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Learning To Fear Free Speech: How Politicians Are Moving To Protect Us From Our Unhealthy Reading Choices

October 11, 2021

Learning To Fear Free Speech: How Politicians Are Moving To Protect Us From Our Unhealthy Reading Choices

Below is my column in the Hill on the increasing calls for censorship and speech regulation on the Internet. The most recent push on Capitol Hill surrounds the testimony of former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen who alleges that Facebook has been knowingly harming children through promotion and access to certain sites. For some, the testimony follows a type of Trojan Horse pattern where anti-free speech measures are packaged as public safety measures. Before embracing the proposals of these senators, the public needs to think long and hard over what is being lost in these “reforms.”

Here is the column:

“Caution: Free Speech May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” Such a rewording of the original 1965 warning on tobacco products could soon appear on social media platforms, if a Senate hearing this week is any indicator. Listening to former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, senators decried how Facebook is literally killing people by not censoring content, and Haugen proposed a regulatory board to protect the public.

But before we embrace a new “ministry of information” model to protect us from dangerous viewpoints, we may want to consider what we would lose in this Faustian free-speech bargain.

Warnings over the “addiction” and “unhealthy” content of the internet have been building into a movement for years. In July, President Biden slammed Big Tech companies for “killing people” by failing to engage in even greater censorship of free speech on issues related to the pandemic. On Tuesday, many senators were enthralled by Haugen’s testimony because they, too, have long called for greater regulation or censorship. It all began reasonably enough over concerns about violent speech, and then expanded to exploitative speech…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

October 7, 2021

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

“Whistleblower” Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled ‘Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower’ on Capitol Hill October 5, 2021 in Washington, (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week’s anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a “whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen’s star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook’s dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

October 5, 2021

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

“Whistleblower” Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Hinge Moment of History

September 20, 2021

A Hinge Moment of History

I have lived in countries that have real domestic terrorism movements…. No country blessed enough not to have a domestic terrorism movement should be inventing one.
We are living in a blizzard of lies.
[W]e are more dependent on a handful of woke billionaires to tell us what reality is. They are far more open than ever that they get to determine what are the agreed facts. Google made an explicit announcement about this recently. They said that sometimes they would put warnings on things that are factually accurate because, even though they are true, they do not think it is in society’s interest for people to be seeing it.
[N]ow you will be banned or deleted or blocked or silenced simply for disagreeing with the official version of events. For example, the Great Barrington declaration, which was written by three of the most prominent epidemiologists in the world from Harvard, Oxford, and I think it was Stanford. That was basically deleted from YouTube, banned from Facebook, simply because it contradicted the WHO, CDC official version of events.
It is just groupthink enforced by a cabal of woke billionaires, who have more power than anyone else on the planet.
The other thing that emerged during this year very quickly is that we are at a hinge moment of history. We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.
American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws

September 7, 2021

Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws

A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security.

The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes.

The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech and press freedom. Digital Rights Watch calls it a “warrantless surveillance regime” and notes the government ignored the recommendations of a bipartisan parliamentary committee to limit the powers granted by the new law.

What’s more, legal hacking by law enforcement may make it easier for criminal hackers to illegally access computer systems via the same vulnerabilities used by the government.

What’s in the law?

The bill introduces three new powers for law-enforcement agencies:

“data disruption warrants” allow authorities to “disrupt data” by copying, deleting or modifying data as they see fit
“network activity warrants” permit the collection of intelligence from devices or networks that are used, or likely to be used, by subject of the warrant
“account takeover warrants” let agencies take control of an online account (such as a social media account) to gather information for an investigation.

There is also an “emergency authorisation” procedure that allows these activities without a warrant under certain circumstances.

How is this different to previous laws?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Divide

August 21, 2021

The Great Divide

The entire COVID agenda has been a pre-staged event; the real agenda has been climate change. Al Gore, who is on the board of the World Economic Forum, ushered in Green Peace’s Jennifer Morgan, who escorted Greta to the Davos meeting to appear in Schwab’s film the Forum, which was intended to push the climate change agenda.

