Dr. David McGrogan – The Daily Sceptic – September 27, 2022
It is encouraging that Tory MPs are taking seriously the threat to an open society posed by PayPal’s demonetisation of UsForThem, Toby Young, the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic. And it is more encouraging still that they are likely to respond to the threat through legislation – possibly through an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill. It is vital, however, that they get this response right, and understanding the purported legal basis for a company like PayPal excluding a user from its services is crucial in this regard.
To get some preliminary matters out of the way, it is important first to distinguish a financial services provider like PayPal from a social media outfit like Twitter or Facebook/Meta. There is a case to be made (although it is ultimately not one I would concur with) that it is legitimate for a social media operator to exclude people who express opinions deemed undesirable by its owners. I agree, for example, with the position that the Supreme Court adopted with respect to the baker in the famous ‘gay cake’ case; it is unconscionable for the law to force the owner of a private company to propagate a message that would conflict with said owner’s sincerely held beliefs. I think large social media providers are fundamentally different from the baker in that case, but I can at least understand the basis on which somebody would argue that Twitter booting, say, Andrew Tate, is essentially the same as a Christian baker refusing to bake a cake bearing a message supporting gay marriage (or, let’s say, a hypothetical Muslim printer refusing to print a satirical magazine bearing an image of the prophet). But there is no sense in which PayPal can be construed to be said to be in this position. PayPal does not serve to propagate messages of any kind; nor are its users even publicly known or identifiable for the large part; whether or not the Daily Sceptic is a customer of PayPal places no requirement on the latter to associate itself with the expression of any view whatsoever. It is a different kettle of fish.
It is also important to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons for a business like PayPal seeking to exclude users who express certain kinds of views that might be connected with criminal offences, even indirectly. To use an obvious and extreme example, there would be nothing wrong with PayPal closing an account it discovered to be connected to an organisation dedicated to sharing positive perspectives on paedophilia; while a group of paedophiles getting together to talk about how wonderful their predilection is would not (I think) in itself constitute a criminal offence, it is easy to see why PayPal would wish to avoid coming within a barge-pole’s distance of any suggestion it was knowingly assisting such a group. However, this kind of concern clearly would not apply with respect to the FSU, UsForThem, the Daily Sceptic or Toby personally.
A company like PayPal cannot therefore fall back on these kinds of excuses in behaving as it has done. And in any case, we can all what is really going on here – it’s nothing to do with matters of conscience or a legitimate attempt to ‘de-risk’ with respect to potentially criminal behaviour. (It is notable, for example, that PayPal appears to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about the risks of being seen to be associated with precisely the kind of paedophile support group I mentioned earlier.) This is simply a case of somebody at PayPal wishing to send a statement: “We’re on the side of the good guys, and if you’re not on our side, mind your P’s and Q’s.” The fact that a very important set of elections is due to take place in the US in November undoubtedly has something to do with this.
It is therefore entirely legitimate for Parliament to legislate to prevent this kind of behaviour, and the question thus becomes: what form should such legislation take?
Looking at the underlying purported legal justification for PayPal’s conduct will give us an answer. The recent closure of the accounts of the Daily Sceptic et al seems to have been done on the basis that these respective parties have violated their respective User Agreements with PayPal. The User Agreement, it must be said, has not been particularly clearly drafted, but this much at least is clear: PayPal may close a user’s account if the user is in breach of its terms. The specific breaches themselves in this case were not, however, made particularly clear. Initially, it seemed that PayPal was accusing the Daily Sceptic et al of breaching its Acceptable Use Policy – namely item 2 (f) of that document, which prohibits the user engaging in ‘the promotion of hate, violence or other forms of intolerance’. This obviously wouldn’t stick, though, and subsequent statements by PayPal have suggested that the accounts were closed on the basis that the Daily Sceptic et al were ‘providing false, inaccurate or misleading information’, which is on the list of ‘restricted activities’ in the User Agreement proper.
The haphazard way in which PayPal appears to have conducted itself is suggestive that the decision was made to close the accounts first, with the justification being worked out afterwards. But we do now know what its legal representatives would trot out as the purported contractual basis for closing the accounts in question: being in breach of the User Agreement by engaging in the restricted activity of providing false, inaccurate or misleading information.
And this in turn would allow us to identify the remedy in the creation of a relatively short Act (or amendment to the Online Safety Bill). I am not a Parliamentary drafter, but my suggestion would be something along the lines of:
A provider of financial services may not by reference to any contract term terminate or suspend the provision of services to a user on the basis of that user spreading false, inaccurate or misleading information, or similar, unless it is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the spreading of said information would in itself constitute a criminal offence in the laws of England and Wales.
