Commentary: VDARE’s Fight Against Letitia James Is Our Fight, Too

New York AG

For all its gesticulations about “free speech,” the conservative mainstream often plays a supporting role in America’s censorship regime. It’s a two-step dance: The Right styles itself as the sworn defender of free speech and the mortal enemy of censorship while simultaneously downplaying or outright ignoring brazen censorship of speech that ventures a bit too far outside the Overton window. By claiming to defend all free speech in principle but only defending some in practice, the Right concedes, by omission, that certain ideas fall outside the bounds of free expression — and that it’s perfectly appropriate (or, at least, not particularly objectionable) to bring the full force of regime power to bear against any individual so unwise as to express them.

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Mike Benz Reveals How NewsGuard Plans to ‘Warp’ the Minds of ‘Tens of Millions of School Children’

Mike Benz

Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, revealed how NewsGuard is making its way into K-12 public schools and “warping” the minds of tens of millions of schoolchildren.

NewsGuard is a for-profit entity dedicated to countering what it calls “misinformation” founded by journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.

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Commentary: The Winners of RealClearPolitics’ Samizdat Prize

RCP Award Show

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.

The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.

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Commentary: The Gift of C-SPAN in an Era of Partisan Media

Al Gore on C-SPAN

Forty-five years ago today, future vice president Albert Gore Jr. stood in the well of the House of Representatives to discuss an innovative development in television programming. There was nothing remarkable about that in itself: Al Gore had been a newspaperman before becoming a Tennessee congressman and had a genuine interest in both new technology and mass communication.

Except that there was something momentous about Gore’s speech that day. It was the first time that remarks delivered on the House floor by a member of Congress were televised. It was an event long envisioned by a 38-year-old Indiana-born, Purdue-educated, U.S. Navy veteran who had worked as a White House and Capitol Hill aide before returning to journalism. His name was Brian Lamb. As the Washington bureau chief of the trade publication Cablevision, Lamb had dreamed of creating a nonprofit cable network that would focus exclusively on public affairs, particularly Congress. It was called C-SPAN, and on March 19, 1979, that dream became reality.

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Mike Benz Warns: The Supreme Court Needs to Exercise ‘Bravery’ in Murthy v. Missouri Case to ‘Dismantle the Government Censorship Complex’

Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the Supreme Court is going to have to exercise “bravery” as opposed to “wisdom” in its ruling of Murthy v. Missouri for the government censorship complex to be dismantled.

Murthy v. Missouri seeks to determine whether the government’s “challenged conduct transformed private social media companies’ content-moderation decisions into state action and violated respondents’ First Amendment rights” related to COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

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Commentary: Why the ‘Language Watch?’

"Gun Violence" Language Watch video

Who is in charge of the language? Not us conservatives, that’s for sure. We are flotsam flowing with the waters formulated by the liberal establishment and culture. We are using their language constructs. No longer.

We are creating a series of short videos, about one minute each, plucking a phrase from those polluted waters and explaining why it is polluted, propagandistic, and not worthy of use in a society that more than ever needs a common language not loaded with political narratives. We are calling the series “Language Watch.”

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‘Censorship Industry Heavyweights’ Carrying Out ‘Very Nasty Tricks’ to Interfere in 2024 Election, Mike Benz Says

Mike Benz

Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said all of the “major censorship industry heavyweights” are currently carrying out “very nasty tricks” to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.

“The main two tools that they’re using for 2024 censorship are the states because the federal censorship mechanism has been weakened after the Missouri v. Biden trial court ruling, which is now before oral arguments in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is likely to deal them a very heavy blow. So they’re moving into the states to help coordinate that rather than the federal government,” Benz explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.

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Free Speech Expert: 2020 Election and COVID-19 Pandemic Most Censored Events in Human History

Mike Benz Tucker Carlson

An expert in online free speech told Tucker Carlson in a wide-ranging interview that he believes the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election were the two most censored events in human history.

“The two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date, are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ll explained how I arrived there,” Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) told Carlson.

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Security State Sees Internet Free Speech as ‘Massive Crisis’

An internet free speech expert said in a recent interview that freedom of speech online combined with massive audiences for independent journalists and news sources created a “massive crisis” for America’s security state. 

“So initially, even these dissident voices within the U.S., even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers,” Founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview. “They never reached the one billion impressions per year type thing. As an uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media, this induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our State Department and intelligence services.” 

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RussiaGate Hoax Paved Way for Security State’s Domestic Censorship During 2020 Election, Internet Free Speech Expert Says

Mike Benz

According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.

Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.

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Revealed: U.S. Military Working to Censor ‘Right-Wing Populist Groups’

Military Cyber Warfare

According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.

