SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies.
No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.
UPDATED: A Few From the Archives:
By Shadow-Banning Punchlines, Twitter Has Become One
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| "Silence!" |
Also "Who, When, How and Where?" That's a little journalism joke. Like Tater.
Evidently, they can talk smack about schoolchildren all day long, but self-important "journalists" themselves are strictly off-limits. Didn't Hillary tell laid-off coal-miners they should learn to code?
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| #They Fell In To a Burning Ring of Fired |
"The Non-Permitted Ballad of Jack Dorsey" from Johnny PayPal's classic"Live at the Folsom Street Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco":
I'm up here banning hashtags
like plastic straws and bags
I got no sense of humor
when it comes to gags
I'm stuck in Twitter HQ
time keeps draggin' on
but that meme keeps rollin'
on down to San Antone.
When I was just a baby,
my mama told me "Jack,
Don't mess with peoples' punchlines
Don't be a Free Speech hack."
But I doxxed a man Encino
just to make him choke
the crime that he committed:
Making Unauthorized Jokes.
I bet there's Trump folk tweetin'
And sayin' what they want
They're probably tossing back to liberals
their own silly taunt
But I know they had it comin'
Speech just can't be Free
But those Trumpers keep a speakin'
And that's what tortures me
Well if they freed me from Headquarters
If the Internet was mine
I would ban all pesky hashtags
that didn't walk the line
Far from San Francisco
Is where I'd rather be
heading the Joke Inspection Bureau
in Washington, D.C.!
UPDATE: Our friend Lucidian provides the excellent Twitter Prison Blues soundtrack for the Man in Black
Un-American and Evil: Facebook Censors Rev. Franklin Graham
Via Daily Caller, Rev. Franklin Graham:
Well, now we know. Facebook has a secret rulebook for policing speech. I was banned from posting on Facebook last week for 24 hours. Why? Because of a post from back in 2016 about North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (the bathroom bill). Facebook said the post went against their “community standards on hate speech.” Facebook is trying to define truth. There was a character in a movie a few years back who said, “The truth is what I say it is!” That’s what Facebook is trying to do. They’re making the rules and changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules and His Word is truth. Actually, Facebook is censoring free speech. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA.
Since Facebook took down the 2016 post last week, I’ll copy it here so you can read it for yourself. Do you see any hate speech here?
April 9, 2016--- “Bruce Springsteen, a long-time gay rights activist, has cancelled his North Carolina concert. He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women's restrooms and locker rooms is going "backwards instead of forwards." Well, to be honest, we need to go back! Back to God. Back to respecting and honoring His commands. Back to common sense. Mr. Springsteen, a nation embracing sin and bowing at the feet of godless secularism and political correctness is not progress. I’m thankful North Carolina has a governor, Pat McCrory, and a lieutenant governor, Dan Forest, and legislators who put the safety of our women and children first! HB2 protects the safety and privacy of women and children and preserves the human rights of millions of faith-based citizens of this state.”
Every single political issue must be freely discussed without giant Big Tech monopolies outlawing opinions they don't like.
And it's not just outright censorship, although there is plenty of that. They are shadow-banning. That's when they block others from seeing what you have written--only you don't know it. They play games with search results, suppress traffic to disapproved sites, de-person dissidents--they even censor critics who say they censor critics!
And that's in addition to the workaday fraud of spying on their customers and selling your information to the highest bidders.
Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous! Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. They have removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase. They have acknowledged-done NOTHING!
"Big Tech lobbyists orchestrated the quiet insertion of a seemingly innocuous provision (Article 19.17) into the (USMCA)deal that is based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230, much beloved by big tech, and an essential building block of their monopolistic dominance, holds that platforms like Facebook cannot be held liable as a “publisher or speaker” of their users’ content.
Under the right circumstances, there’s good reason for tech companies to have this type of immunity. If Facebook were legally responsible for everything its more than 2 billion users post, then it would enforce overly restrictive rules and restrictions and block lawful posts. Because Congress explicitly acknowledged that these platforms served as a “forum for a true diversity of political discourse,” it granted this important privilege.
However, as Senator-elect Josh Hawley — who was an active leader on challenging the power of big tech when he served as Missouri attorney general, and shows every sign of leading this fight in the Senate — pointed out, these platforms no longer support the political diversity that the law was premised on. Instead, big tech relentlessly censors conservatives. They take all of the benefit of the provision, while accepting none of the costs.
Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz has argued that dominant tech platforms aren’t acting neutrally, so they “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken.”
Neither Hawley nor Cruz are arguing that social media should be a free-for-all, but simply that they should be politically neutral."...….
I wonder which congressman
Democrats and the Uni-Party don't care. They like it that Tech Giants are silencing their opponents, just as they like the FBI and CIA wiretapping their political opposition. They worship power. They lack the moral imagination to think that they may be next. Or maybe suppressing your opponents' civil rights is just so much fun they simply don't care if it's risky.
But those of us who still care about free society have to stop this evil.
