[Official] Censorship from governmental actors thread

this example just popped up on my Facebook feed with a "factcheck" warning. Presumably she might want Facebook (a tech company) to "really jump in" and "stop the spread of disinformation" by going beyond a mere warning and remove this content from the Facebook platform entirely.



on edit, here's the factcheck warning

 

everything you say here is correct, but the main complaint I have is with the call for censorship of "disinformation" itself. Doesn't matter if shitte like this is half true or mostly false or partly misleading or mostly misleading.

and from the two articles cited, I think it likely this is exactly the kind of content she wants "big tech" to censor

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

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

 

https://reason.com/2022/06/22/brickbat-you-hockey-puck/

Brickbat: You Hockey Puck
CHARLES OLIVER | 6.22.2022 4:00 AM

The Japanese legislature has increased the penalty for insulting someone online. Those found guilty of violating the law face up to one year in prison or a fine of up to 300,000 yen ($2,200). Previously, those found guilty of insulting someone online faced up to 30 days in prison or a fine of up to 10,000 yen ($75). The change comes two years after the suicide of professional wrestler Hana Kimura, who was the subject of abuse online after she got into a conflict with another contestant on a reality show.

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S.C. Bill Would Apparently Outlaw News Sites' Writing About Legal Abortion Clinics in Neighboring States

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/3...legal-abortion-clinics-in-neighboring-states/

excerpt:

Say a news site writes a story, "North Carolina Abortion Clinic Near S.C. Border Targeted for Protests," and identifies the clinic. (Assume the clinic is legal in North Carolina.) It seems to me the elements of the crime would be met:

1. The story provides "information … regarding … the means to obtain an abortion," or "information on how to obtain an abortion," because it provides information about a clinic that could conveniently perform abortions for South Carolina women.
2. The author surely must know that some readers will use that information to figure out where to get an abortion, or at least are reasonably likely to so use it: It might be only one in a thousand readers, with the remaining readers reading the story simply for the information it provides against the protest, but that could still be tens or hundreds of women. And indeed the story might, in the normal course of things, mention things about the abortion providers that paints them in an especially good light ("Harvard Medical School-trained Dr. Jane Schmane, who practices at the clinic, said …."), which would end up drawing patients to that particular clinic.
3. The author's employer is hosting or maintaining an internet website containing the story.
4. The story may well be seen as being provided "to a pregnant woman" or "purposefully directed to a pregnant woman," because pregnant women will surely read it, and of course the author wants pregnant women (alongside other women) to read it. To be sure, it doesn't seem to be directed to an identified pregnant woman, the way an e-mail to a particular person might be—but subsection (2) obviously contemplates sites published to the world at large, since an "internet website" would basically never be purposefully directed to a particular identified reader.
5. The news site may well be headquartered in South Carolina, or have a branch or office in South Carolina, and would thus be subject to the jurisdiction of South Carolina.
6. The law appears not to be limited to information about abortions that would be (illegally) performed in South Carolina. Perhaps one could argue that the law as a whole doesn't ban abortions performed out of state, and thus the aiding-and-abetting provision applies only to aiding and abetting in-state abortions. But the text of this section seems to cover in-state communication of information about abortions generally, and not just about in-state abortions. (Moreover, the law would clearly cover stories written about companies that are mailing abortion pills into South Carolina, if the law mentions the company's name or gives enough information based on which a quick Google search can identify the company.)

That seems pretty clearly unconstitutional to me, since it doesn't fit within the narrow Brandenburg v. Ohio First Amendment exception for purposeful incitement of imminent, likely unlawful conduct, both because (1) the conduct that the speech might facilitate would be lawful, since it would be an abortion lawfully performed in North Carolina, and because (2) the bill isn't limited to publications written with the specific purpose of promoting abortions. But such speech seems like it would be covered by the bill.

I should note that a law likely could ban providing specific information to a particular woman about where she could get an illegal in-state abortion. That would likely fit within the "speech integral to criminal conduct" exception, by analogy to solicitation of a specific crime (see U.S. v. Williams). Just as telling a friend where she can illegally buy drugs is aiding and abetting illegal drug sales, so telling a friend where she can illegally get an abortion would be punishable aiding and abetting. But this bill appears to me to go considerably beyond that.
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more at the link

 

New Japanese Law Makes 'Online Insults' a Jailable Offense
Dedication to free speech is in short supply around the world, with Britain and Canada previously considering similar bills.

https://reason.com/2022/07/09/new-japanese-law-makes-online-insults-a-jailable-offense/

 

When 'Pro-Life' Becomes 'Pro-Censorship'
Antiabortion activists are the new Anthony Comstocks.

https://reason.com/2022/07/11/when-pro-life-becomes-pro-censorship/

excerpt:

The National Right to Life Committee (NLRC) has drafted model legislation to provide what it calls "an effective enforcement regime" to stamp out abortion. A centerpiece of the proposal would make it a felony to "aid and abet" abortions by "giving instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion" or "hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion." The law would provide for civil enforcement as well.

