Prager U. VS YouTube [Updated]

Last week, John Hinderaker at PowerLine had an update on Prager U’s legal battles against YouTube’s and Google’s censorship of its educational videos:

For several years, YouTube has suppressed Prager U’s videos by “restricting” them, which makes them invisible to viewers who are using the restricted mode, as is the case in many school environments, and by not allowing them to be monetized. After multiple appeals of YouTube’s discriminatory decisions, Prager U sued YouTube and Google in federal court, alleging violations of the First Amendment and the Lanham Act (the federal law that governs advertising in interstate commerce), as well as several causes of action under California law. The district court judge granted defendants’ motion to dismiss the federal counts, and Prager U appealed. That appeal was argued on Tuesday before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

That YouTube has engaged in viewpoint discrimination to the detriment of Prager U is indisputable. That YouTube does this because its employees disapprove of conservatism is obvious. But YouTube and Google are private companies, and the First Amendment applies only to government. (“Congress shall make no law…”) The U.S. Supreme Court has articulated a narrow exception where the First Amendment can apply to private entities if they “exercise powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” Prager U faces an obvious hurdle, in that hosting videos is not a traditional governmental function.

Mr. Hinderaker is not all that optimistic in a speedy remedy:

Prager U may yet win its case, which is in its early innings. Perhaps the 9th Circuit will hold that Prager’s First Amendment and Lanham Act claims state a claim, and give it a green light to pursue discovery. Perhaps Prager U will prevail on its state law causes of action, although I assume that California’s judiciary is securely in the hands of the Democratic Party, which generally is not in favor of free speech. But for the foreseeable future, the Left’s control over the principal means of public communication will remain a huge advantage.

The full article is here.

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Happy Labor Day

image credit: vacuum engineering

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Cleveland Air Show tribute: Doolittle raider

photo credit: pat j dooley photography

This World War II Air Force B-25B medium bomber was in the Cleveland Air Show this weekend. As it was flown by the crowds, the announcer paid tribute to Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle’s co-pilot, Richard E. Cole, born in Dayton, Ohio.  Earlier this year, Cole passed away at age 103; he was the last survivor of the Doolittle raids on Tokyo. From Wikipedia: 

The Doolittle Raid, also known as the Tokyo Raid (Saturday 18 April 1942), was an air raid by the United States on the Japanese capital Tokyo and other places on Honshu during World War II. It was the first air operation to strike the Japanese archipelago. It demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to American air attack, served as retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and provided an important boost to American morale. The raid was planned, led by, and named after Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the United States Army Air Forces.

Sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers were launched without fighter escort from the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier USS Hornet deep in the Western Pacific Ocean, each with a crew of five men. (from Wikipedia)

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Instagram blocks Larry Elder

Image credit: www.mic.com

Another conservative is blocked. This time it’s Larry Elder on Instagram’s blacklist. Elder reported on PJ Media:

After averaging 450 new followers a day since March, when I became active on Instagram, my number of new followers suddenly stopped growing. Dead stop. The count read 68.9K. It remained 68.9K for over two weeks. Then, the number dropped by 100. Meanwhile, over the same two-week period, on Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, I continued gaining hundreds of new followers per day.

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. 

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. [Rep. made several "innocent" lame excuses.]

. . .

Elder then references Robert Epstein’s testimony before Congress; Cleveland Tea Party reported on that recently (go here and here).

. . .

[Rick] Chapman, the hi-tech expert, does not buy the Facebook rep's innocent explanation. Chapman said: "The answer is because they can. And they're not stopping. This attack on you is an example of how bold they're becoming." The challenge is for conservatives to invent and use alternative platforms not subject to liberal bias. For instance, in its June 2019 press release, a startup called Safe Space said it established its social media site for "conservatives frustrated over the censorship taking place on mainstream platforms." Safe Space's CEO said: "Instead of begging Twitter and Facebook to change, or pretending Reddit isn't a puppet for the Chinese, (we decided to) find a solution through capitalism. We've decided to offer a competing platform where no voices will be unfairly targeted."

Full article is here. I’ll ask our household's web expert to have a look at the Safe Space option.

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You Are Being Tracked

image credit: digitalmarketingnetwork

Via Instapundit, a reporter at The New York Times did some searches to determine the extent of digital tracking. Farhad Manjoo’s article, “I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me,” starts off:

Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me dinner first” joke, but it turned out he was serious. What could I say? I’m new here, I like to help, and, conveniently, I have nothing whatsoever at all to hide.

Like a colonoscopy, the project involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were watching my surfing and all the data they obtained. 

Then I uploaded the data to my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)

What did we find? The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.

. . .

The full article is here. (I had no trouble accessing it, although I understand articles in the NY Times can sometimes disappear behind a paywall if you’ve accessed a quota of pages.) The takeaway: we have no privacy. 

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David Harsanyi on The Tea Party

David Harsanyi takes a look at the inception of the Tea Party and its activities today (“The Left Can’t Stop Lying About The Tea Party”). He concludes:

. . .

The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.

In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years.  Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.

One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

Full article at The Federalist is here.

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Air Show here over Labor Day weekend

image credit: pat dooley photography

Labor Day weekend is coming up, and that means the 2019 Cleveland Air Show. Expect to hear and watch the Thunderbirds rehearsing later this week.

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