It is Intellectual Apartheid. It is un-American. And it is evil.
Lizard-Brain--UPDATE: CSI Fakebook says they're sorry they got caught and promise that in the future, they will only censor those who can't fight back.
Twitter: #FreeJamesWoods!
,Not Only Do They Censor Conservatives, They Censor Conservatives Who Say They Censor Conservatives
"A few weeks later, he's called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he's sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It ['The Joke'] was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean's magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal for the crime of "flagrant Islamophobia." In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of "expert witnesses," the "tone" of my jokes. Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly?"--Mark Steyn
"A few weeks later, he's called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he's sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It ['The Joke'] was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean's magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal for the crime of "flagrant Islamophobia." In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of "expert witnesses," the "tone" of my jokes. Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the West so effortlessly?"--Mark Steyn
Conservative actor James Woods has one of the funniest and most interesting Twitter feeds on the web--at least, that's what yer mom says. heh. He has over 1.7 million followers and millions more who read his posts regularly.
And that's precisely why Twitter is censoring him.
Woods posted this clever joke recently:
Twitter responded with this: :
James Woods is refusing to censor himself out of principle.
Twitter is trying to lump James in with well-known criminal election-tamperers such as John Brennan, James Comey and Vladimir Putin.
They really seem to be afraid that Democrat Man-Boy will see this joke and stay home on election day. Wow.
James Woods: Letter From a Twitterham Jail
"First let me say how much I cherish each of you to whom this email is addressed. It saddens me that more people can’t be like us – politically diverse, yet friends and defenders of each other’s beliefs and opinions. That to me is what America is fundamentally about. It is also about a standard of ethics and human values that we all embrace and promote in our daily affairs. I love you all and I admire you for that and for who you are as people and artists and citizens of the world. I mean this with all sincerity. Today I am not in the mood for jokes.
The facts are that I was banned from Twitter yesterday because of an anonymous complaint referencing a tweet I posted in July (yes, the Stasi mentality lives on in the Twittersphere, it seems). Henceforth my 1.7 million followers will no longer hear my views. The purge of conservatives continues unabated on social media (and yes, it was because I posted a sarcastic remark about Democrats).
The offending tweet was included in the email from Twitter Support. It is attached below for your reference.
The good news, I guess, is that liberals (Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, is an unabashed ultra liberal) are now closer to their nirvana of a world without criticism or opposition.
The bad news is they will inevitably be next.
The reason I’m sending this to you is that, liberal or conservative, I know every single one of you agrees that this muzzle on free speech is a cancer that, if allowed to metastasize, will destroy this nation and everything it stands for.
They really seem to be afraid that Democrat Man-Boy will see this joke and stay home on election day. Wow.
James Woods: Letter From a Twitterham Jail
"First let me say how much I cherish each of you to whom this email is addressed. It saddens me that more people can’t be like us – politically diverse, yet friends and defenders of each other’s beliefs and opinions. That to me is what America is fundamentally about. It is also about a standard of ethics and human values that we all embrace and promote in our daily affairs. I love you all and I admire you for that and for who you are as people and artists and citizens of the world. I mean this with all sincerity. Today I am not in the mood for jokes.
The facts are that I was banned from Twitter yesterday because of an anonymous complaint referencing a tweet I posted in July (yes, the Stasi mentality lives on in the Twittersphere, it seems). Henceforth my 1.7 million followers will no longer hear my views. The purge of conservatives continues unabated on social media (and yes, it was because I posted a sarcastic remark about Democrats).
The offending tweet was included in the email from Twitter Support. It is attached below for your reference.
The good news, I guess, is that liberals (Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, is an unabashed ultra liberal) are now closer to their nirvana of a world without criticism or opposition.
The bad news is they will inevitably be next.
The reason I’m sending this to you is that, liberal or conservative, I know every single one of you agrees that this muzzle on free speech is a cancer that, if allowed to metastasize, will destroy this nation and everything it stands for.
Please feel free to share this email.".......
Mark Steyn again, a man also censored by Big Duct Tape:
"A couple of weeks back, I was guest-hosting "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and introduced an interview Tucker had conducted with Dennis Prager, a man for whom I have nothing but the greatest respect: He is blessed with magnificent moral clarity, and an unerring grasp of what's really at stake in the flotsam and jetsam of the daily news churn. Like many of us, Dennis is concerned at the leftward tilt of Big Tech: Facebook and Google/YouTube are bigger and more powerful than many sovereign nations, and in the last decade their malign duopoly has shrunk the Internet from a vast jostling cacophony into a blander, tightly formatted landscape run by a cartel of devious algorithms.
"A couple of weeks back, I was guest-hosting "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and introduced an interview Tucker had conducted with Dennis Prager, a man for whom I have nothing but the greatest respect: He is blessed with magnificent moral clarity, and an unerring grasp of what's really at stake in the flotsam and jetsam of the daily news churn. Like many of us, Dennis is concerned at the leftward tilt of Big Tech: Facebook and Google/YouTube are bigger and more powerful than many sovereign nations, and in the last decade their malign duopoly has shrunk the Internet from a vast jostling cacophony into a blander, tightly formatted landscape run by a cartel of devious algorithms.
