Censorship creep

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports (“The next stage in tech overlords' censorship: De-platformingun-PC blogs”):

It's no longer just Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are censoring online content that offends political correctness.  Wordpress.com, a blog-hosting site that offers anyone the opportunity to create and publish a blog at no cost, has decided to de-platform — in other words, kill — a blog that has been operating for 15 years: Creeping Sharia.

As Pamela Geller points out, this move by Wordpress.com is itself an example of the blog's focus of creeping sharia happening in real time.  Shutting down a critic of creeping sharia is an example of creeping sharia.

Related: Newsbusters reports on a development (which may be a start, but doesn’t seem to me to go far enough):

The White House has announced a new system that gives Americans the power to call out foul play by tech companies.  

As of May 15 it read, “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” 

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” it continued before delivering a bipartisan message that freedom of speech is a right held by all Americans. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

The submission form begins with a survey asking users to submit their names and confirm that they are citizens of the United States. It then asks whether they were censored via major Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It also listed an option for “Other” acknowledging that there are plenty of other platforms which deplatform users.

It then asks, if possible, for a link or screenshot of the restricted post. 

In a reversal of Trump’s earlier praise of Twitter as a way to reach his audience free of being filtered by the media, this White House page asked users for permission to send newsletters via email so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

The Trump administration said it was “fighting for free speech online,” while the liberal Washington Post characterized the new system as part of Trump’s “war against Facebook, Google and Twitter.” 

Rest of the report is here. Hmm. Either these companies need to be trust-busted, or they need to be subject to regulation by the FCC.

# # #

First Amendment under attack again

image credit: sott.net

Today’s targets: James Woods and Pamela Geller. Via 100 Percent Fed Up:

He has over 2.1 million followers and is one of the most active and important conservative accounts on Twitter, but conservative actor James Woods is finished with Twitter until Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, stops being a “coward,” and affords conservatives the same free speech rights as liberals in his platform.

. . .

“Twitter demanded that I rescind my tweet paraphrasing Emerson,” Woods said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “It now seems they have chosen to delete that tweet from my account without my permission. Until free speech is allowed on Twitter, I will not be permitted to participate in our democracy with my voice. As long as Jack Dorsey remains the coward he seems to be; my Twitter days are in the past.”

President Trump and his outspoken, conservative son Don Jr., both came to the defense of James Woods over his censorship on Twitter.

Don Jr. pointed out the hypocrisy of the social media giants censoring the voices of popular conservatives while allowing terror groups to openly post on their platforms. Tweeting directly to Twitter and Facebook, Trump Jr. asked if they consider James Woods to be more dangerous than Hamas?

It’s interesting how @twitter and @facebook both seem more concerned with silencing non-violent people who hold political opinions they disagree with, than violent terrorist organizations and the people that support them,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “Is @RealJamesWoods really more ‘dangerous’ than Hamas?”

And Pamela Geller was censored on Facebook. After complaints, her post was restored. Just another “mistake” by Facebook.

Ms. Geller’s advice:

Attention readers: Challenge ever ban, appeal every deletion. Do not stand by while left wing corporate managers and paid foreign operatives strip us of our unalienable rights as Americans.

# # #

Mark Steyn on “The Big Shut-Up”

image credit: webjunction.org

More censorship this way comes, and Mark Steyn nails it:

In this week of second-birthday celebrations for The Mark Steyn Club, the thing most worth celebrating is mere existence: We haven't yet been vaporized. Every day the Big Shut-Up advances: Last week Facebook eighty-sixed Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and for good measure Twitter suspended the Hollywood contrarian James Woods. It's a bit unfair on poor old calypso conspiracist Louis Farrakhan, who found himself de-platformed with all the right-wing haters just because Speech Commissar Zuckerberg needed a bipartisan figleaf. He won't require that much longer, and indeed Big Social is growing ever more brazen in its preference for monitored speech over free speech. (See, for example, Google's thuggish and moronic censorship of the Claremont Institute.)

