patrick.net

Why is it written in English when they are in France?

11-Year-Old Girl & Woman, 34, Stabbed in London – Citizens Fear Arrest for Commenting

X Stops Operations in Brazil after ‘censorship orders’ from Judge Alexandre de Moraes
Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders.

He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions. Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process.

As a result, to protect our staff's safety, we have decided to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil. We are deeply saddened that we have been forced to make this decision. The responsibility lies solely with Alexandre de Moraes.

His actions are incompatible with democratic government.

The people of Brazil have a choice to make - democracy, or (Judge) Alexandre de Moraes.

British man who quit job to care for wife sentenced to 3 years for mean tweets ... come see the words that sent him to prison

Three years in prison for, at least in part, violating the Communications Act of 2003, section 127:

Improper use of public electronic communications network

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he —

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he —

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b) causes such a message to be sent; or

(c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

(4) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to anything done in the course of providing a programme service (within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1990.

https://x.com/mtracey/status/1826657225924022662

In more good RFK news, MSN (citing the Daily Caller) ran an op-ed about a story completely ignored by corporate media, headlined “Judge Finds RFK Jr. Can Bring Censorship Lawsuit Against Biden Admin After Supreme Court Rejects States' Challenge.”

The Supreme Court disappointed many folks earlier this year by vacating an anti-censorship preliminary injunction, because the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden failed to show direct censorship, instead of sneaky government euphemisms and official “suggestions” to take down posts that weren’t really suggestions.

But Kennedy separately filed a companion case, and the evidence in his case is clearer than was the evidence in Missouri. Kennedy’s emails show the government being much more obvious about wanting his anti-vaccine posts deleted.

Yesterday, Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty found that Kennedy’s case meets the new Supreme Court “direct censorship”’ standard and may move forward toward a new injunction. Progress.

Kathy Boston
6 hrs ago

I tried to post Kennedys speech on my page and it got blocked by Facebook. "goes against their community standards"

"You're violating my First Amendment rights": Arizona woman goes viral for getting arrested at city council meeting

Fun fact of the day: You can be arrested in Surprise, Arizona, for making complaints about a city employee during a city council meeting. Not an exaggeration, not a joke, just plain reality in the City of Surprise.

Here's the city policy which is printed on the back of each public speaker form that citizens hand in before council meetings:

Oral communications during the City Council meeting may not be used to lodge charges or complaints against any employee of the City or members of the body, regardless of whether such person is identified in the presentation by name or by any other reference that tends to identify him/her.

And here's what happens when you break this rule and speak freely about your public servants — in this case discussing their salaries:

Rebekah Massie, 32, was arrested Tuesday night and cited on suspicion of trespassing, a class 3 misdemeanor. The arrest came after she was removed from the meeting at the behest of Mayor Skip Hall who accused her of breaking the city's rule against complaining about city employees while making public comments. ...

Arrested for her free speech.

This one's definitely going to a higher court, and I'll wager that Mrs. Massie will win.

Because making a rule that you can't complain about a public employee during a city council meeting is 100% a violation of the First Amendment.

More well-covered was an astonishing letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent this week to Congressman Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Remarkably, the letter has received wide media coverage, such as in a USA Today op-ed headlined, “Republicans were right: Zuckerberg admits Biden administration censored your Facebook feed.”

Like Marianne’s clip, Zuckerberg’s letter was similarly confessional, since it began by admitting that during the pandemic, Facebook allowed the government to control the information it was permissible for U.S. citizens to receive. From Zuck’s letter:

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."

Although Zuckerberg commendably owned the blame for bowing to the pressure, it’s not quite that simple. The government strongly suggested censorship, and Facebook understandably yielded to that pressure. This two-stepping was just a thinly disguised charade designed to give Biden’s officials plausible deniability that they never directly censored anybody. It’s just a dumb cover story and nobody believes it.

What big tech company could resist focused government pressure? That’s a nice platform you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it, cough, TikTok, cough. TikTok resisted and failed. Musk continues to resist, and he’s paying the price.

Anyway, and this may be the more significant point, Zuckerberg also expressed “regret” about demoting the true Hunter Biden laptop story, and disclosed that the FBI’s warning was not about the laptop per se, but more broadly about “Russian disinformation” related to the “Biden family and Burisma.”

Meaning, Biden’s bribery problems.

In other words, just like in any tinpot dictatorship, the Biden Administration successfully misused its domestic police force, the FBI, to control information about any politically embarrassing topic, not just “dangerous health misinformation” related to the pandemic.