Zuckerberg won’t censor Trump, but don’t mistake Facebook for a bastion of free speech
By Helen Buyniski | RT | June 2, 2020
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken heat over refusing to hide a post from US President Donald Trump that Twitter claimed “glorified violence.” But his reasons are more about placating power than defending free speech.
Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up a Trump post condemning the riots in Minneapolis that warned “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” upset Facebook employees, a few of whom even threatened to appeal to the company’s newly-appointed oversight board – notoriously larded with anti-Trump voices.
But the CEO’s reasoning – “people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open” – had little in common with the fiery rhetoric of free speech activism. In fact, it was so mind-numbingly obvious it would likely have gone unremarked-upon in any other era. How, indeed, are Americans supposed to hold their leaders accountable if they don’t know what those leaders are saying?
It’s not clear if anyone would even have expected Facebook to take action on Trump’s post, had Twitter not already done so, hiding the message behind a warning that it violated the platform’s rules about “glorifying violence.” And it’s unlikely that Twitter would have taken action on that particular message had the president not been needling the platform for weeks with envelope-pushing tweets, starting with accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murdering an intern nearly 20 years ago.
While Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski demanded Trump be kicked off Twitter for the smears, it was a post about mail-in voting that finally brought down Twitter’s fact-check hammer. Still, that was enough of a rationale for Trump to unveil an executive order proposing to strip social media platforms of their cherished Section 230 immunity, which protects them from lawsuits based on user-generated content but also forbids them from selectively curating that content. Checkmate?
Silicon Valley is hurtling into a future whose ever-shrinking boundaries are dictated by censorship algorithms and all rough edges are sanded off (literally, in Twitter’s case) lest any comment wound another user’s feelings. Facebook is as guilty of this as anyone, alerting Instagram users when they’re about to post a “bullying” comment and banning “sexual” emojis. Even as social media styles itself the “new public square,” platforms find themselves in the surreal position of trying to outdo each other in silencing their users: if Facebook exiles conservative performance artist Alex Jones, declaring him a “dangerous individual,” Youtube and Twitter follow suit.
However, while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has attempted to apply the platform’s increasingly absurd restrictions across the board, subjecting even the president of the US to Kafkaesque limitations that seem to shift from day to day, Zuckerberg knows on which side his bread is buttered. While his competitors in Silicon Valley wore their anti-Trump politics on their sleeves, the Facebook founder met with Republican congressmen and took care to include Breitbart in the rollout of Facebook News, triggering howls of outrage from liberals.
While Dorsey exiled political advertising from his platform completely earlier this year, Zuckerberg has clung to his promise not to fact-check the speech of politicians – ensuring a steady flow of advertising dollars from both parties’ campaigns, even as Democratic politicians condemn Facebook’s hands-off approach.
This doesn’t make Zuckerberg a free speech hero, or Facebook a bastion of political enlightenment. “Regular” users will still find themselves shadow-banned or exiled entirely if they post too much “wrongthink,” as even popular pages like PragerU have discovered recently. The Facebook CEO’s equal-opportunity pandering merely makes him a competent businessman, and means he’ll almost certainly survive whatever Section 230-related crackdown is coming.
It also makes it vanishingly unlikely Zuckerberg’s platform will face anything like a takeover bid from formidable Republican “vulture capitalist” and rabidly pro-Israel Trump donor Paul Singer. The notorious hedge-funder reportedly sought to oust Dorsey from Twitter earlier this year when the CEO suggested he’d be stepping back from full-time management of the company to spend six months of the year in Africa. While Singer was apparently rebuffed with the help of loyal Twitter employees and fellow billionaire Elon Musk, he still has four directors on the company’s board and may still be circling overhead looking for signs of weakness.
Twitter has fallen a long way from the days when it referred to itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and now competes with Facebook and YouTube for the title of Silicon Valley’s Ministry of Truth. The future of social media looks bleak indeed when Zuckerberg is cast as the defender of free speech. But ordinary Facebook users shouldn’t mistake his indulgence of Trump for standing on principle. His legendarily low opinion of the platform’s users – “dumb f***s” – is more pertinent now than ever.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Bigoted Cops and the Drug War
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 3, 2020
If Americans want to diminish racial bigotry in police departments across the country, the best way to start is by legalizing drugs, all of them. That would bring an end to the legal opportunity that bigoted cops have in the enforcement of drug laws against blacks.