As readers may have noticed, I don't do Facebook posts or Tweet: We have social media accounts but we use them only to link to content here or to promote radio, TV and stage appearances. To be honest, I don't really understand why so-called "conservatives" write (for free) on Facebook and Twitter, providing the Big Social cartel with more free content and thus enriching them and cementing their near total control of the Internet. Nor do I understand why Dennis Prager, for whom I have almost boundless admiration, sued YouTube for giving his Prager University videos insufficient prominence. Conservatives demand that YouTube cease "de-monetizing" their videos. For what it's worth, the first time I was de-monetized on YouTube, I self-de-monetized all my other videos on the platform. Because whatever percentage of ad revenue you might get from them, YouTube takes more - much more. So you're getting pennies while they're getting even more stonkingly mega-rich: Conservatives who think more YouTube revenue is the way to close the gap don't seem to grasp that they're actually widening it.

In the end, the solution to Facebook and Google/YouTube is to break them up before they police every aspect of human existence on the planet. And right now the only prominent politician pledging to do that is ...Elizabeth Warren. In the meantime, in our modest corner of the Internet, our policy is to try and do as much as possible independent of the Big Tech oligarchies - because anything else just accelerates the shrinking number of entities that control access to all information.

A decade ago, we free-speechers were fortunate enough to fight our battles in Canada just before Facebook and Twitter came along and wrecked the Internet. Today, Twitter's main function is to provide a pretext for destroying random lives pour encourager les autres.

. . .

These are very dark times for a meaningful culture of free speech. Its subordination to identity politics and political correctness is now taken for granted by the Institute of Directors, Rugby Australia, the Philadelphia Flyers and on and on. In such a world I am grateful still to be here, and I thank all of you who swing by each morning even as the lights flicker and die around a once lively Internet.

And today we read that David Horowitz (Freedom Center, Front Page Magazine) has been suspended from Twitter. Anyway, read the rest of Steyn’s column here.

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Censorship on the march

John Nolte at Breitbart has more bad news (“Poynter [Institute] Temporarily Pulls Blacklist with a Big Lie and Promise to Return”)

“Marketers can create blacklists,” Poynter helpfully points out, but since your blacklist might not be as comprehensive as our blacklist here’s a handy blacklist that will allow you to blacklist those we believe should be blacklisted.

Poynter’s list includes… Breitbart News, the Media Research Center, Pajamas Media, Washington Examiner, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Red State, Project Veritas, Newsmax, Zero Hedge, LifeSite, Judicial Watch, Frontpage, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Caller, and the Drudge Report…

But nowhere on this list will you find the establishment media outlets — CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, Politico, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. —  responsible for blowing the biggest stories of the last five years:

·         The Trayvon Martin Hoax

·         The Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax

·         Donald Trump Can’t Win

·         The Russia Collusion Hoax

·         The Brett Kavanaugh Serial Rapist Hoax

·         The Covington High School Boys Hoax

Poynter’s blacklist was only about one thing, had only one goal — one — and that was to tell advertisers to starve alternative media, alternative thought and ideas to death.

But here’s the real news, Poynter is not retracting its McCarthyite blacklist in shame — oh no… Poynter is promising to return with a better and bolder blacklist:

Therefore, we are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria.

“Rigorous” or righteous? This report is one of several over the past months concerning ongoing efforts to blacklist or de-platform or otherwise shut down a debate. For example, see Daily Caller report here. Iain Murray at Instapundit has another:

Leftist activists have forced a vote at the Mastercard AGM next month to establish an Orwellian “Human Rights Committee” aimed at cutting off the rights of anyone they disagree with. The initial aim is to choke off the income stream to right-wing activists.

Master Card? Well, if Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube can get away with blocking our First Amendment rights, and companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods bow to political correctness, what will stop Master Card?  

