.”

This collaboration amounted to “state action” and was in violation of the First Amendment, CHD said…

See the rest here

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: 9th Circuit, anti-vaccine, Facebook, Meta, misinformation, Social media | Leave a Comment »

The World Doesn’t Owe You a Thing

Posted by M. C. on January 23, 2024

by Tom Woods

What I know is this: Nature doesn’t care what you “deserve.” Nature alone doesn’t simply hand you things to sustain you. You have to go out and acquire them for yourself, sometimes at the cost of great physical exertion and sacrifice. And if you do manage, by a direct reckoning with nature, to produce everything you need entirely on your own and without interacting with other human beings, your standard of living will be almost unimaginably low.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-world-doesnt-owe-you-a-thing/

A huge drawback to social media is this: I’m not sure I really want everybody’s opinions on every last thing, and it’s frankly demoralizing to realize just how far gone so many people are.

For example, one of my own Twitter followers wrote this: “The idea of having to ‘earn a living’ implies that, by default, you don’t actually deserve to be alive.”

He thinks this is profound.

I don’t even know what it means to say somebody “deserves” to be alive.

So the way to achieve the kind of living standards we have come to enjoy necessarily involves, at the very least, integrating oneself into the division of labor, such that everybody’s unique specializations combine to multiply output manyfold.

The division of labor, in turn, involves human beings. Since the goods we need to survive are not generated automatically but have to be produced by someone, then if you are going to live on this earth without “making a living” (the expression that the original post finds so offensive), the only way to do so is by forcing other people to make a living for you. And then what happens to the life those people “deserve”? Don’t those people deserve a life in which they’re not required to do forced labor for strangers?

Confusion like this is why it’s important to understand that when in the American tradition we speak of the right to life, liberty, and property, we really mean, in the case of life, the right not to have your life taken away. You do not have a positive right to life in the sense that if you needed it you would have an abstract right to a kidney dialysis machine. You do have a right to pay for the use of such a machine, since that’s a subset of property rights, but your “right to life” doesn’t include a right to demand that somebody else build that machine and let you use it.

See the rest here

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: division of labor, living standards, Social media | Leave a Comment »

CNN Host: We Should Yield to Government Censorship Demands

Posted by M. C. on July 10, 2023

Now, however, major media figures are shrugging off free speech concerns and supporting censorship as what former CNN media host CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter called a “harm reduction model.” While once fiercely opposed to censorship and government-supported blacklists, many in the media are echoing Mattingly’s view that the natural default should be to obey the government and its directions on permitted speech. After all, this is all for our own protection. Censorship just “makes sense.”

CNN Host: We Should Yield to Government Censorship Demands

As a long-standing free speech advocate, the last few years have been alarming and, frankly, depressing. The censorship efforts of the government are, unfortunately, not new. However, what is new is the support of the media and the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the recent opinion finding that the Biden Administration had violated the First Amendment in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” However, the New York Times immediately warned that the outbreak of free speech could “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.” Yet, no one expressed more simply and chillingly than CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly who stated that it “makes sense” for tech companies to go along with government censorship demands.

Mattingly admitted that social media platforms “more often than not” gave in to the censorship demands by the Biden administration. However, he insisted that it “makes sense,” and is “probably what we should do on public health grounds.”

“[T]he Biden administration would regularly reach out to Twitter and Facebook and other companies in kind of the early stages of their COVID response and say, this person is spreading lies about vaccines, this account is spreading misinformation that is inhibiting — not just our efforts, the administration’s efforts to address COVID — but also public health, do something about it. And often, I think more often than not, the companies would respond and say, okay. And there are emails that came out during the course of this case that that was something that I think — when it was explained to me at the time, I thought, alright, that makes sense, that’s probably what we should do on public health grounds.”

What is striking is not just the blind acceptance that the government should be protecting us from harmful thoughts. It is also the failure to recognize that the government was wrong on many of these points while experts were being banned and blacklisted.

Many people were routinely censored on Twitter and other platforms for daring to challenge the official position on masks.

The Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC) initially rejected the use of a mask mandate. However, the issue became a political weapon as politicians and the press claimed that questioning masks was anti-science and even unhinged. In April 2020, the CDC reversed its position and called for the masking of the entire population, including children as young as 2 years old. The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children.

See the rest here

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CNN, COVID response, Democratic Party, Government Censorship, Social media | Leave a Comment »

A HUGE win for free speech

Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2022

Two new developments were not covered by any mainstream media, so I thought I’d let you know about them. You aren’t supposed to know this but …

This news article in the Epoch Times announcing that a free speech case brought by two state attorney generals is a big deal.

