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

you’re reading too much into my response, I just haven’t been following what “GOP lawmakers” have been doing or not doing . Where? on what level? state, local, federal? I

 

I’ll do that, in the middle of a bunch of stuff at the moment. Thanks

 

"Spanish Politician Suspended On Twitter After Responding To Transgender Story With 'A Man Cannot Get Pregnant'":

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/06/...sgender-story-with-a-man-cannot-get-pregnant/

June 7 2021 11:44 AM
Spanish Politician Suspended On Twitter After Responding To Transgender Story With “A Man Cannot Get Pregnant”
by jonathanturley

The expanding censorship on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook continue to be a major issue in the United States. However, the same debate is occurring in Europe despite a long erosion of free speech values. In Spain, a far-right politician was locked out by Twitter after saying “a man cannot get pregnant” because they have “no uterus or eggs.” Francisco José Contreras, deputy to Spain’s Vox Party, made the response to an article about a transgender male who the birth of a baby girl. The remark was deemed hate speech by Twitter.

Contreras said in a Facebook post on May 11 that he had received a message from Twitter which informed him that he had violated its policies on “hate speech” and explained “The hateful tweet (which I was forced to delete) was one that said: ′’A man cannot get pregnant. A man has no womb or eggs.’ You can see this is already fascist biology. Next time I’ll try 2 + 2 = 4.”

Personally, I found Contreras’ posting to be nasty, demeaning, and gratuitous. This couple was celebrating the birth of their new child. However, this is an example of how the solution to bad speech is more and better speech — not censorship. There are many who share this view which has deep political, religious, and social foundations. Rather than simply responding to such comments, many want to stop others from speaking or hearing such views.

In response, Contreras’ supporters started #AManCannotBePregnant.

This is not the first run-in for the Vox party. The party’s account was suspended in January for claiming that high crime rates were tied to North African immigrants.

Last year, we discussed how Norway criminalized hate speech toward transgender people in their private homes or private conversations.

For free speech advocates, we need to educate the American public on where this road leads and why we need to stay faithful to our core values. What is at stake is the very right that has long defined us as a nation. Once we cross the Rubicon into speech criminalization and controls, Europe has shown that it is rarely possible to work back to liberties lost. We are moving into potentially the most anti-free speech period of American history — and possibly the most anti-free speech Administration. Many politicians are already arguing for citizens to give up their free speech rights in forums like the Internet. With the media echoing many of these anti-free speech sentiments, it will require a greater effort of those who value the First Amendment and its core place in our constitutional system.
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related

 

"If Twitter Is A ‘Human Right,’ Why Does It Censor?":

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/10/if-twitter-is-a-human-right-why-does-it-censor/

excerpt:

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more at the link

 

"Why Did YouTube Remove This Reason Video?":

https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-reason-video/

excerpt:

. . . While YouTube, as a private company, is within its rights to decide what to carry, the decision to remove this video illustrates a disturbing, censorial trend that has accelerated in the age of COVID.

For years, I have covered biotechnology's potential to improve our well-being and to liberate us from the constraints of our own biology. My reports have explored everything from lab-grown meat that could profoundly improve the global food supply to mail-order CRISPR kits that hand the keys to the genome to any biohacker bold enough to grab them.

The latter project introduced me to the world of biohackers: a grassroots movement of professional scientists, students, and hobbyists who contend that cutting-edge biology can occur outside large government and corporate laboratories.

"Are people dying and suffering needlessly because of all these committees and all these rules?" Josiah Zayner, founder of the biotech company The Odin, explained to Reason in 2016. "And what if people just say, '**** you, I'm going to do it anyway'? And what if people start getting cured?"

My interest in this defiant subculture led me to the story of a rogue biologist raising money to create a "knock-off" version of one of the various mRNA or DNA coronavirus vaccines in development in early March 2020. I contacted this individual, whose credentials and initial seed funding I was able to verify, and Reason agreed to his condition of anonymity because of his fear of retribution from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"If someone is trying to develop and distribute an unapproved medicine, [the FDA] will come down hard, and they have," he told Reason in March 2020. "It's a severe risk to our livelihoods outside of this project if we were to be deanonymized."

