Tag Archives: free speech

Revised Rules

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Jack Dorsey has them for his Twitter. In response to the blowup over his (and Mark Zuckerberg’s over at Facebook) decision to censor the New York Post‘s reporting on emails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and seeming to indicate connections among Hunter, his business efforts in Ukraine and the People’s Republic of China, and his father Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden—or more likely in response to the pending subpoena compelling his sworn testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee next week regarding his censorship—Dorsey had his legal, policy and trust & safety lead, Vijaya Gadde, announce some unspecified changes. Dorsey also said through her, though, that

All other Twitter Rules will still apply to the posting of or linking to hack materials, such as our rules against posting…synthetic and manipulated media….

In other words, Dorsey still will censor obvious satire and political ads because he’s too lazy to think about what he’s actually looking at. Or because he assumes his customers are too droolingly imbecilic to understand what they’re looking at.

After this, Dorsey claimed to have withdrawn all blocks; he would simply attach a “context” label to the tweets and retweets.

That “changes” turn out to be untrue. The New York Post still is locked out of its own account unless and until it withdraws—withdraws—its tweets regarding its prior two articles.

Free Speech

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Jason Loftus, CEO of Lofty Sky Entertainment, had an excellent op-ed on free speech in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal.  He closed his piece with this:

Politicians shouldn’t aim to restrict access to social-media platforms. It is reasonable, however, to require that any platform operating in the US uphold the freedoms that Americans hold dear.

Absolutely. However, since companies in the People’s Republic of China are bound by PRC law to satisfy any request for information made by the PRC government’s intelligence facility, a requirement to uphold American freedoms is impossible for PRC-based or -owned PRC companies to meet.

Accordingly, WeChat and other PRC companies should be barred from operating in–not just be given restricted access to–our economy.

Censorship

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Here are a couple of New York Post items that Facebook and Twitter are so nakedly censoring. These are in their second article:

And

And

These items are in the NYP‘s second article, published 15 October, the day after the Post published its first article—which Twitter and Facebook began censoring. These two social media enterprises went so far as to lock White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her personal Twitter account unless and until she deletes her own Twitter post that carried that original Post article, which broke the fact of the laptop and emails thereon.

Twitter has extended its censorship to the point that it is blocking a United States Senator—Ted Cruz (R, TX)—from tweeting about this second article.

True, false, or misunderstood, the laptop and these emails and the others on that newly exposed laptop need to be openly discussed and their provenances clearly identified.

With this censorship, Facebook and Twitter have ceased to be pipelines and created themselves publishers controlling what information they will choose to publish.

That makes it imperative to withdraw their immunity from the regulation to which any publisher of information is subject, including in particular the requirement to provide equal time under equal conditions to all sides of any discussion of information.

With their censorship, Facebook and Twitter have drastically abused their monopoly power. With that, it’s necessary, also, to break them up into smaller, independently operating enterprises with management teams and employee suites that are entirely separate each enterprise from the others.

Read both articles. The first one can be seen both here and via the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Web page.

Freedom of Speech

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Not here. Not ever.  You do not have permission to criticize us or any thing, subject, object, or … that we hold above reproach, especially that of your commoner selves.

According to a draft of the Loudoun County Public School district board’s proposed speech code, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, employees would not be allowed to criticize the school district’s “commitment to action-oriented equity practices” in all forms of public and personal communication.

And

The code briefly acknowledges employees have a First Amendment right to engage in protected speech, but says that right “may be outweighed” by the school district’s interest in “promoting internal … and external community harmony and peace” as well as “class equity, racial equity, and the goal to root out systemic racism.”

And

Employees would be prohibited from “retaliating” against accusers, even if the accusations are false.

Your Betters say so, you racist thugs.

Censorship

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It’s active, biased, and deliberate in social media. And Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet intend on stepping it up during the remainder of this election season.

Twitter, for instance, says on its website that it will “require people to remove Tweets” that include “statements which are intended to influence others to violate recommended COVID-19 related guidance from global or local health authorities to decrease someone’s likelihood of exposure to COVID-19.” Among the problematic statements the company lists under that category is “social distancing is not effective.”

But Twitter won’t say how its censors will reconcile the myriad local health authorities who disagree among each other on the proper steps to take.

Facebook on its website outlines a similar policy using similar language, with the company stating that it will “remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities,” including “claims that are designed to discourage treatment or taking appropriate precautions.”

Facebook also declines to say how its censor will reconcile the recommendations and instructions of those local health authorities.

Alphabet makes its bias unembarrassedly obvious:

YouTube has adopted a virtually identical policy, stating that it “does not allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19.”

Never mind that WHO, as an apologist for the People’s Republic of China has no credibility whatsoever.

That’s just the social media’s bias regarding the Wuhan Virus. Their behavior is even more dangerous in the political arena.

Last month, Facebook was reportedly developing a “contingency plan,” intended to address scenarios in which Trump or his campaign attempted to dispute or delegitimize the results of the 2020 election.

But nothing planned to respond to the Progressive-Democrats’ openly stated intention to dispute the results of the 2020 election.

Zuckerberg went on:

the company will “attach an informational label to content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud.”
“This label will provide basic authoritative information about the integrity of the election and voting methods[.]”

All while he refuses to identify his “authorities,” much less to demonstrate their authoritativeness.

Be careful out there.

And vote, despite these Leftists’ efforts to delegitimize your vote.