[Official] Censorship from governmental actors thread

well, this is just an ignorant statement . . . and she has a law degree

 

New York's Governor Wants to 'Silence' Constitutionally Protected Speech
In response to the Buffalo massacre, Gov. Kathy Hochul invoked a hoary analogy to justify censorship.

https://reason.com/2022/05/18/new-yorks-governor-wants-to-silence-constitutionally-protected-speech/

 

Thousands Swept Up as Kremlin Clamps Down on War Criticism
The arrests are a stark gauge of how the Kremlin has intensified repression of critics. At least 50 people now face years-long prison sentences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/...raine-war-critics-arrests.html?smid=url-share

excerpt:

At least 50 people face prison sentences of up to either 10 years or five years hard labor, or fines of as much as $77,000, for spreading “false information” about the military. More than 2,000 people have been charged with lesser infractions, according to a human rights organization that tracks cases nationwide.

The charges piling up against activists, politicians, journalists and ordinary Russians in big cities and remote towns, from Kamchatka in the Far East to Kaliningrad in the west, provide a stark gauge of how the Kremlin has intensified the repression of those who criticize the war.

“Clearly, the goal was to have a chilling effect on the public and on any critical voices against the military operation,” said Pavel Chikov, the head of the Agora Human Rights Group, which tallied the cases and has helped to defend some of the accused. “To a certain extent it was successful, because people are kind of cautious about how they express their opinions.”

The two laws address slightly different actions. The harsher one criminalized deliberately spreading “false information” about the military, interpreted as anything outside the official version of events. If the actions cause undefined “grave consequences,” the sentence goes up to 15 years imprisonment or an $80,000 fine.
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more at the link

 

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/0...l-media-platforms-to-restrict-hateful-speech/

[Eugene Volokh] New N.Y. Law Aimed at Getting Social Media Platforms to Restrict "Hateful" Speech
Its operative provisions just require social media platforms to create a mechanism for taking complaints about such "hateful" speech; but the title is "hateful conduct prohibited," and it's clear the legislature is trying to get social media platforms to restrict such speech more.

by Eugene Volokh
6.7.2022 3:52 PM

N.Y. General Business Law § 394-ccc, just signed by the Governor yesterday (AB A7865A / SB S4511A) and scheduled to go into effect in six months, provides:

Social media networks; hateful conduct prohibited.

1. As used in this section, the following terms shall have the following meanings:
   1. "hateful conduct" means the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
   2. "social media network" means service providers, which, for profit-making purposes, operate Internet platforms that are designed to enable users to share any content with other users or to make such content available to the public.
2. A social media network that conducts business in the state, shall provide and maintain a clear and easily accessible mechanism for individual users to report incidents of hateful conduct. Such mechanism shall be clearly accessible to users of such network and easily accessed from both a social media networks' application and website, and shall allow the social media network to provide a direct response to any individual reporting hateful conduct informing them of how the matter is being handled.
3. Each social media network shall have a clear and concise policy readily available and accessible on their website and application which includes how such social media network will respond and address the reports of incidents of hateful conduct on their platform.

1. Nothing in this section shall be construed
   1. as an obligation imposed on a social media network that adversely affects the rights or freedoms of any persons, such as exercising the right of free speech pursuant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, or
   2. to add to or increase liability of a social media network for anything other than the failure to provide a mechanism for a user to report to the social media network any incidents of hateful conduct on their platform and to receive a response on such report.
2. Any social media platform that knowingly fails to comply with the requirements of this section shall be assessed a civil penalty for such violation by the Attorney General not to exceed one thousand dollars. Each day such offense shall continue shall constitute a separate additional violation. In determination of any such violation, the Attorney General shall be authorized to take proof and make a determination of the relevant facts and to issue subpoenas in accordance with the civil practice law and rules.

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Despite the section heading—"hateful conduct prohibited"—this seems to just mandate platforms to provide a reporting mechanism, and to indicate how they will respond:. Presumably, "we will not take down any such material" or "we might or might not take down any such material, depending on our own editorial judgment" would be a legally permissible response.