These legal tactics and messianic zeal bring to mind Anthony Comstock, the most prominent anti-vice crusader of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Comstock started in 1872 as a vigilante, making "citizen's arrests" of smut peddlers on the streets of New York. But he quickly became, in the words of H.L. Mencken, "the Copernicus of a quite new art and science," one "who first capitalized moral endeavor like baseball or the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors."

Comstock had his own model law, which he persuaded Congress to adopt in 1873. It said that no "obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of an abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use or nature…shall be carried in the mail." This was popularly known as the "Comstock law," and Congress designated him a special agent of the Post Office, vested with the power to enforce the law personally.

Comstock also headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. From these twin positions, he terrorized writers, publishers, free thinkers, birth control advocates, physicians, and artists, jailing thousands and driving at least 15 to suicide. Near the end of his 40-year career, Comstock claimed to have convicted enough people "to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first almost full." Comstock's law targeted obscenity, but in his mind, anything that related to sex was obscene. This covered information on contraception or abortion, including that found in popular home health guides, such as Edward Bliss Foote's book Medical Common Sense.
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more at the link

 

Saudi woman given 34-year prison sentence for using Twitter
Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University student, was charged with following and retweeting dissidents and activists

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ven-34-year-prison-sentence-for-using-twitter

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitte...itrust-11660732095?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censorship
Alex Berenson was kicked off at the White House’s urging. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.
By Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld
Aug. 17, 2022 1:47 pm ET

Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrotelast week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

Facts that Mr. Berenson unearthed through the discovery process confirm that the administration has been secretly asking social-media companies to shut down the accounts of specific prominent critics of administration policy.

On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden: “On Covid misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook.” Mr. Biden replied: “They’re killing people.” (The president later said he meant users were killing people.) Later that day, Twitter locked Mr. Berenson’s account, and on Aug. 28 it banned him permanently.

Last Friday Mr. Berenson published conversations from an internal Twitter Slack channel. Referring to an April 2021 meeting with White House officials, one Twitter employee noted that the meeting overall was “pretty good,” but added that the White House “had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”

Another employee asked: “Any high level takeaways from the meeting? Anything we should keep an eye out for?”

The first employee responded: “Yes, they really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.” The employee wrote that Andy Slavitt, then a senior White House Covid adviser, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” (“Viz” probably stands for “visualization” and “disinfo” for “disinformation.”)

Mr. Berenson wasn’t the only target. At a July 15, 2021, White House press briefing with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, press secretary Jen Psaki said: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. . . . There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of antivaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” This was a reference to the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” 12 named individuals identified in a report by the U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate—a report that Facebook disputed even as it said it had taken action against its targets. Ms. Psaki went on to say of the 12 that “all of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including . . . ones that Facebook owns.” That might have been a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccination, who had been deplatformed by Facebook-owned Instagram.

At the same briefing, Dr. Murthy called on social-media companies to purge more Covid posts: “We’re asking them to consistently take action against misinformation superspreaders on their platforms.” At a briefing the next day, again possibly referring to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Psaki said that if you post misinformation, “you shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

Recent Freedom of Information Act disclosures show that a week later, on July 23, 2021, Nick Clegg—a former U.K. deputy prime minister and now Facebook parent Meta’s president for global affairs—emailed Dr. Murthy to thank him for meeting with Facebook and to report on “the steps we took just this past week” to “further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the ‘disinfo dozen’ . . . resulting in every member . . . having had at least one such entity removed.” He added that Facebook was “continuing to make 4 other Pages and Profiles, which have not yet met their removal thresholds, more difficult to find on our platform.”

