https://t.co/k770FhDgoE — Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 24, 2024 What Justice Jackson said to raise eyebrows was “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” Correct! One clear goal of the First Amendment is to hamstring the federal government from doing what it would like to do: control our speech. I would have expected a Supreme Court justice to have learned this in law school, not in on-the-job training. Justice Jackson went on to say, “The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country . . . by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she said. There’s always a euphemism handy for “information the government doesn’t want you to know,” e.g., “misinformation” “disinformation,” “harmful information,” etc. We can’t have freedom of speech! It’s too dangerous! As a thought experiment,… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Censorship
Seven Years
We’ve had seven years and counting of Hitler and Nazi references directed at Trump and his supporters, but in recent months we’ve had an opportunity to see who the real Jew-haters are in our country. And they’re not MAGA Republicans. Amazingly, the Hitler references continue. They haven’t stopped. This seems self-destructive. We’ve had seven years and counting of “Democracy is in danger” from a party that rigged the 2016 Presidential primary so Bernie Sanders wouldn’t win, rigged the 2020 Presidential primary so Bernie Sanders wouldn’t win, colludes with intel agencies, corporate media and Big Tech to lie, spy and censor. Amazingly, “Democracy is in danger” continues, even as they prosecute political opponents and take names off ballots. You can’t vote for the wrong candidate if his name isn’t on the ballot, right? Forget democracy. Democracy is dead. We had to take away your right to vote for the candidates of… Read more →
A Mystery of the Digital Censorship Era
A mystery of the digital censorship era is the ease with which its core ideas have been sold to people who were its fiercest initial opponents. The closer you look at mechanisms now used to isolate, remove, disrupt, and spy on everyone from environmentalists to antiwar activists to anti-mandate or anti-lockdown protesters, the more easily you’ll see a direct line to high-profile civil liberties controversies of two decades ago. The modern Internet surveillance state was born in programs bitterly opposed then by left-leaning intellectuals, of the type who subscribed to The Nation and carried NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs while protesting war in Iraq. — Matt Taibbi Read more →
Missouri v. Biden
Here’s how federal judge Terry Doughty yesterday described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” — Matt Taibbi Read more →
Censorship is Not “Misinformation”
YouTube says it has removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company says is vaccine misinformation. https://t.co/lIVNxVBbpq — NBC News (@NBCNews) June 22, 2023 Vaccine misinformation has nothing to do with it. “Misinformation” is a meaningless but useful term because no one wants to just come out and say “We love censorship and we are silencing the views of anyone we disagree with.” Instead, under the guise of “misinformation,” they can say that certain content cannot be allowed, in the interest of safety and the Common Good. Google, which owns YouTube, donates vast sums of money to the Democratic party, and they are not going to have RFK Jr. clips on YouTube because if they do, people might decide to vote for him. The Democratic party doesn’t like voting, they don’t like elections, what they like is to just… Read more →
When Empires Start to Collapse
Yeah, I think if you look at history, it’s really interesting when empires start to collapse, when you start to get such a breach between how the elite lives and how the rest of the country lives. There are usually two options: you can either start to placate and appease the vast majority of the country who are living in deprivation — some symbolic gestures of social programs just enough to keep them mollified so they don’t go out into the streets — or you can decide, “You know what, we don’t really care how angry the citizenry gets. What we’re going to do instead is ‘paramilitarize’ the country, we’ll put them under a massive surveillance system. “We’ll keep a really close eye on everything they’re doing, we’ll listen to their communications and we’ll crush, first by demonizing and then, criminalizing and, then, censoring any form of dissent so that… Read more →
Suck it Up, Censors!
