Good for Thorne

Barton Thorne, who leads Cordova High School in Shelby County, TN, was put on leave after a video address to students in January in which he warned them about Big Tech companies that “filter and…decide what you can hear and know about.”

Thorne retained the services of Liberty Justice Center, and as soon as they contacted the school district, the district lifted the suspension and reinstated Thorne.

That’s the end of the matter, right?

No. What makes this case especially noteworthy is Thorne’s and LCJ’s next action.

Though Thorne has been reinstated, he is still suing the school district over the dismissal. In a complaint filed this week, Thorne’s attorneys argued that Thorne’s statements were within the protected bounds of Shelby County Schools policy and that the school should be compelled to acknowledge that his suspension “violated the First Amendment” and that the school district “breached [its] contract” with Thorne over the dismissal.
“When they took Principal Thorne’s job away, they took his reputation away,” [LJC Senior Attorney Daniel] Suhr said. “They gave his job back, but now they need to make right on his reputation.”

Yewbetcha. Never disengage. Don’t let them loose, which only means we’ll have to fight them again.

Not a Mixed Message

Amazon insists it’s only censoring violent speech, and claimed that when it tossed Parler off its AWS cloud hosting facility, thereby denying (as Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s MFWIC, knew full well at the time) Parler and all of its primarily conservative participants any voice on the Internet.

Just the News says that with the tossing of sites like Parler while hosting other sites like Twitter, Amazon is sending “mixed signals.”

Here are some tweets that still are up on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, that’s now on Amazon’s AWS cloud hosting facility:

Actor and liberal activist George Takei on Sunday referred favorably to Paul’s assault in a tweet in which he wrote: “Admit it. These days we all sort of wish we had been Rand Paul’s neighbor.”
Podcaster Amy Westervelt, meanwhile, wrote: “Where is Rand Paul’s neighbor when you need him.”
Author Brandon Snider tweeted in favor of a “GoFundMe for Rand Paul’s neighbor to finish the job.”
Author Mark Sarvas wrote that Paul’s neighbor should “kick his racist ass again.”

JtN is misapprehending the situation. Amazon is not sending any mixed signals at all; Bezos’ message is quite clear: Conservatives have nothing to say and no voice to say it as far as he’s concerned. He freely allows violent messages on his facility—so long as they’re spoken by the “right” persons.

Alphabet Strikes Again

Alphabet, through its wholly-owned Google’s wholly-owned YouTube, has censored The Epoch Times, barring the news outlet from its YouTube channel and expelling it from YouTube’s Partner Program, through which The Epoch Times monetized much of its output.

Alphabet claims the news outlet violated its subsidiary’s subsidiary’s “Community Guidelines.” Its YouTube spokesman said,

All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines, and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.

The spokesman declined to say how the guidelines had been violated, or what output from The Epoch Times had been deemed wanting.

Of course, if Alphabet got specific, it would have to explain its censorship.

Censorship

Jack Dorsey is expanding his censorship function, this time under the guise of something he’s euphemistically calling “Birdwatch.”

The project, which is called Birdwatch, will be available to users on a first-come, first-served basis. It will allow users to write notes that provide context to tweets they believe require additional information to be digested by the public responsibly.

First come, first served—so no pretense of an actual cross-section of the speaking or political spectrums. And birders’ definition of “public responsibility,” not posters’ or readers’ definition(s). Can’t have that.

Then there’s Keith Coleman, Twitter Vice President Product:

Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable[.]

Never mind that, for the foreseeable future, “Birdwatch” will exist separately from the Twitter timeline so that Twitter users won’t be able to see this…contextualizing…commentary.

Here’s the kicker, though:

“Birdwatch” users will be allowed to rate the notes of other Birdwatch users, an attempt to prevent bad-faith individuals from undermining the goal of the system.

Gotta keep those censors contextualizers contextualizing from the right slant, after all.

The Unimpressed Congresswoman

…is unimpressed. Recall that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) was censored by Jack Dorsey and his Twitter company by his shutting down her account for 12 hours for tweets of which Dorsey disapproved and which Dorsey considered us ordinary Americans too stupid and too weak of character to be able to process properly.

Now that she’s back on the air (until Dorsey melts again), she expressed her disdain for Dorsey’s censorship and especially for his and his cronies’ arrogance (summarized by Newsmax below).

Contrary to how highly you think of yourself and your moral platitude, you are not the judge of humanity. God is. And you and the rest of your pals from the Silicon Valley Cartel are not God. Difficult for you to grasp I know, however it’s the truth. The tweets that you deem ‘appropriate’ and ‘safe’ and ‘true,’ compared to tweets you deem ‘inciting violence’ and ‘spreading false information’ and ‘claims of election fraud is disputed’ are so many times, in the opinion of many, quit hypocritical and false.

What she said.