FIRE comment on Free Speech, Elon Musk and Twitter. An Excerpt: In the neverending debate surrounding Twitter under Elon Musk, the distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value can get confused. Free speech culture is a set of norms that support free thought and our ability…
Truly, Russian Spies are EVERYWHERE!!!
I understand that many people have grown up reading and trusting NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo, so their instinct is to keep reading and trusting. To be fair, there is still a lot of good information to be had in these places, but objective eyes will find huge swaths of fact-free insanity about Russia, including the apparent belief that every serious thinker who crosses Democrat Party Orthodoxy is a Russian spy or at least paid by the Russians. It's stunning that so many people paid to be "journalists" spout these claims in the absence of any facts. The ends apparently justify the means, however, so lies and censorship are deemed to be warranted to support one's team. These are very sad days for "journalism" in America.
This is the mental illness with which liberal media outlets and liberal pundits have contaminated millions of American minds. They are trained to believe that, lurking everywhere, there are Americans with whom they disagree because they're paid and controlled by the Kremlin...All of these liberal journalists and pundits -- none of whom has ever broken a significant story, by the way -- know that a large percentage of their followers suffer from this mental illness of paranoia, believing that everyone with whom they disagree is a paid Kremlin spy.
Not a drop of proof is needed to make this false claim, even if you are paid to be a "journalist." Same problem with the "Russian Interference in the 2016 election." Do any of these cheerleaders for the Democrats care about the minimal extent of Facebook ads during that campaign?
Matt Bivens describes the extent to which Russian Facebook postings swung the 2016 election:
Chest-thumping about how the FBI needs to drive the dastardly foreigners out of our Facebook and Twitter feeds was, of course, not new. It was always eye-rolling to anyone who looked into it.
For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.
(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)
For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:
Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)
Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!
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Matt Taibbi writes:
Matt Orfalea didn't lie, alter clips, or remove key context. He made edits faithful to reality and just got a strike for it. Welcome to post-Trump America, where truth is a censorable offense.This is our New Rule: Only Democrats can deny that elections are not legitimate.
See Taibbi's entire distressing article: "Election Denial" for Me, But Not for Thee: YouTube Censors TK-Produced Videos, Again, Despite Factual Accuracy."
Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of the Intercept have just broken one of the most important news stories of the decade. Caveat: You can't read about it at the NYT, NPR, WaPo or NPR (I just checked) because it doesn't fit their narrative. The U.S. Federal Government has been putting enormous pressure upon social media outlets to censor certain stories and push others without factual justification. This brazen censorship being done by social media outlets (and spinelessly followed by corporate media) has long been obvious to all of us who are heterodox thinkers, but we didn't have access to the mechanism for this censorship and these lies . . . until now. Anyone who abhors tribal membership (I am one) constantly sees that social media and corporate media refuse to allow obvious questions and criticisms when publishing questionable claims (e.g., re COVID). What is the reason that so many of us are nodding in agreement at Noam Chomsky's recent comment: "“The United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing and, which in fact, go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.” If you find Chomsky's comment difficult to digest, read the article by Klippenstein and Fang. Here are a few excerpts from the much longer article, "TRUTH COPSLeaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation":
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. . . . .
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