Still, both the heading and the body of the law make clear that this regulation is aimed at pushing restrictions on certain viewpoints, and the mandate it imposes is limited to particular viewpoints. Compare a similar law mandating a mechanism to report "anti-American conduct," defined as "the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against the United States of America or any state, their governments, or any of their institutions"—both, it seems to me, are based on the viewpoint of the speech they are targeting, and both should therefore be unconstitutional.

By the way, it seems that sites that allow commenting, which enable users to share content with other users and to make it available to the public, would likely be treated as "social media networks" under the definition in the statute. That might be the Conspiracy, for instance, or for that matter Reason.com and many others. We are obviously much smaller than Facebook and Twitter, and only enable commenters to speak to other commenters, but that seems to be a difference of degree and not of kind for purposes of the statute: To be sure, we're not Internet service providers of the sort that provide a connection to the Internet, but neither are Facebook and Twitter (at least for most U.S. users).

I therefore have six months to figure out whether to post a policy (which would be "you can complain about whatever you please by e-mailing me at this address, but I will respond and address the complaints entirely based on my own discretion"), or perhaps to challenge the law.

Thanks to Stephen Green (VodkaPundit) for the pointer.
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‘An Affront to Open Discourse’
PEN America and the American Association of Colleges and Universities come out once more against so-called divisive concepts bans, saying they represent the biggest threat of all to free speech.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/06/09/aacu-and-pen-america-oppose-divisive-concepts-bans

excerpt:

The recent wave of educational “gag orders” restricting the teaching of race, gender or other so-called divisive concepts is a dire threat to what makes American higher education unique and sought after. Such legislation is a far greater threat to free speech than any problem it might be trying to solve, and it also risks colleges’ and universities’ accreditation. Institutions must speak out against this kind of government censorship, which is not politics as usual.

These were the major themes that emerged during a Wednesday panel organized by the free expression group PEN America and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. The occasion was the release of a new joint statement from the two groups opposing legislative restrictions on teaching and learning, which notes that 70 such bills affecting higher education have been introduced in 28 states, and passed in seven states, since January of last year. (More states have passed bills affecting K-12 education.)

“These legislative restrictions infringe upon freedom of speech and academic freedom, constraining vital societal discourse on pressing questions relating to American history, society and culture,” the joint statement says. “Legislative restrictions on freedom of inquiry and expression violate the institutional autonomy on which the quality and integrity of our system of higher education depends. In the U.S., the content of what is taught and discussed in higher education classrooms is shielded from direct governmental control.”
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more at the link

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climat...-house-11655156191?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s

Climate-Change Censorship: Phase Two
Now Gina McCarthy tells Big Tech to stifle debate global-warming policy responses.
By The Editorial Board
June 13, 2022 6:46 pm ET

Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition.

A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.

Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

Ms. McCarthy cited the week-long power outage in Texas in February 2021. “The first thing we read in the paper was” that the blackouts occurred “because of those wind turbines,” she said. “That became the mantra.” In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels.

We were among the few to point out that wind energy plunged as temperatures dropped and turbines froze. Gas-fired plants couldn’t make up for the wind shortfall despite running all-out, and then some went down too. Ms. McCarthy doesn’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that renewable energy sources are making the grid increasingly unreliable.

Comparing fossil-fuel companies to Big Tobacco, she complained that “dark money” is being used to “fool” the public about “the benefits of clean energy.” “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast.” Got that, Mark Zuckerberg ?

Merely pointing out technical limitations of lithium-ion batteries could be “disinformation.” Asked whether climate disinformation posed a threat to public health, Ms. McCarthy replied “absolutely” while adding hilariously that “President Biden doesn’t focus on, and neither do I on, bashing the fossil-fuel companies.” The Axios interviewer smiled and nodded along.

Some conservative scholars argue that Big Tech companies could be sued as “state actors” for violating users’ First Amendment speech rights when they censor content at the behest of government officials. Ms. McCarthy is helping make their case.

Appeared in the June 14, 2022, print edition as 'Climate Censorship: Phase Two.'