This would quite neatly prevent PayPal or any other such provider from doing this kind of thing in future, while allowing such operators to ‘de-risk’ for the legitimate reason of avoiding any connection to the commission of crime. The consequence would simply be to make a term of a contract between a financial services provider and a customer purporting to allow termination on the grounds of the spreading of false information, etc., unenforceable, and the legislation could be worded to give this immediate effect.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
Stop Press: Allysia Finley has written a good comment piece for the Wall St Journal about why the Supreme Court may well uphold the law in Texas prohibiting large social media companies from blocking speech based on viewpoint.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 27, 2022
During an appearance at the “Goalkeepers 2022” event, investor and philanthropist Bill Gates lamented “misinformation” that was shared about him amid the coronavirus pandemic and complained that so-called misinformation about masks and vaccines reduced compliance with mandates.
“I’d say the biggest tragedy is that it [misinformation] fragmented society where certain sources, if they told you to wear a mask, that was the last thing you were going to do,” Gates said. “Or if they told you, you know, get the vaccine, particularly to protect, reduce transmission to elderly people, they didn’t comply. It is a phenomena that held us back and hurt us in a pretty dramatic way.”
Gates also dismissed “conspiracy theories” about him wanting to track people.
“This whole tracking thing, why would I want to track you?” Gates said. “I don’t know, you know. Do I have time to track all these people?”
While Gates was seemingly referring to vaccines, just one day later, at the “Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit,” Gates admitted that he has a group dedicated to tracking what people say about him online.
“I have a group that tracks what’s on the web that’s talking about things that connect to me,” Gates said. “Overwhelmingly during the pandemic, 95% was all the conspiracy theory stuff. It is calming down now.”
At the Goalkeepers 2022 event, Gates also complained that conspiracy theories are “cynical” and look for “one bad person who’s doing all this stuff” and welcomed “trusted sources” and “fact-checkers” partnering with social media companies to slow down the spread of content that he deems to be misinformation.
Gates’ nonprofit, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to some of the Facebook fact-checkers whose content is used in warning labels that are appended to Facebook posts. When these warning labels are added to Facebook posts, their click-through rates decline by around 95%.
While Gates framed the debate around so-called misinformation and conspiracy theories as a tragedy that reduced compliance with the advice being pushed by trusted sources, he failed to mention that these so-called trusted sources have issued false or conflicting advice throughout the pandemic.
In the early stages of the pandemic, mainstream media outlets downplayed the severity of Covid and health officials in the US urged people to stop wearing masks, then later reversed their stance.
The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab was initially dismissed as a conspiracy before so-called trusted sources finally admitted the lab leak theory was a possibility.
And health experts initially suggested that COVID-19 vaccines were up to 90% effective at preventing Covid before ultimately admitting that the vaccines don’t prevent infection.
Those who challenged or questioned the “trusted sources” were accused of spreading misinformation and censored by Big Tech platforms, even though many of their challenges and questions later turned out to be true.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 21, 2022
The battle with Big Tech for free speech is heating up! States are passing bills to stop the social media censorship, and legislators are holding investigative hearings, while a recent lawsuit including several State Attorneys General is making headway.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 21, 2022
Suddenly, Biden announces the pandemic is over as the narrative is now collapsing from all sides. From boosters to kids shots, the vaccine push is faltering as lawsuits pile up to remove the last covid restrictions.
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 24, 2022
In a letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Senator Ron Johnson demanded answers on the platform’s COVID-19 moderation policies because of repeated censorship of a sitting senator.
“YouTube has displayed a troubling track record of censoring a sitting United States Senator, the proceedings of the United States Senate, journalists that interview me, and the display of data that is entirely generated from U.S. government health agencies,” Johnson wrote.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The Wisconsin Republican and ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee asked YouTube to provide the committee with documents “concerning the development and implementation” of its COVID-19 content moderation policies.
The letter highlights several cases, starting in October 2021, where YouTube censored content or suspended the senator.
Johnson also noted that YouTube is not fair in applying its moderation policies, something that was highlighted when the platform’s chief product officer Neal Mohan testified before the Senate on September 14.
“I read the following two quotes that President Biden said on July 21, 2021. The first was, ‘You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.’ The second was, ‘If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die,’” the senator recounts in his letter.
