Freedom of Speech
Peers have passed a controversial new law aimed at making social media firms more responsible for users’ safety on their platforms.
The Online Safety Bill has taken years to agree and will force firms to remove illegal content and protect children from some legal but harmful material.
Children’s charity the NSPCC said the law would mean a safer online world.
But critics argued it would allow a regulator, and tech firms to dictate what may or may not be said online.
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Read MoreThis morning, Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s “trust and safety” (or censorship) unit, offered these stunning words in The New York Times:
It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted.
Exactly, Yoel! I couldn’t agree more. People can be pressured.
That’s why the Biden Administration shouldn’t have relentlessly demanded social media companies suppress users like me who raised questions about the Covid vaccines. And it certainly should not have tied Section 230 liability protection, which as you know is crucial to Twitter’s business (for better or worse) to that censorship.
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Read MoreRebel News is being raided — we need your help!
On August 2nd, the Calgary Police Service emailed this court order to Rebel News, demanding that we quickly hand over a whole bunch of our photographs, audio recordings, and video recordings, or else we could be fined, and Ezra Levant could even be imprisoned for it.
We received that 30-day court order on August 2nd.
By my math, it’s now been 49 days.
And I have no intention of complying.
Because that court order is totally illegal.
That’s why I’m going to court in Calgary to get this illegal order thrown out.
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Read MoreIn a well written article in the EuroNews, Dr Norman Lewis writes that the EU needs to “let the court of public opinion decide what is truth, information or disinformation. For that, we need more free speech, more freedom, certainly not the censorious Digital Services Act”.
A spectre is haunting Europe — not of communism, but of state censorship. In the name of fighting disinformation, the European Commission, through its Digital Services Act (DSA), is about to fundamentally alter what can be said or shared on the Internet, the public square of the 21st century.
The DSA, passed last year and whose major provisions will come into force next month, is a law ostensibly aimed at regulating Big Tech’s control over online content.
Many people have embraced it. Investigative journalist Julia Angwin expressed this well in a piece in the New York Times where she welcomed this “bold experiment” as “the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech”.
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Read MoreThe Washington, D.C., attorney general can compel Meta to reveal users who violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policies, a D.C. appeals court judge ruled. Critics warn of privacy risks and the chilling of free speech.
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Read MoreA man carrying a loaded pistol was taken into custody on Sept. 15 at an event in Los Angeles where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was set to deliver a speech for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Adrian Paul Aispuro, 44, was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster and a badge stating he was a U.S. marshal, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department told The Washington Post.
Aispuro appeared at a side entrance to the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, prior to the start of Kennedy’s speech
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Read MorePastor Artur Pawlowski has been fighting against COVID tyranny since public health restrictions were first imposed. While he’s had many successes in his legal fights, he was found guilty of charges stemming from a sermon he gave at the Coutts, Alberta, border blockade during February 2022.
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Read More“We, the people, must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights”
“My position was just tell the American public the truth. There are side effects to vaccines. Tell them the truth and don’t try to package it.”
That was Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control during the administration of Donald Trump. Dr. Redfield recently went on record that the government health bureaucracy tried to quash discussion about the ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines.
“There was such an attempt to not let anybody get any hint that maybe vaccines weren’t foolproof, which, of course, we now know they have significant limitations,” said Redfield, who co-founded the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology and served as the Chief of Infectious Diseases and Vice Chair of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“I think we should have really confidence and not be afraid to debate the issues that we think are in the public’s interest and just tell the public the truth,” said the former CDC director. This wasn’t the first time Dr. Redfield had been at odds with the government health establishment.
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Read MoreThe newspaper lobby is demanding its $595 million “temporary” bailout be extended with double the federal subsidies. “Address this,” lobbyist Paul Deegan, CEO of News Media Canada, wrote MPs.
“The financial situation for most news publishers is extremely challenging,” Deegan wrote the Commons finance committee. “It will remain so for many in the short to medium term.”
Parliament in 2019 amended the Income Tax Act to pay cabinet-approved publishers a 25 percent payroll rebate to a maximum $13,750 per newsroom employee. The rebate must increase to 35 percent on a higher pay calculation to a maximum $29,750, wrote Deegan.
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Read More130 Unions in Canada are taking part in organizing intimidation, assaults and hate crimes against peaceful protesters and supporters of children.
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