After exploiting Greta, who simply read from prewritten speeches that Morgan probably wrote, their agenda was not catching fire. People were not willing to alter their lives for a problem that was decades from now. They needed something more terrorizing, and that was COVID. They had to threaten people’s lives immediately, not decades in the future.

When we look at Google the news, we do not all get the same results. Big Tech is deliberately not just censoring the news, but they are strategically showing people ONLY what they should read and blocking stories that may be to the contrary. As Julius Caesar once said: people believe what they want to believe. This is dividing the world and causing one side to look at the other side as flaming conspiracy theorists because they are fed different stories that hide the opposition. The AI models being used are feeding people only news that the powers above want them to see. Those who see through the truth are then faced with immediate censorship and banning from mainstream platforms – the cancel culture.

Big Tech is dividing the United States and the entire world. This will only lead to civil wars. Ironically, we will see the US split North v South over the issue of slavery again, but this time the slave owners will be those in government taking orders from the WEF consortium on how to manage the Great Unwashed to further their agenda of the Great Reset.

Between Two Fires

August 9, 2021

Between Two Fires

Caspar David Friedrich Woman before the Rising Sun 1818

No, I wasn’t going to talk about the wildfires raging outside my hometown of Athens, Greece, though they are bad enough. The skies are anything but blue, and the sun is deep red. Thousands have been evacuated, and hundreds lost their homes. Just so far. As I said earlier, the Monasteraki kitchen, which the Automatic Earth actively supports, is feeding about 2,500 people daily, including firemen, but I have little additional info. They work almost 24 hours a day in the heat and the smoke to do it, and we’ll talk about organizational and financial details later.

But yeah, it’s a cruel reality that the government doesn’t take care of its own firefighters. Until earlier today, the evacuees from the island of Evia apparently were made to buy a ferry ticket as their homes were burning down. You can’t make it up. A good time to count one’s blessings. The biggest support efforts so far, in manpower and equipment, come from Romania and Poland. Not western Europe. Oh, and: “For the $3 billion #Greece will pay for 18 French jet fighters, 12 of which are used, #Athens could have bought 100+ state-of-the-art fire fighting aircraft”. Too late now. The politicians call “force majeure”.

Evia

The fires I am thinking of are of a more “symbolic” art: the propaganda and censorship that on the one hand keep us from asking the questions that need to be asked, and on the other hand from hearing from those who can help us formulate those questions. It has gone to such an extreme now that most people are not even aware that there are such questions, including many politicians and health “experts”. It is indeed the biggest global propaganda operation ever, and it’s costing, and destroying, scores of lives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Shadow State: Twitter Suspends Commentator for Criticizing Vaccine Policies

July 30, 2021

The Shadow State: Twitter Suspends Commentator for Criticizing Vaccine Policies

I recently discussed how the Biden Administration was actively encouraging corporations to limit speech and impose vaccine mandates as a type of shadow state. Rather than take such actions directly ( and face both legal and political challenges), the Administration is relying on its close alliance with Big Tech and other companies to carry out such tasks. That surrogate relationship is particularly clear in the expanding censorship program carried out by Twitter, Facebook and other companies. Twitter’s action against political commentator Dave Rubin is an example of how these companies are now dispensing with any pretense in actively barring criticism of government policies and viewpoints.

Rubin was locked out under the common “misinformation” claim by Twitter. However, his tweet was an opinion based on demonstrably true facts. One can certainly disagree with the conclusion but this is an example of core political speech being curtailed by a company with a long history of biased censorship, including the barring of discussions involving Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election. With a new election looming, these companies appear to be ramping up their censorship efforts.

In his tweet, Rubin stated:

“They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago. People are getting and transmitting Covid despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.”

Even President Biden admitted yesterday that he was wrong weeks ago when he assured people that if they took the vaccine, they would not be at risk for the variants and could dispense with their masks. There are breakthrough cases that have taken many officials by surprise. It is also true that there is now talk of likely booster shots.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

White House Colluding with BigTech for Censorship

July 21, 2021

White House Colluding with BigTech for Censorship

The White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s recent admission that the administration is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” was legally a major development. She has admitted that Facebook is working with the White House to censor Americans so it is acting under color of law. This is a very critical point that legally amounts to Facebook being directed to censor what the White House is calling “misinformation” about COVID-19 that is effectively anything that contradicts of even questions the official narrative.

