An Op-Ed published by two M.D.s in the Journal of the American Medical Association essentially calls for on- and off-line censorship of what the authors decry as health or medical misinformation. The latter apparently mean quashing any discussion of approaches outside the conventional Big Pharma paradigm or surgical interventions.
Tag: censorship (Page 2 of 2)
The owner of the irreverent, muckraking Turtleboy Sports blog knows a thing or two, to borrow language from that TV commercial for an insurance company, about online censorship. The entertaining and provocative Massachusetts-based investigative journalism portal — plus its slightly toned down, less vulgar TB Daily News version — focuses mainly on municipal corruption, felonious activity, and welfare scammers and assorted “hoodrats,” rather than sports. Given that the big social media networks have repeatedly de-platformed Turtleboy Sports and associated sites, owner “Uncle Turtleboy” claims that he “invented” tech censorship.
You don’t have to be a fan of controversial, fringe Infowars at all, for example, to be concerned about the implications for free speech. The latest bans, which also includes independent journalist Laura Loomer, appears to be a warm-up act by social media platforms for future censorship of mainstream conservatives, populists, and libertarians heading into the 2020 election.
Congressman Devin Nunes is suing Twitter for defamation in a filing that he says is the first of many. Nunes, a California Republican who headed the House Intelligence Committee (which made him a target of the far left or alt left), is seeking money damages totaling $250 million (a trendy number) for defamation from the social media network, among other forms of requested relief. He also maintains that Twitter shadow-banned him and others. Although the president has spoken about and tweeted about social network bias, neither the Trump administration or possibly compromised GOP lawmakers collectively have taken any substantive steps to address against social media censorship as yet. Nunes has taken the matter into his own hands.
Despite insistence by its CEO Jack Dorsey that it is an impartial platform, a new study suggests that Twitter disproportionately suspends political conservatives or Trump supporters (which is not always the same thing). Dr. Richard Hanania, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, published his findings this week in Quillette.
Conventional western medicine tends to focus on treating symptoms, rather than the underlying condition, with pharmaceutical drugs. These meds often come with severe side effects, causing some patients to seek alternative healthcare. In a New York Times Op-Ed, a cardiologist appears to suggest that the Big Tech search engines should censor any “fake medical news” that raises questions about the efficacy of pharmaceutical drugs.
Conservative firebrand Laura Loomer has handcuffed herself to the front door of Twitter headquarters in New York City to protest online censorship and is live-streaming the encounter. Twitter recently put Loomer’s account on a permanent suspension.
Update: the NYPD has reportedly arrested Laura Loomer.
So Laura Loomer handcuffed herself to the Twitter headquarters.https://t.co/iWI2O2qyMz
— Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) November 29, 2018
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Although Loomer — who often uses the left’s confrontational tactics against them — is receiving criticism by dismissive liberals and conservatives, especially the blue-check Twitter cohort, the demonstration continues with a heavy police presence. It doesn’t appear that she is leaving anytime soon.
That said, in this era of politically motivated social media suspensions, outright bans, shadowbanning, de-platforming, de-monetization, inflated or squelched trends, and so on, is this form of street theater completely out of line?
I support Laura Loomer. https://t.co/FPiPM36Av3
— Jeff Giesea🌿 (@jeffgiesea) November 29, 2018
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In June 2017, Loomer, an independent journalist, rushed the stage at Shakespeare in the Park during a contemporary interpretation of Julius Caesar to protest the the assassination of a Trump lookalike in the play’s Caesar role.
Y'all liberals (I love you all) who read me don't get this Laura Loomer stuff.
Breaking the 4-minute mile was seen as impossible. Roger Bannister broke it, and since then 1,400 followed him.
"Conservatives" never engaged in left-wing style activism.
Today the game changed.
Last summer, Jesse Kelly predicted that the de-platforming of a fringe media personality like Alex Jones was merely a trial run for banning mainstream conservatives, libertarians, and populists from social media.
Exhibit A for the accuracy of this prediction is Jesse Kelly himself.
Similarly, perhaps the shenanigans in Broward County, Fla., Arizona, California, and elsewhere in the 2018 midterm elections constituted a trial run for the 2020 presidential contest.
A Marine Corps combat veteran and Houston-based talk show host, Kelly made these observations about free speech or lack thereof in The Federalist in August 2018.
“The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him…They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you.,.The same people who ceded control of public education, the federal bureaucracy, the media, movies, and music to the left have once again found another hill not worth dying on. ‘It’s only social media,’ they say. Yeah, fear not. Around 2.5 billion people use Facebook and Twitter. What’s the worst that can happen if we just let the left have them?…We need to stop whistling past the graveyard and realize the left is seeking total victory. They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.”