UPDATE from Breitbart's James Delingpole: 

Facebook is Big Brother.

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More censorship on social / online media

Daniel J.Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, points out the chilling effect of de facto censorship on social media and online platforms. (One of the most recent examples is Amazon, which yanked Tommy Robinson’s new book on the Koran.)

Creepy people at massive corporations imagine themselves as the policemen of public content, except they would never use such as gendered term as policemen to describe themselves.

A former Facebook worker revealed evidence to Project Veritas that the online platform secretly uses a “deboost” function to suppress conservative speech on the social media platform. “The ‘deboost’ tag appears after the word ‘Sigma,’ which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts,” the exposé explains.

Does this mean Facebook analysts rationalize the suppression of conservative speech on the grounds that it induces self-harm? The corporate behemoth refuses to say. Facebook responded to the Project Veritas revelations by noting that it had fired the whistleblower, as though this discredits her instead of credits her story of a company fixated on controlling information.

Online Goliaths that deny suppressing speech strangely openly boast of banning it.

. . .

“Currently, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pretend that they are not publishers to avoid lawsuits involving libel law,” Zmirak tells The American Spectator. “But they are acting like editors of magazines. If they are editing content based on it not being illegal but it being objectionable to them, they should lose their exemption. They have to pick, either they are neutral platforms or they are publishers.”

Flynn identifies four potential solutions: 1)  eliminating exemptions from libel law;  2) billionaire-funded alternative platforms;  3) trust-busting;  4) individuals refraining from using FB, Twitter, etc.  Flynn does not favor option #4, and his fuller evaluations are here.

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Censorship: Losing our freedom of speech on social media

 openclipart.org

James Delingpole reports on the bad news from Great Britain:

Facebook has banned the third largest political page in the UK from their service, Tommy Robinson. Amazon has just stopped selling his book on the Quran. Twitter and Paypal already acted along these lines months ago.

This is a terrible day for freedom of speech. And possibly an even worse one for the future of social cohesion in Britain.

And Michelle Malkin reports the latest on her battles with the censors -- because she is conservative:

. . .

The Twitter notice assured me that the company “has not taken any action on the reported content at this time,” yet advised me that I should “consult legal counsel about this matter” in response to complaints from unnamed “authorized entities.”

Don’t worry, lawyer up? Gulp.

I’m used to getting threats directly from bloodthirsty cartoon jihadists. In 2006, I spearheaded a “Mohammed cartoons blogburst” in support of the Danish cartoonists at Jyllands-Posten. After posting all 12 of the drawings to educate the public about the publication’s brave stand against sharia-enforced self-censorship in the West, death and rape threats from radical Muslims around the world poured into my e-mail box. Vengeful thugs based in Turkey and Germany called me a “whore” and “prostitute,” vowing “We will kill you” unless I deleted the pictures from my server. My website was targeted by jihadist hackers who launched a week of denial-of-service attacks.

Thirteen years later, however, who knew that using an American company’s microblogging service from my secluded mountain top in Colorado could get me in hot water with foreign Muslim stone-age goons 8,000 miles away still hung up on the cartoons?

. . .

Over the past few months, several other prominent critics of Islamic extremism have received similar warning letters from Twitter’s legal department, including Saudi-Canadian activist Ensaf Haidar, the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi; Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, an Iranian-born Muslim scholar and reform advocate from Australia; Jamie Glazov, a Russian-born Canadian columnist who just released a new book called “Jihadist Psychopath”; and Pamela Geller, an anti-jihad blogger and activist.

. . .

Among others targeted by SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center], which collaborates with credit card companies and banks to silence influential thinkers and activists on the right: David Horowitz, a venerable scholar and investigative author who successfully beat back Mastercard’s attempt to drop him over his organization’s opposition to Islamic radicalism and illegal immigration, and the Center for Immigration Studies, which is suing the SPLC for labeling its mainstream think tank a “hate group.”

