Freedom Of Speech - Global Edition
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
Europe’s plot to regulate political speech in America
Some in this country have the same taste for speech-regulation. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.
In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans.
The EU immediately responded by threatening Musk with confiscatory penalties against not just his company but himself. He would have to resume massive censorship or else face ruin.
It was a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The anti-free speech movement had finally found the one man who could not be bullied, coerced or threatened into submission.
Musk’s defiance has only magnified the unrelenting attacks against him in the media, academia and government. If Musk can be broken, these figures will once again exercise effective control of over a large swath of speech globally.
This campaign recently came to a head when Musk had the audacity to interview former president Donald Trump. In anticipation of the interview, one of the most notorious anti-free speech figures in the world went ballistic.
European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”
While offering a passing nod to the freedom of speech, he warned Musk that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events.” In other words, be afraid, be very afraid.
Musk responded with “Bonjour!” and then suggested that Breton perform a physically challenging sexual act.
To recap, the EU is now moving to force censorship upon American citizens to meet its own demands of what is false, demeaning or inciting. And that includes censorship even of our leading political candidates for the presidency.
The response from the Biden administration was not a presidential statement warning any foreign government from seeking to limit our rights or even Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling the EU ambassador to his office for an expression of displeasure.
That’s because Biden and Harris are not displeased with but supportive of letting the EU do what they are barred from doing under our Constitution. This administration is arguably the most anti-free speech government since John Adams signed the Sedition Act. They have supported a massive system of censorship, blacklisting and targeting of opposing voices. Democratic members have given full-throated support for censorship, including pushing social media companies to expand in areas ranging from climate control to gender identity.
Politico ran an update story yesterday headlined, “France charges Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, releases him on €5M bail.” Telegram’s chief executive was indicted on six charges and must remain in France. He must report in person to a local police station two times a week.
Durov was charged with managing an online platform to “enable” illegal transactions and “complicity” with child pornography, drug trafficking, and “online hate.” He’s not been accused of doing any of those things himself or even knowing about them.
The article didn’t discuss why other platforms like Facebook aren’t also being investigated.
It’s not like there isn’t abundant evidence that Facebook is doing just what Telegram is accused of doing, but worse. In late December, New Mexico sued Facebook civilly (for money) but didn’t charge anyone criminally:
The Facebook suit doesn’t just allege illegal material on the platform. The lawsuit claims that Instagram and Facebook included features deliberately designed to hook children and contribute to a youth mental health crisis.
In fact, New Mexico’s Attorney General told the judge that the case was not about hosting content at all. Instead, it is about Meta actively and intentionally pushing illegal material—far beyond what Durov’s been accused of doing. Still, no criminal charges have been filed against Meta. And even New Mexico’s tepid civil lawsuit does not include the platform’s chief executive. In March, a New Mexico judge dismissed Facebook’s CEO from the lawsuit.
I can’t wait to find out why Telegram is different.
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Back in early August, Elon Musk and social media site Rumble filed suit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). The lawsuit must've had teeth, because shortly after it was filed, GARM disbanded. Which tells us Elon Musk is not a guy you want to mess around with.
But in Brazil, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes hasn't gotten that memo. He's got Elon Musk in his sights, and is threatening to shut down X in the country if Musk doesn't comply.
It started with orders to comply with de Moraes' demands for censorship and the turning over of private information, and Musk responded by closing the X office in Brazil:
But in Brazil, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes hasn't gotten that memo. He's got Elon Musk in his sights, and is threatening to shut down X in the country if Musk doesn't comply.
It started with orders to comply with de Moraes' demands for censorship and the turning over of private information, and Musk responded by closing the X office in Brazil:
Now that August is in the can, only two months remain until the most consequential election since Abe Lincoln was elected the first Republican President, starting a shocking stovepipe hat trend on men the Lincoln generation will never forget. Plus the whole Civil War and freeing the slaves thing. But this year is arguably even bigger than that consequential 1860 election, since this November’s election in the U.S. will probably be the most consequential election for the entire world.We can clearly see forming the battle lines of the globalists’ counter-attack: worldwide censorship.