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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/dems-want-to-ban-telling-the-truth.php

Dems Want to Ban Telling the Truth
by John Hinderaker
JUNE 14, 2022

In a virtual Axios event on Thursday, Gina McCarthy, Joe Biden’s top climate official, urged tech companies to suppress truthful information about climate issues:

“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” she told Axios’ Alexi McCammond at a virtual event that aired Thursday.

“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” McCarthy said.​

“Really jump in” means to ban, suspend, delete and censor views on climate issues different from those of the Biden administration’s extremists, like McCarthy.

McCarthy said that overall, the problem of disinformation has shifted from disputing the reality of climate change…​

No one has disputed the “reality of climate change.” The climate has been changing for millions of years, and will continue changing as long as the Earth exists and has an atmosphere. The issue is not climate change per se, but rather the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming that is in dispute. On that issue, the realists are winning out over the alarmists.

…to inaccurate claims about the feasibility and benefits of moving away from fossil fuels.
***
“Now, the challenge really is, how do we accelerate the solutions we have available to us, the technology improvements that we’ve seen that are most cost-effective, in fact cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

“And what the [oil] industry is now doing is seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with that and whether they work or not.”​

First of all, the claim that “green” energy technologies are “cost-competitive with fossil fuels” is ridiculous. If that were true, then there would be no need for subsidies and mandates–measures that the likes of Gina McCarthy will defend to the death. And energy bills across the country would not be rising rapidly as more wind and solar energy are added to the grid.

And McCarthy doesn’t like talk about “the costs associated with that” because the costs of the administration’s green dreams are in fact ruinous. The impact of high energy prices that we are now seeing is only a drop in the bucket compared with the economic and human disaster that will unfold if the “green transition” actually proceeds. But the Biden administration wants all such discussion censored from social media and from the internet (at least to the extent that Google controls the internet).

Finally, “whether they work or not”–whether the “green” measures proposed by environmentalists would actually have a significant impact on global temperatures–is another sensitive point for the administration. It is sensitive because, on any competent scientific evaluation, the administration’s proposals (and those of any environmental group you care to name) will not “work.” Their impact on climate will not be discernible. Far from being “misinformation,” that is scientific fact that the administration does not even attempt to rebut.

We have here a form of McCarthyism–we could call it Gina McCarthyism–far more dangerous and irrational than the McCarthyism of the 1950s. The Biden administration wants to suppress the dissemination of scientific facts and arguments not because they are wrong, which would be bad enough, but because they are right. And because they are right, they promise to destroy public support for the Green New Deal. The combination of economic and human ruin with suppression of free speech is as contemptible a combination of government policies as one can imagine.
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that's gonna be an expensive kiss

‘Lightyear’ Banned in 14 Markets for Including Same-Sex Relationship
Ban of Pixar’s ‘Toy Story’ spinoff shows difficulty of expanding film, streaming in places with strict censorship regimes, conservative social values

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lighty...ex-relationship-11655319434?mod=hp_lead_pos13

excerpt:

Fourteen markets across the Middle East and Southeast Asia banned theatrical showings of the Pixar movie “Lightyear,” Walt Disney Co. said, after the company declined to remove depictions of a same-sex relationship, including a kiss between two married female characters.

The markets—all in majority-Muslim countries or territories with conservative social values—include 12 where Disney is launching its Disney+ streaming service this summer to grow its global subscriber count.

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Jordan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Palestinian territories, Syria and Iraq have all banned release of the film by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios division.

Some countries, especially those with stringent rules around movie content, typically ask studios to edit out material local authorities deem controversial or offensive. Disney typically refuses to make cuts or changes that interfere with the integrity of a movie or that it views as inequitable, a spokeswoman said.

No decisions have been made beyond the theatrical release stage, and it isn’t known whether “Lightyear” would be shown in the markets on Disney+, the spokeswoman said.

