patrick.net

“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….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I 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. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

—Mark Zuckerberg

What are the implications of this admission from the CEO of one of the largest social media platforms in the world?

Jeffrey Tucker, Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute, an organization that puts out excellent editorial commentary regularly, takes a hard look at the repercussions of our current administration’s unprecedented actions against the freedom of expression in an article (full text below).

Here are the some of the big takeaways:

Outright censorship is only part of the problem. By limiting engagement with a piece of content, users will mistakenly believe that what is offered does not resonate with most people. In other words, if a ton of people have taken the time to watch, listen or read something it will motivate others to check it out. I can personally attest that this is continuing today on another massive platform, YouTube (see below)

Those of us who have been trying to express the problems with the lockdowns, mandates, etc. may have wrongly concluded that the public was too ignorant to understand what was transpiring. The reality is that by limiting exposure to such opinions, people were unaware that there were a lot of qualified voices offering a counter narrative.

The fallout of this form censorship is in our faces right now. Democratic nominee for VP, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz beat Dr. Scott Jensen in a gubernatorial race in 2022. Jensen is a highly credentialed physician who saw through the simplistic “safe and effective” mantra. He lost to Walz by 8%, a substantial margin, but one that likely existed because of the broad suppression of counter narrative voices like his. Had platforms like Zuckerberg’s stayed out of the public debate we would have likely had a different Democratic ticket today as well as a completely different public discussion around the upcoming election.

Independent candidate for POTUS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has sued the Biden administration for the very same attack on free expression that Zuckerberg is confessing to. While that case continues to be swatted around with injunctions being enforced and then dropped, the FB CEO is publicly confirming Kennedy’s allegations.

It’s my hope that Zuckerberg’s candid letter will prompt other platforms to admit to their complicity in this egregious assault on the foundation of democracy. The reality is that this is a big but first step. The distortion of public debate continues right now.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. ...

What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate.

We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.

People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced! ...

A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.

Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election. ...

And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.

When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said. ...

Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. They see the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to 1 support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart.

It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should they take back the White House. ...

At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception, and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year.

Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times.

It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. ...

Dr. Scott Jensen
March 31, 2022
https://gettr.com/post/p12uz3l6ff2

DR. SCOTT JENSEN: Dr. Scott Jansen and I'm running to be next governor of Minnesota and I need your help. I need you to write down or go directly to Dr Scott Jenson dot com slash join. What does that mean? I'm asking you, please join our email list because that's the one way we can assure that we can communicate with you. Dr. Scott Jensen dot com slash join. D-R-S-C-O-T-T-J-E-N-S-E-N dot com slash join.

Why am I asking you this? I'm asking you this because on our FaceBook reach we are having the same super high levels of engagement from people watching our FaceBook videos and our content, but our reach has absolutely been flattened for the last 6 to 8 weeks. And that's never happened before. So some way or another we're being throttled.

Same thing is happening on our Twitter account. It's flat. Typically we can predict growth, but we've not been able to the last six weeks. Something's happening.

Today YouTube notified me that they were pulling down a video whereby I had a FaceBook live conversation with a 10 year-old boy who had some perspectives on various aspects of what's been going on recently, and that was pulled down.

Do you get the message?

I've had trouble with TikTok, too.

I think it's all over, what we're seeing is Big Tech is willing to flex their muscles, and they will censor. And we've seen that.

So I'm asking you, does the increased censorship as we approach elections concern you? Because it does me. And that's why I'm asking you, please, take an action for us, join our email list so that we know we can communicate with you. D-R-S-C-O-T-T-J-E-N-S-E-N dot com slash join J-O-I-N.

Thank you so much.

Hedge Fund Billionaire Bill Ackman Criticizes Brazil’s Blocking of X Platform, Says It Makes the Country ‘Uninvestable’

The blocking of social media platform X in Brazil has left 20 million users frustrated, and has also generated widespread condemnation from all sectors where free-speech is cherished.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman is one of the critics of the measure.

Ackman has become one the latest critics of a court order to suspend Elon Musk’s social-media platform in Brazil.

He argues in an online post that the tyrannical ruling will drive away investors and harm the country.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, on Friday, ordered internet service providers in Brazil to prevent people from gaining access to X.

The order was in response to X’s refusal to name a legal representative in the country since the Court was making illegal secret requests and threatening the representatives with prison.

Justice Moraes wanted the X platform to handle requests to remove accounts that allegedly spread political misinformation. ...

