Twitter Doubles Down On Censorship With Renewed Warnings On Trump Tweets
By JonathanTurley | November 4, 2020
We have been discussing the rising private censorship on the Internet demanded by Democratic leaders and meted out by companies like Twitter and Facebook. The original purpose of the Internet as a free and robust space for political and social expression is under attack as politicians demand greater levels of control to combat “disinformation.”
Indeed, Biden adviser Pete Buttigieg on Election Day demanded more penalties for companies not stopping “inciting material,” a subjective term left intentionally undefined. This drumbeat for censorship was amplified on Election Day when Twitter again hit tweets from President Donald Trump with warnings of disinformation. The tweets were pure political speech and Twitter again showed that it is now fully committed to biased regulation of speech between users of its service.
I have criticized President Trump’s rhetoric in the election about “stealing” the election. However, that is hyperbolic political speech. Biden supporters, including leaders like House Whip James Clyburn, have been saying that Trump was stealing the election through voter suppression. They have not been hit with Twitter warnings. Yet, Trump was immediately hit when he sent a Twitter post that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls. Many Democrats have fallen back on the false narrative that the First Amendment does not regulated private companies so this is not an attack on free speech. Free speech is a human right that is not solely based or exclusively defined by the First Amendment. Censorship by Internet companies is a “Little Brother” threat long discussed by free speech advocates. Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.
This is why I recently described myself as an Internet Originalist:
The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.
If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.
The actions by Twitter and Facebook on Election Day were reprehensible and wrong. What is so disturbing is that so many Democrats have become enablers of such corporate speech controls by the giant tech companies.
Protests of more than two people will be ILLEGAL under updated rules for UK national lockdown
RT | November 3, 2020
Protests are no longer exempt under the UK-wide coronavirus lockdown that begins Thursday, and police plan to enforce that rule, unlike during the previous lockdown, according to UK media.
Demonstrations consisting of more than two people will be made expressly illegal under the second national lockdown, which is expected to take effect Thursday. Police allowed large protests, in particular for the Black Lives Matter movement, during the first lockdown even as individual British families were barred from getting together – a situation many found unfair.
A Home Office spokeswoman avoided ruling protests out completely, telling Yahoo News UK that “the right to peaceful protest is one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” but added that “any gathering risks spreading the disease, leading to more deaths, so it is vital we all play our part in controlling the virus.”
Police have reportedly received instruction from Home Secretary Priti Patel to break up any protest involving more than two people from Thursday on. However, a government source told The Times that protests would not explicitly be prohibited in the lockdown legislation which is scheduled to be voted on Wednesday and take effect the following day. Instead, the loophole that allowed protests while families were prevented from gathering will be closed.
Nevertheless, some officers fear that people will be more inclined to take to the streets because of the restrictions, as one police source told The Times, adding that “this is going to cause a lot of trouble.”
“People are going to be extremely angry and there are concerns they’ll protest the fact they can’t protest.”
News of a second lockdown has already triggered protests in the suburbs of London, where hundreds of people took to the streets over the weekend to denounce the proposed national shutdown. The demonstration was organized by the group StandUpX, which warns that the pandemic is being weaponized to permanently deprive UK residents of their freedoms. PM Boris Johnson has insisted this second national lockdown will end in December, though that is likely cold comfort to those who remember the original “two weeks to flatten the curve” that instead stretched on for months.
At Israel’s behest, Twitter blocks dozens of Palestinian accounts
Palestine Information Center – October 31, 2020
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – Palestinian media NGOs have accused Twitter of suspending dozens of Palestinian accounts that actively posted tweets against normalization of Arab relations with Israel.
Sada Social Center, a Palestinian group defending rights of social media users, said it had noticed during the past few days that Twitter blocked dozens of accounts belonging to Palestinian figures and social media activists.
Sada Social told Anadolu news agency that the blocked Twitter accounts contained tweets that expressed opinions against normalization of Arab ties with Israel and Israel’s annexation plans in the occupied West Bank.