I’m not saying that all cops are racial bigots. We all know that they’re not. But we also know that some of them are. And the drug war permits them to exercise their racial bigotry to their heart’s content — and even get praised and thanked for their service while doing so.
After all, let’s face it: there are racial bigots in society, and there will always be racial bigots in society. Anyone who thinks he is going to wipe out racial bigotry through “education” and “enlightenment” is living in la la land.
When someone engages in racial bigotry on a private level, he is subject to private and peaceful retaliatory measures, such as loss of sales if he is a business owner or the loss of a job if he is an employee. He is also subject to criticism and social ostracism. The free society makes the bigot bear an economic and social penalty for his bigotry, which might well nudge, not force, him into better behavior.
It’s totally different with drug laws. They have converted police departments into magnets for racial bigots. With the drug war, cops are empowered to stop blacks arbitrarily and subject them to abusive interrogations and intrusive, demeaning, and oftentimes violent searches and seizures of their persons, automobiles, and homes.
As long as they are “searching for drugs,” it’s all okay. No loss of sales. No loss of job. No public criticism. No social ostracism. Hey, they are helping cleanse our society of illegal drugs! They’re considered heroes! People praise them for their courage and thank them for their service.
That includes many judges, some of whom do not hesitate to mete out extraordinarily long jail sentences to blacks. A good example is a black man in North Carolina named Michael Holmes who has now served some 30 years of a 200-year jail sentence for a non-violent drug offense. There are thousands more like him.
The drug war also provides bigoted cops with the perfect opportunity to frame blacks for drug offenses by planting drugs on them or by simply lying about drug transactions. As prosecutors ask jurors, “Who are you going to believe — this upstanding (white) police officer who is simply trying to keep drugs from reaching your children or this (black) defendant who obviously has a motive to lie?” The false and fraudulent arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and harsh jail sentences meted out to dozens of innocent blacks in Tulia, Texas, several years ago is just one example of this phenomenon.
The noted academician Michelle Alexander rightly calls the drug war the new Jim Crow. It gives bigoted cops a license to do what bigoted cops did during the days of racial segregation. In fact, the drug war is without a doubt the most racially bigoted government program since segregation.
The legalization of drugs would, of course, not end racial bigotry in society. But it would end the opportunity that drug laws have given cops to legally exercise racial bigotry. Unable to exercise their bigotry legally through the enforcement of the drug war, police departments would no longer serve as a magnet for racial bigots. Those who are already cops would begin drifting back into the private sector where they would be nudged toward more appropriate behavior with such things as boycotts, criticism, and social ostracism rather than praised and thanked for their bigoted enforcement of the drug war.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.
Israelis Trained the Minnesota Cop How to Kill
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | June 2, 2020
Precisely as I reported Minnesota police received Israeli training. The knee-on-neck is an Israeli restraint hold that Israeli forces use for breaking Palestinian necks. I doubt the Minneapolis cop intended to kill Floyd. He probably thought he was just using a restraint technique. In so many of the cases of police-inflicted death and injury there is no need for restraint. People are not resisting. Maybe the cops just want to practice their training.
Another main cause of police-inflicted death and injury are the middle of the night home invasions, sanctioned by courts and local authorities. There is absolutely no reason for these invasions. They are nothing but murder weapons.
The real murderers of George Floyd were the Israelis who taught the Minnesota cops the knee-on-neck restraint technique. The irresponsible court rulings that permit unannounced home invasions have also killed a lot of people. The police have been turned into killers by their absurd and inappropriate training. The cop will pay the price for his wrongful training just as did George Floyd.
It is pure idiocy to let those responsible for these practices off the hook and to run around shouting “racism.” Knee-on-neck is a restraint technique taught to the police. It is not racism. The technique should not have been taught to American police, and people who are not resisting should not be restrained. George Floyd died because of wrongful police training, not because of racism.