"#VaccineInjuries You Can't Silence the Awaken"
icrunchfakedata, posted May 30, 2022
https://rumble.com/v16p7eo-vaccineinjuries-you-cant-silence-the-awaken.html

SUSAN C: I'm still not well, I still feel depressed and sick, my hair is still out. And they closed the group down, I was in FaceBook. We had 10,000 people there, that we were sick, we were trying to get help, and they closed us down, they don't want anybody to know people are sick after the fu#king vaccine! OK? I didn't know I had Hashimoto's,[1] I had no idea! And the pain and suffering! They should let us talk so we can help each other. Don't they understand, that's wrong! Look at me! I was a beautiful person and I'm ugly and horrible and sick and nobody fu#king cares. And they want to silence us. We have a right to talk, OK? We have a right! I did this for the country, I did my best to try to help people, people dying of covid!

https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/09/17/hillary-clinton-calls-for-americans-be-criminally-charged-free-speech-that-sounds-like-russian-propaganda/

California’s New AI Law Proposals Could Impact Memes
Didi Rankovic

California’s state legislature has passed several bills related to “AI,” including a ban on deepfakes “around elections.”

The lawmakers squeezed these bills in during the last week of the current sessions of the state Senate and House, and it is now up to Governor Gavin Newsom (who has called for such laws) to sign or veto them by the end of this month.

One of the likely future laws is Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024, which aims to regulate how sites, apps, and social media (defined for the purposes of the legislation as large online platforms) should deal with content that the bill considers to be “materially deceptive related to elections in California.”

Namely, the bill wants such content blocked, specifying that this refers to “specified” periods – 120 days before and 60 days after an election. And campaigns will have to disclose if their ads contain AI-altered content.

Now comes the hard part – what qualifies for blocking as deceptive, in order to “defend democracy from deepfakes”? It’s a very broad “definition” that can be interpreted all the way to banning memes.

For example, who’s to say if – satirical – content that shows a candidate “saying something (they) did not do or say” can end up “reasonably likely” harming the reputation or prospects of a candidate? And who’s to judge what “reasonably likely” is? But the bill uses these terms, and there’s more.

Also outlawed would be content showing an election official “doing or saying something in connection with the performance of their elections-related duties that the elections official did not do or say and that is reasonably likely to falsely undermine confidence in the outcome of one or more election contests.”

If the bill gets signed into law on September 30, given the time-frame, it would comprehensively cover not only the current campaign, but the period after it.

And “translated” into plain language, the provisions are designed to “protect” candidates from AI-generated content in any scenario (when such measures are actually justified, or merely, for example, as part of the “war on memes”).

Another category to protect are election officials, that is, “election integrity” (one can make an educated guess, in case an election is contested – again, even if the content is protected lawful speech such as satire).

It’s the “reasonably likely” phrase that leaves space for such broad interpretation

as soon as you allow ANY speech whatsoever to be branded dangerous or harmful or anti-social and suppressed by force of the state, no speech is truly free. you no longer possess an inalienable right. you posses a privilege that can be alienated “if we have a good reason.” this is a massive shift in power that seems like a small thing when they do it. it’s an entirely new framing.

the question is no longer settled by “you are a human, you have an absolute right to free speech, therefore, speak.” any act of the state to bar or prevent such is unjust and illegal. the debate is “is this suppression?”

the question is now “you are speaking. does this speech pass some threshold beyond which the state should prevent it?” and that is a VERY different question. you have already accepted that speech can be illegal. you’ve let them substitute “do you support nazis?” for “do humans have an inalienable right to speech?” it is the shape of the question itself, not the answers to it, that then determines the outcomes.

once you frame the issue, the debate is already over.

this is why, upon hearing of any new such suppression, ESPECIALLY if it is the suppression of something you hate, you should pause and dig down to the true essence of what is happening. ...

they will pick the least sympathetic case to get the ball rolling.

after all, who’s going to stand up for some neo nazis?

well, you should, and here’s why: sure they may be odious and you may disagree violently with them, but an assault on their speech is an assault on everyone’s speech, yours included. ...

it’s a sneaky, effective trick. but it’s one they use over and over. because it works. well. but using it over and over comprises a weakness as well, because once aware, you can see the whole arc coming.

they give you something you actually want and an outcome you like. but this most trojan of horses is how you lose the whole city.

all you see is “bad people have to shut up now” and you miss the “i just accepted ends justify the means thinking and rendered my own rights entirely alienable at the discretion of the state.” ...

you must defend the speech of odious people then go back to ignoring what they say or to refuting it.

you must realize that surrendering all your privacy and liberty to (allegedly) catch terrorists means that the terrorists have not only already won, but that you have turned the role of the state into acting the terrorist themselves and refuse to submit to such predation, even and especially if they tell you “it’s temporary.”

you must immediately rail against and resist a state and a media claiming the right to lie to you and manipulate the facts because “we need to shape perception to get the outcomes we want.”

this becomes a reflex and we need this reflex to spread sufficiently to generate a firewall against being overrun. ...

if you would do one, simple, useful thing for your children: teach them this skill.

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