Read the rest here. Malkin’s list of silenced, de-platformed, or demonetized conservatives is long, but not long enough. And last month, John Hawkins at Townhall reported on his personal experience as the proprietor of Right Wing News; he describes HOW these gigantic companies/monopolies methodically target and silence conservative voices.

Project Veritas (James O’Keefe’s group) has more chapter-and-verse (h/t Ace of Spades).

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Angst on the Internet

image credit: shutterstock.com

From Michael Ledeen at PJ Media:

. . .Compared to those happy early days, most of what I read is fearful and/or angry.  As a Russian commentator observed back when, the Internet did indeed threaten tyrants, because it provided internal challengers with information that both exposed the malefactions of the regime and also enabled the opposition to plan their actions.  If you talk to Iranian anti-regime activists and ask them what they most need, they will usually reply that they need secure communications with one another, along with access to detailed, reliable reporting on their own country.

However, as that smart Russian commentator observed, the same Internet that threatened the tyrants could also be used to suppress the promised wide-open exchange of facts and ideas. And so it has. The world’s most effective oppressors, those in places like Iran, Russia, North Korea, China and Cuba, have all developed technology to isolate their citizens from the Net, and to inundate their cyberspace with the regime’s own disinformation.  No doubt they have helped each other, as free and open communication threatens them all.

. . .

All that is part of the ongoing war against America, but that’s only a part of what disturbs us, what has changed our feelings about the Internet.  Our current upset has more to do with the spying on us by our own government, and by our own corporations. We unaccountably continue to cherish privacy, even though there hasn’t been any for a long time. Some of us have not assimilated the unpleasant fact that our emails, even those we believe to have been “encrypted,” are public documents, available to anyone with the requisite skills to read them. And there are lots of people with the requisite skills, ranging from broadcasters to blackmailers.  Is there a remedy?  I don’t think so. I think we simply need to shut up, until the day comes when a tough-minded judge slaps the snoopers with hefty fines and maybe even prison time.

It doesn’t seem to me that that day will come very soon.  It seems instead that freedom of speech protects the bad guys along with the good, and it is up to us to protect ourselves as best we can.

Meanwhile, we must use the Internet as the weapon it has always been, and count on the bad guys’ entirely justified fear of it. They’ve got more to fear than we do.

Read the rest  here. And then there are ongoing issues with Facebook; here’s the latest on “privacy lapses."

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Twitter, Facebook, and The Thought Police

art credit: thebiganswer.info

Boris Zelkin at American Greatness cancelled his Twitter account:

This had been building for some time for two primary reasons. First, Twitter, like Facebook (which I had given up a few months ago), is a hate machine. Second, Twitter’s ever-changing terms of service and curiously selective enforcement of said terms via shadow and outright bans made it increasingly obvious that Twitter is less interested in real conversation than it is in kabuki theater conversation—censored one-sided shadow-boxing—replacing freedom of speech with speech at the pleasure of one’s betters.

As such, Twitter has became a platform I can no longer support with my participation.

From my perspective, participation on a platform that actively censors political speech, even when that participation consists of criticism the platform, is a tacit approval. Remember how you felt when you saw those “Occupy Wall Street” folks using iPhones to bemoan capitalism? That’s how I began seeing giving Twitter my voice, a voice that they could choose to either allow or silence if it became pesky or popular enough.

Richard Fernandez at PJ Media reports that Mr. Instapundit dropped his Twitter account:

Glenn Reynolds has deactivated his Twitter account, citing the banning of Jesse Kelly for no apparent reason as the immediate cause of his disillusionment with the platform. Explaining his decision, he wrote:

Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.

He may have beaten the digital bouncers to the door by only a little. The Thought Police are rushing to ensure that everyone toes the line. 

I found several supposed alternatives to Facebook here, but I had not heard of any of them. Any Tea Party people identifying any good alternatives?

