Tag Archives: free speech

Free speech is your only protection from a tyrannical government

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Let me come back to my articles on conservatism that was published in Quadrant at the end of last year. Here’s the conclusion at the end of the second article, Conservative Thought in the Time of Covid (Part II):

These are the elements of conservatism as it needs to be understood if we are to defend ourselves against the rising socialist beliefs that are its major political alternative.

  1. An individual’s right to be left alone to live one’s own life as one pleases with no interference from government unless to prevent harm to others.
  2. Absolute right to free speech—anyone can say or write anything about anything they like at any time as part of a public discussion.
  3. Market economy—economic outcomes should be almost entirely based on individual personal decisions to produce. The government’s role in the creation of wealth is minimal.
  4. Adherence to a legal and moral tradition with historic roots based on individual rights and freely determined religious beliefs so long as those beliefs are not imposed on others.

The first of these issues gives the government a pass to impose restrictions during a pandemic, since the aim is to prevent harm to others, but the second is the only safety valve – the absolute right to free speech. Lose that, and you have lost the lot. Which brings me to this email I have just received. This is a quote from someone who sends out a number of emails on Covid who tries to suggest that it may not be the greatest catastrophe in medical history.

Bigpond ISP has black listed and banned me. Bigpond are referring to “sender score (dot) org” who initially gave me a low score and now have me blacklisted. Sender score are eves dropping in on all private emails looking for political content and particularly related to the virus and it’s jab. If they don’t like what you are saying they give you a low score. I don’t know what other ISPs are using this mob. I have sent a letter of complaint to the Communications Minister and demanded he do something. As far as I am concerned, what they are doing is illegal. Bigpond are now censoring your private emails.

Came with this example:

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Free speech is your only protection from a tyrannical government. 

This was Part 1: Conservative Thought in the Time of Covid.

PICKED UP LAST NIGHT: We have little idea what is being done behind the scenes to manipulate the information flow. We might get only the occasional glimpse but here is another look at the possibilities in place: The Gateway Pundit Files Official Complaint Against T-Mobile with Missouri Attorney General – Requests Investigation of Mobile Carrier for Blocking and Erasing Text Messages with GP Articles and Links.

In early January we learned the tech giants are using a frightening new method to censor and control what you are able to see, read and discuss online. T-Mobile was disappearing our links. You could not send our links through T-mobile. They would disappear them. Your friends would not even know that you sent them a Gateway Pundit article.

Dozens of our readers sent us proof that this was happening.

The terror tactics being used by almost every government across the world to make fighting off Covid the most important issue which has led to astonishing restrictions in our freedoms and a massive loss of personal wealth, especially amongst the lower ranks of the community can only be resisted if there is access to information flows that contradict the official versions of events. 

Freedom of speech, so that anyone – including Whoopi Goldberg – can say what they believe in public is our only form of protection at this stage.

Censorship is not a form of free speech

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Should a carrier of information be allowed to do this? ’60 Minutes:’ More Than 300 Ads by Trump Campaign Taken Down by Google and YouTube. That is, should a carrier of the views of individuals who have signed up to discuss issues with their friends and with anyone else who would like to join in, be censored by the platform on which their views are expressed?

More than 300 of President Donald Trump’s political ads have taken down by Google and its video platform YouTube, mostly over the summer, according to a report by 60 minutes.

The CBS reporters were unable to find specific reasons for the mass takedowns of Trump ads, a common problem with social media companies, which are often reluctant to explain precisely why a ban or other act of censorship has happened. “We found very little transparency in the transparency report,” concluded 60 Minutes.

They are not just publishers, they are also censors. Why is this allowed? Let me also draw in Wednesday’s editorial in The Australian: Tech titans Google and Facebook want to rule your world, wherein we find:

In July, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission issued a report on the devastating impact of digital platforms. It was the deepest dive yet by a regulator into the predatory business models of Google, Facebook and Twitter, exposing monopoly powers, cavalier approaches to user privacy, pathological secrecy and parasitical freeloading on businesses such as News Corp Australia, our parent.

No doubt News Limited has its own interests at stake, but more importantly so do the rest of us. Moreover, Australia is being looked at as a test case:

The question is: can these giants be brought under control, their dominance checked for the common good? Authorities around the world are watching what happens here. The government’s move will have a profound effect on the future of news media and the lives of all Australians.

