“Free Speech is Censorship” and “Censorship is Free Speech.”
A few years ago the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) was demanding government regulations that would force internet providers to carry the content of members like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Now it’s suing Florida to fight regulations that would force some of those same members to carry the content of ordinary Americans.
Its latest crackdown on ‘misinformation’ proves the tech giant hasn’t learnt its lesson
Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
The FBI knows that Jacob Travis Clark of Colorado was inside the prohibited environs of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 exactly from 2:15 p.m., the riot’s approximate start time, to 3:25 p.m.
The snitch: Google technology.
Known for its indispensable search engine, the Silicon Valley giant also can track its Gmail account holders.
Tell me again that we don’t live in a surveillance society.
Social networks will be banned from discriminating against particular political viewpoints and required to protect “democratically important” content, the UK government has announced, as its landmark online safety bill finally heads to parliament.
The additions to the bill, based on a white paper first drafted by Theresa May’s government in 2019, would make the UK one of the first nations in the west to require social networks to take active steps to moderate their impact on the democratic process. But there are fears that the requirement could lead to social networks refusing to take action against harmful content in case it is decreed to be democratically important.
“[Sheryl Sandberg] has donated $2 million publicly so far to Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion chain,” she stated. “Big Tech is notoriously ruled by far-left ideologues, so it’s a huge problem when we talk about the fair and open sharing of information, that these groups are basically colluding with the abortion industry to shut down pro-life voices.”
I closed my Facebook account two years ago and I was never on Twitter, regarding it as COVID on steroids. I saw Twitter as a broad thoroughfare for the most vulgar and contemptible people we are ever likely to meet, a digital forum for the SJW mob, and of course, the offspring of a censoring autocrat with no sense of managerial decorum or moral decency. This is not to say that one does not—or did not—meet good and interesting folks on Twitter, but that the palaver is pervasively tainted by obscenities, scurrilous vilification, intellectual stagnation, scandal, and malice. It is a home for everything tawdry, boorish and sordid while whatever is noble or discreet or truthful is in danger of imminent deplatforming.
An account pulled from Twitter for appearing to belong to former President Donald Trump’s newly launched communications platform was not created by the ex-commander-in-chief’s team, The Post has learned.
The 45th president on Tuesday revealed his new website, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” which allows him to provide his thoughts in Twitter-style posts that can then be shared on social media sites from which he has been banned.
Former President Donald Trump reacted to Facebook’s move to uphold the suspension of his account, arguing that Big Tech firms are working to censor Americans.
“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a statement on Wednesday after Facebook’s Oversight Board handed down a decision saying the former president’s account should be suspended.
Twitter CFO Ned Segal Re-ups Pledge to Maintain Ban on Trump Forever
Appearing Tuesday on Yahoo! Finance Live, Twitter CFO Ned Segal reaffirmed that the social network giant will never reverse its blacklisting of former President Donald Trump
Americans turned against Big Tech, according to a shocking Gallup poll. The shift from 2019 to 2021 was drastic with Republicans and independents rejecting “large technology companies.”
A few billionaires currently have the power to decide that some Americans’ speech rights are more sacred than others. Clarence Thomas offers a remedy.
Do your eyes gloss over when you see the words “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act”? Mine do.
Yet the subject of Big Tech’s might — Should Facebook have the power to ban a president? Should Amazon have the power to ban the sale of a controversial book? Should Twitter have the power to permanently bar a user over a single tweet? And if not, what should the government be doing about it? — is both fascinating and incredibly important.
Amazon workers at a giant warehouse in Alabama voted decisively against forming a union on Friday, squashing the most significant labor drive in the internet giant’s history.
Workers cast 1,798 votes against a union, giving Amazon enough to emphatically defeat the effort. Ballots in favor of a union trailed at 738, less than 30 percent of the votes tallied, according to federal officials.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel slammed Silicon Valley leaders for outsourcing vital technologies to the Chinese Communist Party.
Joined by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien at a Tuesday Seminar On China, Thiel said his peers in the tech industry act as “useful idiots” for the interests of Beijing by transferring innovative American technology to the oppressive regime. The entrepreneur and founder of PayPal pointed to companies such as Google that export artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to China, tools used to oversee the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Western China.
Big Tech’s unchecked power serves a moral vision as comprehensive as that of any religion
What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday Donald Trump, as a former president, is now free to block whomever he likes on Twitter — while Justice Clarence Thomas hinted it’s Big Tech that may be due for an edit.
The conservative associate justice warned social media giants that the high court — or lawmakers — may soon have to step in and address Big Tech companies and their free rein to silence people “at any time for any or no reason.”
“They leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. They are the perfect weapon for changing… the outcome of elections”
“Ephemeral experiences”: You might never have heard this phrase, but it’s a very important concept. These are brief experiences you have online in which content appears briefly and then disappears, leaving no trace. Those are the kinds of experiences we have been preserving in our election monitoring projects. You can’t see the search results that Google was showing you last month. They’re not stored anywhere, so they leave no paper trail for authorities to trace. Ephemeral experiences are, it turns out, quite a powerful tool of manipulation.
Are people at companies like Google aware of the power they have? Absolutely… In emails leaked from Google to the Wall Street Journal in 2018, one employee says to others, “How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban?” There is that phrase, “ephemeral experiences.”