Let’s begin with two major speech disclosures this week. The first was a less-noticed interview. Former Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) reporter Marianne Klowak spoke recently at the National Citizens’ Inquiry (a Canadian anti-mandate group). Her talk was more of a confessional, as her tense voice dramatically described the irresistible pressure on reporters to conform during the pandemic and help spread government propaganda and misinformation.
For instance, Marianne explained how she was made to ignore vaccine-injured citizens who contacted her directly for help getting their stories out:
YouTube: Former CBC reporter Marianne Klowak admits that the media manipulated citizens during the pandemic (2:35).
More well-covered was an astonishing letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent this week to Congressman Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Remarkably, the letter has received wide media coverage, such as in a USA Today op-ed headlined, “Republicans were right: Zuckerberg admits Biden administration censored your Facebook feed.”
Like Marianne’s clip, Zuckerberg’s letter was similarly confessional, since it began by admitting that during the pandemic, Facebook allowed the government to control the information it was permissible for U.S. citizens to receive. From Zuck’s letter:
Although Zuckerberg commendably owned the blame for bowing to the pressure, it’s not quite that simple. The government strongly suggested censorship, and Facebook understandably yielded to that pressure. This two-stepping was just a thinly disguised charade designed to give Biden’s officials plausible deniability that they never directly censored anybody. It’s just a dumb cover story and nobody believes it.
What big tech company could resist focused government pressure? That’s a nice platform you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it, cough, TikTok, cough. TikTok resisted and failed. Musk continues to resist, and he’s paying the price.
Anyway, and this may be the more significant point, Zuckerberg also expressed “regret” about demoting the true Hunter Biden laptop story, and disclosed that the FBI’s warning was not about the laptop per se, but more broadly about “Russian disinformation” related to the “Biden family and Burisma.”
Meaning, Biden’s bribery problems.
In other words, just like in any tinpot dictatorship, the Biden Administration successfully misused its domestic police force, the FBI, to control information about any politically embarrassing topic, not just “dangerous health misinformation” related to the pandemic.
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Marianne Klowak and Mark Zuckerberg’s tardy confessions were welcome, but they were merely a garnish on the tableau we’re currently watching unfold around the Western world, as it races to achieve peak authoritarianism. Yesterday, CNN ran a story headlined, “Brazil begins to block X as Elon Musk’s feud with judge deepens.”
Straight from central casting (villains department) comes Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who appears to be a Brazilian law unto himself. The dispute began last month when Moraes ordered Twitter/X to subject itself to government controls or face criminal prosecution.
In response to those threats, Elon Musk refused to comply. The space billionaire promptly closed X’s offices in Brazil, to protect the company’s workers from being arrested. Judge de Moraes then ordered all of Starlink’s Brazilian bank accounts to be frozen, even though StarLink is a completely different company than Twitter with a completely different ownership structure—apparently just because Musk was involved.
Now it’s personal.
Musk then announced that StarLink, now unable to collect user fees, would provide internet service to Brazilians for free. De Moraes responded by ordering a bankrupting daily fine against any Brazilian citizen who accesses Twitter through StarLink or any other way. No Twitter for you!
“De Moraes’ defenders,” CNN reported, “have said his actions aimed at X have served to protect democracy.” Because, of course, the last thing democracy needs these days is citizens informing themselves outside of official government-controlled channels.
Brazil is becoming only the latest jurisdiction where free speech and free thought are under relentless assault by Western governments that were ostensibly originally organized to protect those very rights. Our survey begins by noting the developments in the birthplace of modern Western Civilization, Great Britain. Headline from yesterday’s UK Spectator:
How about Canada, that freedom-loving country where U.S. liberals used to flee to avoid being drafted? Last month’s headline from the Atlantic:
Or consider France, whose official slogan is “liberté, égalité, fraternité” —the first of which, liberté, means “freedom.” This week, French authorities criminally charged —meaning, a potential prison sentence— Telegram’s founder, for derivative speech offenses France was criticized this week by no less ironically a source than the (anti-Putin) Moscow Times:
Next, see Germany. July headline from Jurist:
In June, EU President Ursula von Leyen darkly warned that the “core tenets of our democracy” were under threat, so she unveiled plans for a “European Democracy Shield” — to counter online disinformation and foreign interference.