This is the reverse of a free speech issue in the usual sense. People didn’t sign up to twitter, facebook and youtube expecting the content of their posts to be heavily censored on behalf of massive corporate entities whose politics is embedded on the far left. We would be mad to let them get away with it, and in the long-run would pay dearly for allowing these censors to pretend they are on the side of free speech.

We need a strategy for dealing with censorship by the left

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You can see this for now, while there are other things you cannot see at all, and do not even know you cannot see them because they have been obliterated by media proprietors as if they are private companies with no need to provide the service they promised once they forced the opposition out of the picture. If it’s not illegal to say something, then it should be illegal to remove anything from twitter, facebook and youtube. The backstory here: Lauren Southern’s Documentary ‘Borderless’ Goes Viral Despite YouTube Censorship.


YouTube reportedly censored Lauren Southern’s latest documentary on the migrant crisis in Europe but it went gone viral nonetheless.

As of Monday morning her documentary had over 526,000 views.

 

Free speech consists only of what I think is reasonable to say

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This is via AP and found in Campus Review: A third of online election news in Sweden ‘junk’: English study. No idea how well those people at Oxford speak Swedish, but this is a very strange story. How would they really know if the information provided was actually “mis-leading” and even more difficult to know, whether these non-factually accurate and biased reports were “deliberate” attempts to mislead? The one certainty, however, is the wish to prevent specific news stories from being read.

One in three news articles shared online about the upcoming Swedish election come from websites publishing deliberately misleading information, most with a right-wing focus on immigration and Islam, Oxford University researchers say.

Their study, published on Thursday, points to widespread online disinformation in the final stages of a tightly contested campaign that could mark a lurch to the right in one of Europe’s most prominent liberal democracies.

The authors, from the Oxford Internet Institute, labelled certain websites junk news, based on a range of detailed criteria. Reuters found the three most popular sites they identified have employed former members of the Sweden Democrats party; one has a former MP listed among its staff.

It was not clear whether the sharing of junk news had affected voting intentions in Sweden, but the study helps show the impact platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have on elections, and how domestic or foreign groups can use them to exacerbate sensitive social and political issues.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, whose centre-left Social Democrats have dominated politics since 1914 but are now unlikely to secure a ruling majority, told Reuters the spread of false or distorted information online risked shaking “the foundations of democracy” if left unchecked.

The Institute, a department of Oxford University, analysed 275,000 tweets about the Swedish election from a 10-day period in August. It counted articles shared from websites it identified as junk news sources, defined as outlets that “deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news”.

“Roughly speaking, for every two professional content articles shared, one junk news article was shared. Junk news therefore constituted a significant part of the conversation around the Swedish general election,” it said.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on the results of the study.

Facebook, where interactions between users are harder to track, said it was working with Swedish officials to help voters spot disinformation. It has also partnered with Viralgranskaren – an arm of Sweden’s Metro newspaper – to identify, demote and counterbalance junk news on its site.

Joakim Wallerstein, head of communications for the Sweden Democrats, said he had no knowledge of or interest in the party sympathies of media outlets. Asked to comment on his party’s relationship with the sites identified by the study, he said he had been interviewed by one of them once.

“I think it is strange that a foreign institute is trying to label various news outlets in Sweden as junk news and release such a report in connection to an election,” he said.

Swedish security officials say there is currently no evidence of a coordinated online attempt by foreign powers to sway the September 9 vote, despite repeated government warnings about the threat.

What could “foreign powers” do that they were not doing themselves. The deep state exists everywhere.

Malicious censorship on the net by Twitter and Facebook

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I tried to open the following article on twitter via my mobile phone – Details of Ocasio-Cortez’s Ties To George Soros Revealed – and this is what came up:

Warning: this link may be unsafe

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/details-ocasio-cortezs-ties-george-soros?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=MobileFloatingSharingButtons&utm_content=2018-08-19&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons

The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful or associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. This link could lead to a site that:

  • steals your password or other personal information
  • installs malicious software programs on your computer
  • collects your personal information for spam purposes
  • has been associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service

Back to previous page

Learn more about unsafe links

Ignore this warning and continue 

I get something similar when I try to open up links to Rush Limbaugh.

Twitter, with 100% certainty, was not worried that my password would be stolen, that malicious software would be installed, or that personal information was being collected for spam purposes. They just wished to deter me from going to the website and reading the article that had been posted.

If they are a common carrier, any and all of this should be seen as an infringement of our right to free speech. Same again for Facebook, Google and any other purveyor of personal views. The phone company cannot decide whether to connect me to someone else based on their judgment over whether I should be allowed hear what other want to say to me or what I have to say to others. Same again that a common carrier should just carry and not offer their judgements.

