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Greenwald: Congress demands more private censorship


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2021 Mar 28, 2:24pm   374 views  4 comments

by MisdemeanorRebel   ➕follow (12)   💰tip   ignore  

Great way to get around the 1A, allow Monopolies in return for Political Censorship.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf

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1   Ceffer   2021 Mar 28, 2:30pm  

Open the floodgates of speech and information to allow the idiopolous to rat itself out, then close them back down to keep them passively zombified with cream puff.

I don't know that floodgates can be fine tuned to that degree.
2   Patrick   2021 Mar 28, 2:33pm  

The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves. ...

... one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes. ...

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users). ...

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don't think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don't think the government should be either.” ...

But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted. ...

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the “unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they dislike removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on Google-enabled podcasts...

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.
3   Ceffer   2021 Mar 28, 2:36pm  

Maybe it's time for Dorsey to be switched from heroin to fentanyl. Puppets do not talk back.
4   Patrick   2021 Apr 1, 2:33pm  

https://reclaimthenet.org/california-bill-to-force-big-tech-to-censor-more/



California lawmakers introduce a new unconstitutional bill to force Big Tech to censor more

Grandstanding.

California has joined many other US states in trying to grapple with the effects of social media and free speech – and California just happens to be that state that appears to be looking for even more ways to moderate or censor content published on there.

It means that, as is more often than not the case, an initiative to table a bill seems to be focused around the need to have even more censorship of whatever’s defined as “hate speech” and misinformation – rather than dealing with the real elephant in the room: too much censorship that already exists, to the point of rendering the open internet potentially unsustainable.

In California, the upcoming bill was announced in a press release issued by Democrat Jesse Gabriel, who pitched it as a bipartisan effort to force tech companies to take accountability for the ills of hate speech and disinformation (but, apparently, not the overarching one – that of the runaway train of censorship).

The statement announcing the proposed bill did not actually consider linking to the text of the draft, as an easy way to allow people reading the release to also read what the bill itself is actually all about. (Red flag alert.)

We obtained a copy of it for you here. https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/calif-bill-censor.pdf

Those who went to the trouble of actually reading the bill seem to think it may be fishy in and of itself – such as that quite a few of the issues the bill wants to tackle at the state level turn out to be protected speech in the US at the federal level, thanks to the First Amendment freedom of expression law.

The question then is this: why even bother? How can a state hope to enact legislation that would violate the country’s Constitution, and have it stand?

The answer may be – and this is an educated guess – it’s a bill designed to gain some “good press,” or “campaign taking points” – by promoting legal solutions and regulations that clearly will not stand in the big picture, or long-term, in the country’s current legal system. A kind of political “clickbait.”

It might be no more than a “bi-partisan” nothingburger, a performative exhibition that might be the california-legislators-now-get-into-pointless-likely-counterproductive-content-moderation-legislating-business.

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