For everyone whining about bitching about how Twitter is a private company, the bit about "acting directly with federal officials" invalidates that defense and means the 1st Amendment absolutely does apply.
The intended effect is obvious: to co-opt journalists into dependent lapdogs. Frankly it's amazing that the existing media lapdogs aren't considered servile enough.
The claim that government wasn't involved in these cancel campaigns has been shattered. The Obama administration pioneered the efforts with Operation Chokepoint, which basically tried to get banks and the financial industry to "voluntarily" (under threat by their regulatory agencies) deny service to the gun industry. Now that's been expanded to deny access to social media and any speech or financial platform for, basically, everyone the left doesn't liked on whatever thinly veiled excuse they can come up with. If you're a CEO or a high level corporate officer, better not speak out or you will be hounded out of your job, or have your bank cancel your accounts, or whatever else they can come up with. And in many cases, there's a hidden hand of government applying pressure behind the scenes.
That should violate the 1st Amendment, but if it's kept secret, how would you ever know?
Texas passes law protecting free speech on social media
Somehow, that first paragraph was written without irony. "Free-Speech activists" oppose a law that prevents banning users based on their political opinions? The rest of the article is, if anything, worse -- conflating political opinions with obscenity and all the usual boogeymen.
I do not condone violence, but there's scant actual evidence of violence in this article. Instead, there is evidence that school board members are feeling the heat of an angry and engaged populace over COVID-19 rules and critical race theory.
Keep the pressure on, peacefully. This is what winning looks like.
Biden Admin directing Big Tech censorship efforts on COVID
It's one thing for Big Tech to decide, on their own, to "fact check" and suppress free speech on a topic. I believe that to be improper, but legally difficult to challenge. Most legal protections for free speech are based around government being the bad actor, with the infamous section 230 of the Communications Decency Act being an outlier. That section extends immunity from lawsuit to companies that decide to be "platforms" for user speech, as distinct from companies that are making editorial decisions about what to publish.
I believe that Big Tech has definitely stepped over the line into making editorial decisions, thus removing those legal protections. Cases are moving through the courts that will likely decide that.
But, it appears another front has just been opened. In separate situations, Big Tech appears to have colluded with Big Government (both the Biden Administration after the election and state government officials before the election) in censoring topics and specific posts that government officials requested be censored.
They are even asking for cross-platform censorship based on those government requests.
This will likely prove to be a dramatic mistake, as now the full force of the 1st Amendment protections against government censorship can be brought to bear.
In a nation that once considered freedom of speech a founding principle, the demands for censorship from the current regime are breathtaking.
Democrats want to fact-check your cell phone text messages
I think this is a significant escalation from fact-checking public posts on social media, and even from doing that in direct/private messages on social media platforms. Cell phone messaging predates most of the internet services messaging capabilities and is generally viewed as significantly more private. If this is implemented, suddenly the Democrats will be inserting themselves into the private conversations of many older and less technically sophisticated Americans who did not previously feel personally impacted by spying and censorship.
When companies like facebook and the media collude to suppress opposition to their favored narrative and policies, they destroy any trust in anything they say or allow to be said. Censorship is counterproductive when your message is true. It's only when your message is false that it becomes necessary.
The SPLC has already thoroughly discredited itself, and any groups associated with them should have no part in anything like this. Not that that matters, since this is a political purge of the US military. Obama purged the officer core and Biden is purging the rank and file. The next step, likely in 2024, will be using the military against the people.
MA government told Twitter to delete tweets of Senate candidate
We've seen recent revelations about California and Iowa officials making similar censorship demands of Big Tech companies. Funny how it's all about private companies exercising their own discretion until you find out the government is giving them instructions.
Police officer investigated for Molon Labe keychain
The phrase has been associated with the right to keep and bears arms -- not just the three-percenters, which are a more recent development -- since ancient Greece. This whole panic over anyone who believes in America as the Constitution defined it is political bullshit. And no, the right to keep and bear arms is not extremist.