If it is not illegal to say it, then it should be illegal for them to prevent someone from saying whatever it is.

All that then comes with this: Facebook has TRUST ratings for users – but it won’t tell you your score.

Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets.

This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.

This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ News Feeds.

It’s not clear exactly what users’ ratings are for, but it’s possible they may be used in a similar way.

But Facebook hasn’t revealed exactly how ratings are decided, or whether all users have a rating.

You’ll just have to trust them.

They believe they have a right and duty to keep you ignorant

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Your choices are being limited by people on the left side of the political spectrum who prevent you from hearing alternative points of view because you might think these other views are actually correct. If they thought you would never agree with them, they would not try to stop you from hearing what these other points of view are.

It is an astonishing arrogance that Google, twittwr, Facebook, and other forms of social media – the “they” in the heading – believe they have the right and the duty to keep you from hearing other people’s opinions.

Open debate is the only defence against wrong opinion. Google stops you from hearing the truth at least some of the time, and perhaps as much as half the time. We should not put up with it. Totalitarians keep you from hearing other opinions that they do not agree with. Their aim is to take your freedom from you as best they can by preventing you from hearing opinions they do not think you should be allowed to find out.

Funny enough, you can find both Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto on Google, as you should. You just can’t find all of the videos from PraegerU,

Lindsay Shepherd and Mark Steyn

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On the off chance you think the generations coming through to replace us are in some sense onside with the notion of free speech and an open society, then watch this video. As they discuss, argument from the left is reduced to ad hominem forms of personal attack. Since everything is socially constructed everything must be socially deconstructed. White males believe what they believe because it is in their personal interests to believe it. Therefore, nothing white males have to say has the slightest value so far as understanding the world is concerned. Non-white, non-males have the answers and are the only ones anyone should pay attention to, all the more so since truth is relative and never absolute.

In the video, Mark Steyn talks to Lindsay Shepherd, the Teaching Assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who became internet famous at the end of 2017, when three members of the WLU faculty attempted to destroy her life for having shown a short Jordan Peterson public television clip to her students. She had, however, recorded her interview and then released the recording to the media which stopped them in their tracks, and has, in fact, made her famous. Articulate beyond her years, a product of the modern left though she is, she is a bridge between us and the millennial generation. She describes herself as “the most left-wing member of her family”.

Here as well is the original recording of Lindsay’s inquisition by the faculty at Wilfred Laurier, worth every minute of the 43 minutes it takes to listen to it through.

And if you want to see where this is heading, you should look at this and this. More people in “the shut up business”, as Steyn describes it. However, as one commenter on the MS/LS video said:

Peterson’s command of facts, deep understanding of human nature and group behaviour, and wealth of experience with people in need is a reality the SJWs and post modernists cannot deal with. And it rings true to those who listen to him. And gives them something real to anchor too.

So there is hope, as faint as it may well be.

The Mark Steyn interview comes via Expression, Identity, and the Corruption of the Academy.

What really matters is not what actually matters but who decides what matters

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This is a twitter stream on Big Brother and Protecting Elections which really is not just funny but also relevant and serious.

And speaking of Facebook, let me also mention this: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fake News Problem Isn’t Going Away. From which:

In early September, Facebook disclosed that it sold $100,000 in political ads during the 2016 election to buyers who it later learned were connected to the Russian government. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Mark Warner of Virginia, the most senior Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have said they’re considering holding a hearing, in which case Zuckerberg could be asked to testify.

Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller has made Facebook a focus of his investigation into collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s campaign. A company official says it’s “in regular contact with members and staff on the Hill” and has “had numerous meetings over the course of many months” with Warner. On Sept. 21, Zuckerberg said the company would turn over the ads to Congress and would do more to limit interference in elections in the future. Facebook acknowledges that it has already turned over records to Mueller, which suggests, first, that the special counsel had a search warrant and, second, that Mueller believes something criminal happened on Zuckerberg’s platform. . . .

On Sept. 14, ProPublica reported that it had managed to purchase ads targeted at users who’d listed interests such as “Jew hater” and “How to burn Jews.”

Well they’ve stopped that now, but only after it was pointed out to them. Every new technology not only changes the way people find things out but also what things they find out. I am therefore a free speech absolutist which is why we should make it illegal for Facebook or Twitter and other platforms of the same kind to prevent people from saying things there that are perfectly legal to say anywhere else.