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This is not a Halloween prank

photo credit: 2popcornmovies.blogspot.com

IRONY ALERT! Joshua Caplan at Breitbart has the not-a-joke headline: “Facebook Suffers Data Protection Mishap at London Security Event”:

Facebook was left red-faced earlier this month after the social network giant suffered a data protection mishap during a cybersecurity conference hosted in London, according to reports.

The blunder occurred when Facebook misplaced an email list of the summit’s participants.

Financial News London reports:

The privacy breach was not at any old seminar though, it happened at an event entitled “Cyber security: the next 50 years”, which was hosted by Facebook and The Fulbright Commission, the US-UK scholarship programme, at their offices in Brock Street.

The panel discussion was headed by Gail Kent, Facebook’s global public policy lead on security. Fulbright scholars and security experts Jamie Collier, Cameron Colquhoun and Karen Renaud also spoke and the talk was followed by a networking reception.

But the next day guests were shocked to receive an email from Chris Horry, chief operating officer at the Fulbright Commission, which has been forwarded to Capital.

…

Attendees initially assumed the message was an ironic joke, given the theme of the event, and wondered whether a Facebook employee had grabbed the guest list in view of the company’s track record on this issue.

“Unfortunately, I have to inform you that in the course of yesterday evening’s cyber security event, a printed guest list with the name of the invitee and email address has been mislaid,” an email via Horry to participants read. “Whilst we do not expect that the list has been misappropriated, we cannot exclude that possibility. Please rest assured we very much value your data privacy and sincerely apologise for this unfortunate incident.”

Read the rest here.

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And the censorship goes on

Four headlines reporting censorship on social media and at movie theaters -- just in the last week:

From Newsbusters:

Twitter Locks Conservative Site Outfor ‘Hate’ Citing Facts About STDs

From Steve Green at PJ Media:

Twitter Permanently Bans 'GayPatriot' Bruce Carroll, Cites Kafka for Precedent

From Beth Baumann at Townhall:

Suppression: Theaters Drop 'Gosnell' Movie Despite It Being a Top-Grossing Film

From John Stossel at NWF Daily News:

            Shut up, they explain

UPDATED 5pm

From Scott McKay at American Spectator:

           A Letter From Facebook Jail: The casualties of Big Tech’sassault on free expression

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Gosnell, free speech, and free markets

image credit: thoughtsonfilm.com

The film about “America's all-time champion serial killer” Kermit Gosnell opens later this week at a few theaters, and its subject matter is outside Cleveland Tea Party’s core mission. But the topic of “free markets” is very much a core Tea Party value.

The film Gosnell has been an uphill battle from the start. It was difficult to produce, and efforts to market it are being thwarted as I type. If this film is emblematic of the closing of free markets and increasing censorship in the mainstream media and on social media, then it is very much on the front burner of the Cleveland Tea Party. How can one have free markets if a legal product is not allowed to be promoted in the marketplace?

Fox News is running paid ads, but NPR and PBS won’t run them, and Facebook has banned any ads promoting this film. It should not matter whether you are Pro Choice, Pro Life, or undecided. The issues of Roe vs Wade and abortion were hot talking points during the entire nomination process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, so the film has a place in the current and ongoing debate. 

The other day I attended a presentation by the filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer followed by a private screening of Gosnell. Mark Steyn’s must-read blog on the film is here. The website for the film is here and it includes a drop-down which specifies theaters showing this film, listed by state. Only two were located in the greater Cleveland area (Valley View and Solon).

The goal of the two film-makers is to get enough venues and audiences to get this film to be eligible for NetFlix general access/release. If I understood them correctly, if they get enough showings and viewings in theaters this year, they can get a much wider distribution for this film via NetFlix, and they intend to categorize it as a crime drama along the line of, say, Law and Order, to reach an audience that might otherwise not choose to watch a film advertised as being about abortion per se. I thought that was a good marketing strategy. And if you are reading this blog, I hope you will consider seeing the film later this week, even if you don't think you'll like it.