Minnesota cops ‘trained by Israeli forces in restraint techniques’
Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian protestor on March 12, 2019.
By Jon Collins – Morning Star– June 1, 2020
Officers from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.
Mr Floyd’s death in custody last Monday, the latest in a succession of police killings of African Americans, has sparked continuing protests and rioting in US cities.
At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference* hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.
There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.
The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli claimed that the half-day session brought “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police” to share knowledge with their US counterparts.
It is unclear whether any of the officers involved in the incident in which Mr Floyd was killed attended the conference.
Israeli forces broke necks
But in a chilling testimony, a Palestinian rights activist said that when she saw the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck, she was reminded of the Israeli forces’ policing of the occupied territories.
Neta Golan, the co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.
“They started twisting and breaking fingers in a particular way around the same time. It was clear they had undergone training for this. They continue to use these tactics — two of my friends have had their necks broken but luckily survived — and it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the US and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.”
Israeli training of US police is widespread
The training of US police officials by Israeli forces is widespread.
Even Amnesty was compelled to report that hundreds of police from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state and Washington DC had been flown to Israeli for training.
Thousands more have been trained by Israeli forces who have come to the US to host similar events to the one held in Minneapolis. According to the somewhat selective rights organisation, many of these trips are taxpayer-funded, while others are privately funded.
Since 2002 the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), it said.
The Minneapolis Police Department was contacted for comment.
*(embedded links added by If Americans Knew)
[IAK notes: Anoka County (north Minneapolis region) Sheriff James Stuart traveled to Israel last December for a similar training.]
‘Wanton thuggery’: Outraged Australia to probe US police attack on its journalists covering White House protest
Police aim at Reuters TV cameraman during unrest in Minneapolis. © Reuters / Julio Cesar-Chavez
RT | June 2, 2020
The Australian embassy in Washington, DC will investigate an apparent assault by the US police against two Aussie journalists. The pair were roughed up live on air while covering a protest outside the White House.
A crew working for the outlet 7News was targeted on Tuesday while reporting from a demonstration in the US capital against police brutality. Correspondent Amelia Brace and cameraman Tim Myers were battered as the police cleared a protesting crowd, footage of the incident showed. Brace was hit with a baton, while Myers was attacked with a riot shield.
“We have asked the Australian embassy in Washington, DC to investigate this incident,” Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Tuesday, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an investigation into the alleged assault. “I want to get further advice on how we would go about registering Australia’s strong concerns with the responsible local authorities in Washington,” she added.
Craig McPherson, Seven Network’s Director of News and Public Affairs, in turn, said, it was “nothing short of wanton thuggery.”
“They weren’t in anyone’s way – just doing their job,” McPherson said, adding that the company will file its own complaints against the police’s behavior, calling the incident “abhorrent.”
Brace, who returned to cover the news after the attack, said the officers’ actions were indiscriminate and they simply didn’t care that he and Myers were members of the media.
What happened to the Australian crew is one of many instances of journalists reporting from protests in the US being caught up in violence and targeted by police officers. Russia has demanded an investigation into an attack by Minneapolis police on a group of reporters, which included a Russian correspondent who was pepper-sprayed.
The US is currently experiencing nationwide protests and rioting over the death of an African American man, George Floyd. He was arrested by Minneapolis police and pinned to the ground, with one officer putting his knee on the man’s neck. An independent autopsy confirmed that Floyd died as a result of being unable to breathe due to their actions.
Will Italy be the next country to leave EU?
By Paul Antonopoulos | June 2, 2020
On May 27, the political movement Italia Libera submitted a constitutional bill to the Supreme Court of Cassation demanding a referendum for Italy to leave the EU. After years of discussions, the foundation stone was laid for Italians to debate whether they want to remain in the EU or follow the United Kingdom out of the bloc. The draft bill presented by Italia Libera to the Supreme Court of Cassation is entitled “Call for a referendum on the withdrawal of the state from the European Union.”
