Twitter’s COVID Censorship

David Zweig's new article at The Free Press: "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy." An excerpt:

The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods.

And it wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.

When the Biden administration took over, its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.

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The European Union’s Troublesome Plan to Clean Up Social Media

Jacob Mchangama, author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (2022) is warning us of the EU's well-intended "Digital Services Act, enacted in November 2022. The stated purpose of the Act is to require social media platforms to

evaluate and remove illegal content, such as “hate speech,” as fast as possible. It also mandates that the largest social networks assess and mitigate “systemic risks,” which may include the nebulous concept of “disinformation.”

Mchangama is concerned that the EU is ignoring the likely consequences of the Act:

The European law, by contrast, may sound like a godsend to those Americans concerned about social media’s weaponization against democracy, tolerance and truth after the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported the European clampdown on Big Tech’s amplification of what she considers “disinformation and extremism.” One columnist in the New Yorker hailed the Digital Services Act as a “road map” for “putting the onus on social-media companies to monitor and remove harmful content, and hit them with big fines if they don’t.”

But when it comes to regulating speech, good intentions do not necessarily result in desirable outcomes. In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that the law is a cure worse than the disease, likely to result in serious collateral damage to free expression across the EU and anywhere else legislators try to emulate it.

Removing illegal content sounds innocent enough. It’s not. “Illegal content” is defined very differently across Europe. In France, protesters have been fined for depicting President Macron as Hitler, and illegal hate speech may encompass offensive humor. Austria and Finland criminalize blasphemy, and in Victor Orban’s Hungary, certain forms of “LGBT propaganda” is banned.

The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments — censors who will enjoy wide discretion under vague and subjective standards. Add to this the EU’s own laws banning Russian propaganda and plans to toughen EU-wide hate speech laws, and you have a wide-ranging, incoherent, multilevel censorship regime operating at scale.

The obligation to assess and mitigate risks relates not only to illegal content, though. Lawful content could also come under review if it has “any actual or foreseeable negative effect” on a number of competing interests, including “fundamental rights,” “the protection of public health and minors” or “civic discourse, the electoral processes and public security.”

The DSA appears to be a blank check written to powerful actors, inviting them vigorously assume the the role of nannies for others, to make sure people in EU all talk properly to each other, as determined and enforced by governments. This is an invitation for powerful actors to embrace unrestrained government-enforced censorship. What could possibly go wrong?

Mchangama warns of the spill-over effect. The Act only applies to the EU on its face, which is bad enough, but it could affect those all over the world, including in the U.S."

The European policies do not apply in the U.S., but given the size of the European market and the risk of legal liability, it will be tempting and financially wise for U.S.-based tech companies to skew their global content moderation policies even more toward a European approach to protect their bottom lines and streamline their global standards. . . . The result could subject American social media users to moderation policies imposed by another government, constrained by far weaker free speech guarantees than the 1st Amendment.

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University of Missouri School of Journalism Embraces Censorship.

University of Missouri School of Journalism has announced that it is engaging in censorship based on comically vague criteria. Excerpt from City Journal:

One of the top journalism schools in the country endorses restrictions on free speech. The University of Missouri’s School of Journalism currently enforces a sweeping newsroom diversity policy that aims to eradicate “reporting that is racist or sexist in fact or in connotation” and to “eliminate nationalistic, racist, sexist and other demeaning remarks . . . whether said in seriousness or jest.” The policy applies to the university’s six affiliated news outlets, which are often staffed by faculty and students.

When asked, the journalism school refused to provide any definitions or examples of a “demeaning” remark. But recent incidents suggest that university students and faculty can encounter severe repercussions if they criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, hang flags in support of the police, or challenge gender ideology. The School’s vaguely defined policy allows university faculty and administrators to enforce speech restrictions as they see fit....

If one refers to the horrifically vague Newsroom Diversity Policy, one can see that the school is laser-beam discriminatory when it comes to students seeking work on-air. The university is proudly lispist, hissist and stutterist.

Criteria for air work will include clarity of diction; enunciation and elocution; well-modulated pitch and tone; lack of lisp, hiss, stutter, thickly accented speech or distracting mannerisms; correct inflection; and interpretation of delivery.

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Jonathan Haidt Joins FAIR’s Board of Directors

Below is Jon’s statement on why he signed up to join FAIR’s Board of Advisors:

The first 50 years of my life, from 1963 to 2013, were the greatest period of social progress and the extension of rights and inclusion in human history. Progressives should have been celebrating success and vowing to continue on toward the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream. Instead, because of changes to social media platforms in the early 2010s, new, terrible, and illiberal ideas flooded into universities, and from there to the rest of our institutions. I co-founded Heterodox Academy to push back against illiberalism in universities. I joined FAIR's advisory board because FAIR is pushing back everywhere else.

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