Sada Social said that it had sent a letter signed by different civil society institutions to Twitter administration to protest such measure and urge it to reverse it.
For its part, the Forum of Palestinian Journalists (FPJ) said that Twitter’s decision to disable Palestinian accounts was in response to Israeli pressures.
FPJ added that Israel recently asked Twitter to block 128 accounts of Palestinian activists and figures after they had highlighted issues against Israel’s annexation plans and its normalization deals with Arab regimes.
FPJ called on Twitter to refrain from blocking Palestinian accounts and to respect users’ rights to freedoms of opinion and expression.
You are a heretic in woke America if you oppose trans treatment for kids, liberal crusade against ‘Irreversible Damage’ book shows
RT | October 31, 2020
An author attempting to publish a book arguing against transgender treatment for teenagers realized that woke America has no time for “common sense” after receiving backlash over her publication.
Published in June, Abigail Shrier’s ‘Irreversible Damage’ argues that teachers, therapists and the media are encouraging vulnerable teenage girls to identify as “transgender,” and pushing life-changing treatments and surgeries – including puberty-blocking hormones and double mastectomies – on these teens.
Childhood gender dysphoria is a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that has entered the mainstream. At a town-hall event last month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden even said there should be “zero discrimination” against children wanting to transition. In this woke climate, Shrier said that she faced immense difficulty in voicing her “commonsense” opposition.
“Amazon blocked my publisher from sponsoring ads for my book, while allowing ads for books that pushed the contrary view,” she said in a Twitter thread on Thursday. The retail giant said the ad “may not be appropriate for all audiences,” even though Regnery Publishing said the ad only featured a shot of the book’s cover.
Amazon blocked my publisher from sponsoring ads for my book, while allowing ads for books that pushed the contrary view — that is, books that argue that gender transition for teens is without serious risk. https://t.co/VV7dTkZYNJ /2
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) October 29, 2020
“All of the legacy media outlets refused journalists’ requests to review my book,” she continued. One media figure that did speak to Shrier about her book was podcast host Joe Rogan, who was harassed by Men’s Health magazine for daring to host such a “transphobic” author, whose work was apparently “putting lives in danger.” Men’s Health used to feature workout plans and diet tips, but lately has embraced woke orthodoxy.
Joe Rogan had me on his show. Spotify has now held 10 meetings w employees to debate whether to pull the episode–about a *book* that presents the mainstream idea that all this gender transition for teens is too much, too fast with too little oversight. https://t.co/KPa78O1xAt /4
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) October 29, 2020
Moreover, Spotify executives hastily convened meetings to decide whether to pull the episode from their platform. It remains online, but others speaking out in support of Shrier were successfully ‘canceled.’ Science forums banned users for praising her book, and a crowdfunding campaign to put up billboards promoting it was shut down by Gofundme. The crowdfunding site still allows transgender teenagers to raise cash for “gender reassignment” surgery.
“Commonsense debate is being strangled by a woke orthodoxy,” Shrier concluded. “My book contains not a word of hate. I explored a medical issue and offered a considered view.”
“How many other issues will you never hear about? How many journalists have already abandoned the pursuit of truth?”
The censorship drive highlighted by Shrier is ongoing. Joe Rogan – a relatively apolitical pundit – landed himself in hot water again this week for hosting a podcast with right-wing controversialist Alex Jones. Though Spotify’s top brass refused to censor the episode, liberal listeners began a boycott campaign against the streaming service.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all cracked down on a range of controversial content. British supermarkets cave to the whims of transgender activists and pull their ads from right-wing magazines. Newspapers call the victims of ‘Black Lives Matter’ mob beatdowns racists to excuse the violence. Insulting transgender people from the privacy of your own home may soon be a criminal offense in Scotland.
In the US, Shrier’s warning that journalists may have “abandoned the pursuit of truth” is apparently coming true. The media at large there has censored itself on the issue of the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, seemingly in a desire to see President Donald Trump removed from office.
