That is probably the dumbest thing I've ever seen you post. You can't be taken seriously if you really think that way. SMH That sounds like something that Trump would spurt out at a MAGA rally to his Q kooks.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cl...on-musk-twitter-11665006072?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 The Climate-Change Censorship Campaign The left is demanding that social media shut down debate even on solutions. By The Editorial Board Oct. 5, 2022 6:44 pm ET Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.” What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.” Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring. The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes? “We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month. “If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.” Huh. Who else has “partnered” with Silicon Valley? It is hardly fake news, to pick a phrase, to point out that the internet is full of bad information. Amid the pandemic, Facebook worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fact-check claims that Covid-19 vaccines might cause “magnetism” or “alter blood color.” Twitter asked the CDC if it could flag “examples of fraud—such as fraudulent covid cures, fraudulent vaccines cards.” Yet it was also initially dismissed as tinfoil-hat lunacy to wonder if the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Shortly thereafter, experts with scientific standing acknowledged that as a real possibility to be discussed in earnest. It’s a bad sign when one side of a political debate demands to cut off the microphones of the people on the other—and the tech censors these days are almost uniformly progressives. On climate change, the disinformation tag gets liberally applied even to people who agree that it’s real, caused by fossil fuels, and a problem . . . but who also think humanity can adapt, apocalyptic predictions are overwrought, or subsidies for green energy are a poor investment. “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said this summer. Dissent has shifted from climate-change “denial” to “the values of solar energy, the values of wind energy,” she continued, but “that is equally dangerous to denial.” In other words, censorship must increase the more the public resists the climate lobby’s preferred solutions. If Gina McCarthy’s ideas lose a debate, the cause must be “disinformation.” With statements like that from White House bigs, is it any wonder that skeptics of big tech’s power are gaining ground? The left increasingly wants Silicon Valley to deploy its mute buttons as a way to stifle opposition, especially on climate. If the platforms give in, they’ll be begging the next Republican Congress to rewrite the liability shield under Section 230. Sen. Josh Hawleyproposed a bill in 2019 to make internet sites get a federal certificate proving lack of bias. This is a bad idea, but one that the continuing censorship push is doing its best to popularize. Which brings us back to Mr. Musk, assuming his Twitter purchase goes through. His plans for the social site are far from clear, but he has spoken or tweeted in the past that Twitter should be the modern town square and should be an “inclusive arena for free speech.” A good place to send that message would be to shut down the climate censors. Appeared in the October 6, 2022, print edition as 'The Climate Censorship Campaign'.
I have been observing this, and it is disgusting. That's exactly what people like Jacinda Ardern are doing. It's totalitarian, closed-minded, dangerous and evil. "Only our narrative must be allowed. Every other opinion or fact must be censored immediately." Covid was a test run. "Climate change" is next. "Climate change" is a Trojan Horse to force a socialist, authoritarian agenda onto the world. 1984 says hi.
Tech companies that rely on algorithms to promote "information" they think people want to see in order to maximize ad revenues have a responsibility to ensure their algorithms are not skewed towards propagating clearly false information. And that's all this is. It applies to climate change, disease control during a global pandemic, or anything else that can have a widespread impact on the well-being of human society. Telling tech companies to actually censor content that contains misinformation isn't the solution. If someone wants to search for "alternate views on climate science", they should be able to get at it. But if you type "climate change" or "climate science" and the results a user is seeing is not mostly authoritative but instead mostly conspiratorial nonsense, that is obviously a huge problem.
Do you want a list of what got censored as "conspiratorial nonsense" during the early stages of the pandemic, and later turned out to be true? And the flipside of it, do you want some statements by government officials which got promoted on social media, but later turned out to be completely false? The problem with your argument is that someone, usually governments, will determine what is "clearly false information". There are good reasons why the 1st amendment (and comparable constitutional provisions in other civilized countries) protect you from governments pre-declaring what you want to say is "false" and stifling your free speech. When governments use private entities with massive reach to "get their way", the resulting effect the 1st amendment is trying to protect you from is the same (or worse).
Orang Also, can we please not post auto-playing videos...embarrassing when I surf the BBS during Zoom conferences and suddenly the sound comes on...busted.
I highly recommend this documentary! David Attenborough A Life on Our Planet David Attenborough has explored the world for 60 years, and is in his 90's now, I would call him the world's most experienced expert on nature and the living world. He's seen it all, and this film is what he calls his witness statement. The documentary offers a bleak, but hopeful look at climate change, and how we can shape a better future living with nature. You may not believe in climate change, but you can't dispute the story David has to tell. He's an expert on nature, and this video is his testimony of the drastic changes he's seen in our climate, with facts you can't dispute. I suggest you watch this. Seriously.
Thanks, I will watch it (just in a call). For clarification, I am not saying the climate is not changing. What I am saying is that as long as humanity has existed, real or perceived threats have been used to control the population. And "climate change", however legitimate the concern may be, has been hijacked by people and movements who are seeking authoritarian, anti-freedom, Stalinist control of populations.
There will always be fanatics on anything, but David Attenborough isn't one of them. Honestly, this movie is very good!!! I just happened to watch it one day by chance. I have always been a fan of David's research and books.
Whenever I see people make very general statements about movements I ask about things like motive and opportunity cost. Now what would be the motive for this "stalinist" activist? Now what would be the motive for a trillion dollar industry that have mastered the economy of scale of a certain product denying claims that product is harmful? Your world view never asks these basic type of questions. Same with Covid restrictions. So after these Covid restrictions are lifted, did the communist takeover fail?
We heard this same sentiment here about the US using the covid-19 emergency to start and hold onto "authoritarian" power to "control the population". Let's take masking as an example. I wouldn't consider masking mandate authoritarian, but let's just assume it is. It was temporary. In hindsight, we now know it was used to control a pandemic (effective or not, that was the intention) and not to "control the population". But what you said is very true for states with non-democratic or weak-democratic governments. China doesn't count - they were already fully authoritarians. Covid19 just expose to their own citizens how authoritarian their government can be. Countries like Turkey, Thailand, and Hungary do count. Many of these countries used covid19 as an excuse to strengthen their power and assert control over media, political parties, and others that may check them or pose a challenge to them. Some have gone further. Hungary's Orban secured an indefinite state of emergency that enables him to rule by decree. But fortunately, that's not the case here in the US, Canada, and most western democracies. This shows why having a strong democracy should be a top priority. Why authoritarian wanna-be leaders should be rejected. Why some (me included) are very concerned with the US declining democracy due to Trump, his enablers, and the Republican party as a whole transitioning over to Trumpism and their ongoing push to de-power the public through voting rights restrictions, attempt to shift all election power to the legislator and remove all check on them by the judiciary, and their fight to delegitimate elections.
A 30 year "debate" sounds like a generation's worth of sandbagging to me. Frogs in a boiling pot anyone?
Again, while I do understand and largely agree with the concerns about Trump, more restrictions on actual civil liberties have been coming from the left than the right. Jacinda, Trudeau, Newsom, etc. - they are more like China than Sweden and DeSantis.
The fool already has the answer…. DeSantis defeated the Covid communists/stalinists from enacting their master plan. These people’s simple minded thinking is easy to predict.
I think any government in power is terrified by any potentially destabilizing event and will do a lot of questionable things. Could be a pandemic. Could be terror cells banked by stateless actors. Most are usually shrouded as a security issue. Much harder to swallow when tensions from both sides are higher while income inequality is deepening. This doesn't feel like a right-left issue. It's being framed as one in order to divide people demanding powers that were taken from them decades ago.
