[NCAC] PRIVATE CENSORSHIP – FIGHTING SUPPRESSION OF SPEECH BY NON-GOVERNMENTAL ACTORS

have not had the opportunity to watch this yet, but related to this thread

 

Watched this and it was excellent. Highly recommend it

 

What I learned when Linkedin suppressed my post

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/19/what-i-learned-when-linkedin-suppressed-my-post/

excerpt:

. . . This is a forbidding message, as it's intended to be. If you follow the "Learn more" link you eventually come to the standards for restricting or removing accounts, which tells you, "If we determine that an account, or content posted to that account, violates the Professional Community Policies or the User Agreement, we may remove the content or place a restriction on your account. Depending on the severity of the violation, your account may be restricted indefinitely." (Emphasis added). In short, Linkedin was telling me that it might lock me out of its service if I repeated my offense.

The Linkedin message worried me. I've got more than 5000 contacts on Linkedin, and I use it in business almost every day. Losing my account would be a blow.

Nonetheless. I hadn't been bullied by such a clueless authoritarian since high school. So instead of moving on to some less fraught topic I doubled down, posting five variants of my original post. The idea was to see exactly what it was about my original post that triggered Linkedin's antibodies. I began by simply posting "The straight news version: The Hunter Biden laptop was genuine and scandalous, according to the Daily Mail." Then I added a link to the Daily Mail story. Then I added commentary: "Social media suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story in the middle of the 2020 election campaign. Now we know that the story they suppressed was true." In the fifth post, I was more pointed: "Social media won't let you talk about election interference in 2020. Maybe that's because it was social media that interfered in the election by suppressing a true story that would have hurt Joe Biden." And, finally, I reposted the original, which said the same thing as the fifth, but talked about "rigging" rather than "interfering with" the election.

I thought there was a real possibility that Linkedin would deplatform me for the same reason the vice principal used to discipline me in high school – my palpable lack of respect for authority. But it was a risk I was willing to take in the name of science – trying to figure out exactly what triggered Linkedin's content suppression machinery. To cut to the chase, Linkedin left up all of my posts except the one that repeated the original post. That came down, and I again was warned about Linkedin's professional standards.

What did I learn? First, I am grateful to Linkedin for a chance to recapture my youth, if only for a few hours. Second, Linkedin and its corporate parent, Microsoft, has some explaining to do. (Brad Smith, I'm talking to you.) The most charitable assessment of its policy is that it adopted a lame algorithm that suppresses claims of election rigging of any kind, no matter whether they are charges that Venezuela tampered with our voting machines or arguments that Silicon Valley used its platform power to defeat Trump. The scariest possibility is that, having first joined in suppressing stories that hurt Biden in 2020, Linkedin is now suppressing stories that criticize its role in suppressing stories that hurt Biden.

I'm guessing that a lame algorithm is the real culprit. But frankly, I and anyone else censored by Linkedin deserves to know how that happened. That's why we need laws requiring social media to provide far more transparency and better appeal procedures when they suppress content. But such laws alone do not seem adequate to the threat.

To be clear, Linkedin, or some algorithm, or some contract employee in Arizona or the Philippines, decided that there were some views about an American Presidential election that I could not express, even to my friends. Really? That's the real offense to American free speech values. Linkedin added insult to injury when it failed to say why it didn't like my speech, but that insult carried an injury of its own: It chilled (or tried to) anything I might say in future on that topic. A prudent man wouldn't have put up any of my followon [sic] posts.

That chilling effect probably helps explain why no American media did a story on the Biden laptop after Twitter took down the Post's coverage. Even a reporter or newspaper who thinks there could be a great story in the laptop had to ask what would happen once the story went on line. If Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube suppressed it, the story would go from bombshell to bomb. It would get no reach and attract no ads. The ambiguity raises the already high cost of doing investigative journalism on this topic.

Such suppression is a recent phenomenon, less than ten years old, but Silicon Valley is not done yet. One of my rules about the Valley is "You won't know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who maintain it begin to fear for their jobs."

Right now, social media is printing money. No one fears for their jobs, or even their yachts. But if the move to rein in social media really gathers steam, I'm confident the content suppression tools that protected Joe Biden will be used with even more enthusiasm to protect Silicon Valley itself.
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more at the link

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Twitter Admits To Censoring Criticism of The Indian Government

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/04/...censoring-criticism-of-the-indian-government/

excerpt:

Buried in an Associated Press story on the raging pandemic and failures of the Indian government are these two lines:

“On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. The targeted posts include tweets from opposition ministers critical of Modi, journalists and ordinary Indians.”

The article quotes Twitter as saying that it had powers to “withhold access to the content in India only” if the company determined the content to be “illegal in a particular jurisdiction.” Thus, criticism of the government in this context is illegal so Twitter has agreed to become an arm of the government in censoring information.

Keep in mind that that some of this information could be true and actually protect lives. It is not “fake news” but efforts by journalists and others to disclose failures by the government that could cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Twitter’s policy states:

Content that is demonstrably false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of harm (such as increased exposure to the virus, or adverse effects on public health systems) may not be shared on Twitter. This includes sharing content that may mislead people about the nature of the COVID-19 virus; the efficacy and/or safety of preventative measures, treatments, or other precautions to mitigate or treat the disease; official regulations, restrictions, or exemptions pertaining to health advisories; or the prevalence of the virus or risk of infection or death associated with COVID-19. In addition, we may label Tweets which share misleading information about COVID-19 to reduce their spread and provide additional context.​

Here critics are saying that Twitter is acting in coordination with the Indian government to censor criticism of its response — criticism that could expose “significant risks of harm” from government neglect. Moreover, Twitter does not appear to be merely flagging the tweets but blocking them at the behest of the government like an out-sourced censor bureau.

This is the face of the new censors. The future in speech control is not in the classic state media model but the alliance of states with corporate giants like Twitter. Twitter now actively engages in what Democratic leaders approvingly call “robust content modification” to control viewpoints and political dissent.
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more at the link

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another installment in the Twitter-can-do-anything-it-wants-because-it's-a-private-company department

Twitter Suspends Cornell Student For Showing Embarrassing Picture Of Hunter Biden

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/04/...showing-embarrassing-picture-of-hunter-biden/

excerpt

The student was using a widely discussed image of the son of the President — one of many images that critics allege not only show his period of abusive drug use (while being paid by foreign companies) but also images that could have been used to influence or blackmail the family before they were disclosed through the laptop. It is part of a national news story despite the active effort of many in the media to avoid the story. It would by any measure satisfy the newsworthy exception as would the image of Giuliani.

There is no question that this is an embarrassing photo as are the other photos of drug use and sexual trysts. The question for Twitter is what standard it is applying to public figures and public officials in such stories.

It is particularly concerning to see Twitter (which is responsible for censoring the story before the election) continuing to block discussion and refusing to address the glaring contradiction with other images allowed on its platform. Indeed, that it is the point of the tweet that the lack of media attention is in striking contrast to the “anything goes” atmosphere for conservative figures like Donald Trump Jr.

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