Category Archives: Censorship

Right-wing activists should know that educational censorship, book banning never ends well | Letter  lehighvalleylive.com

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Right-wing activists should know that educational censorship, book banning never ends well | Letter - lehighvalleylive.com

From classified documents to artistic censorship and bogus election audits, the 2023 Foilies Awards recognize the worst in U.S. government transparency  Salt Lake City Weekly

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From classified documents to artistic censorship and bogus election audits, the 2023 Foilies Awards recognize the worst in U.S. government...

Vasan Bala says, censorship is always going to be there, boring to have a black and white discourse | Exclusive  India Today

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Vasan Bala says, censorship is always going to be there, boring to have a black and white discourse | Exclusive - India Today

Republican House shifting tech focus from antitrust to censorship, more investigations  13WHAM-TV

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Republican House shifting tech focus from antitrust to censorship, more investigations - 13WHAM-TV

A school librarian on technology, book censorship and the power of ...  Northern Public Radio (WNIJ)

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A school librarian on technology, book censorship and the power of ... - Northern Public Radio (WNIJ)

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has secured another win for conservatives on tech policy, removing a loophole from a bill designed to regulate the app marketplaces of Apple and Google that would have allowed them to continue to censor in the name of digital safety, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The bill, the Open App Markets Act, protects the ability of app developers to sideload apps onto iPhones and Android devices, bypassing the chokehold of the two tech giants, who control 99 percent of smartphone operating systems worldwide.

Apple CEO Tim Cook looking pensive ( Spencer Platt /Getty)

Google boss Sundar Pichai is masked up ( Drew Angerer /Getty)

An early version of the bill contained a big loophole: Google and Apple would still have been able to boot apps from their marketplaces if they did so in the name of digital safety a term wide-open to interpretation, that has often been used by Big Tech as a pretext to censor conservatives. Even for non-political apps, Apple and Googles current systems represent a strangehold on their businesses.

However, a new version of the Open App Markets Act seen by Breitbart News no longer contains the digital safety language. Sources familiar with the matter say Sen. Blackburn was responsible for this last-minute change. The new version of the bill is likely to be introduced via the hotline procedure in the Senate, meaning it will pass if no Senators object.

Left wing groups such as the Center for American Progress argued that the earlier version of the bill would ensure hate speech and disinformation were not protected because the loophole allowed platforms to take action to protect the safety or security of its users.

The removal of this censorship loophole, which was the number-one point of conservative criticism of the Open App Markets act, would be the second big win for Sen. Blackburn on tech policy this week.

On Tuesday, a last-ditch effort by supporters of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to force the bill into law by attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) failed.

Sen. Blackburn was the first Republican Senator to come out against the bill, which would establish a gravy train of financial handouts and other favors from Big Tech to the media industry, when it was first introduced in the spring of 2021.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.He is the author of#DELETED: Big Techs Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

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Marsha Blackburn Secures Another Tech Win, Removes Censorship Loophole ...

Internal Twitter deliberations surrounding the censorship of the New York Posts reporting on Hunter Bidens laptop from hell reveal the companys management engaging in willful ignorance of the facts of the story in order to justify censoring it on the platform.

Matt Taibbi, the journalist tasked by Elon Musk to reveal the internal communications, explains that Twitter management at the time used the companys hacked materials policy as an excuse to squelch the Posts reporting, but knew it wasnt going to hold. The reason it wasnt going to hold was because the Post explained that the reporting was based on a hard drive abandoned at a computer repair shop, not hacked material, and produced a federal subpoena given to the repair-shop owner to bolster the claim.

Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees (@Jack/Twitter)

Twitter Exec Vijaya Gadde (Fortune Brainstorm TECH/Flickr)

Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth messaged colleagueVijaya Gadde, The policy basis is hacked materials though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, were erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.

Another member of management, Brandon Borrman, then asks, Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?

Jim Baker, Twitters then-Deputy Legal Counsel and former senior member of the FBI, adds, [We] need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that conclusion is warranted.

Baker then admits, per the Posts reporting in the story in question, that there is evidence indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.

But during the time this communication was underway, Twitter did not contact the New York Post to inquire about whether the reporting was based on hacked material, and the story in question explained exactly how the Post obtained the material it was reporting on.

In the story headlined, Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad, published on October 14, 2020, it says that the correspondence between Burisma board memberVadym Pozharskyi and Hunter was contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

The Post published that it had the entire hard drive, which was originally obtained by a computer repair shop in Delaware.

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Bidens home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the stores owner, the Post wrote in the initial story.