Also on rt.com:
Soviet-style thought-policing has come to America, outsourced to Big Tech corporations
Facebook’s ban of New York Post’s Hunter Biden story had NOTHING to do with fact-checkers, report suggests
RT | October 30, 2020
Fact-checkers appear to have been invoked only as an excuse to shadowban the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, according to Facebook’s own statement and leaked internal moderation documents.
Earlier this month, the Post had obtained a hard drive belonging to the son of the current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and cited emails they found as indication of troubling business deals in Ukraine. Twitter responded by locking their account, but Facebook said it would “temporarily reduce distribution” of it.
According to Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director, the story would have to be looked at by fact-checkers, which was part of a “standard process” to reduce the spread of “misinformation.”
On Friday, however, a Facebook statement seemed to confirm that no such review actually took place.
“As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation,” a company spokesman said in a statement to the Guardian. “Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our fact-checkers had a chance to review it.”
“When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”
The spokesman did not clarify whether the fact-checkers even attempted to verify the materials published by the Post, but no results of such a review have ever been published.
Moreover, the Guardian cited internal moderation documents that someone at Facebook leaked to them, indicating that the shadowban wasn’t part of a regular process. Instead, the documents purportedly showed the existence of a policy under which stories can be “manually enqueued” for suppression, citing the upcoming US elections as an “issue of importance” that justified such actions.
The documents also say that the standard practice is for Facebook AI to predict which content might contain misinformation, based on signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments,” in a sort of pre-crime enforcement straight out of dystopian science fiction.
There is also a de-facto “whitelist” of some 5,000 media outlets, called the “Alexa 5K,” whose content the AI ignores by default “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation.” The Post was apparently on that list, so the decision to suppress the story was made by actual Facebook employees, not an AI system flagging potential misinformation.
It worked, too. Data compiled by research firm NewsWhip and published in Newsweek last week showed that Facebook’s soft suppression was far more effective than Twitter’s outright censorship of the Post’s account, which was finally overturned on Friday.
On Facebook, the story reached only half as many readers as similar anti-Trump bombshells pushed by the mainstream media. Neither the claims by the New York Times about the president’s taxes nor the Atlantic’s repeatedly-refuted story about Trump calling US troops “suckers and losers” were flagged for fact-checking by either human moderators or Facebook’s AI.
Stone, Facebook’s policy director who announced the shadowban, is open about his history with the Democrats. His Twitter biography shows him working in the past for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Jerry McNerney, among others.
Maduro Accuses Facebook of Censoring Publications on COVID-19 Medicine
Sputnik – 30.10.2020
CARACAS – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has criticised Facebook for censoring several publications concerning the DR10 molecule which, according to Venezuelan scientists, eliminates the effects of COVID-19.
“I want to say that today (29 October) my account was censored on Facebook, they deleted three publications from my Facebook account, they deleted the complete transmission of Sunday’s programme where I scientifically explained this step that Venezuela has taken and two more publications about DR10”, Maduro said in a statement published by the channel Venezuela de Television.
According to Venezuelan Minister of Sciences and Technologies Gabriela Jimenez, the molecule DR10 was isolated from a medicinal plant that eliminates the COVID-19 virus with 100 percent efficacy without affecting healthy cells. This molecule can be used to produce medicines that will help to combat the coronavirus infection.
Earlier in October, the Venezuelan government reported that they had presented their research to both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO).
The government also expressed its intention to produce the medicine in collaboration with such countries as China, Cuba, Russia, and India after approval from the WHO. The drug is seen by authorities as a potentially complementary medicine to treat diseases caused by COVID-19.
Venezuela has registered over 90,000 positive cases since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 85,000 patients have recovered and 789 people have died from the virus in the Latin American nation.
Soviet-style thought-policing has come to America, outsourced to Big Tech corporations
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 29, 2020
Social media were supposed to democratize speech, liberating the people of the world from the tyranny of gatekeepers. They failed. Seduced by vanity and ideology, they’ve become censors themselves, a Soviet-style thought police.