FL legislation would impose fines for deplatforming
The same rules should apply to everyone. I understand that the legislature loves to create special rules for politicians, but all Americans have free speech rights.
That said, there was likely a tradeoff between imposing penalties large enough for Big Tech to notice and limiting the people covered by such a law. As far as compromises go, I'm fine with this one.
There are three boxes to which a free man can go when seeking to remain free.
He begins with the soap box -- advocating for retaining his liberty, using the 1st Amendment to protect his ability to speak. The media's bias (especially following the final capitulation of Fox News), combined with Big Tech's censorship of the internet, and pervasive cancel culture, have created a situation where speech is no longer free.
If speech alone is insufficient, he moves to the ballot box, voting for leaders who will correct the situation. While this may not resolve the problem immediately, so long as leaders are chosen by popular vote in free and fair elections there remains hope.
The presidential race in 2020 appears to have demonstrated that the ballot box is no longer free or fair.
That only leaves one box left. Pray we need not open it.
Facebook fact checkers were in Biden's camp all along
This will only surprise people who thought Facebook and other Big Tech companies actually wanted to check facts. They didn't. It was always about censorship.
Wikipedia now censoring support for traditional marriage
The problem here is that censoring something like this does not make it go away (as Wikipedia no doubt wishes), it just prevents that opinion from being expressed on a certain platform. It's a thumb on the scales of the overton window, as I saw it described somewhere earlier today; it's not a rational argument, not a discussion, not an explanation, merely a declaration that a certain position is verboten in polite society. Not only does the law not agree with that opinion (any longer, even though this change to millennia of law only happened recently), that opinion can no longer be spoken about at all, thus hampering anyone who disagrees from expressing their disagreement.
This is evil. It is evil in the unique manner of totalitarian technological societies; a minor evil that hurts millions of people just a little bit, and thus hopes to achieve great evil while sliding beneath the notice of those who might oppose it effectively.
This is an obvious attempt at influencing the election, and should result in Twitter being denied any protections against suits for those tweets it does not correct or remove, as Twitter has now claimed for itself an editorial role rather than being a content-neutral service provider. Trump has responded with an executive order emphasizing the importance of free speech and declaring that, by stepping back from political neutrality, Twitter has become a publisher making editorial decisions instead of a platform, thus stripping their protections from suit under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
... and they did it because of red flag laws. They are also refusing to share their bodycam footage, because of course they are. After all, that footage would expose them as liars who shot and killed a man while he slept peacefully in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend, who they also shot.
The police are keeping the survivors under surveillance and threatening them with arrest if they attend protests.
Everyone involved here needs to go on trial for murder and violation of civil rights. But they won't. Because they are police.
I'm not sure if I want to go that far. Any serious attempt at regulating the media would invite regulatory capture immediately, and backfire upon the small, indepedent bloggers and commentators. But to be honest... yes, I do think the media attention given to mass murders that happen at school contributes to them happening again and again and again.
Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.
Do the words obstruction of justice ring a bell?
There is no way this was anything other than a completely deliberate attempt to cover up incriminating evidence.
When it was Nixon, they said "It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
Major media is paid by government agencies for specific content
Those who have been paying attention have known this was true for some time in the realm of entertainment programming. If you ever wondered why so many children's shows have ham-handed anti-drug messaging, wonder no more: running an anti-drug storyline was good enough to tick a box and get money from the government, so of course everyone did. But a new revelation indicates that a similar situation exists for news programming:
Amber Lyon is an award-winning journalist who worked for CNN. She says while working at CNN she was ordered to report fake stories, delete unfriendly stories adverse to the Obama administration (like the Nick Robertson report), and construct stories in specific manners while working for the left-wing network. Why? According to Lyon CNN is paid by foreign and domestic Government agencies for specific content. [Emphasis added]
They are also paid by foreign governments to not air things, with an example at the link above. I can remember when CNN previously admitted to not reporting the truth from Baghdad while Saddam Hussein was in power.