This is kind of obvious but have you noticed that when someone is revealed to have done something they shouldn’t have done, they try to deflect the blame to whoever revealed the wrongdoing? It’s becoming customary, almost compulsory, on any point of contention to assert that your opponent’s position is not only wrong but that it would result in a loss of safety for, and in fact the probable death of, some unfortunate person or persons. Suck it up, censors! Read more →
Musk vs. Markey: A Battle of Wits With an Unarmed Man
.@elonmusk could respond to my tweets but failed to respond to my letter by yesterday’s deadline and answer basic questions about Twitter verification. Congress must end the era of failed Big Tech self-regulation and pass laws that put user safety over the whims of billionaires. https://t.co/BEn6n9EitW — Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) November 26, 2022 Pardon me for stating the obvious but Senator Ed and a lot of other pissy little congresspeople were fine with Big Tech’s self-regulation when that meant censoring people and ideas that they didn’t like. They’re also fine with the whims of billionaires like Zuckerberg, Soros, (former billionaire) SBF and so on when those whims include making massive donations to Democratic candidates and causes. A quick Web search on Ed Markey reveals that he went to law school, went into politics, has apparently never done a productive day’s work in his life, but he wants to tell the… Read more →
Get The L Out
Get The L Out is critical of the trans ideology. They say, quite rightly, that it is erasing lesbians, both by transing young lesbians and turning them into ‘men’ and by saying that anyone can be a lesbian, even if you have a penis. So they turned up at Pride Cymru with banners saying ‘Lesbians don’t like penises’ – yes, this apparently needs to be said in 2022 . . . And what happened? They were ejected by police. By those Pride-enforcing cops of 21st-century Britain. This essentially means it has become a risky endeavour to publicly declare that you are same-sex attracted, that you are a homosexual. The idea of same-sex attraction runs counter to the post-sex, post-biology lunacy of the Pride religion, and so it is problematised, demonised, even censored. Gay rights? Pride is a threat to them, not the upholder of them. — “The Tyranny of Pride” Read more →
I’m Actually Old Enough to Remember Freedom of Speech
Poland Proposes $13.5 Million Fines for Tech Giants Engaging in Ideological Censorship — The Epoch Times I’m actually old enough to remember when the USA, not Poland, carried the torch for freedom of speech. We took it for granted I suppose, but Poland has much more recent experience with being told what they are not allowed to think, say or write, and they don’t like it. Na Zdrowie, Polska! Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote the following: I was born and raised among people for whom freedom was the most precious of values. In Poland we are so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it. For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how we are meant to live and what we are meant to feel, and what… Read more →
Dude, Where’s My Insurrection?
Oh gosh, I hope this doesn't mean the magnitude of the threat has been wildly exaggerated for political gain, media excitement and ratings, censorship orgies, and laying the foundation for a new fear-driven Domestic War on Terror to control politics and information. https://t.co/oHhUPojpSO — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 21, 2021 Read more →
Incitement of Violence
Apple CEO Tim Cook said the removal of Parler from Apple’s online store was done because the company doesn’t consider incitement of violence free speech. “We looked at the incitement to violence that was on there and we don’t consider that free speech and incitement of violence has an intersection,” Cook told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. Yes, “incitement of violence” is the party line and Tim Cook I guess is just a puppethead. Despite the faux outrage over the Capitol riot, the virtuous left seems ok with using and endorsing violence when it suits them. Antifa has had ongoing riots in major American cities. Left-wing “protests” often include looting, smashing store windows, burning down people’s homes and businesses. An MLK Day protest in New York City this week resulted in 11 police officers injured and 28 arrests. If you try to get a conservative speaker on a college campus,… Read more →
Huckleberry Finn Banned Again
A Pennsylvania high school has removed Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its 11th-grade curriculum after complaints from students who said they were made “uncomfortable” by the novel. The school’s principal defended the decision to remove the book from the curriculum. “I do not believe that we’re censoring,” he said. “I really do believe that this is an opportunity for the school to step forward and listen to the students.” He went on to add, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Because if suppression of material you deem objectionable is not censoring, what is? As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “Have somebody read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution out loud to you, you God damned fool!” Read more →
Obama in China
Obama’s strongest comments during the town hall were directed at China’s Internet controls. “I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” Obama said. . . . Chinese bloggers who saw it were grateful that he addressed censorship, but many zeroed in on what they considered Obama’s waffling language. “Learn English from Obama: Instead of saying ‘I want to eat,’ say ‘I am a big supporter of non-hunger,’” Wang Pei, a writer based in eastern China’s Hangzhou, twittered on Tuesday. — China govt pleased but ordinary folk cool on Obama Read more →