Once upon a time, Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” Facebook was all about connecting people, and Twitter executives proclaimed it the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Fast-forward to 2020, and they’re all about ‘deplatforming’ voices the legacy media and the political establishment has denounced as unworthy of being heard.
“Who the hell elected you?” thundered Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during Wednesday’s hearing, expressing frustration over the platform’s crackdown on a story about a major political scandal. In attempting to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings, Twitter has locked the account of America’s oldest publishing newspaper, and even gone after White House officials and members of Congress.
Yet anyone who didn’t see this coming in the months after the 2016 US election simply hasn’t been paying attention. The greatest irony is that Cruz and his fellow Republicans enabled it themselves, partly by preferring sound bites over legislative action, but also by validating the ‘Russian meddling’ conspiracy theories peddled by their political opponents in an effort to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.
Make no mistake, ‘Russiagate’ is how Big Tech was pushed onto the path of censorship. By way of just one example, the Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ was used to bludgeon Facebook into hiring censors and partnering with outside ‘fact-checkers’. When it eventually turned out there had been no scandal and the whole thing was a manufactured outrage by self-serving ‘whistleblowers’ and the media… there wasn’t so much as an apology, and the mechanisms stayed in place.
Silicon Valley has been more than eager to go down that path, too. Public records show the vast majority of their employees donate to Democrats, while their executives have poured millions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden this year.
Nobody needed to pressure Google into embracing the role of the ‘good censor’, its executives and employees did so themselves. Not surprisingly, the president of their parent company at the time, Eric Schmidt, had been fully invested in Clinton’s campaign.
It took a mere suggestion of a crackdown by an influential Senate Democrat for Twitter to ban all RT advertising and overhaul its entire advertising policy, back in October 2017. Not surprisingly, the proposal by Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) went nowhere, but its purpose had been accomplished.
Like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled, the pressure to censor ‘objectionable’ content steadily rose over the course of the Trump presidency. It marched on regardless of the revelations that ‘Russiagate’ was a scam and that the real ‘collusion’ was between the spies, police, prosecutors, media, and the political establishment.
Things almost boiled over when the platforms started deleting any mention of the alleged ‘whistleblower’ who kick-started the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Trump – even those made by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
The Covid-19 pandemic the very next month saw an expansive effort to ban ‘misinformation’ about the virus – meaning anything not coming from ‘authorities’, even as those very authorities kept changing their line over time! That was probably when the ‘frog’ first began noticing the boiling water.
By then, however, Twitter had begun openly censoring Trump this spring. Condemning riots? “Glorifying violence,” restricted. Putting rioters on notice they can’t set up a lawless “autonomous zone” in Washington, DC? “Abusive behavior, threatening harm,” restricted.
Oh, granted, the same insane standard was later applied to a metaphorical statement by a self-identified socialist, but whether that was the exception that proves the rule or an effort to ‘both sides’ the issue, at the end of the day, Twitter had appointed itself arbiter of acceptable speech – and that was the point.
How can this happen in a country where free speech is the very first enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights? Because, as both Democrats and libertarian-minded NeverTrump Republicans have been quick to argue, the First Amendment applies only to the government, not to private companies! This is manifestly absurd, but hasn’t been challenged in the courts just yet.
This sophistry has enabled the champions of corporate thought-policing to argue that technically, the US doesn’t have the kind of censorship of word and thought once attributed to the Soviet Union. Because it has Big Tech, it doesn’t have to! Meanwhile, some lawmakers certainly aren’t shy about demanding for more censorship, either.
If you think the comparisons to the KGB or the Stasi are too much, note Twitter’s insistence that the New York Post – founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 – needs to delete the “offending” tweet [linking to the Hunter Biden emails] before its account can be unlocked, but it will supposedly be free to repost it then, because the rules have since changed.