“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”

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Founder of ‘Your American Flag Store’ Details Censorship Battle with Big Tech

Your American Flag Store

Founder and CEO of Your American Flag Store James Staake recounted his censorship battle with Facebook, Shopify, and PayPal, revealing how the tech giants targeted his patriotic business the day after January 6, 2021.

Staake’s business, which started as a side job involving him building wooden American flag pieces featuring patriotic artwork created by his wife, grew from a small local operation in 2018 to a full-time gig once the products were available to purchase online.

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Report: Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House

Vaccine Shot

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

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Ohio U.S. Rep Jim Jordan Debuts ‘Amazon Files’ Showcasing Federal Censorship Efforts Against Books

Rep. Jim Jordan

The House Judiciary Committee and the Weaponization subpanel on Monday revealed internal documents secured via the subpoena of Amazon, highlighting the Biden administration’s efforts to address “propaganda” and “misinformation” in books the online retailer sold.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan outlined the effort in an X thread reminiscent of the “Twitter Files” reports that addressed federal involvement with that platform.

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Commentary: Logically.AI of Britain and the Expanding Global Reach of Censorship

Computer Keyboard

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

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Abortion, Trump, and Censorship Headline Supreme Court’s Docket in the New Year

Issues involving the chemical abortion pill, former President Donald Trump and the Biden administration’s encouragement of censorship online top the Supreme Court’s docket in the New Year.

Though only one decision has been released so far this term, the justices have already heard arguments on gun restrictions for subjects of domestic violence restraining orders, government officials blocking constituents on social media and Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement. Other pending cases will require the Supreme Court to grapple with multiple hot-button issues in the lead up to the 2024 election.

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Director of Internet Free Speech Nonprofit Says EU is Angling to Make X Purchase ‘Middleware’

Elon Musk X EU

Mike Benz, the director of a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, is sounding the alarm on the European Union’s investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, for what it claims are breakages of the multinational conglomerate’s hate speech laws. 

Benz, an attorney and the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), says that the EU’s plan is to force X into implementing a mandatory “disinformation compliance” service like NewsGuard. Such products have been termed “middleware.” 

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Former New York Times Editorial Page Editor Writes Scathing Essay About Newspaper’s Culture and His Exit

James Bennet

James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times, has written a scathing column about his departure from the paper and criticizing the Times for what he sees as a shift away from its previous journalistic principles.

Bennet gave his version of the story of his departure in a 16,000-word article in The Economist, where he is currently a columnist. In the article, titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” he describes what he sees as the Times’ shift from traditional journalistic principles, according to The Daily Wire, and “courage,” to an “illiberal” philosophy of the news.

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Commentary: Government Cannot Become Big Brother

Anyone who lived through 2020 observed that some messages received treatment online that stood in stark contrast to other messages. Conservative voices and messages were censored and banned, while progressive voices and messages flowed freely. If a person spoke against COVID-19 lockdowns—and later vaccines—there was a good chance that a social media platform would take down the post. If one were to suggest that suspicious activities occurred surrounding the 2020 election, the label “misinformation” might appear.

The primary vehicle to censor internet speech is to label disfavored messages as dis-, mis-, or mal-information. While the category of malinformation is seemingly the most offensive – true information that government censors believe lacks sufficient “context” – the other categories can be just as malignant. Mis- and disinformation require someone to determine what is true and what is not.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues Pfizer for Misrepresenting Efficacy of the COVID-19 Jabs and Conspiring to Censor Public Discourse

AG Ken Paxton

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he is suing Pfizer for “unlawfully misrepresenting” Covid-19 vaccine efficacy and conspiring to censor public discourse.

“Pfizer engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” Paxton said in a press release.

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Commentary: The ‘Complexity’ of Idiocy

Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks.

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Commentary: Supporting Censorship Will Backfire on the Right

Free speech has long been one of the most sacred American values. Until recently, commitment to free speech in general was bipartisan and widespread. Almost every American from every political persuasion valued free speech.

There used to be some debate on the margins. Conservatives were wary of extending free speech protection to corrosive things like pornography, and liberals were wary of official speech endorsing religion. But, as recently as the 1990s, neither side believed its opponent should be censored, and the idea of exempting “hate speech” from the normal rule against censorship did not have much traction.

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YouTube Censors Babylon Bee After Sharing Covenant Killer Manifesto

Alphabet-owned YouTube is censoring The Babylon Bee after the publication shared the leaked partial manifesto of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville in March. 

“Normally we’re flagged for misinformation, incitement, or hateful conduct. This is our first ‘violent criminal organizations’ policy violation,” said Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter. 

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Apple Blocks Presidential Candidate’s Newsletter, Libs of TikTok Banned from Email Marketing

Boring old email is still one of the most effective marketing methods – and a major choke point for entities deemed outside the political mainstream.

Apple is blocking delivery of a newsletter founded by Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Rectenwald to his own email subscribers, while email marketing provider AWeber booted Libs of TikTok, the influential chronicler of progressive pieties, a day after accepting its business.

