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: Misinformation
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 →
FBI: Exposé of Our Spread of Misinformation is “Misinformation”
The “Twitter Files” have been coming out in installments over the last couple weeks or so, documenting how the FBI, CIA, the Democratic party, almost every major news outlet, and tech giants like Twitter collaborated to label any information that might make people want to vote against Democrats as “misinformation,” and using that label to justify hiding the information from public view. The centerpiece of this collaboration was the Hunter Biden laptop story, reported by the New York Post shortly before the 2020 election. 50 members of the U.S. intelligence community signed a letter, which, if you read it carefully, said that the laptop could be Russian “disinformation,” although there was no evidence that it was Russian disinformation, and they really had no way of knowing whether it was Russian disinformation, but that it looked like like the kind of sneaky trick that Russia would pull, knowing that it would… Read more →
How to Get Permanently Banned From Twitter
Alex Berenson, conservative commentator, one-time New York Times reporter, and vaccine dissenter has been permanently banned from Twitter for, according to a Twitter spokesperson, “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.” According to Berenson, the tweet that got him banned was this: It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity. It is hard to sift information from misinformation on COVID and any number of other topics but I do NOT trust the meatheads at Twitter to take on that role in my life. Looking at the above tweet, what is the misinformation? My understanding is that the vaccine is intended to be effective against hospitalization and death, but not… Read more →