In order to truly work, submission must be voluntary. That’s why Americans still file their tax returns, even though the IRS has been withholding taxes from their wages since the Second World War. That is why in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith couldn’t just be broken – he had to love Big Brother. That is why Twitter forces you to bend the knee before they will allow you to speak.
What started as anyone’s ability to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN on equal footing has morphed into the neutral ‘platform’ choosing to promote their non-stories while shutting down legitimate lines of thought and inquiry under the guise of ‘protecting our democracy’ and fighting (phantom) ‘Russian disinformation’.
So Twitter is basically everything they claim Russia is: They’re manipulating what information people see to try to influence the election.
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) October 28, 2020
It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. But it will take more than just strong words to make speech in America free again.
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
Joe Rogan refutes claims that his Alex Jones interview spread ANTI-VAXXER conspiracy theories, cites BILL GATES saying same thing
RT | October 29, 2020
Podcast host Joe Rogan, facing allegations that his Alex Jones interview spread anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, has denied the claims by pointing to tech billionaire Bill Gates confirming the same data for a Covid-19 vaccine.
“I knew people were going to criticize the content of the podcast without even listening to it, and I was right,” Rogan said on Wednesday via Instagram. “That’s why I fact-checked every single crazy thing [Jones] said, and all of them were verified.”
Rogan noted that Jones’ comment about 80 percent of patients in a certain vaccine trial getting sick was one of the supposed conspiracy theories, and his post included a CBS News interview from July showing Gates admitting to side effects at that same rate in Moderna’s Covid-19 trial.
Gates has been interviewed by mainstream media outlets as a leading authority on the various Covid-19 vaccine trials because his foundation has committed $350 million in funding to help fight the pandemic through development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.
He tried to parry CBS host Norah O’Donnell’s initial question about side effects by pointing out that vaccines will be scrutinized by the FDA, which he called “the gold standard of regulators,” but when pressed again on patients getting severe chills and high fevers, he said, “Yeah, but some of that is not dramatic, where, you know, it’s just super painful.”
Rogan insisted that he’s not “anti-vaccine.”“If a safe and effective Covid vaccine is created, I’ll take it and encourage others to take it. But I wanted to put this video up to validate what (Jones) said.”
Jones and his media outlet Infowars were banned from various social media platforms in 2018 and 2019. Spotify, which began carrying Rogan’s show exclusively on September 1 under a $100 million licensing deal, removed its entire library of Infowars content in 2018. Jones had been a frequent guest on Rogan’s podcast before being deplatformed by Big Tech, but Spotify reportedly excluded those episodes along with interviews featuring other controversial figures, such as Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, when it acquired the rights to Rogan’s show.
Sweden-based Spotify was hit with criticism from customers and its employees after allowing the Rogan-Jones episode, which also included comedian Tim Dillon, to air on Tuesday. The company’s chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, reportedly told managers in an email, “We are not going to ban specific individuals from being guests on other people’s shows, as the episode/show complies with our content policies.”
Among those who accused Rogan of spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories was self-described “free-speech activist” Nathan Bernard, who said that Rogan’s decision “to platform these far-right sickos is incredibly gross and dangerous.” Journalist Alex Malouf told Spotify, “You lost me as a customer because of your support for this conspiracy nonsense.”
From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.
By Raul Diego | MintPress News | October 27, 2020
Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years.
Company spokesman Andy Stone told the WSJ that the social media giant will be applying the “lessons” learned from previous elections in accordance with the designs of “hired experts” and vague references to “new teams,” who are leveraging their “experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto monopoly over online peer-to-peer communication tools has given Facebook an inordinate amount of influence over the political narratives at both national and regional levels, which it has shown a willingness exercise with topics like the Philippines and Palestine.
Last week, the company took a major step in solidifying its grip over the content purveyed on its platform with the official launch of the Facebook Oversight board. A body that is to function like a ‘Supreme Court’ for chat rooms, if you will, with the power to review any decisions regarding post removals or deplatforming and to make policy recommendations. Members have been drawn from “law experts… rights advocates” and journalists from around the world. The oversight board currently boasts 20 members.
