Censorship

“[T]his is the clarion call of every nation that has engaged in censorship.

They always say that they’re protecting citizens from harmful thoughts, harmful ideas, harmful viewpoints, that this is all for the good, because you shouldn’t hear these views. That’s always been the case.

But what’s really distressing is when you read the Twitter Files and you read the evidence that we have seen come out recently, the government was even censoring what they call malinformation. This is stuff that is true that the government says is being used for a misleading purpose.

Try that hat on for a second. They’re saying that if you say something true, but the government believes it’s misleading in the way you said it, they also were targeting you for censorship.”

Scottsdale real estate magnate Tom Lewis has donated millions of dollars to Arizona State University over the past 20 years.

But Lewis withdrew his support in recent weeks over 'left-wing hostility and activism' as well as a visceral reaction to the February event featuring Kirk, Prager and author Robert Kiyosaki.

'After seeing this level of left-wing hostility and activism, I no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift, and made the decision to terminate our agreement, effective June 30, 2023,' Lewis wrote in a news release.

'I regret that this decision was necessary, and hope that Barrett and ASU will take strong action to ensure that free speech will always be protected and that all voices can be heard.'

According to a current senior producer at Fox News there are company-wide layoffs happening right now that no one is reporting on. “Morale miserable across teams on both news and opinion,” the producer says.

Producers are also feeling “insulted” about getting 0 or 1% increases the same week Abby Grossberg got $12m “for helping force out Tucker.”

The source also says shows are getting “frantic, bipolar guidance almost daily on blacklisted and unblacklisted guests, including sitting members of the Senate.”

The judiciary had so little regard for our free speech - just look at some of the ridiculous gag orders they have placed on people not favored by the regime.

But don't you dare censor their speech, even for a moment

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/195583

Key Takeaways

• Former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were directly involved in the drafting, publication, and public promotion of Proximal Origin — a paper written to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis.
• There was a coordinated effort between public health officials in the United States government and expert scientists to craft a narrative that would advance the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 in order to protect the Chinese government from any potential criticism and repercussions.
• The conclusions drawn by the co-authors of “Proximal Origin” rest on insufficient evidence, draw inaccurate assumptions, and have never been proven or verified by the wider scientific community.
• Dr. Kristian Andersen confirmed the U.S. funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell below recommended bio-safety markers.
• Scientific integrity was abandoned by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and the co-authors of Proximal Origin in favor of political expediency. Suppressing a legitimate scientific theory to advance the preferred narrative of senior government officials is egregious and must be fully investigated.
• There is still more work to be done to hold public health officials accountable for their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Select Subcommittee emphasizes its outstanding request for transcribed interviews and documents from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/194470

A renowned scientist who led the condemnation of the Covid lab leak theory privately believed it was 'highly likely', leaked messages show.

Dr Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist, co-authored a now-notorious research paper published in March 2020 that denounced the origin scenario as a conspiracy theory and xenophobic.

Yet Slack messages obtained by DailyMail.com show how just weeks before the publication of that paper, Dr Andersen told colleagues the idea of a lab leak was 'not some fringe theory' and was, in fact, 'highly likely' the genesis of the pandemic.

Separate, publicly-available communications between the virologist and his co-authors show how the group backed the natural origin theory - the idea the virus jumped from an animal to a person in the wild - for 'political' reasons and feared pinning the blame on the Chinese lab would cause a ‘s***show’ and threaten future funding of virus manipulation research.

Critics say the messages show how the scientific community conspired to censor debate about the origins of the pandemic, but the scientists involved claim they changed their minds between sending the messages and writing the paper.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/195086

Amethyst’s interface is like Twitter and there are lots of similarities between the two apps.

We are here on Exploding Heads

Court documents revealing the FTC’s attempts to pressure a this top-tier accounting firm, Ernst & Young, into penalizing Elon Musk.

The situation escalated to the point where the employees at the accounting firm feared they would face repercussions if they failed to act against Musk.

At times, it’s hard to identify this new totalitarian country as the “America” we once knew.

A great summary of this important case.

Rebellion, Not Retreat

The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions: Every totalitarian regime first monopolizes what counts as rationality and determines what questions you are allowed to ask.

At the risk of offending my audience, I will suggest: If you don’t see that precisely this is happening on an unprecedented scale globally, you have not been paying close attention. https://www.theepochtimes.com/rebellion-not-retreat_5376123.html

The box office success of Sound of Freedom is particularly embarrassing for Disney, whose ridiculously expensive Indiana Jones movie is performing poorly and unlikely to earn a profit, because Disney reportedly sat on the rights to distribute Sound of Freedom for five years, only to relinquish the rights and see it become a smash hit. Unhappy shareholders may well question the wisdom of retaining current management if SoF becomes a mega-hit based on word of mouth.

