Freedom of Speech
Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta/ Facebook bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to censor content, especially about COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop. He wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation of censorship and said that the interference was “wrong” and he plans to push back if it happens again.
During the last election in 2020 during the pandemic, Zuckerberg contributed $400 million via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support “election infrastructure”, a move that drew criticism that it benefitted Democrats. He said that he will not fund the 2024 election.
Analyst Jeffrey Tucker pointed out that Zuckerberg’s meddling had a profound impact because we experienced the most significant and far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, and it was not part of any serious public debate. The harm caused by lockdowns, masks and especially the danger of COVID vaccines was censored. Elections were biased because conservative voices were silenced. For example, Facebook banned candidate Dr. Scott Jensen entirely from advertising, reducing his reach by 90%. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who buckled to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.
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Read MoreBrazil: Elon Musk’s X refused to comply with orders to block/ censor accounts accused of spreading ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’. Despite repeated warnings, Musk’s platform did not designate a legal representative in Brazil, a requirement under the country’s internet laws. This led Supreme Court Justice de Moraes to order the suspension of X, until all related court orders are complied with, including the payment of fines amounting to 18.5 million reais ($3.28 million) and the nomination of a legal representative in Brazil. In a move to avoid the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the blockage, Moraes said that individuals or companies who tried to keep access to the social network could be fined up to 50,000 reais a day, which is equal to nearly $9,000. More than 21 million people per month used X and it was the largest source for news in Brazil.
Brazilian officials also froze the satellite internet provider Starlink’s financial accounts in the country, which is 40% owned by Musk.
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Read MoreUniversities across America are unveiling new rules aimed at banning anti-Israel protests on campus and classifying criticism of “Zionists” as “hate speech.” Protests that involve encampments or overnight demonstrations are being banned. Rutgers University and George Washington University have suspended its chapters of Students and other pro-Palestinian groups. New York University has new community standards that say using the terms Zionist or Zionism in a derogatory way may violate its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (formerly Facebook) banned Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.
Our college campuses are adopting rules that violate Free Speech under lobbying from Jewish activist groups.
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Read MoreWe need to talk about Julie Sweeney.
She’s a 53-year-old English woman who used to live in Church Lawton, Cheshire, and she once had a Facebook account. Today, she’s in prison, serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted under new Criminal Code provisions in the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
From all available accounts, Ms. Sweeney had—at least until this summer—lived without causing any trouble or having any negative interactions with the local constabulary. Then, on Aug. 3, she lost her temper during the height of the British riots that ensued following the murders of little girls in a Taylor Swift dance class and wrote something really nasty on a local community group Facebook page.
“Don’t protect the mosques,” she posted to the 5,100-member group. “Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.”
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Read MoreIt was in a philosophy class that I first read John Stuart Mill’s Essay “On Liberty,” which spends so much time on the idea of free speech: It is not for views that are popular and approved but rather unpopular and unapproved. We need it because we lack access to certain truths, and so all claims need to be constantly tested. Further, the sheer size of anything resembling truth is so vast that everyone needs freedom to express in order to get closer to the whole.
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion,” he wrote, “mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
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Read MorePavel Durov, the enigmatic CEO of Telegram, once a symbol of defiance against Russian authoritarianism, is now rotting in a French jail. His crime? Daring to keep Telegram a platform for free speech and refusing to bend the knee to the FBI. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, who openly admitted that his social media giant, Facebook, was coerced by the Biden administration into censoring COVID-19 content, remains cozy in his Silicon Valley fortress, free to continue his Big Tech empire. If this doesn’t scream double standards, what does? You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
Durov refused to give in to the FBI’s demands for backdoor access to user data, and now, he’s paying the price. Ironically, it wasn’t “big bad” Putin who threw him behind bars, but the so-called free and democratic West. The charges against him are as absurd as they are numerous—supporting terrorism, money laundering, and even pedophilia. But we know the truth: Durov’s real crime was refusing to allow the FBI to spy on Americans.
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Read MoreIntroducing the top ten stories they chose not to tell you this week.
#10 – RFK Jr. vows to stop the “crime” of chemtrails as part of the Trump administration.
Chemtrails have been repeatedly attacked as a crazy “conspiracy theory,” but anyone who has been paying attention knows that our skies have not looked the same for years.
Beautiful blue skies that we enjoyed so much in our childhood have often become hazy, littered with these long white stripes that seem to stay put, then evolve into a monstrous cloud cover that blankets large portions of the sky.
This phenomenon has a name. It has many, actually, but the most common tagline given to it is chemtrails, which is short for chemical trails.
Geoengineering expert Dane Wigington has been fighting to expose the “poisoning of our skies” for decades.
He insists, “What we’re seeing in our skies are not condensation trails… they are sprayed particulate trails.”
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Read MoreYesterday’s order by Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes to halt the operations of the social media platform X has ignited international debate over free speech and governmental overreach. The order, which spans over 50 pages, cites concerns over the platform’s role in spreading what it deems anti-democratic speech and “misinformation” ahead of Brazil’s 2024 elections. US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr has voiced significant concerns over this move, describing it as a “broader blow against free speech.”
We obtained a copy of the order for you here: Original, English.
In his detailed ruling, Moraes explicitly references global political events such as Brexit and the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, describing them as “types of extreme ‘populist’ outcomes” that his decision aims to prevent. This linkage is critical to understanding the sweeping nature of the order, as Carr points out, “His opinion does not even try to hide it. He comes right out and points to Brexit and the 2016 election of President Trump as examples, in his telling, of the types of extreme ‘populist’ outcomes that he is attempting to avoid.”
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Read MoreThey either don’t grok the situation at all, or grok it all too well but are pretending not to: either way, Democrats are once again on a warpath against memes, satire, etc., and in the same token against constitutionally protected political speech.
All this is happening months ahead of another presidential election.
Here the target is the Grok-2 AI art generator, which X released earlier this month. Now House Democrats have written to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Acting General Counsel Lisa Stevenson in a bid to have it censored.
The seven members of Congress who signed the letter claim that restricting what can be done with Grok-2 is “critical for US democracy.”
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Read MoreThe EU is putting additional pressure on Telegram, after one of its member countries, France, arrested the platform’s co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov.
The EU has launched an investigation into the number of users the platform has in the bloc, and whether the number reported by Telegram is correct.
The importance of this is the EU’s ability to censor using the Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies services with over 45 million users.
In February, Telegram said that their number is 41 million, but the EU has chosen precisely this moment to start looking for ways to determine if this reporting was accurate – or, more likely, try to prove that it isn’t.
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