Four members – two of which have extensive experience in the U.S. judicial system – serve as the board’s co-chairs and were handpicked by Facebook, according to The Guardian. Other board members include former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a co-chair and is perhaps only remembered outside of Denmark for her selfie faux pas at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 when she was photographed taking a group photo with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the commemoration.
Judges of little character
Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.
Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.
Palmor posing with Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016. Photo | Israeli Government Press Office
Inviting a literal state censor from a country with such an atrocious record of oppression and overt ethnic cleansing policies to serve in a supervisory role at one of the largest content networks in the world, should be reason enough for concern. Perhaps, even reason enough to call for the board’s dissolution given that such an egregious choice of personnel reveals an unacceptable political bias in an ostensibly impartial quasi-judicial body.
A clear agenda
A look at the other co-chairs on the oversight board leaves no doubt as to which interests Facebook intends to further through its sham social media traffic court. It might not be a surprise to learn that an American company would tap American legal minds to form part of a dispute resolution body, as Jamal Greene, an oversight board co-chair, describes it.
Greene is a Dwight Professor of Law Columbia Law School who served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris during the highly-controversial Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to this, he was a law clerk for late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1997 Internet decency controls decision that shot down legislation that sought to regulate online speech. An auspicious sign, perhaps, but tempered by Steven’s own pragmatist views on free speech, leaving the door open to context when protecting the “public interest” surrounding the first amendment.
Sitting alongside Greene and Helle Thorning-Schmidt on the oversight board’s co-chairmanship is Michael McConnell; a constitutional law scholar who served seven years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit court. McConnell wrote the dissenting opinion in the seminal “Ten Commandments” case, which centered around the government’s authority to decide which monuments can be erected in a public park.
Judge McConnell, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee more than once and is “highly regarded for his writing on church-state law,” argued in favor of the government’s discretionary powers, claiming that private donations to public facilities – like the ten commandments monument in a public park in Utah, that spurred the case – became “government speech” and, therefore within the purview of governmental authority.
Rounding out the co-chair suite is Catalina Botero Marino, a Colombian attorney and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organization of American States (OAS); an organization well-known for being Washington’s mouthpiece for D.C.-aligned policy in Latin America.
Botero expressed her position on the very topic she will be dealing with first-hand in her new position as co-chair of the Facebook oversight board in a 2019 paper titled “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: standards, contexts, and lessons from the Inter-American Human Rights System.” In it, Botero reveals why she was tapped to join the make-shift panel of social media judges when she defines freedom of expression as “individual and collective self-government” and highlights her “utmost concern” over the “deliberately false circulation of information, created and put into circulation with the purpose of deceiving the public” in electoral processes.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter Limit Access to 20 Russian Media Sources, Internet Watchdog Says
Sputnik – 27.10.2020
In late-September, Facebook said in a statement that it had removed a total of 242 users, 41 Pages, 19 Groups and 45 Instagram accounts allegedly originating from Russia.
Censorship of Russian media outlets by foreign Internet companies has become systematic, with Google, Facebook and Twitter restricting access to materials of around 20 Russian outlets, the Russian communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, said on Tuesday.
“Foreign Internet companies’ censorship of Russian media has become systemic, Google (YouTube), Facebook and Twitter restrict access to materials of around 20 Russian media outlets, including RIA Novosti, Russia Today, Sputnik and Russia-1,” Roskomnadzor said in a statement.
As a result of these foreign attempts to control the Russian media, Russians may fail to receive objective information, the watchdog specified.
“Multiple requests to stop the censorship of Russian media outlets are being ignored,” Roskomnadzor went on to say.
The communications watchdog added it had submitted to both chambers of the Russian parliament proposals on enshrining in the national legislation measures that may be implemented to retaliate to the facts of censorship.
Roskomnadzor also reported an increase in the spread of fake news by foreign platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
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- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