It’s going great! Headline, also from June, from Tech Policy Press:
Unsurprisingly, the study cited by Tech Policy’s article found that almost all speech censored by official government action in the EU wasn’t even illegal — not even under those country’s draconian speech laws:
How could this happen? How did we get here? First of all, during the pandemic, the government of the freedom-loving United States of America taught all these other governments how it’s done. Second, when you give unaccountable bureaucrats any laws to censor citizens, such as pandemic-era disinformation laws, they will always twist the speech laws to conform to whatever political shape is required to meet the needs of the controlling party’s next election cycle.For instance, just two weeks ago, we watched EU technocrats try to twist their hate speech laws to stop Europeans from watching Elon Musk’s interview with President Donald Trump. They threatened Musk with the vague charge of “amplification of harmful content.” Fortunately, Musk told them to bugger off. Headline from Politico:
The fact that any speech law, sooner or later (usually sooner) will ultimately be abused is the precise reason why the Founders were so very perfectly clear when they drafted the First Amendment of our Constitution. In relevant part, it says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
No. Law. Zero, zilch, nada.
None. No laws. Not for hate speech, disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, or any other kind of speech inconvenient to the narrative, no matter how unfairly critical of the government it may be.
That’s why the U.S., more and more, once again, despite all odds and internal enemies, is becoming the world’s final, shaky redoubt of freedom. Because outside America, where our Constitution’s grace does not extend, the dark night of fascism falls once more, dimming the light of liberty to a faint flicker.
That’s why the upcoming U.S. election is also the most important election facing Brazilians, English, French, Germans, and all the rest, even though they won’t get to vote. (Well, not unless they illegally crossed the border and got hooked up with a good NGO, but that’s a different story.)
If America falls, liberty’s faint flicker will be fully and finally extinguished, social media will become neo-Pravda, and the world will fall into murky blackness where people routinely get jailed for tweeting a meme.
Having failed to cough up a new pandemic with which to plague the 2024 election cycle, global censorship has become the globalists’ last gasp. To me, it resembles another pandemic-style overreach, and, I believe, is doomed to fail. But they’re not going down without a fight.
The best news of all is that the enemies of freedom are terrified of free speech because it works. It’s our most effective weapon, and it’s the easiest weapon to deploy, because all we need do is keep talking.
They want a fight? A fight is exactly what they are going to get. Bring it.
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Today's "1984"-type totalitarianism is more dangerous than the "tanks and torture"-type of totalitarianism in the past. There is no need to rig elections or overthrow governments if the ruling party, the media, and state-sponsored NGOs control the information environment.
Yesterday, some criticized my claim that Brazil is now, effectively, a dictatorship. After all, they pointed out, it has free and fair elections and a balance of powers. It has an independent judiciary and Senate, whose president can impeach Supreme Court justices. And the government is not persecuting, incarcerating, and torturing political dissidents.
But Brazil is not a democracy. It is a nation ruled by two men, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and President Lula. Moraes apparently controls Brazil’s Senate President by abusing his powers. And Lula endorsed Moraes’ actions this morning.
According to Brazilian legal experts, Moraes’ censorship demands of X, his summons to X on Wednesday, and his freezing Starlink’s bank accounts yesterday are all brazenly illegal and unconstitutional acts.
Why do I think that Zuckerberg's sudden about-face has more to do with protecting himself than freedom of speech.
Maybe the Epstein guest list being published?Nooo Really ?
what does a man that rich have to fear
Chopticon64
Well-Known Member
The Catholic Church abused thousands of boys and yet millions still attend weekly and give hundreds of millions a year.
No one is going to care who is on the Epstein list, they will all look the other way.
PJay
Well-Known Member
Including you?
Chopticon64
Well-Known Member
PJay
Well-Known Member
False.
Chopticon64
Well-Known Member
Whatever
How does Epstein effect Kamala, Walz, or heck even Biden?
Why aren’t you focused on dismantling the Catholic Church which over decades molested thousands of kids?