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Supreme Court Issues Another Temporary Pause on Injunction Against Biden Admin Censorship Efforts

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday issued another stay of an injunction blocking the Biden administration from encouraging social media companies to censor speech.

Alito’s administrative stay blocks the injunction originally issued by District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty until Oct. 20, giving the justices more time to consider the Biden administration’s request for a longer stay on the injunction and to take up the case. Alito has issued short stays against the injunction twice, with the last one expiring Sept. 27.

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Supreme Court Extends Pause on Appeals Court Ruling on Biden Admin Censorship Efforts

The Supreme Court on Friday extended its stay on an injunction blocking the Biden administration from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to censor speech.

Justice Samuel Alito temporarily froze the injunction until Sept. 22 last week after the Biden administration requested a stay. On Friday, the justices extended the stay to Sept. 27.

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Trump Vows to Crush Federal Censorship with New Appointees, Executive Order if Elected in 2024

Former President Donald Trump is vowing to dismantle the federal machinery built by the Biden administration to censor political speech in America, saying he will appoint new leaders of agencies that have engaged in silencing free speech. He also said he would sign an Executive Order banning government employees from participating in projects that infringe the First Amendment.

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Emails Reveal Katie Hobbs While Secretary of State Pressured Twitter and Facebook to Censor Her GOP Opponents

Newly released emails reveal that Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, while serving as secretary of state overseeing elections, had her staff pressure social media companies to censor posts by her Republican opponents under the guise of “misinformation.” Her targets included the Arizona Republican Party and former conservative powerhouse legislator Kelly Townsend.

The AZGOP responded in a tweet, “EXPOSED: @GovernorHobbs has relentlessly censored major entities, including the Arizona Republican Party. Shocked? We’re not. It’s time for transparency and accountability. This goes beyond politics—it’s a matter of principle.”

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Arizona AG Kris Mayes and Other Democratic AGs File Amicus Brief Supporting Government’s Ability to Pressure Social Media Companies

Congress and First Amendment supporters have condemned the Twitter Files recently after it came out that government agencies colluded with social media companies to censor information on controversial topics that went against the government’s position. A federal judge in July barred the federal government from communicating with social media companies after two Republican attorneys general sued, but now some Democratic attorneys general, including Arizona’s Kris Mayes, are joining the lawsuit in support of the government.

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Director of Internet Free Speech Nonprofit Sounds Alarm on ‘Middleware’ Censorship by NewsGuard

The founder of a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of speech on the internet is sounding the alarm on government weaponization of “middleware” companies, which he said are essentially shell organizations for government censorship.

“The reason that they call it competitive middleware is because they’re trying to create a competitive industry around middleware compliance to avoid any antitrust situations that could arise,” Mike Benz, the executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told The Tennessee Star Tuesday.

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Censorship Case Involving State Collusion with Social Media Companies Could Be Heard by the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could hear a case questioning a California agency’s coordination with Twitter to censor election-related “misinformation.”

O’Handley v. Weber, which concerns the California Secretary of State’s Office of Election Cybersecurity’s work with Twitter to monitor “false or misleading” election information, was appealed to the Supreme Court on June 8. The case raises questions similar to those posed in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, now being appealed in the Fifth Circuit: Can the government lawfully induce private actors to censor protected speech?

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Federal Judge Denies Biden Admin’s Request to Keep Coordinating with Big Tech to Censor Americans

A federal judge denied the Biden administration’s attempt to pause an injunction that bars federal officials from communicating with social media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on Monday.

The Biden administration appealed Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty’s July 4 injunction on Wednesday, also requesting an emergency order to pause the injunction while the appeal is pending on Thursday night. Doughty denied the administration’s emergency order Monday, finding that plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving the government colluded with social media companies “to engage in viewpoint-based suppression of protected free speech.”

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Biden Admin Asks for Emergency Order Stopping Ban on Big Tech Censorship Coordination

The Biden administration requested an emergency order Thursday night to pause the preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge to prevent officials from communicating with social media platforms to censor protected speech.

The administration asked to immediately halt the injunction, issued by Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty on Tuesday, or to issue a seven day administrative stay while their appeal to the Fifth Circuit, which was filed on Wednesday, is pending. Doughty’s injunction bars federal officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, FBI and other agencies from communicating with social media platforms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

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Judge Grants Injunction Against Censorship of ‘Conservative’ Election Information, Which Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer Participated In

A U.S. District Court judge granted an injunction Tuesday stopping the Biden administration from working with social media companies to censor information about elections, COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other “conservative” speech. Similarly, in 2022, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer worked with Biden’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, to “manipulate elections,” Trump attorney Christina Bobb tweeted last December. The Biden administration immediately filed a notice of appeal.