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/a-huge-win-for-free-speech

And today there is now this headline that subpoenas have been served and the officials (as well as Twitter, YouTube, Meta, Instagram and LinkedIn) have 30 days to respond:

You will not find either story in mainstream media because it is counter narrative. But for people like me, this is one of the biggest news items I’ve seen.

Alex Berenson tried to argue the state-action doctrine in his Twitter lawsuit, but Judge Alsup denied it. This was in Federal Court in San Francisco.

See this excellent article (and it’s short) describing the state-action doctrine. It notes that federal courts think Twitter is off the hook, but state courts can rule differently.

I’m looking at suing Twitter in California state court and if I win, Twitter has to pay my legal expenses and it also means they can’t silence free speech on their platform anymore, which will be a huge step forward for free speech.

This development is a big win because it means that a judge wasn’t convinced by the government’s attempts to dismiss the case. If the case succeeds, it could open up free speech on all these platforms. It would mean that people with vaccine injuries don’t have to hide anymore.

This win in court is more evidence that the narrative will be falling apart soon.

I now have nearly 100 reasons the safe and effective narrative is falling apart.

Summary

Free speech is key.

This ruling and the issuance of subpoenas is a solid step in restoring free speech rights on social media platforms.

The decision makers aren’t hearing the other side of the story because voices have been censored, including the voices of millions of vaccine injured people.

As I’ve said before, the key to ending the pandemic is for decision-makers to start listening to the people that are being censored.

So stopping censorship is an important step forward.

Once that happens, we can go back to normal almost instantly since COVID will no longer kill nearly as many people (we’ll use sensible treatment for in-patient and out-patients), the PCR and antigen tests will be properly specified to eliminate the false positives, and we can end all the stupid mitigation measures (like masks, lockdowns, isolation, etc). And we’ll start incentivizing hospitals to save lives instead of killing people. With a handful of changes, I think there’s an excellent chance we can cut the death rate from COVID to insignificant levels.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: collusion, free speech, Social media, state attorney generals | Leave a Comment »

New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud – by Glenn Greenwald – Glenn Greenwald

Posted by M. C. on September 25, 2021

An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 election. We now have definitive proof.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/new-proof-emerges-of-the-biden-family

Glenn Greenwald

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer warns that emails and other documents reported on by *The New York Post* about Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China may be “Russian disinformation,” Oct. 16, 2020.

A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post‘s archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter’s own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden’s profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one’s career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

See the rest here

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden family, BigTech, CIA, Hunter Biden, Social media | Leave a Comment »

The Trump Ban: The Only Free Speech Zone for American Conservatives Is Russia — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2021

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/18/trump-ban-only-free-speech-zone-for-american-conservatives-russia/

Tim Kirby

This is the moment Russia has been waiting for but it is unknown if those in the halls of the Kremlin even know that it is happening.

The only side that is going to really benefit from Big Tech’s war on free speech will be the Russians. In fact, it is really the Western elite’s deep hubris that has given Russia so many opportunities to become “russurgeant” after being crushed in the Cold War. Decades of questionable wars of “convenience” along with unending threats of destruction for anyone who dares question Washington have created a diverse group of scorned nations all willing to shake hands with Moscow. Making international agreements is a lot easier when no ideological strings are attached and no submission demanded. Thanks to incremental anti-Russian sanctions imposed because the pro-Washington Maidan didn’t take 100% of the territory of Ukraine, 1990s import addict Russia is now living a sober West-free lifestyle actually producing the things it needs to survive under Capitalism. And now, the blanket ban of Right Wing/Conservative figures over Social Media including the President of the United States himself is opening the door for Russian Social Media to explode onto the English-language online space. Without pettiness from within the American elite itself Russia could have never create this #migration of non-Russian speaking users to their sphere of electronic influence. But the big question is will the Russians actually understand this and jump on this truly unique opportunity?

Image: A now iconic screenshot about the state of the 1st Amendment.

It seems impossible to believe but the present “leader of the free world” Donald Trump has been completely banned from the big Social Media giants for his role in the recent storming of Capitol Hill by the MAGAmen. It is important to note that Trump has never admitted to organizing the aggressive protest nor has he been convicted of inciting a riot in a court of law. Twitter, Facebook and others believe he did this and that is good enough evidence for them. For the morally self-righteous accusation is now as good as guilt. Furthermore, this ban extends to “allies of Trump” which could be anyone of the ~80 million who voted for him and foreign people who like his memes. Noted Conservative speaker Ron Paul was temporarily and inexplicably blocked for “violating community standards” which has become coded language for “we don’t like what you have to say on our platform”. Long story short, anyone for any reason at all, real or fake, can be completely and totally banned from the largest public spaces on the internet and the key victims of these purgings will be those with morals that conflict with Big Tech and the Beltway.