Effectively, Italia Libera has demonstrated that it is possible to follow an institutional path to allow citizens to decide whether they want to remain in the EU or not – and for those who want to leave, now is the best time considering the massive decline in popularity for the bloc after their abandonment of Italy when it was at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
Gian Luca Proietti Toppi, a lawyer involved in the bill, said that it is necessary to reach ordinary Italians and “open their eyes to the harmful effects of participating in a Union without a soul and based only on finance. It is clear that with the filing of the 50,000 signatures necessary to start the parliamentary process of the proposal, a broad debate will open on the opportunity to exit the cage of the EU and the Euro.”
He continued to explain that “the effects of liberating the old continent from this bureaucratic and oppressive superstructure will certainly be complex to manage. However, Italia Libera, who is the first promoter of the Committee that collected the signatures needed, has already put experts and academics to work to draw up a plan that will secure the savings of Italians and from the debt.”
Although he did not mention the EU’s abandonment of Italy during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, he did emphasize how the bloc financially exploits Italy, just as it does to all of Mediterranean Europe with the exception of France.
There are many positive aspects to the EU, most notably the free movement of people and a coordinated effort to fight crime through Europol, but these multilateral agreements can exist without a European Parliament and domineering institutions based in Brussels and Strasbourg. As Toppi explained, Italy imagined the EU to be “a community of peoples and not of bankers.” It is for this reason that they announced the bill on the same day an unprecedented European Union Recovery Fund became official. This fund was only established because of the backlash received due to the bloc’s initial disinterest in assisting already struggling economies of the EU that were being further devastated financially by the pandemic.
With widespread southern European dissatisfaction with how the EU abandoned its supposed liberal ideals, particularly Germany, in favour of serving inward self-interests, bloc leaders are now playing catch up. President of the European Commission and Angela Merkel’s right-hand man in previous German governments, Ursula Von Der Leyen, and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who was also a former member of the Troika of bankers, announced the unprecedented measures to assist Europe through its financial woes. This time they promised real aid that would not completely decimate state structures and entire economies like what happened to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy, for the entirety of the 2010’s. The Governor of the Bank of Italy expects a 13% drop in GDP in 2020, and for this reason Toppi emphasized that Italy does not need any further indebtedness which will increasingly put Italy in the hands of international speculators.
However, Italians remember that Lagarde announced on March 13, just as coronavirus was truly beginning to overwhelm hospitals, that the pandemic was an Italian problem only. This was the catalyst that saw ordinary Italians begin to remove EU flags from public display and replace them with Russian and Chinese flags in gratitude to the significant assistance that these two countries gave to Italy when it was abandoned by Brussels and Berlin.
An “Italexit” would be a bigger blow to the prestige of the EU then Brexit. Italy, as a G20 country, uses the Eurodollar unlike Britain which maintained currency sovereignty and continued to use the pound. Therefore, to prevent the strong possibility that Italy in the coming years could leave the EU, Brussels and Berlin must take note of its political failures and work to design a new community that has respect for national sovereignty and identity, and on the basis of reciprocity. It is not acceptable that Germany remains the dominant country of the EU and effectively rules over the European Commission, the European Central Banks, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament.
A Europe free of unscrupulous bankers, self-referential bureaucrats and inadequate politicians is at the forefront of those pushing for their respective countries to exit the EU or call for its reformation. However, for this to be achieved, a major state must lead the charge, and it appears that Italy will take on this mantle and could very well be the first Eurodollar state to leave the EU if drastic reformations are not made. And Italian exit will surely have a domino effect felt all across Europe.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Moscow demands probe after Russian journalist pepper-sprayed by Minneapolis police
RT | May 31, 2020
The use of violent force by police against journalists, including a Russian correspondent who was pepper-sprayed in the face, is unacceptable, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said, urging the US to investigate the incident.
This comes after a RIA Novosti correspondent, Mikhail Turgiev, and a group of US journalists were attacked by police in Minneapolis while covering the ongoing riots provoked by the death of an African American man, George Floyd. The crew was targeted with rubber bullets and Turgiev was pepper-sprayed, despite showing his press ID.
Police attacks on media staff executing their professional duties are unacceptable, the ministry added, calling the law enforcers’ use of pepper spray on Turgiev “unjust cruelty.”
The ministry urged the US authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into the incident, reminding Washington of its obligation to ensure that journalists can carry out their activities on US soil in a manner that is safe and unhindered.