As I have stated before, the escape clause for BigTech is that the First Amendment only applies to government, not them. However, cooperating behind the curtain and for the White House to be telling Facebook to flag certain people or posts is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and a serious breach of what a free society is all ab out.

Biden himself is engaging in misinformation. Generally, about 50% of the people with this new Delta Variant have already been vaccinated. To claim that the only pandemic is among the unvaccinated and “they are killing people” but the lockdowns did not kill anyone. We really have to wonder if he is aware of what is really going on.

Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy

July 18, 2021

Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy

With many focusing on tomorrow’s Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum’s real ambitions in cybersecurity – to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

Amid a series of warnings and simulations in the past year regarding a massive cyber attack that could soon bring down the global financial system, the “information sharing group” of the largest banks and private financial organizations in the United States warned earlier this year that banks “will encounter growing danger” from “converging” nation-state and criminal hackers over the course of 2021 and in the years that follow.

The organization, called the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), made the claim in its 2021 “Navigating Cyber” report, which assesses the events of 2020 and provides a forecast for the current year. That forecast, which casts a devastating cyber attack on the financial system through third parties as practically inevitable, also makes the case for a “global fincyber [financial-cyber] utility” as the main solution to the catastrophic scenarios it predicts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an organization close to top FS-ISAC members has recently been involved in laying the groundwork for that very “global fincyber utility” — the World Economic Forum, which recently produced the model for such a utility through its Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC) project….

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Biden Administration Completely Kills The “It’s A Private Company So It’s Not Censorship” Argument

July 17, 2021

Biden Administration Completely Kills The “It’s A Private Company So It’s Not Censorship” Argument

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

In what’s surely the biggest “Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that” moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading “disinformation” about the Covid-19 response.

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the press on Thursday. “Within the Surgeon General’s Office, we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts with people, who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content. So, we’re helping get trusted content out there.”

Psaki told the White House press corps that the administration has a list of accounts who produce most of the anti-vaccine information on Facebook, which civil libertarians are decrying as an obviously authoritarian government overreach.

“The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as ‘problematic’ so that Facebook can remove them,” Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter in response to the news. “This is the union of corporate and state power — one of the classic hallmarks of fascism — that the people who spent five years babbling about fascism support.”

“If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” Greenwald said. “No other information is needed about you to know that. There is no circumstance — none — in which it’s acceptable for the White House or any other agency of the government to be providing lists to Facebook of ‘problematic’ content it wants removed, yet that’s exactly what Psaki says they’re doing…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?

June 3, 2021

Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?

Back in April I published an article titled ‘Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails’. In it I noted an odd trend which many of us in the liberty media have become aware of over the years – Almost every major man-made catastrophe in the US and in many other parts of the world in the past couple decades has been preceded by a government or globalist “exercise”. These exercises and war games tend to mimic the exact disaster that would eventually strike the public only days or weeks later. Sometimes the mock disaster exercises and the real events happen at the same time.

The covid pandemic was no exception. It’s quite miraculous…

I have specifically outlined the bizarre “coincidence” of the World Economic Forum’s Event 201 exercise, a war game co-funded by Bill Gates and Johns Hopkins and launched in October of 2019. Event 201 simulated a global novel zoonotic coronavirus pandemic (supposedly spread from bats to people) that “required” a global lockdown response. Only two months later the real thing actually happened. Almost every aspect of the Covid event has played out exactly as was practiced during the WEF war game.