Depicting same-sex relationships or promoting LGBT rights in a movie is illegal in many Middle Eastern countries regardless of how the content is distributed, including in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., where same-sex sexual activity can lead to corporal punishment and sometimes the death penalty.
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more at the link

 

University of Houston Rolls Back Unconstitutional Anti-Harassment Policy
Students sued to protect their First and 14th Amendment rights.

https://reason.com/2022/06/18/unive...back-unconstitutional-anti-harassment-policy/

excerpt:

The University of Houston last week agreed to rescind its anti-harassment policy in a settlement with several students who sued the school and its chancellor, alleging that the policy violated their First and 14th Amendment rights.

A settlement in Speech First v. Khator et al. spells the end of the university's sweeping anti-harassment policy, which a group of conservative students claimed would restrict almost all expression of their political beliefs.

The University of Houston's contested policy described harassment as including "epithets or slurs, negative stereotyping, threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts, denigrating jokes and display or circulation (including through email or virtual platforms) of written or graphic material in the learning, living, or working environment." While some of these actions might constitute harassment—for example, physically threatening a fellow student—others clearly do not. For example, "negative stereotyping" and "denigrating jokes" are clearly protected by the First Amendment.

The policy also noted that such offenses as "verbal and nonverbal slights," "microaggressions," and "annoyances" could result in punishment if occurring frequently enough. The policy even went so far as to note that "academic freedom and freedom of expression will not excuse behavior that constitutes a violation of the law or this Policy."

Not only was the University of Houston's definition of harassment untenably broad, but the policy also claimed jurisdiction over any interaction between "University-Affiliated individuals"—be it on or off campus.

In February, the nonprofit group Speech First filed a formal complaint with the Southern Texas District Court. On behalf of several conservative students, the group alleged that the policy violated those students' rights based on their political affiliation. As the complaint read, one represented student "fears that other students will find his views 'humiliating,' 'abusive,' 'threatening,' 'denigrating,' 'averse,' or 'intimidating' and claim that his views 'interfere[] with' their performance or 'alter' their environment, especially if he shares those views passionately and repeatedly."

On May 13, Judge Lynn N. Hughes granted a preliminary injunction preventing the policy's enforcement. In the ruling, Hughes wrote that "the University cannot choose to abide by the First Amendment in the Constitution. It is not guidance—it is the law. Restraint on Free Speech is prohibited absent limited circumstances carefully proscribed in the Supreme Court." On June 10, this injunction was followed by a settlement in which the University agreed to permanently remove the challenged portions of its policy—and pay Speech First $30,000 in legal fees.

This case is a decisive victory for college students' First Amendment rights. Universities frequently use overly broad and unconstitutional anti-harassment policies to chill unpopular speech. The settlement in Speech First v. Khator et al. shows yet again that public universities' anti-harassment policies must comply with the First Amendment and that schools must limit themselves to punishing "Davis Standard" harassment—unlawful harassment which is "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" that it denies students equal access to educational opportunities.
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more at the link

 

Senators Want To Control Google Search Results About Abortion

https://reason.com/2022/06/20/senators-want-to-control-google-search-results-about-abortion/

excerpt:

In their letter to Google, the senators—including Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.)—give the impression that all crisis pregnancy centers falsely represent themselves as abortion clinics. "We write today regarding disturbing new reports that Google has been directing users who search for abortion services towards anti-abortion 'fake clinics,' also known as 'crisis pregnancy centers' or 'pregnancy resource centers,'" they state.

They call on Google to "limit the appearance of anti-abortion fake clinics or so-called 'crisis pregnancy centers' in Google search results, Google Ads, and on Google maps when users search for 'abortion clinic,' 'abortion pill,' or similar terms." They ask that Google attach disclaimers to crisis pregnancy center websites that appear in search results.

But it's inaccurate to suggest all crisis pregnancy centers are masquerading as abortion clinics. And those that are doing this in a way that runs afoul of the law should be dealt with by the legal system, not by federal lawmakers exerting censorial pressure on a private company.

The latter approach doesn't just undermine free speech and free markets; it's remarkably short-sighted as a political strategy. If senators pressure private companies into excluding speech that Democratic politicians don't like while Democrats are in power, what do they think will happen when Republicans are in charge again?
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more at the link