The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.

The shop owner couldnt positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunters late brother and former Delaware attorney general.

Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shops owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello.

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.

The Post also published an image of a federal subpoena, showing the computer was in the FBIs possession, after being turned in by the computer repair shop owner, who has now been publicly identified as John Paul Mac Isaac.

Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her atejmorris@breitbart.comor follow heronTwitter.

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Morris: Internal Twitter Deliberations on Laptop from Hell Censorship ...

Over half of Americans believe media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story constitutes election interference, a new survey finds.

The survey from the Media Research Center found 49 percent of respondents said it was inappropriate for social media sites to suppress an October 2020 New York Post report that showed Hunter promised Ukrainian business partners access to his father. Twitter suspended the Posts account following publication and blocked users from sharing the link. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the blackout constituted election interference.

Big tech has come under fire over the past year for censoring posts on hot-button issues. Facebook has regularly removed or suppressed content that suggests COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab. The platform also removed posts from a Gold Star mother critical of Biden's handling of the death of her son. Twitter this month suspended the account of Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) after he referred to a transgender Biden official as a man.

The Media Research Center survey found that the ban on the Hunter Biden story also shaped voters' perceptions of Joe Biden. Almost 30 percent of respondents said they would have been less likely to vote for Biden if they had been aware of evidence Biden lied about "knowledge of his son Hunter's overseas business dealings."

When the story first broke, media outlets labeled it Russian disinformation, even though there was no evidence that Russian agents were behind the story or that the emails had been falsified. The survey found that line has stuck with many voters, with 30 percent still saying the story was Russian disinformation.

Dan Gainor, a vice president at the Media Research Center, said the survey showed "people are finally catching on to how much we're getting manipulated by big tech." He framed the survey results as a reflection of widespread concerns about self-rule, asking the Washington Free Beacon, "How can democratically elected countries survive if big tech decides it wants to pick who wins the election?"

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Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop ...

Jonathan Turley is not only a renowned George Washington University law professor, legal scholar, and Fox News contributor; he has called himself a Democrat whos willing to speak truth to power, and as a result, regularly blasts the Democrat Party and liberal media now over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Turley dropped by Fridays episode of Fox Newss Hannity to discuss the ongoing Twitter Files dumps with an intelligent-as-usual take on the Twitter 1.0 internal documents, telling host Sean Hannity that Congressional Democrats have refused to pursue censorship allegations against Twitter for years:

These files are not just an indictment of the FBI, theyre an indictment of Congress. Congress has shown a steadfast refusal to dig into these censorship allegations, many of us have been writing about this for years. The Democratic members have refused to pursue this, and in fact, Democratic members have pushed social media companies to expand censorship.

The good professor then analyze the Democrats telling response to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorseys apology for the social media companys part in the Hunter Biden story:

In the very hearing where Jack Dorsey apologized for the Hunter Biden laptop debacle, the immediate reaction of Democratic senators [was] to tell him, dont backslide on us, we want more censorship. Well, now, we have, not just censorship, we have blacklisting, we have these shadowbans. All of that is now open to the public.

And so, in some ways, Musk has forced people to choose sides. And I think that some of the anger that you see in the media borders on self-loathing. I mean, theyre having now to embrace not just being censorship apologists, but blacklisting and shadowbanning and also lying, because thats what weve seen for the last three years.

Thats a lot to take on yourself and still claim that youre a journalist or you believe in free speech, Turley said of the media.

Both the Democrat Party and the liberal media sock puppets are between a rock and a hard place as a result of Elon Musks return of free speech to Twitter. The Democrats and mainstream media lapdogs vociferously deny their support of censorship out of one side of their face, yet histrionically almost condemn Musk to eternal hell for lifting multiple suspensions of high-profile conservative Twitter accounts out of the other side.

Meanwhile, Musk gleefully continues to troll the crap out of the whole lot.

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Jonathan Turley Blisters Democrats Over Twitter Files as 'Indictment of ...

Former President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social that The silent majority is back. The question of a silent majority was raised in both the 2016 and 2020 elections as being essential to a potential Trump victory, under the allegation that censorship and social pressure are keeping his supporters silent.

Meanwhile, theres a large-scale movement underway of propaganda disguised as local news, big tech censorship tools that fine people for misinformation, and programs that allow for communal fact-checking. Yet many of these are facing a troubled launch, amid controversy and social pushback.

In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, well discuss these stories and others, and answer questions from the audience.

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Trump Declares Return of the Silent Majority; New Censorship Attempt ...