{"id":61657,"date":"2022-01-27T13:02:23","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T18:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61657"},"modified":"2022-01-27T13:02:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-27T18:02:23","slug":"the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61657","title":{"rendered":"The Folly of Pandemic Censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Folly of Pandemic Censorship<\/a><\/h3>\n

As the latest anti-Substack campaign shows, more and more people are forgetting why free speech works<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to\u00a0The Guardian\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>. Both outlets came out with their scare pieces this morning. From\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

A group of vaccine-skeptic writers are generating revenues of at least $2.5m (\u00a31.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of thousands of followers on the online publishing platform\u00a0Substack<\/a>, according to new research\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said companies like Substack were under \u201cno obligation\u201d to amplify vaccine skepticism and make money from it. \u201cThey could just say no\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0Post,\u00a0<\/em>citing \u201csome misinformation experts say\u201d \u2014 the pandemic version of \u201cpeople familiar with the matter\u201d \u2014\u00a0added<\/a>:<\/p>\n

These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints \u2014 potentially making the services\u00a0<\/strong>less responsible for spreading harmful views, some misinformation experts say.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If these stories sound familiar, it\u2019s because this same Center for Countering Digital Hate two years ago tried to pull the same stunt with\u00a0The Federalist<\/em>, using NBC to ask Google to crack down on them. Humorously, and typically \u2014 this happens a lot with these stories \u2014 that effort ended in fiasco. The piece NBC ended up writing boasting of the success of its \u201cVerification Unit\u201d in getting the site demonetized, entitled, \u201cGoogle bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles<\/a>,\u201d turned out to itself be misinformation.\u00a0The Federalist\u00a0<\/em>was never banned, only warned, and the issue was its comments section, not its articles. Google had to issue a statement:<\/p>\n

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\"TwitterGoogle Communications <\/span>@Google_Comms<\/span><\/div>\n

The Federalist was never demonetized.<\/a><\/p>\n

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June 16th 2020<\/p>\n

623<\/span> Retweets<\/span>2,513<\/span> Likes<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Folly of Pandemic Censorship As the latest anti-Substack campaign shows, more and more people are forgetting why free speech works Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to\u00a0The Guardian\u00a0and\u00a0The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9336,120,2703,3733,1426,607,655],"class_list":["post-61657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-big-tech","tag-censorship","tag-free-speech","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-misinformation","tag-pandemic","tag-propaganda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61658,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61657\/revisions\/61658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}