International organizations and human rights NGOs should also look into the attack on the Russian correspondent, it added.
Veteran FBI Lawyer Boente Resigns Over Role in Michael Flynn Case
Sputnik – 31.05.2020
Federal Bureau of Investigation lawyer Dana Boente has resigned after 38 years due to pressure from the Justice Department, after facing criticism for his role in the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“Few people have served so well in so many critical, high-level roles at the Department. Throughout his long and distinguished career as a public servant, Dana has demonstrated a selfless determination to ensure that justice is always served on behalf of our citizens. While it will be difficult to replace Dana, I am committed to ensuring that the next general counsel is experienced, objective, and prepared to lead the men and women who make up this vital part of the FBI’s mission,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
Boente, who had also been acting assistant attorney general of the National Security Division and US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has come under fire for his handling of the case against Flynn.
Flynn pleaded guilty December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding a United Nations resolution on Israel – Flynn has since rescinded his plea, and the Justice Department is seeking to drop the case.
In late April, a couple of right-leaning news outlets reported Boente had concealed exculpatory evidence related to Flynn. These reports were amplified by Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who said on his show, “Shocking new reports suggest FBI General Counsel Dana Boente was acting in coordination with FBI Director Christopher Wray to block the release of that evidence that would have cleared Gen. Flynn.”
Wray picked Boente to be the FBI’s general counsel in January 2018, and he went on to play a key role in the agency’s Trump-Russia investigation – Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Judiciary Committee, named him as a possible target for subpoena as part of the panel’s probe of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
Boente is the last remaining active government official who signed off on a FISA warrant targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page – former FBI Director James Comey signed off on the second FISA renewal for the FBI April 2017 – which occurred during his brief stint as acting attorney general. He assumed the role after Sally Yates, deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, was fired in late January 2017 for refusing to defend President Trump’s travel ban. Boente was replaced by Jeff Sessions.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report into Crossfire Hurricane criticised the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to FISA warrants against Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the Bureau’s reliance on former MI6 operative Christopher Steele’s utterly discredited dossier. Recently declassified footnotes show the FBI was aware the document’s content may have been compromised by Russian intelligence and used it anyway..
The report noted Boente and other DOJ officials who signed off on the applications “did not have accurate and complete information at the time they approved them”.
Israeli Police Kill Unarmed Man with Mental Disability in Jerusalem
![Iyad Hallaq, a mentally disabled Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces in Jerusalem on 30 May 2020 [Twitter]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Iyad-Hallaq.jpg?resize=1200%2C787&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1)
Israeli forces shot and killed Iyad Khairi Hallak, 32, a Palestinian man with mental disability. (Photo: via Social Media)
Palestine Chronicle | May 30, 2020
Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man with mental disability in East Jerusalem on Saturday morning, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
According to Israeli reports, Israeli officers opened fire on a man who was carrying “a suspicious object that looked like a pistol” and ran away when ordered to stop.
Later Israeli reports confirmed that the man, who was shot dead during the chase, was actually unarmed.
The victim was identified as Iyad Khairi Hallak, 32, from Wad el-Joz neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. Hallak, who was attending an institution for people with special needs in the same area where he was killed, was left on the ground bleeding until he died.
Police closed all gates leading into Jerusalem’s old city following the incident and banned entry or exit from it. They also raided the Hallak home in Wad el-Joz, according to Palestinian sources.
Two can play Section 230 game: Trump’s EO uses key statute against social media censorship
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 28, 2020
Social media giants have long hid behind a law shielding them from litigation to censor content they did not like. President Donald Trump’s executive order just reminded them that laws can also be used as a sword.
Though the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the government from restricting freedom of speech, social media platforms have long argued this does not apply to them as private companies. The executive order signed by Trump on Thursday points out that their status as platforms, and immunity from endless civil lawsuits, depends on their removal of controversial content being done “in good faith.”
The order instructs federal agencies to focus on that qualifier when considering Section 230 (C) of 47 US Code to social media companies, noting that this clearly does not apply when their practices are “deceptive” or “pretextual,” inconsistent with their own terms of service, and used to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree.