From SteynOnline:

If making the film was hard, breaking through the societal omertà is harder: The Hyatt in Austin, for example, just canceled a screening at the behest of Planned Parenthood. So do be alert both to bookings of Gosnell at your local multiplex and to attempts to get it bounced. As producers and (with Andrew Klavan) screenwriters, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer set out to tell a story none of the big studios would touch, and their doggedness deserves to find an audience.

In a free market, the producers would be free to buy ads. Facebook claims the ad does not meet their “standards.” No, Facebook just doesn’t like the film and doesn’t want any more exposure of the Gosnell case. That’s not what's supposed to happen to free speech in free markets. How can you function in a free market when you are muzzled because you have a different view? No, that’s censorship, and that is why I posted with these links.

Exit question: Who will be censored next?

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Tech Researcher Epstein Warns Conservatives: Get Off Gmail!

image credit: 4thmedia.org

I’ve been reading about the thumb-on-the-scale algorithms built into searches and regular activities on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and so on. A tech researcher, Dr Robert Epstein, was a guest on Fox News a couple of weeks ago, so I recognized his name in an article today at Newsbusters. Here’s a sampling:

Google has more power and control than most people realize and a top tech researcher is warning about it.

In an interview at the D.C. premiere of the Creepy Line, a documentary on the dangers of Google and Facebook, Dr. Robert Epstein told the Media Research Center that Google was building personal profiles of users mainly through Gmail. He warned that Google was compiling information upwards of 3 million pages per user, and said, “The more they know about you, the easier it is for them to manipulate you without your awareness.”

Epstein explained what parts of Gmail Google used to create these profiles: every single part.

“I can’t even begin to emphasize how important it is that you not use Gmail. The problem is that it’s so extensive it’s hard to condense into a sentence or two. But the point is that they’re taking that information, not just from the emails you send, but even from the drafts, those crazy drafts that you decide not to send, that all becomes part of your personal profile. If you’re mentioning other people, that goes into their personal profiles.”

He mentioned that it didn’t matter if some users had emails outside of Gmail, those were on the profiles too.

. . .

[C]onservatives have “special reasons to be concerned” based on the leaked emails and videos from Google concerning the 2016 election. Detailing an article that he was about to release, he said, “I describe 10 different methods by which Google and big tech companies can shift millions of votes in the midterm elections coming up in the U.S. I estimate upwards of 12 million votes.”

In the Fox interview I watched, Dr Epstein made the point that the compiling of data and the manipulation of YOUR online activities to influence YOUR decisions, including your vote, are taking place and leaving no paper trail. Scary. Read the rest here.

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#WalkAway Campaign

 

image credit:breitbart.com 

Maybe you know one or two liberals who are having second thoughts about the Democratic party platform, tactics, and Big Government values (the opposite of Tea Party values). If so, this information will be of interest.

The headline at The Daily Signal: “Rally in Washington Will Urge Disillusioned Democrats, Leftists to ‘Walk Away’”

The organizer: actor, singer, hair stylist Brandon Straka.

The #WalkAway event: The march and rally will be held Saturday, Oct. 27. The event will start near the Democratic National Committee headquarters building on Capitol Hill and end on the lawn of the Capitol. The date is 10 days before the midterm congressional elections.

On May 26, Straka released a video of himself explaining why he was walking away from the Democratic Party and building a platform for folks who shared similar experiences. Mr. Straka can use all the help he can get, since a few days ago, his Facebook page was suspended for 30 days but then suddenly reinstated under questionable circumstances. 

The full report on the October 27 #WalkAway rally in DC is here. We Tea Party members welcome any #WalkAway red-pill takers into our community.

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Social media, surveillance, and your vote

image credit: picstopin.com

Breitbart has reported on the "the extent to which major technology companies such as Google are surveilling their users." But the segment that I hope everyone will watch (it’s less than 4 minutes) is Dr. Robert Epstein’s appearance on Tucker Carlson from (apparently) a few months ago and re-broadcast last Friday. 