This goes even beyond what was happening when we wrote the week before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. At that time, lawmakers had repeatedly threatened tech companies with catastrophic consequences if they didn’t more aggressively censor speech the government disfavors. Congress had immunized these companies from liability if they remove “objectionable” but “constitutionally protected” content, to quote Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

In response to these and other inducements and threats, social-media companies were already suppressing speech about Covid that was well within the bounds of legitimate debate and sometimes proved accurate. Facebook had banned anyone from saying that Covid might have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, or that the Covid vaccines didn’t prevent infection.

When the government exploits these legislative inducements to target specific critics for censorship, it has crossed a constitutional Rubicon. Targeting, punishing and silencing dissenters is the paradigmatic First Amendment violation. The Biden administration is using Big Tech as its private censorship arm, and that violates what the Supreme Court, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), called an “axiomatic” principle: The government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The administration’s behind-the-scenes use of social-media companies to evade the First Amendment seems to be continuing unabated. In April this year Ms. Psaki, who was still the White House press secretary, said: “We engage regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken . . . and I’m sure that will continue. But there are also reforms we think Congress could take and we would support taking, including reforming Section 230 [and] enacting antitrust reforms.” The unexplained pivot to “antitrust reform” here is telling: Censor the “problematic” posts and people we identify, Ms. Psaki implies, or we may break you up under the antitrust laws.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. If in November 2020 President Trump and Republican lawmakers had used threats and private communications with tech companies to remove what they considered “misinformation” about election results, Democrats would have instantly and rightly identified a threat to democracy.

Democracy depends on free and open debate. If government officials continue to deputize private companies to stifle dissenters, it’s high time for federal courts to deliver them a reminder: If it’s state action in disguise, the Constitution applies.

Mr. Ramaswamy is executive chairman of Strive Asset Management and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” forthcoming in September. Mr. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale Law School and a First Amendment lawyer. His clients include Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Supreme Court Asked To Decide if Paid Diet Advice Is Protected by the First Amendment
A Florida woman has been threatened with fines for giving tips without the proper occupational licensing.

https://reason.com/2022/08/16/supre...t-advice-is-protected-by-the-first-amendment/

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-th...covid-instagram-11662761613?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook on Censorship
Newly released emails show tech sites working with public officials, often solicitously.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Sept. 9, 2022 7:05 pm ET

One nagging question in the social-media age is how online platforms like Facebook and Twitter choose to “moderate” speech—and why, and whether the government is leaning on them to step it up. Hundreds of pages of emails between federal officials and the big social sites were recently dropped in court, and they make for instructive, if not definitive, reading.

The civil case was brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that misinformation crackdowns by the tech giants are legally “government action,” since they involve “open collusion” with public officials. In a court filing last week, the AGs posted some of what they have already obtained, which they call “a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’”

Well, maybe. Many of the email chains read like good-faith interactions between public officials and internet companies worried about clearly false information. What raises eyebrows in some communications, though, is an oozing solicitousness toward top White House advisers. This week the judge granted additional discovery, meaning more emails soon.

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The trouble with seeing all of the correspondence, some of which dates to the Trump Administration, as inherently illegitimate is that much of it seems to involve actual misinformation. The White House flags the Instagram user anthonyfauciofficial, apparently someone posing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and asks: “Any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours.” The answer from Facebook (most of the names are redacted): “Yep, on it!”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells Twitter about false claims circulating that some Covid diagnostics were “revoked by the FDA.” Twitter calls the warning “super helpful.” The CDC also flags tweets saying that Covid vaccines contain microchips or that unvaccinated people are at risk “just by being near to vaccinated people.” The Twitter contact responds that “some of these have been previously reviewed and actioned,” and “I will now ask the team to review the others.”

In some messages, a tech giant is doing the asking, especially as new Covid theories keep popping up. Facebook queries the CDC to see if it can “debunk” claims that vaccines in children might cause hepatitis or ALS or possibly “magnetism,” or that they can “alter blood color.”

In replying, the CDC looks careful. Is it a myth that Covid vaccines are ineffective in kids? “CDC can’t speak to this until the pharmaceutical companies have reported data.” Is heart inflammation a risk? “True, there have been increased reports of myocarditis.” The same goes for “Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) in people who have received the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, but not the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

A Twitter worker tells the CDC: “My team has asked for examples of problematic content so we can examine trends.” Particularly helpful would be “if you have any examples of fraud—such as fraudulent covid cures, fraudulent vaccines cards, etc.” There’s evidence here that the big social sites were worried about a Gresham’s law of information, with bad Covid information driving out the good, so they welcomed help in correcting the record.