“There is no doubt that these two statements are false. I asked Mr. Mohan and the witnesses from the other social media companies whether your companies ever flagged President Biden as a spreader of misinformation. No one even attempted to answer my question.”
The letter demands external and internal communications related to each incident where he was censored.
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | September 26, 2022
Although PayPal has been banning conservatives and right-wingers for years, its recent move to terminate accounts operated by the Free Speech Union and other groups in the UK that opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates has apparently been a step too far.
Following the controversy, dozens of Conservative Party MPs, including Michael Gove, David Davis and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, signed an open letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Business Department demanding that PayPal be legally barred from imposing discriminatory practices.
The letter asserts that it is “hard to avoid construing PayPal’s actions as an orchestrated, politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views on these topics within the U.K.”
This morning, the London Times also published a powerful piece by Jawad Iqbal which highlighted the dangers of allowing PayPal to abuse such powers.
“This is censorship by corporate diktat: the company sets its own rules and interprets them as it sees fit. It appears oblivious to the notion that it is wrong in principle to withdraw vital services from people because of their political views. Would it be acceptable for a supermarket to refuse to serve a customer because of their politics or for a high street bank to refuse to make a payment to a company it deemed politically objectionable?” asked Iqbal.
After questions were asked in Parliament about the issue, a new law could be on the cards that would put an end to PayPal’s crusade against dissident viewpoints.
“Conservative backbenchers are considering launching an amendment to upcoming financial legislation in the House of Commons that would ban companies from freezing campaigners’ accounts,” reports the Telegraph.
“One source said ministers are likely to accept the amendment to the law because Conservative backbenchers will support it.”
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has also demanded answers from PayPal.
The familiar old argument from leftists, who apparently now vehemently support monopolistic transnational corporations using their might and vast resources to impose censorship, is that “PayPal is a private company and can ban who it wants.”
However, at least in the UK, that isn’t strictly true.
PayPal is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which mandates “All firms must be able to show consistently that fair treatment of customers is at the heart of their business model.”
Fair treatment of customers clearly isn’t at the heart of PayPal’s business model, it’s literally the exact opposite.
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 21, 2022
An officer of the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) is facing discreditable conduct charges because she donated to the Freedom Convoy protest in February. If found guilty, Constable Kristina Neilson could be demoted or fired.
According to a report by the CBC, the OPS claims that on February 5 Neilson donated to the Freedom Convoy, a protest against Covid mandates in February. According to the OPS, the donation was an act of “disorderly manner,” and that she did it knowing that the OPS was against the “illegal occupation.”
In March, the OPS announced that it would investigate any member of the force who contributed to the protest.
Last week, Neilson was summoned to a disciplinary hearing and was charged with one count of disorderly conduct. She did not make a plea and she awaits another hearing later this month.
The Freedom Convoy protest was brought to an end after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. The act gave the government the authority to target anyone who contributed to the protest. Ottawa sued to shut down the protest’s donation pages on GoFundMe and GiveSendGo, and Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, froze the accounts of all those linked with the protest.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 20, 2022
Online fact checkers have great authority over what speech gets suppressed on mainstream social media platforms and a fact-check of a post on Facebook can result in that post being suppressed by as much as 95%.
Yet, despite their great power over what people can say, fact checkers are also increasingly frustrated at calls for more transparency about the way they operate and say they are being bombarded with freedom of information act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits.
The fact checkers say these requests and lawsuits are meant to drain the resources of climate change researchers and to discourage them from doing their work which is, in turn, an attempt to shut down their own speech.
“They make a point of going after the fact-checkers because, in addition to stopping regulation, they also want to prevent or discourage climate scientists from doing things that might educate the public,” said Lauren Kurtz, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund’s executive director to Bloomberg.
Kurtz’s organization provides climate researchers with legal assistance. They assist about 40 researchers annually. But this year has been busier, as they have already assisted 35 people.
One of the beneficiaries of the fund is Doug MacMartin, who was sued by Dane Wigington after he fact-checked his documentary “The Dimming,” which, according to MacMartin, is filled with conspiracy theories.
On the science fact-checking website Climate Feedback, used by social media companies to flag what it sees as science misinformation, MacMartin described Wigington’s documentary as “pure fantasy.” The plaintiff sought $75,000 in damages from MacMartin, arguing that the fact-check reduced the visibility of his documentary on Facebook, hurting its revenue.
“I mostly felt disbelief,” MacMartin recalled to Bloomberg. “A bit of shock combined with, ‘I just don’t have time for this.’”
Earlier this month, a federal court dismissed Wigngton’s lawsuit, but he plans to appeal.
Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at University of California, Los Angeles, had to deal with a FOIA request filed by a group called Energy Policy Advocates. Swain is vocal about droughts and fires in Western US. The requests sought text messages, encrypted messages, and emails related to a fact-check written by Swain and others about the book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” by Steven Koonin, who worked in the Department of Energy during Obama’s era.
Swain challenged the requests using a university lawyer, arguing that it had the “presumptive intent of disrupting primary research and outreach activities by inundating climate scientists.” The records department said that the motivations of the requester were irrelevant, but was bound by law to provide the information requested.
“I spend nights and weekends compiling and going through thousands and thousands of emails because these requests are extremely broad,” he said. “In some cases they’re essentially open ended: they’re asking about multiple years, multiple keywords and multiple platforms.”
The group filing most of the requests are Government Accountability and Oversight, and Energy Policy Advocates. The two groups go by the acronyms GAO and EPA, the same acronyms used by federal agencies Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Climate Feedback and Meta are facing a $2 million lawsuit filed by Libertarian commentator John Stossel who was censored on Facebook as a direct result of a post by the fact-checker.
Climate Feedback flagged Stossel’s video “Government Fueled Fires” about the wildfires in California in 2020. The fact-check resulted in Facebook limiting the visibility of the video and we have more information on that case here.
BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
If you’re a regular donor to the Daily Sceptic and got an email from me in the small hours of the morning telling you that PayPal had closed our account and urging you to set up a new donation with a link to our donate page, don’t panic. It wasn’t a scam. PayPal really has shut down our account and the email really was from me.
I’ll tell you the full story in a moment, but just to be clear – this won’t affect the majority of people making regular donations, just those whose donations are processed by PayPal. So unless you’ve received an email from me with instructions about how to donate without using PayPal, please don’t cancel your recurring donation. I repeat: Please don’t cancel your donation. This just applies to people whose donations are being processed by PayPal and I’ve written to all of you.
The first I heard about this was on Thursday afternoon last week when I received a notification from my personal PayPal account informing me that it was being shut down because I’d violated the company’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’. I looked at that policy and it covers things like fraud and money laundering so my first thought was it must be a mistake. Then, a few minutes later, I got another notification, this one from the Daily Sceptic’s PayPal account. That, too, had been shut down and for the same reason. Eh? That was odd. Then, another email, this one from the Free Speech Union’s PayPal account. Same story – the Acceptable Use Policy.
Now call me a cynic, but the chances of all three accounts violating the same policy within minutes of one another struck me as a bit implausible. Was something else going on?
I contacted customer services and asked what I’d done, exactly, on my personal account that ran afoul of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. I’ve had it since 2013 and use it, at most, four times a year, usually to receive money from a Swiss weekly magazine I occasionally write for.
The person I spoke to said she had no idea, but if I wanted I could “escalate“ the matter and someone higher up the food chain would get back to me. I did that, obviously, and a couple of days later received a notification that my appeal has been unsuccessful. No explanation offered beyond the original one. Oh, and by the way, it would be keeping the money in that account for up to 180 days while it decided whether it was entitled to “damages” for my yet-to-be-explained breach of its Acceptable Use Policy.
It was the same story with the other two accounts. The only clue as to what might be going on was a message sent a couple of days ago from PayPal on the now closed Daily Sceptic account. The crucial passage read:
PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance. We regularly assess activity against our long-standing Acceptable Use Policy and carefully review actions reported to us, and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies.
That message was a bit weird since it didn’t explicitly accuse the Daily Sceptic of promoting “hate, violence or racial intolerance”, or say that that was how we’d violated its precious policy. But it certainly implied it. To which my response is: How exactly? Or, more profanely: What the f*** are you talking about?
Even if the Daily Sceptic is guilty of that sin – and I defy anyone to point to an article we’ve published that promotes “hate, violence or racial intolerance” – why is that a reason to shut down my personal account or the FSU account? I still haven’t received any indication of why that’s happened. And for what it’s worth, I’ve written to the CEO of PayPal UK – Vincent Belloc, you can email him here – and the Corporate Affairs Department of PayPal US and PayPal UK (you can email them here and here), asking for some kind of explanation. No reply, obviously. Laughably, it says on the media contact page of PayPal‘s website above the email addresses: “Reporter on a deadline? Looking to book an interview or need a comment for a story?” The implication is that someone from its crack Corporate Affairs team will get back to you immediately. But I emailed them last Thursday and still haven’t heard back.