Prior court cases have established that unconstitutional state action includes not just (1) the state’s exercise of “coercive power,” but also (2) when the state “provide[s] such significant encouragement, either overt or covert” to private conduct; (3) when “private actors” operate as “a willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents”; and (4) when the “formally ‘private'” action “may become so entwined with governmental policies or so impregnated with a governmental character as to become subject to the constitutional limitations placed upon state action.” Furthermore, case precedent has established that specific features of the government’s action may combine to create a compelling case for state action, especially where (5) a federal statute has immunized private conduct.

As we argued in extensive detail in our motion for the preliminary injunction, all these factors are present in the government’s actions: (1) coercion, (2) significant encouragement, (3) joint participation, (4) entwinement, and (5) legal immunity [Section 230 protections] combined with other factors [implicit and explicit threats of removing broad immunity].

Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in Social Media Censorship Case

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration ...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-delivers-major-blow-to-biden-admin-in-social-media-censorship-case_5373891.html

The censorship measures, supposedly intended to prevent so-called ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, are so onerous that even Mark Zuckerberg’s new Twitter rival, Threads, has refrained from launching in Europe out of concern about complying with the law.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/190551

Coach Totura retaliated by saying the girl was engaging in “hate speech” and throwing her off the swim team. Totura allegedly told the girl she was “not allowed to participate with the swim team and was asked to leave the pool area,”

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/random/t/172404

If you enter a domain, you will find which instances block this domain.

If you enter a reason, you will find all instances that blocked for this reason and who they blocked.

If you reverse search, you will find all instances the domain you entered blocks.

Facebook has long tried to get the public to embrace its role as some kind of speech overlord. Years ago, Facebook rolled out an Orwellian commercial campaign to get the public to embrace censorship. The commercials showed young people heralding how they grew up on the internet and how the world was changing, creating a need for censorship under the guise of “content moderation.” Facebook, they promised, was offering the “blending of the real world and the internet world.”

Facebook is not alone in trying to get people to accept censorship. Recently, after the court ruling, various figures assured the public that they are better off letting corporate and government censors protect them from harmful thoughts. On CNN, Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly went so far as to state that it simply “makes sense” for tech companies to go along with government censorship demands.

If this decision is not reversed, things are likely to get far worse (if possible) for conservative, libertarian and contrarian faculty members. Rather than investigate, sanction, or fire faculty for their viewpoints, schools will now simply declare them uncollegial in raising such viewpoints. School or board officials like John Corkins will no longer have to say that dissenting faculty should be “taken to the slaughterhouse” for their anti-diversity views. They can be “culled” on collegiality grounds.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/189015

The Defenders of Censorship Now Admit Everything

Commentary They no longer deny censoring. They've shifted tactics. Now, they defend censorship as a policy in the ... https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-defenders-of-censorship-now-admit-everything_5378096.html

“There are 40,000 people at Google and Meta pulling stuff down. They’ve pulled over a billion things down. I don’t really trust Big Tech to be in charge of this, and I don’t, frankly, trust government in cahoots with Big Tech in private to be in charge of this.”

Journalists should cheer this decision to restrict government censorship. Instead, the mainstream media are defending the government's collusion with social media companies to censor protected speech. That’s because they are partners in the censorship, routinely supporting government narratives and censoring via “fact checks.” With less censorship, these outlets are more vulnerable to being discredited in the public eye.

He said that the NSW government had enacted an “authoritarian Covid police state.”

He said that the NSW government had given in to “vaccine extremism,” telling the public, ‘we won’t let you out until you take multiple injections of not only a rushed vaccine but of an entirely new class of vaccine’.

He said that, “NSW Health published weekly data showing, the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.”

He said that, “since the vaccine rollout there has been a 15-20 per cent increase in excess deaths in nations like Australia that had mass mRNA injections,” and questioned whether this might have anything to do with the vaccines, or from locking people up for so long.

He said that take-up of the fifth shot is low – “too many know of others with bad reactions.”

He said that ivermectin, an anti-viral drug that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was disingenuously smeared as a horse dewormer. He noted the financial incentives for suppressing ivermectin as a potential treatment for Covid, despite researchers around the world testifying to its efficacy.

He said that there have been over 137,000 adverse events reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration following Covid vaccination, and that many drugs have been pulled from the market for far less than this.

Agree or disagree as you please, but all these claims are evidence-based. As a friend of mine said when disagreeing with my insistence, in late 2021, that the vaccines would not be effective in preventing/reducing transmission, “We believe different scientists.”

Next month, a little-known development will occur that could end up having huge repercussions for the nature of public discourse on the Internet all over the planet. August 25, 2023 is the date by which big social media platforms will have to begin fully complying with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, or DSA. The DSA, among many other things, obliges all “Very Large Online Platforms”, or VLOPs, to speedily remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. If not, they risk fines of up to 6% of their annual global revenue.