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I tried the Left’s new social media platform and was banned in 20 minutes ...
I came across a tweet from October 17th claiming the platform doesn't “...censor any posts. [The] algorithms simply filter out fake news, bigotry, and hostility” and I thought this was a great opportunity to put their claim to the test.
I opened an account and posted a few messages, the first reading “Men cannot get pregnant.” Others included “men cannot become women and women cannot become men,” and “Joe Biden sniffs little girls.” ...
In less than 20 minutes, my account was suspended and I was banned from the platform. Tribel posted statements categorizing me as “racist,” “transphobic” and bigoted. So much for Tribel Social combating “fake news!” Apparently stating “men cannot get pregnant” is transphobic— Biology is bigoted and racist!
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling for increased censorship and “interventions” in free speech rights to “improve safety” online.
In a new twist, German economist Klaus Schwab’s organization claims it is “thinking of the children” with its new push for online content moderation.
In a bit over a week Stanford University–or more properly the Stanford University School of Business in conjunction with the Hoover Institution–will hold a conference on promoting free speech in academia.
Predictably a bunch of Stanford professors are trying to cancel it, either literally or metaphorically, complaining that their voices will not be heard. Not that they weren’t invited to attend, of course, but rather that, having declined, they will not be just let in, presumably to protest and disrupt the conference. If they attended as invited guests they would be implicitly acknowledging that the ideas about which the conference is based upon are legitimate, and nothing Leftist dislike can be legitimized in any way.
The premise of the conference is laid out on the front page of their website:
Academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech are under threat as they have not been for decades. Visibly, academics are “canceled,” fired, or subject to lengthy disciplinary proceedings in response to academic writing or public engagement. Less visibly, funding agencies, university bureaucracies, hiring procedures, promotion committees, professional organizations, and journals censor some kinds of research or demand adherence to political causes. Many parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge their orthodoxy. Younger researchers are afraid to speak and write and don’t investigate promising ideas that they fear will endanger their careers.
The two-day Academic Freedom Conference, arranged by the organizing committee, aims to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture and restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish. The conference will focus on the organizational structures leading to censorship and stifling debate and how to repair them.
It is indeed true that the conference attendance has been limited to invited guests, but the reason for that is obvious: dissenters from the prevailing Narrative™ are unwelcome on college campuses. They are harassed, yelled at, shouted down, and occasionally worse. Comedians rarely visit campuses any more because they are dominated by a political monoculture where any deviation from accepted speech is unacceptable–which of course precludes comedy.
Visiting a college campus today reminds one more of China during the Cultural Revolution than anything recognizable to those of us who attended college or graduate school decades ago. The signs of the impending rot were there, but there was still room for dissent. One of the reasons I abandoned my PhD and left academia was a sense that there was no room for me any more on the modern campus. I believe I was right about that.
No longer does intellectual freedom exist on our campuses..
TRUTH COPS
Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
Lee Fang
@lhfang
The emails and documents show close collaboration b/w DHS & private sector. Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (fired by @elonmusk last week) met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship plans. Microsoft exec texted DHS: "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't"
‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship. Their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass. ...
Thus, the ‘emergency’ is signalled as over and the Era of Permanent Despotism begins. Now we move into the world predicted two years ago by one Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s leading assets management behemoth, BlackRock: ‘Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like, actually . . . totalitarian governments, where you have an understanding of what’s out there, and obviously the whole dimension is changing now with a democratisation of countries. And democracies are very messy.’
Since those fateful days in the Spring of 2020, this was always going to happen, being baked into the lockdown cake. This is because, if an ‘authority’ suspends supposedly inalienable rights and freedoms, and then, after a long period of withholding them without objectively discernible justification, trickles their simulacrum back out under the rubric of concession, it soon becomes clear that these rights and freedoms have ceased to exist. After that, it is only a matter of carting the husks away.
This is absolutely wild. The government is secretly transforming "national security" agencies into a new Narrative Police.
“If a foreign government sent these messages,” said the former ACLU president, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
Read the story: https://t.co/9bMjDKSmcd
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 31, 2022
Facebook, Twitter Created Special Portals for Biden Admin Officials to Flag 'Misinformation'
China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign
Inside the CCP’s use of social media bots and other disinformation tactics to promote its own response to the coronavirus pandemic and attack its critics
Should California doctors lose their medical licenses if they favor guidance from Sweden and Denmark over guidance from the CDC?
Censorship of medical dissent is now being expanded in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Assembly Bill 2098 into law, officially granting the California Medical Board the authority to penalize and suspend the licenses of doctors who intentionally spread “misinformation or disinformation” about COVID risks and prevention, as well as the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines. In the U.K. and Sweden, by contrast, COVID vaccines are no longer offered to healthy children under 12, and in Denmark boosters are not available for anyone under 50.
Twitter isn’t just real life, it’s bigger than real life, and I’m far from the only person who’s figured that out. Heavy social media censorship is merely one sign of its overwhelming importance. Liberal democracies like to pledge all kinds of freedoms to their populations, but you’re generally only allowed to exercise these freedoms as long as you don’t pose a serious threat to anyone in power. The minute it starts to matter, speech is inevitably circumscribed. In Europe, where we don’t have anything like a Bill of Rights, this is typically done by laws that directly regulate what you’re allowed to say and prescribe substantial fines or prison sentences for offenders. The US Constitution requires a softer, asymmetrical approach in America. There, government regulators and advertisers pressure social media platforms to censor speech behind the scenes. We don’t understand all the ways this is done, but the results are clear enough. The freewheeling days of the early internet are over. Almost all influential content flows through a handful of tech platforms, and these chokepoints are heavily controlled.