Until now, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others could have it both ways, insisting they were “platforms” and therefore not liable for user-generated content, while acting as “publishers” and actively deciding which content they would allow, using entirely arbitrary and ever-changing rules.
The issue became political after 2016, when Trump used social platforms to bypass the establishment media that overwhelmingly favored – and endorsed – his opponent. The ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory wasn’t just used in an attempt to get Trump out of office, but also to pressure social media giants to censor viewpoints the establishment did not like – overwhelmingly targeting Trump supporters, but also purging dissident voices on the left.
It made little difference whether the companies did so internally, or by outsourcing it to third parties – such as Facebook did recently – the people making these decisions invariably turned out to be passionately partisan.
The fact that Trump specifically called out Twitter’s “head of integrity” and referenced the presence of a Democrat impeachment witness on Facebook’s Oversight Board indicates that Thursday’s order did not come out of the blue. The advanced copy leaked to friendly journalists earlier in the day likewise suggested that the White House has been laying the groundwork for such a measure for years, just waiting for the right moment.
Remember when a federal judge ruled that Trump is not allowed to block trolls on his personal account, because Twitter was a “designated public forum” and he is an elected official? Trump does, and he’s using the same logic to put the responsibility on social media to act as such.
Critics, of course, claimed that Trump was only acting now – after years of doing nothing and “monitoring the situation” – because Twitter dared “fact check” his opinions on mail-in ballots this week.
Attempting to shield his employees from Trump’s ire, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey argued that the president’s tweets “may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot.”
Trump called this “ridiculous” and “stupid.” Think of him what you want, but in this instance he’s correct – Dorsey is really reaching here, and insulting the intelligence of millions of Americans in the process.
Perhaps one of the most absurd features of the Trump era is the extent to which his critics have openly sacrificed their own publicly professed principles in order to oppose him. Thus the self-styled civil libertarians on the left suddenly decided they actually love private corporations and hate government regulations, coming out in support of purging “hate speech” (a nonexistent category in US law).
All of a sudden, the First Amendment applied only to the government – but not to Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Nor did they bother protesting when those companies applied German, Pakistani or Chinese laws to silence Americans. But now the American Civil Liberties Union is reacting to Trump’s order by shrieking “He can’t do that!”
Except that yes, he can. Ensuring US laws are faithfully executed is literally his mandate (Article II, Section 3). Trump is not revoking Section 230 – only Congress can do that – but he is clearly issuing new guidance as to how it is to be enforced. The federal government may not even need to do much – Trump seems to be well aware of Saul Alinsky’s Rule 9:“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
The mere prospect of being stripped of Section 230 protections and facing costly litigation as a result may prompt these companies to rethink their behavior. Or they could decide their commitment to the ideology of “social justice” and connections to one party in the US political system trump business concerns, so to speak. We’ll see what happens.
The trouble with the latter approach is that Joe Biden, the Democrat nominee facing off against Trump in November, has just recently called for abolishing Section 230 altogether – making Trump’s position the more moderate and reasonable one by comparison, from their standpoint.
As I’ve argued before, the battle has never been over a particular tweet or two, but over who gets to be the arbiter of truth – the American people, or the establishment and its allies in legacy and social media.
At the end of the day, that’s what this executive order is all about.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Australian Court Ruling Grants Access to Queen’s Correspondence Written Before Whitlam Dismissal
Sputnik – 29.05.2020
On 11 November 1975, Governor-General of Australia John Kerr sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, arguing that he had failed to get parliament to approve a national budget and then refused to resign or call an election. Since then, historians have questioned what Buckingham Palace knew about the removal of Whitlam.
The Australian Supreme Court ordered to make public the correspondence written by the Queen Elizabeth II before the 1975 dismissal of then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
The court ruled that the letters that the monarch had sent to Governor General John Kerr were in the public domain, according to the BBC.
Kerr fired Whitlam three years after he was elected prime minister, which led to a deep constitutional crisis. The reasons for his resignation are still being discussed; some experts believe that the UK and even the US tried to suppress the reformist ideas of the politician.