I suspect what’s really going on is that someone at PayPal – possibly the entire C-suite – doesn’t like what the Daily Sceptic or the Free Speech Union stands for. The company has form in this area. As Matt Taibbi wrote earlier back in May:
In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress.
Those sites – Consortium News and Mint Press – are both left wing and they’re opposed to the war in Ukraine, which is presumably why PayPal cancelled them. Is the fact that the Daily Sceptic has published articles critical of the mainstream narrative about that war – including one in which we linked to Mint Press – the reason we’ve been cancelled? Seems a bit harsh, given that we’ve also published several articles defending Ukraine and its war effort and debunking some of the criticisms of the current Ukrainian regime.
A number of sites that have raised questions about the Covid vaccines have also been demonetised by PayPal in the past few months, including the U.K. Medical Freedom Alliance. Liz Evans, the head of the UKMFA, also had her personal PayPal account closed at the same time.
Is that fact that we’ve published data suggesting the mRNA vaccines aren’t as efficacious or as safe as we were initially led to believe why we’ve been cancelled?
Colin Wright, a former colleague of mine at Quillette and a staunch critic of trans rights dogma, was deplatformed by PayPal in June, presumably because some people in the company didn’t approve of his gender critical views. We’ve expressed similar views on the Daily Sceptic. Was that the issue?
My hunch is it’s all of the above. PayPal just doesn’t like free speech, which is why it has shut down the FSU account at the same time. There are five issues in particular where it’s completely verboten to express sceptical views and if you do you can expect to be cancelled, not just by PayPal but by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.: the wisdom of the lockdown policy and associated Covid restrictions, the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines, Net Zero and the ‘climate emergency’, the need to teach five year-olds that sex is a social construct and the war in Ukraine. Dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy in any of those areas is no longer permitted.
This is the new front in the ongoing war against free speech: the withdrawal of financial services from people and organisations that express dissenting opinions on those topics. And not just those who express them, but those who defend them, too, like the FSU. That‘s what makes this an escalation in the war on free speech. Until now, companies like PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon and CrowdJustice have only demonetised individuals and groups whose views they disapprove of. Now, PayPal has closed the account of an organisation that defends people’s right to free speech, without taking sides on the issues they’re speaking about. Even that is no longer allowed, according to this Silicon Valley behemoth.
Fear not, comrades. I may not be able to use PayPal again in a personal capacity, but I’m confident the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union will survive. Yes, we’ll take a hit, but I hope people who still believe in free speech and the importance of casting a sceptical eye over the prevailing orthodoxy will show their support by joining or donating.
To join the FSU, click here. To donate to the FSU, click here. And to donate to the Daily Sceptic, click here.
And rest assured, PayPal has been expunged from all our payment systems. There‘s zero risk that if you give money to either of those organisations it will be pocketed by the fintech Death Star.
I thought about launching a campaign to get PayPal to restore its services to the three accounts, but then decided I didn’t want to have anything more to do with the wretched company. Even if it did a reverse ferret, what guarantee is there it won’t demonetise us again? No, from now on I will have nothing more to do with PayPal and if you’re a customer of the company I hope you’ll follow suit. (Here is a handy YouTube video explaining how to close your PayPal account.)
Stop Press: If anyone reading this is a donor to the Daily Sceptic or a member of the FSU based in Texas, please get in touch. In Texas, it’s illegal for large social media companies to ban users’ posts based on their political viewpoints. Is PayPal a social media company? Users can send messages to each other so… maybe. Worth exploring.
By Mike Campbell | The Counter Signal | September 21, 2022
A June interview with the Moderna Chief Medical Officer has surfaced where he concedes the spike protein from the COVID vaccine can interact with and damage heart cells, vindicating Dr. Byram Bridle, a Canadian doctor who warned about the vaccine over a year ago.
“We know so much more about myocarditis today than we did a year ago,” said Dr. Burton.
“I do believe that it is the spike protein . . . that either causes a little bit of direct damage to the heart, or antibodies that are produced that react with the heart cells,” he said.
Dr. Bridle, a defamed viral immunologist professor at Guelph University in Ontario, responded in his substack on Monday.
“Are people going to accuse the manufacturer of spreading misinformation?” he asked.
In June of 2021, Bridle expressed concerns that the spike protein in the COVID vaccine could travel throughout and damage the body.
Subsequently, “my life exploded into a storm of harassment, accusations, and censorship,” Bridle said.
Bridle is still unable to practice in his research lab at Guelph University. He must work from home and is an outcast at his university.