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More worrying are a few tense emails involving high political appointees who had the White House imprimatur. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden about Covid misinformation and his message to sites like Facebook. “They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

That day, a person the AGs describe as “a very senior executive at Meta” sent an email to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward,” the executive says. Oh, is that why it’s called the bully pulpit? In a text message soon after, the exec added: “It’s not great to be accused of killing people—but as I said by email I’m keen to find a way to deescalate and work together collaboratively.”

A week later, the AGs say, “that senior Meta executive” sent a follow-up email. “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation,” it says. “We hear your call for us to do more and, as I said on the call, we’re committed to working toward our shared goal of helping America get on top of this pandemic . . . . You have identified 4 specific recommendations for improvement and we want to make sure to keep you informed of our work on each.”

Fascinating. After Mr. Biden publicly accused social sites of killing people, what else did the White House say privately? On Tuesday federal Judge Terry Doughty gave the government 21 days to turn over correspondence that the tech giants might have had with Dr. Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and several public-affairs staff at the Department of Health and Human Services.

We already know that Twitter worked with the government to censor Covid commentator Alex Berenson. Bring on more Facebook emails.

Appeared in the September 10, 2022, print edition as 'How the Feds Coordinate With Facebook'.

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The ACLU Says California's Ban on COVID-19 'Misinformation' From Doctors Is Gratuitous and Unconstitutional
Two chapters of the organization say the law violates the First Amendment.

https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-a...m-doctors-is-gratuitous-and-unconstitutional/

excerpt:

The LJC's motion for a preliminary injunction notes the difficulty that physicians will have in figuring out what A.B. 2098 requires. The law defines "misinformation" as "false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care." As written, the LJC notes, "the definition is senseless, as it says that the covered information is contradicted by a consensus that is itself contrary to the standard of care." That puzzling language, the motion says, "suffices to make the statute void for vagueness, for it is incomprehensible."

Let's assume legislators meant that "misinformation," rather than the "scientific consensus," is "contrary to the standard of care," which is how Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to read the law. Even then, "hopeless ambiguities remain," the LJC says.

"Is information false because it is 'contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus' and (or?) 'contrary to the standard of care'?" the motion asks. "Or is falsity a separate requirement? How does a court decide 'falsity' in the context of scientific questions that are, and will always remain, matters of hypothesis and study? When is falsity determined: at the time of the statement, or given how the evidence has developed? What is a 'scientific consensus,' and how is a court to determine it? When is 'contemporary': when the statement was made, or at another point? Whose 'standard of care' matters? Does the information have to be both contradicted by consensus and contrary to the standard of care?"

Consider advice about the benefits of face masks in preventing COVID-19 transmission, a subject on which official guidance evolved during the course of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially dismissed the value of general masking, then embraced it as "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." More recently, it has conceded that commonly used cloth masks do little, if anything, to stop coronavirus transmission.

Imagine a doctor who was advising patients in March 2020, when the CDC was still saying that healthy people who are not caring for COVID-19 patients "do not need to wear masks." Suppose the doctor "disregarded the consensus guidance not to wear masks," the LJC says, "and advised his patients that they needed to wear N95 masks to have the best protection from COVID"—the position that the CDC eventually adopted. "Was that advice false?" the LJC asks. "When? Was it contradicted by a contemporary scientific consensus? Which consensus? When? Was it contrary to a standard of care? Was it all three? If it was all three, but is now none, does it matter? The statute answers none of these questions, all of which are crucial to understanding the law."

That is a due process problem, since the law does not give doctors fair notice of which conduct it reaches. It is also a free speech problem. "Given the ambiguities in the reach of AB 2098 highlighted by the Plaintiffs," the ACLU brief says, "physicians will be loath to speak their minds and share their opinions with patients about a rapidly evolving disease with many unknowns. At any point, the State could determine that a physician has violated AB 2098 for sharing an unconventional opinion and go after their medical license."
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more at the link

 

full article on the California law in the NYT today:

Is Spreading Medical Misinformation a Doctor’s Free Speech Right?
Two lawsuits in California have pre-emptively challenged a new law that would punish doctors for misleading patients about Covid-19.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/technology/medical-misinformation-covid-free-speech.html

 

posted in the Nobody-Cares-About-Hunter-Biden thread, but deserves to be here as well

Censorship by Surrogate: Why Musk’s Document Dump Could be a Game Changer

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/...-musks-document-dump-could-be-a-game-changer/