This Loss is No Loss

Posted on 18 February 2020 by eehines

Recall the fact of the tweet that the NBA’s Houston Rockets General Manager sent in support of the Hong Kong freedom protesters. Recall further the NBA’s abject cowardice in deeply kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China in response to the latter’s projected upset over the tweet and the NBA’s impudence. The kowtowing was rationalized from the league on down to individual players that they all had money at risk from the GM’s tweet—as if their personal pocketbooks could compare with the sacrifices of life and limb, in addition to economic loss, of those freedom protesters as they struggled for their basic freedoms.

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Upset

Posted on 10 February 2020 by eehines

Republicans have run a video montage that pairs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) SOTU speech rip-up with individual quotes from President Donald Trump’s speech. The Progressive-Democrats have their panties thoroughly twisted over that. Here’s the offending video.

Here’s Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s Deputy Chief of Staff with a canonical example of the angst:

The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests[.]

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Criminalizing Speech

Posted on 31 January 2020 by eehines

That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws. She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

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Authoritarian

Posted on 28 January 2020 by eehines

Recall the slowed down video of a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) press conference in which the slow-down was done to make Pelosi’s speech seem slurred. It was an obvious, if poor taste, parody of Pelosi’s speaking style and of the incoherence of her anti-Trump position, as viewed by many.

In a The Atlantic interview, Hillary Clinton expressed her outrage over Facebook’s handling of that video.

Google took it off YouTube…so I contacted Facebook. I said, “Why are you guys keeping this up? This is blatantly false. Your competitors have taken it down.” And their response was, “We think our users can make up their own minds.”

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More Censorship in the Offing

Posted on 25 January 2020 by eehines

Amazon and YouTube are two companies peddling streamed videos, and they’re looking at “filtering” certain content.

An (unidentified) Amazon spokeswoman says

We continuously review and monitor titles to ensure that they are in accordance with our policies and guidelines. If content is identified as not meeting those standards, it is immediately removed.

YouTube, also:

[A] self-avowed creature of user-generated video, also has faced the challenge of policing objectionable content on its site.

Policing objectionable content.

Indeed.

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The Contempt of the Left

Posted on 21 January 2020 by eehines

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says it’s time to start censoring private enterprise eliminate protections for tech platforms that publish user posts [emphasis added].

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said in the interview, which was published on Friday.
The law, which was enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, gives websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter broad legal immunity—essentially, it eliminates the possibility of legal consequences over what their users post. The statute was created to protect free speech on the internet.

Biden went further:

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Score One for Facebook

Posted on 3 December 2019 by eehines

Facebook had a post up, recently, that the government of Singapore didn’t like and of which that government disputed the truthfulness.

As a result, By Order Of the Singapore government, Facebook added a notice—a “label”—to the post:

Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.

For a wonder, Facebook didn’t take the post down, nor did it make any effort to “correct” its content. Instead, it posted the notice, letting readers decide for themselves…whether they should take seriously the post or the notice required by a mendacious government.

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A Thought on Censorship

Posted on 21 November 2019 by eehines

Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.

Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:

My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.

This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

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Free Speech vs No Free Speech

Posted on 9 November 2019 by eehines

The Progressive-Democratic Party vs the Republican Party.

Progressive-Democratic Party icon—and proud progressive—Hillary Clinton wants to ban free speech, and the first step is Twitter’s Jack Dorsey’s ban on the free speech of political advertising, done with her wholehearted and full throated support.

Twitter made the right decision to say, “Look, we don’t want to get into the judging game.” I think that should be the decision that Facebook makes as well.

Never mind that banning political ads—a form of the speech explicitly protected under the 1^st Amendment—is a most fundamental bit of judging speech. Note that Clinton desire to extend the ban to Facebook:

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Love Me that Censorship

Posted on 5 November 2019 by eehines

That’s what that icon of the Left, Juan Williams, says.

The reality is that [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to understand, from my perspective, that he’s undermining his brand by allowing political lies to be put on his platform. That, to me, lessens the trust that the consumer has.

Because censoring speech—especially politically speech—is the way to win the hearts and minds and trust of the consumer.

Certainly, controlling speech and allowing only that which the Left approves—what Juan Williams personally approves—can be a tool for winning controlling the hearts and minds of citizens, but trust? No. Censorship destroys trust.

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