A slanderous website was launched to pop under search results for Bridle. The website claims “the mRNA vaccine is injected into the upper-arm (the deltoid) muscle. There is no spike protein in the mRNA vaccines.”
Canadian health officials accused experts who raised safety concerns about the COVID vaccine of spreading disinformation. Those claims went largely unchallenged by mainstream media, who pushed for more lockdowns and restrictions in their questioning.
Bridle said being vindicated with the Moderna admission comes with “mixed emotions” since he’s suffered “irreparable damage” to his career and reputation.
“I wonder if the naysayers will listen to the COVID-19′ vaccine’ manufacturers as they now confirm this 1.5-year-old message.”
In July, Ontario Chief Medical Officer Kieran Moore announced that a fourth vaccine is now available for everyone 18+ but said not everyone should get it due to the risk of myocarditis.
Vaccines continue to be recommended for healthy babies in Canada and children, even though many countries have stopped offering vaccines to kids.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 15, 2022
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is publishing ideas about yet another reason, or excuse, to deploy more surveillance technology: this time it’s climate change, and specifically, monitoring carbon emissions – at the individual level.
This is generally referred to as “My Carbon initiatives” and according to a post on the group’s website, penned by the director of India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Smart Cities Mission, it’s all about “inclusivity of citizens” in reducing carbon emissions in urban areas.
However, “My Carbon” and what’s dubbed as “personal allowance programs” have apparently not been a success, although the push has been there for years; but now, with tracking and surveillance technology continuing to, technically speaking, improve and become more and more ubiquitous, the idea is to start bringing those into the climate change story.
And since the share of emissions attributed to individuals in cities is 40%, the proposal is to tackle those things that are now identified by WEF and its cohorts as standing in the way of personal allowance programs taking root: social and political resistance, a lack of awareness, and, of “fair mechanisms” to track individual emissions.
The post, which says the views are “those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum,” sees “an improved” world not only when it comes to technology, but also society, and mentions the catastrophic pandemic restrictions in a positive tone, as proof that billions of people can effectively be trained to show “individual social responsibility.”
Good old Covid was a test for that. “A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world,” the WEF blog piece says approvingly.
The implication is that billions are also now more likely to accept restrictions regarding their lifestyle in other contexts. Then there’s the technology, “AI,” blockchain, digitization, “smart home” devices – all useful in advancing this specific dystopian agenda.
And the plan is to use surveillance tech to track in detail personal carbon emissions, along with giving “individual advisories on lower carbon and ethical choices for consumption of product and services.”
Further, costs for “carbon-intensive” activities and goods should be increased, while offering economic incentives to reduce demand – another way of saying, “low carbon emissions social credit system.”
And then, creating new social norms is also recommended. These would impose a new definition of what “a fair share” of personal emissions is, and set “acceptable levels” of personal emissions.
The case will likely go to The Supreme Court
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 17, 2022
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a law that was passed in Texas that prohibits large social media platforms from censoring users based on political viewpoints.
The law was passed in September 2021. It was challenged by industry trade group NetChoice and was blocked by a federal district court in December 2021.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Critics of the law argued that it violates the First Amendment rights of social media companies by forcing private companies to publish content they don’t want to. The First Amendment protects both people and companies from censorship by the government intervention in speech.
The state of Texas appealed the decision by the district court in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Writing the ruling on behalf of a three-judge panel, Judge Andrew Oldham said the court “rejects the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”
“The Platforms are not newspapers,” he continued. “Their censorship is not speech.”
The ruling argues that the Texas social media law doesn’t violate the First Amendment because “Section 7 does not regulate the Platforms’ speech at all; it protects other people’s speech and regulates the Platforms’ conduct.”
The order adds, “Our decision is reinforced by 47 U.S.C. § 230, which reflects Congress’s judgment that the Platforms are not ‘speaking’ when they host other people’s speech. Our decision is still further reinforced by the common carrier doctrine, which vests the Texas Legislature with the power to prevent the Platforms from discriminating against Texas users.”
NetChoice expressed disappointment with the ruling and plans to appeal in the Supreme Court.
“We are disappointed that the Fifth Circuit’s split decision undermines First Amendment protections and creates a circuit split with the unanimous decision of the Eleventh Circuit,” said Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel.
The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit blocked a similar law passed in the state of Florida.
“We remain convinced that when the U.S. Supreme Court hears one of our cases, it will uphold the First Amendment rights of websites, platforms, and apps,” Szabo added.
The Supreme Court will now likely hear the case and, based on precedent, will likely overturn the ruling.
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By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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