You don't even have to be that "right-wing". Mandy O'Brien ran a popular "body language channel on YouTube, but made the mistake of analyzing St David of Hogg's body language - and now YouTube has disappeared her channel, and the only body language you can spot over there is rigor mortis.
What to do about it? Some (including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg) favor government regulation - which would turn them into Ma Bell and give them a hammerlock on the 21st century as Bell had for almost the entirety of the 20th. Others prefer an anti-trust break-up: If Standard Oil was too big in 1911, both Facebook (as a news outlet) and Google/YouTube (as a content promoter) are far bigger today - and, unlike Esso, there are no Shells, Texacos, BPs or Totals on the horizon.
However, I'm slightly less clear on the logic of suing YouTube in order to get them to give your content more prominence than they wish to. That's like me suing Barnes & Noble because I'm on the bottom shelf in the back room rather than in the front window. So, at the end of the Tucker/Dennis segment, I remarked en passant:
Hmm. I hope Dennis has a good lawyer - 'cause that's actually quite a subtle needle his legal team will need to thread there...
It is and they didn't. Last week Judge Lucy Koh dismissed the Prager suit in an order that was noticeably unimpressed by his legal team's theory of the case. As Nasim Aghdam realized, YouTube is operating a class system: You check the "monetization" box, but then somebody complains about you and you're "de-monetized", which kinda leaves a taint of festering resentment, like all that blue-check bollocks at Twitter. Why, it's almost like being made to sit at the back of the cyber-bus or use a separate de-monetized drinking fountain...
Don't like it? Well, you can go to a rock-ribbed conservative like, say, Senator Mike Lee of Utah. But Google/YouTube recently moved into his state and - surprise! - he now seems disinclined to rock that particular boat. Tucker Carlson interviewed him, and some edgy Internet types lifted the interview and posted it to YouTube, billing Senator Lee as "Google's Number One bootlicker"- and then complained that Google/YouTube had "shadow banned" them so they'd only just realized that Google/YouTube were preventing them cleaning up with Google/YouTube ad revenue by posting somebody else's content on Google/YouTube in order to trash Google/YouTube. That right there is the Internet in a nutshell.
Presumably someone someday will lay a motion before an American judge arguing the case rather better than the slapdash Prager brief did. But YouTube will now be able to respond that they don't just discriminate against conservatives, they discriminate against all sorts of people, including Iranian vegan immigrants - and they have the bullet-holes to prove it.
The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I've been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions: "Hate speech" doesn't lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called "hate speech" do - because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech - or even being perceived to be restricting speech - incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you'll notice in YouTube comments, I'm often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there'll be more of that: The less you're permitted to say, the more violence there will be.
Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation - and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they're increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That's their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.".......
UPDATE: Twitter relented--until recently. Now they've censored Woods again for quoting Emerson. And on and on and on it goes, Candace.
Democrats will not change the law since they like the censorship of their opponents. They approve of quashing dissent. They want to manipulate election coverage like they accuse Putin of doing. While Big Tech is helping dictatorships abroad.
So the Tech Monopolies must be stopped by Anti-Trust prosecutions, Civil Rights prosecutions, public shaming, boycotts and the like, including fraud charges. It is financial fraud to induce users to join without telling them you are going to censor them and it is fraud to sell ads without disclosing the same. Not to mention the workaday privacy violations.
A century ago, Standard Oil controlled energy supplies. But the reach of Standard Oil pales in comparison to Information Age Monopolies. Not even John D. Rockefeller had files on every American. Nor did he seek to control what they could say about him or about the issues of the day. He was a businessman--he wasn't arrogant enough to think he was a god.
TR sez: "#BustTheBigTechTrusts!"
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| "Bullies!" |
* Breitbart: WordPress.com Blacklists Blogs Critical of Islam
* PJM: "On Wednesday, Facebook blocked Trump 2020 advisory board member Jenna Ellis Rives over a pro-life post. She appealed the decision. On Sunday, Facebook finally got back to her, and doubled down, claiming the post violated its "community standards" on "hate speech."
Rives had posted a photo of a tweet from blogger Matt Walsh, pointing out how transgender activism undermines key pro-choice arguments. "Gender is a social construct but I am woman hear me roar but anyone can be a woman but no uterus no opinion but transwomen are women but I demand women's rights but men are women but men are scum but drag queens are beautiful but appropriation is evil," Walsh tweeted.
Facebook blocked Rives's post, calling it "hate speech."...….
Congratulations, Jack Dorsey; not even Fidel Castro could censor Babalu, but you have done it! You must be so proud.
Meanwhile, of course, the Twitter accounts used by the Castro Military Dictatorship remain unmolested.
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| "Viva Dorsey!" |
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