Video credit: YouTube [another platform for surveillance] via thelibertydaily.com

Here’s a partial report and transcript from The National Sentinel: 

Dr. Robert Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, joined Carlson to discuss an upcoming presentation on “The Search Suggestion Effect (SSE): How Search Suggestions Can Be Used To Shift Opinions and Voting Preferences Dramatically.”

The researchers looked at the power of Google and Facebook to influence elections over a period of five years and came up with powerful results.

“I can tell you we should be paranoid because what Google and Facebook can do is really mind-boggling,” he told the host.

“For example, if Mark Zuckerberg on election day last year, if he had chosen to press the enter key early in the morning and just sent out a message to Hillary Clinton supporters only saying, ‘Go out and vote,’ that would have sent her an additional 450,000 voters that day with no one knowing that this had occurred. And that’s just Facebook,” he added.

“What Google can do is really off the scale. Our studies show that Google can take a 50-50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90-10 split with no one knowing they had been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail,” the research continued.

“It has to do with those search suggestions. Literally from the very first character that you type into the search bar you are being manipulated,” Epstein said. “And we’ve done 16 months of experiments. We’ve done all the research now and we know exactly how this works… The threat is absolutely, positively profound.”

Read the rest here or watch the video. Please share with all your social media friends.

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E-Censorship

 art credit: 2012patriot.wordpress.com

Most days I visit several news aggregators to find reports, analyses, and commentary. A couple of weeks ago, one of the aggregators, Lucianne.com, was down for several days. It wasn’t the first time it went down, and I wonder about why it happened. For the last two days, another aggregator, Politipage, has gone blank. Hmm. Maybe these were just technical crashes. Both these aggregators lean conservative.

In what are probably related developments, some prominent conservative voices have been demonetized or blocked from Facebook or other platforms. Among them are Diamond and Silk, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Avi Yemini.

Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today titled “When Digital Platforms Become Censors: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants say that they’re open forums. What happens when they start to shut down voices they consider beyond the pale?”:

Call 2018 the “Year of Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media.

That’s his opener. The rest of his commentary is here.

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Tech Giants War on Free Speech

art credit: pamelageller.com

Are we losing our First Amendment Rights?

In case you don’t follow Pamela Geller, she specializes in defending the right to free speech and, in particular, threats to free speech presented by jihad and sharia law. Geller is fearless, and she is under perpetual death threats.

Quite recently, subsequent to the Southern Poverty Law Center putting another target on her back, her access to PayPal was withdrawn. Enough readers complained, and PayPal backed down and restored access. Now it’s Google search drives and YouTubes that are limiting her right to free speech. 

If you do not bookmark her website, you might never hear about this. Jihad and sharia law may not be your particular focus, but your right to free speech is probably toward the top of your priority list. It would be for any Tea Party person. We already know that under the previous administration, the weaponized IRS targeted all sorts of conservative and liberty groups. It's getting worse.

Check out Pamela Geller’s chilling Sept. 2 report here. A few extracts:

My website and posts have been scrubbed from Google search. Fourteen years and over forty thousand posts. Google Adsense has banned my account. Google is blacklisting and has admitted to working with alt-left smear groups to silence opposition. And it’s not just me, it’s all criticism of jihad and sharia.

Facebook has blocked my news-feed. My twitter account is shadowbanned. I have been blocked from uploading videos to YouTube [as] punishment for 2007 video on jihad (and YouTube demonetized all of my videos). Paypal suspended me until an outpouring of condemnation and outrage forced a reversal.

Is this really America?

Read her full report here. Scroll down the article for readers' suggestions on what we can be doing to reverse these dangerous developments. It’s OUR problem!

And for Geller’s equally chilling report on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Aim in Life to Destroy These Groups Completely,” click here.

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