In his 155-page opinion, Judge Terry Doughty observed that the censorship was directed at conservatives. “It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature,” he said. “This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country.”

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Judge Orders Biden Administration to Limit Contact with Social Media Platforms

A Louisiana federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Biden administration to limit its contact with social media platforms, determining that the government likely violated the First Amendment by working to censor disfavored political viewpoints online. Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointed U.S. District Court judge, issued a preliminary injunction barring federal officials and agencies from contacting social media firms to seek the removal of protected speech, Politico reported.

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Study Finding Facebook Does Not Censor Conservatives Is ‘Deeply Flawed,’ ‘Laughable,’ Experts Say

Media Matters for America published a study recently concluding that Facebook does not censor conservatives, but experts told the DCNF the study is not credible because it did not properly measure the suppression of right-leaning pages.

Right-leaning Facebook pages typically got more total interactions than politically nonaligned and left-leaning pages on Facebook, according to the study. However, experts say this does not mean that there was no censorship of right-leaning Facebook pages, as the only example of suppression the Media Matters study cites is Donald Trump’s Facebook ban.

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COVID Vaccine Injury Victims Sue Biden Officials, Alleging They’ve Been Victimized by Censorship

The Biden administration is using “threats, pressure, inducement, and coercion” to censor social media groups for COVID-19 vaccine injuries and prevent them from raising money, according to a new First Amendment lawsuit based in part on legal discovery from ongoing state-led litigation.

Plaintiffs Brianne Dressen, Shaun Barcavage, Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland and Suzanna Newell allege they “suffered –and continue to experience – serious and debilitating medical injuries within days (and, in many cases, hours)” of COVID vaccination. And plaintiff Ernest Ramirez says his 16-year-old son died of cardiac arrest five days after the boy’s first Pfizer dose. 

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Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly’s Support for Censoring Viewpoints on Social Media Is Taken Out of Context: Spox

During a Zoom call this past week with federal government finance officials, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) called for censorship of unfavorable remarks on social media. He was referring to posts raising alarm about the financial stableness of banks after the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which resulted in long lines of customers attempting to take their money out and the Biden administration stepping in to guarantee deposits of over $250,000, amounts the law doesn’t insure. 

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, expressed his concern in an op-ed for The New York Post titled “Censorship addicts: Democrats seek to squelch speech on banks.” He said, “Rather than convince citizens that their deposits are safe, it is easier to just silence anyone who disagrees with you. So now ‘the expense’ of free speech is too high if it might undermine faith in our banks’ stability.”

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Commentary: Government Censorship Agency Scrubs Disinformation Web Page About Its History Interacting with Social Media Platforms

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the censorship agency everyone has been talking about, has scrubbed its Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation (MDM) webpage, https://cisa.gov/mdm to remove any mentions of interacting with “appropriate social media platforms” to “route disinformation concerns”.

How malinformative, to use the agency’s jargon. Malinformation, per the agency, “is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” By removing mentions and the context of the agency’s stated history of interacting with social media platforms, the agency is apparently attempting to mislead, harm and manipulate the public into believing it never did those things in the first place.

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Latest Twitter Files Reveal Adam Schiff’s Collusion with Platform to Censor Opponents

On Tuesday, the eleventh and twelfth installments of the Twitter Files highlighted the role that Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) played in censoring conservative accounts on the platform.

As reported by Fox News, the two back-to-back threads posted by journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter “received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned.” One example was in November of 2020, when Schiff’s office emailed Twitter demanding the banning of several “QAnon conspiracists” on Twitter, which they claimed were responsible for “harassment” against Schiff aide Sean Misko.

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‘Take Aim:’ Adam Schiff Threatens Big Tech Unless They Censor More Content

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California said Sunday that Section 230 protections should be repealed if tech companies do not do more to combat “hate and loathing” on their platforms.

“I’m particularly concerned about the practice some of the large tech companies have of, whenever there is a budding, promising new entrant into the market, they buy them out because they don’t necessarily want to develop that product line themself, but they don’t want the competition,” Schiff told CNN host Jake Tapper on State of the Union. “We should absolutely take aim at that and other anti-competitive actions of Big Tech, and I think we’ve got a big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.”

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State Senators Propose Pennsylvania Law Against Social Media Censorship

Pennsylvania State Senators Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) and Scott Hutchinson (R-Oil City) Thursday announced they would reintroduce a bill proposed in the last legislative session designed to prevent social media platforms from censoring Pennsylvanians. 

Mastriano and Hutchinson introduced the original measure in May 2021. They secured the cosponsorship of four other senators, all Republicans, but the bill did not receive a vote in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee. The two lawmakers said new developments impelled them to try again in the new session. They cited the recently released “Twitter files,” internal documents pertaining largely to the social-media company’s decision in late 2020 to deny users access to a New York Post story concerning Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s personal computer.

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