More than 200 letters have been kept sealed in the National Archives since 1978, but on Friday the High Court of Australia ruled that they could be accessed in the national interest.
The contents of the the letters between the Queen and Sir John are unknown.
In 2018, the historian Jenny Hocking demanded that the correspondence be published, but the Australian federal court refused the plaintiff to release the Queen’s letters.
‘Muzzling Freedom of Expression’: Facebook Slammed for Appointing Israeli Censor to Oversight Board
Sputnik – May 28, 2020
On 6 May Facebook revealed the first 20 members of its Oversight Board, an independent body entrusted with the final say over certain content moderation decisions for the world’s largest social media platform, the creation of which was announced in November 2018, to avoid accusations of bias over removing content deemed problematic
Facebook has been taking flack for hiring the former director-general of Israel’s justice ministry as a member of its new Oversight Board, which will be able to overturn the company’s own content moderation decisions.
Under Emi Palmor, who headed the justice ministry from 2014 until she was dismissed from her post last year, the Israeli ministry “petitioned Facebook to censor legitimate speech of human rights defenders and journalists because it was deemed politically undesirable,” insisted Palestinian civil society groups in May, writes The Electronic Intifada, an online Chicago-based publication covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The groups slammed Facebook’s choice of Palmor to the international panel that will take content moderation decisions for the world’s largest social media platform.
Palmor, they warn, could potentially “muzzle freedom of expression” on the platform, censoring human rights defenders, particularly Palestinian, Arab and Muslim.
The Palestine Digital Rights Coalition, the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council and the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network have been quoted as urging Facebook to “consider the grave consequences that electing Emi Palmor may have particularly on Palestinian human rights defenders and on freedom of expression online in defense of Palestinian rights.”
Palmor was employed as a top civil servant during the term in office of Ayelet Shaked as Minister of Justice.
Under Palmor’s oversight, say the groups, the ministry established a cyber unit whose efforts resulted in the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from social media platforms, with Adalah, a group advocating for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, calling into question the legality of the unit’s practices.
According to Adalah, with “no transparency or legal procedure whatsoever”, the unit directs requests to the Israeli state attorney, demanding that “Facebook and Google remove, restrict or suspend access to certain content, pages or users.”
Adalah claims the procedure leaves users no possibility to defend themselves against allegations that their posts were “illegal or warranted removal.”
The Oversight Board
On 6 May Facebook revealed the names of the first 20 members of its international Oversight Board, an independent body that will be tasked with specific content moderation decisions.
The board will govern appeals regarding content takedowns from Facebook and Instagram users, receiving cases through a content management system linked to Facebook’s own platforms.
The members – a diverse group containing lawyers, journalists, human rights advocates and other academics with expertise in digital rights, religious freedom, content moderation, internet censorship and civil rights – will discuss the case as a group before issuing a final say regarding whether the content should be allowed to stay up or not.
“We are all committed to freedom of expression within the framework of international norms of human rights,” the four co-chairs of the board – Catalina Botero-Marino, Jamal Greene, Michael W McConnell and Helle Thorning-Schmidt – wrote in a New York Times op-ed introducing themselves to the public on 6 May. “We will make decisions based on those principles and on the effects on Facebook users and society, without regard to the economic, political or reputational interests of the company.”
In November 2018, in the wake of a New York Times report that slammed Facebook for social media misuses, the company announced the establishment of an independent panel.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Prime Minister of Denmark and one of the board’s four co-chairs, was quoted by CNBC as saying:
“Up until now some of the most difficult decisions about content have been made by Facebook and you could say Mark Zuckerberg… Facebook has decided to change that.”
Set to eventually comprise around 40 members, the board will begin hearing cases in the coming months.
Amid a slew of charges of bias and politically censoring content, the move is seen by many as potentially able to help Facebook avoid the accusations which it emphatically rejects.
Last December, Facebook pledged the board $130 million in funding, with the money set to cover operational costs for at least six years.
In January, however, Facebook outlined the extent to which it remained in control, in a 46-page document.
Facebook outlined the powers and limitations of the board, stating that the board’s decisions do not necessarily set precedents that the company would be called upon to adhere to in the future, and the board is limited when it comes to content it can address.
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