On Sunday, Twitter abruptly permanently suspended Jesse Kelly for unspecified rules violations without providing an explanation.
Shortly after his article hit the Internet, former congressional candidate Jesse Kelly discussed the censorship with FNC’s Tucker Carlson, likening it to modern-day book burning.
U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, a vocal Never Trumper in the GOP, backed Kelly even they disagree on politics.
“Jesse Kelly can’t stand me. And I think his tribal war scalping stuff is stupid and wrong. But that doesn’t matter much compared to the bigger picture here: The trend of de-platforming and shutting down speech is a bad precedent for our free speech society.”
Jesse Kelly can’t stand me. And I think his tribal war scalping stuff is stupid and wrong.
But that doesn’t matter much compared to the bigger picture here: The trend of de-platforming and shutting down speech is a bad precedent for our free speech society. https://t.co/V11v6uDZY3
About 100 bold Facebook employees have stepped forward to align themselves with a group calling for ideological rather than merely cosmetic diversity.
In an unusually fair story, The New York Times reported on this development.
“The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled ‘We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,’ it quickly took off inside the social network. ‘We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,’ Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. ‘We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.’ Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB’ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group’s page and who were not authorized to speak publicly. The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.”
The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social network. https://t.co/aHEZ09cRSh
Much has written about accusations that the progressive tech giants (a.k.a. Big Data or Big Social) are censoring politically conservative, populist, or libertarian websites and individuals (or those perceived as harboring leanings of that nature) through methods such as the algorithm changes, or shadow banning, throttling, de-platforming, and de-monetization, or artificially trending or not trending certain content.
Mainstream influencers on the right have from time to time also seen their accounts suspended for transgressions pursuant to standards that don’t seem to apply to their left-wing counterparts.
Parenthetically, Big Social lined up behind the now-repealed net neutrality but as far as content neutrality, not so much.
A study of 50 online publishers released in March by The Western Journal concluded that modifications to Facebook’s news feeds sent conservative publishers’ reader engagement into a nose dive far more than liberals. The Outline came up with similar findings after Facebook apparently adjusted the news feeds to de-emphasize content from news outlets.
A recent Pew Research Center poll indicates that a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum perceive that the big tech platforms are censoring political views with which they disagree.
While praising Facebook as a key to the Trump presidential election victory, digital guru and 2020 Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale explained the following to the Bloomberg news agency.
“Facebook is a liberal company…that has an inherent bias…that is based in a place that is probably extremely biased…their employees have biases, and those decisions probably go into every line of code they write and everything they do…I think the inherent bias in those companies is significant.”
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale says Facebook and Twitter have liberal biases https://t.co/ghSmZiVITF pic.twitter.com/903HTmQsJd
— Bloomberg (@business) July 17, 2018
In the interview with a Russia-obsessed Bloomberg reporter (is there another kind of journalist these days?), Parscale also implied that unlike the other platforms, he thinks that Facebook is trying to take steps to eliminate liberal bias and that he intends to hold all the major tech firms accountable for fairness.
Parscale has sat down with Facebook officials personally to discuss various issues including the application programming interface. Watch the interview clip below.
In recent Capitol Hill testimony, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Silicon Valley is an extremely very left-leaning place, but denied that his company is censoring conservatives.
Apart from Trump’s twitter feed, Parscale implied that Twitter is inconsequential as a persuasion vehicle.
This may be the result of Twitter being dominated by a far-left social justice thought-police cohort ready to pounce on any opinion that doesn’t fit within the progressive agenda.
Parscale also revealed that Google-owned YouTube will play a bigger role in the 2020 Trump reelection campaign than int 2016. As Parscale noted in the interview, YouTube has, however, also come under criticism for liberal bias in terms of of the way it indexes conservative-leaning videos.
Yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Aspen Security Forum that China (not Russia) is the most significant threat to the U.S. in terms of economic espionage as well as traditional espionage.
In a Capitol Hill hearing about online content filtering on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) asked three robotic, talking-points-memorizing Facebook, Google, and Twitter officials about nations other than Russia that might have meddled in U.S. elections. See clip below.
At that hearing, a Facebook official admitted “that Russian election interference was limited to ‘a few thousand’ of two billion posts analyzed, Breitbart News reported.
You may recall that Gohmert blew up the Peter Strzok hearing last week when he alluded to the witness’s extra-curricular activities.
“This is intolerable harassment of a witness!”
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