Image: Flagrant hypocrisy is the new normal.

The obvious quick fix for Trump, who feels he is battling to save Democracy from a rigged 2020 electoral “loss”, would be to jump to alternative Social Media platforms across the “free market”. No one is stopping famous rich individuals like him from creating competitors to the big dogs right? Sadly for him, growing FB alternative Parler has been removed from the App Store because some people have used it to incite violence or something. The obvious irony of this is that on every platform there are people who say horrible things and call for the deaths of their enemies. But if a platform is big enough, and they agree with the given fatwa then it’s A-okay.

This complete lack of opportunity on America’s diverse free market has given the Russians the chance of a lifetime to pull every English-speaking conservative into their Social Media space. In fact within just 72 hours of this ban madness starting, Russian Social Media/Messenger Platform “Telegram” gained 25 million new users. This is unlikely to be a fluke or coincidence. Furthermore, this new member surge brings the total user base to healthy 500 million. It is important to note that there are only some 250 million+ Russian speakers on the planet and not all of them like to follow intellectual feeds and memes on Telegram. This means that the majority of Telegram’s audience are now not connected to Russia in any way. The platform has reached the critical mass needed to become a mainstay of daily life across the globe.

Image: Telegram needs to add “freedom from woke political repression” as their 4th selling point.

The Telegram product combines the ability to make feeds of content like a Facebook group, make big statements like Twitter and message easily like on Whatsapp. It is a program that stands on its own merits, but it’s promise of complete privacy and offer of freedom of speech to 21st century dissidents on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall Museum is what made it explode. It is the absurd hypocritical policies and witch hunts of Western elites that are handing Russia the hearts and minds of the EU/USA on a platter. If you want privacy, and the right to share the opinions of the American President online, as of today you can only go through Russia.

This is similar to the rise of RT. Most people want to hear their own news from within their own culture, but when the Mainstream Media preaches utter madness that even children find mental in it is not surprising that Russian news media became such a hit. People want high quality, professional, reasonable news media and you are 100 times more likely to see that on a given day on RT than CNN, the BBC or the other big boys. Those media giants had the ball in their hands, and they somehow managed to drop it right into their own end zone for the Russians to just fall on.

Image: Ron Paul shutdown: accident or warning?

During the Cold War, thanks to the dismal state of Soviet media, the youth of the USSR was listening to Radio Freedom and doing anything that it could to jump into the Western media sphere of influence. It was simply the better alternative that gave them breathing room to think about life without a framed Lenin picture in the background. Now it looks like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Donald Trump will be forced onto an expanding Russian side of a social media geopolitical space. This will act like the same type of media “beachhead” that America had in the Soviet Union during the Reagan years.

Telegram is a massive messenger that can replace WhatsApp and Twitter for many users. The Russian equivalent of Facebook, VK.com has been more reluctant to accept its destiny. I have approached their management personally bringing to their attention the fact that a massive Western Convservative audience is being repressed and will jump to a new platform for freedom of speech given the knowledge that such a platform exists. Especially when that platform can and does do everything that Facebook is capable of. My words were met with the usual hopeless pessimism that defines the Russian nation. In America we say “if you build it they will come” in Russia the logic is “if it has not been built, it can’t be and we shouldn’t think about it”. Perhaps with this new development they will reconsider my offer. I could use a percentage of a massive advertising campaign to attract the hordes of Conservative shows and blogs that have been deplatformed. VK, now is your time, they are giving you millions of English-speaking subscribers, just fall on the damn ball.

In terms of YouTube Russia does have an equivalent called RuTube (and some Netflix-like services) but it is not even that popular inside of the country itself. This would really be a good time for gents in the Kremlin to invest in a free speech video platform to win hearts and minds in the countries that threaten to kill them most often. As someone who has been deplatformed I would much appreciate the opportunity to make some fair and square ad revenue without the fear of using YouTube no-no words like “Depression”, “Brazil” and “Idaho”.

This is the moment Russia has been waiting for but it is unknown if those in the halls of the Kremlin even know that it is happening. The powers that be are not exactly filled with people from the media. Hopefully some of them will read this and realize just what a glorious opportunity Big Tech and the Democrats have given them. And since everything I write is banned anyways I’d be more than happy to run any attempts to absorb Western dissidents. It is not like these words are allowed to be posted on FB anyways.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: censorship, free speech, Russians, Social media, Trump Ban | Leave a Comment »

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Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

Two new developments were not covered by any mainstream media, so I thought I’d let you know about them. You aren’t supposed to know this but …

Summary