One very disturbing element of the covid response has been the coordinated suppression campaign by Big Tech platforms from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter. This campaign has sought to undermine or destroy any facts, data and opinions which run contrary to the government narrative on covid, even if the official narrative on covid ends up being completely wrong. The strategy was described in detail during Event 201 and it was executed with extreme efficiency among supposedly disconnected companies and governments around the world…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why BigTech are State Actors & Violate our Civil Rights

May 28, 2021

Why BigTech are State Actors & Violate our Civil Rights

As many know, I lived in London years ago. At the upper end of Hyde Park by Marble Arch, there is Speakers’ Corner. That is where anyone could stand up and talk about anything that they wanted. You were free to listen or just walk away. There would often be a crowd, and that was not an indication that they agreed. It simply meant that the topic was curious, worth listening to or just entertaining crazy talk.

Speakers’ Corner even shows up on Google Maps, showing that this is indeed a landmark. What is important about this is that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, especially those who claim to be public forums, also claim they have the right to censor what you say or even think. Section 230 only gave them immunity from suit because someone posted something another did not like. In that context, it was a reasonable grant of immunity. It would be like suing the city of London because someone at Speakers’ Corner said something that offended you.

You cannot be a public forum by deleting people and canceling anyone you do not like. Speakers’ Corner in London is what these forums were supposed to be. If someone is a Nazi and hates Jews, so be it. They have a right to say that just as the rest of us have the right to shake our heads and walk away as in Hyde Park. It used to be an easy world. If someone was talking to themselves walking down the street, we just looked at them as being strange. We didn’t run to the police screaming we were offended by what the crazy person said…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Danger of BigTech Censorship

April 28, 2021

The Real Danger of BigTech Censorship

When the oligarchs assassinated Caesar and Cicero put out a never-ending onslaught against Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), Brutus (85-32 BC) issued a coin promoting that he killed Caesar on the Ides of March for the people. This was an early propaganda coin. However, in fact, the people supported Caesar against the oligarchy.

The Senate had to flee Rome because the people did not support them. Their champion was Caesar – not Cicero and Brutus. As for Brutus, Suetonius (Divus Augustus, 13) says that his head was sent to Rome to be thrown at the feet of Caesar’s statue.

Perhaps the greatest of all fake news reporters was none other than Cicero (104-43 BC). He was an Optimat (Oligarch) and thus was against Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) who was a member of the Populares (for the People) rather than the Oligarchs. The leader of the Optimates was none other than Cato. It was Plutarch who reported that when a friend of Cicero remarked that the constellation of Lybra was due to rise the next day, Cicero snapped – “Yes, by edict.”

This is merely an example that the Optimates were constantly complaining about every reform Caesar would make including the calendar which they would bribe the priest to delay elections. Because of the fake news of Cicero, even Shakespeare bought into it and painted Julius Caesar as a ruthless dictator. However, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the cities all cheered and opened their gates. The Optimates had no support of the people for they were exploiting the Republic since they were the Oligarchs. It was Cato who instigated the Civil War.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Admits To Censoring Criticism of The Indian Government

April 27, 2021

Twitter Admits To Censoring Criticism of The Indian Government

On Saturday, Twitter admitted that it is actively working with the Indian government to censor criticism of its handling of the pandemic as the number of cases and deaths continues to skyrocket. There are widespread reports that the Indian government has misrepresented the number of deaths and the true rate of cases could be as much as 30 times higher than reported. The country has a shortage of beds, oxygen, and other essentials due to a failure to adequately prepare for a new surge. Not surprisingly, the Indian government has moved to crackdown on criticism. This included a call to Twitter to censor such information and Twitter has, of course, complied. With the support of many Democratic leaders in the United States, Twitter now regularly censors viewpoints in the United States and India had no trouble in enlisting it to crackdown on those raising the alarm over false government reporting.

Buried in an Associated Press story on the raging pandemic and failures of the Indian government are these two lines:

“On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. The targeted posts include tweets from opposition ministers critical of Modi, journalists and ordinary Indians.”

The article quotes Twitter as saying that it had powers to “withhold access to the content in India only” if the company determined the content to be “illegal in a particular jurisdiction.” Thus, criticism of the government in this context is illegal so Twitter has agreed to become an arm of the government in censoring information.

Keep in mind that this information could protect lives. It is not “fake news” but efforts by journalists and others to disclose failures by the government that could cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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