On August 10, 2021, the Los Angeles Times published a long feature on “the indie-rock singer-songwriter,” Joseph Arthur. The headline—”He was a celebrated singer-songwriter with famous fans. Then he started posting about the vaccine”—instantly reminded me of the New York Times feature on the French medical doctor and microbiologist, Didier Raoult, headlined, “He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19.”
The formula for both stories was identical—namely, recount the exceptional achievements of the subject while marveling that such a brilliant man would embrace such crackpot ideas. Nothing in either feature even allowed for the possibility that the subjects had made valid points. The reporters apparently started with the assumption that the official orthodoxy was entirely correct, while the heterodox views of the great professor and great musician were entirely false.
For Professor Raoult’s advocacy of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, he was relentlessly criticized and harassed by France’s official medical establishment. Because Joseph Arthur questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and the morality of vaccine mandates, he suffered a similar fate in the music industry.
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Nov 26
How can society continue -- how can marginalized people survive -- if there's even one place on the internet that doesn't take censorship orders from Media Matters, AOC, Taylor Lorenz, the Dept. of Homeland Security, the ADL, Harvard's clinical instructors, and Nina Jankowicz?
Glenn Greenwald
ggreenwald
Nov 26
How can society continue -- how can marginalized people survive -- if there's even one place on the internet that doesn't take censorship orders from Media Matters, AOC, Taylor Lorenz, the Dept. of Homeland Security, the ADL, Harvard's clinical instructors, and Nina Jankowicz?
HE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
@ggreenwald
It just continues to be one of the most surreal aspects of American political life that the political party that incessantly claims it is the sole bulwark against "fascism" has, as one of its central tactics, the union of state and corporate power to censor the citizenry.
I have to (not really, I gladly) agree with Richwicks on this. The Gubment has finally woken up to the existential threat the internet poses to their traditional propaganda narrative. The problem is that they are trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle in full view of the intarwebs, and are in full panic mode that their efforts at this point are futile.
That's our "rulers". A bunch of fucking pedophile scum.
Can anyone actually grok how “progressive” thinking works these days? This faction now in charge of so many things has decided in the starkest terms that freedom of speech has got to go. For some years, the Party of Chaos had achieved such exquisite control of all national debate by seizing the dials and toggles of social media that they made reality itself their hostage. The truth was only what they said it was, and anyone who said otherwise got banished, cancelled, and even destroyed. ...
And now a struggle ensues over the relationship between the truth and the making of a consensus. Elon Musk bought Twitter — the horror! — and methodically set about to liberate this new digital “public square” from insidious and nefarious manipulation. It’s not a trifling matter, of course, but it’s amusing to watch Elon play with our nation’s overlords; and even more entertaining to see these tyrants strain and bluster to justify their war against free speech. How did the cognitive elite, America’s thinking class, the law professors, the editors and pundits, the public intellectuals, the managers of most everything, ever find themselves so self-owned in idiocy? ...
Rumors were flying days before that the Lords of Tech would pull on Twitter the same kind of treatment they dealt to Parler two years ago, a then-rising rival app for Internet chatter that threatened to open up free debate. Apple and Google took Parler out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head — and nobody could do a damn thing about it. I have a hunch that Elon explained a few things to Tim Cook that made him think twice about another move like that.
Twitter is different than the upstart Parler was. Twitter was already established as the authorities’ official arbiter of approved thought in America. Under the old boss, Jack Dorsey, Twitter accomplished its thought management ends with a staff of thousands of mini-Stalins rooting out anything that smelled like opposition to the official narratives. (Elon fired the whole lot of them in short order.) It has been revealed since then that Twitter carried out censorship at the aggressive prompting of US deep state officialdom, the nagging, twanging, and strong-arming by bureaucrats from many federal agencies. Who knows (not yet, anyway) how many Twitter censors were actually put in-place by the government?
So now, one big truth has come nakedly out in the open: the Left is against the First Amendment to the Constitution. Free speech, they say repeatedly now, makes our democracy unsafe. It can’t be allowed. They say that because they don’t have a better argument. The safety talking-point is a shopworn cliché from their grab-bag of Woke shibboleths that the public is sick of hearing. Anyone with half a brain can see how transparently dishonest and stupid it is. It’s not going over well, even among a people so sorely gaslighted as the USA in late 2022.
Speaking of what is safe and what is not safe, one of the main deceptions the past three years has been the suppression of information about the Covid-19 vaccines that were foisted on the population — for many, made a requirement to earn a living. The old Twitter worked strenuously to bury any data and all news that suggested the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were disabling and killing people. It has now reached a critical point, with so many suspicious “all-causes” deaths coming to the public’s attention. This is what the authorities are really afraid of: that the people will learn their government has carried out — by epic incompetence or true malice — something the looks like an attempted genocide.
On October 14, 2020, less than a month before election day, the Post published “BIDEN’S SECRET EMAILS”: an exposé that used files obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop and which suggested that “the big guy” — possibly Joe Biden, the man running to be president — may have been involved in his son’s business dealings.
As Taibbi relates, Twitter treated the story as if it were child pornography — even blocking transmission via direct message. They also locked down the account of the then-White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany because she tweeted the story.
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It's coming, and it will encapsulate the Social Justice Revolution as part of American Canon, so to criticize it will be subject to censorship.