The result was my video, which points out that synthetic DNA and mRNA vaccines were, at the time, brand new territory—technologies that most Americans had never heard of, much less considered a possible solution to a pandemic. As I reported, my biohacker source "acknowledges that most people won't be willing to inject a non-FDA-approved vaccine but believes that if the pandemic gets bad enough they could fill a gap between the time the government approved an official vaccine and the time that vaccine is shown in trials to be relatively safe and able to generate antibodies in the blood."

As it turned out, DIY vaccines haven't played a major role in conquering the pandemic, in large part because of the remarkable speed with which the official vaccines were developed and deployed. But the FDA's emergency authorization for those vaccines doesn't suddenly transform my video into "medical misinformation." It remains a snapshot of an early longshot effort to prepare for a frightening and uncertain pandemic, and it continues to raise questions about whether the future of science needs to be as centrally managed as it has been for the past century. It's a factual report, not misinformation.

Incidentally, Zayner has publicly demonstrated that it may indeed be possible to create a generic COVID-19 vaccine outside of a corporate laboratory, having published results showing an increased reading of COVID-19 antibodies after injecting himself with a DIY vaccine.

YouTube probably flagged Reason's video as part of its effort to combat misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, which is indeed rampant. This exemplifies the problem with broad, automated content moderation: It creates a chilling effect, creating a de facto prohibition on the legitimate discussion of certain topics. Stanford technologist Daphne Keller has documented this chilling effect in other realms, such as the documentation of war atrocities, calling the imprecision of mass automated moderation the "dolphin in the net" effect.

Biohackers like Zayner have been complaining about the problem for a long time. He has seen his company's products removed from Facebook and his livestreams from YouTube. This is bad for free inquiry and for the future of science, as are efforts to suppress discussion of any COVID-19 prevention or treatment besides those explicitly authorized by the FDA.

Meanwhile, misinformation hasn't just emanated from dark corners of the internet. It has travelled from the top down, from politicians—starting with the president—and public health officials, such as Anthony Fauci, who has said that his early stance against face masks wasn't really about their efficacy but about preserving supply for health care workers. Major media outlets preemptively labeled the hypothesis—currently being investigated by the federal government—that COVID-19 escaped from a viral laboratory in Wuhan a debunked conspiracy theory. The World Health Organization initially denied the efficacy of masks, and it became clear early on that it might be privileging the leadership's relationship with the Chinese government over scientific concerns. Yet YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told CNN in April 2020 that "anything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy."

A major lesson of the pandemic should be that there's no guarantee political leaders and public health officials are going to deliver us accurate facts. We badly need skepticism and an unfettered marketplace of ideas to challenge conventional wisdom, now more than ever.

It remains essential to defend YouTube's right to make poorly reasoned and executed content moderation decisions; any government regulation of speech on social media is likely to backfire and hamper the free exchange of ideas. But it's also essential to recognize and critique censorious overreach if we want the market to respond to such errors. And a healthy market response is exactly what we need when the boundaries of acceptable discourse are being hemmed in by large companies susceptible to political pressure.
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more at the link, including the video

 

review of a new book:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...ltivating_respect_for_free_speech_145994.html

excerpt

In “The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech, Progressives, and Universities,” Dershowitz writes, “Freedom of speech in America is facing the greatest threats since the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798, which unconstitutionally punished ‘false, scandalous or malicious writing’ against the United States.” The reason, he explains in his short and bracing book, is that the new censors are in the main “so-called progressives, who are far more influential and credible than the reactionaries who promoted and implemented McCarthyism.” Moreover, the new censors seek to curtail freedom of expression on issues that many Americans already favor, such as the rejection of racism, sexism, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and various forms of disinformation. Further magnifying the danger is that the new censorship is not prohibited by the First Amendment since “it is promulgated and enforced by private parties who have their own First Amendment rights, rather than by government agents who are bound by the Constitution to ‘make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.’”

Dershowitz, who represented the former president in both impeachment trials, believes that Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech to supporters was “ill-advised and justly condemnable.” Yet Dershowitz has little doubt that if the issue had reached its chambers, the Supreme Court would have properly held that the speech was “fully protected under the Brandenburg principle, which distinguishes between advocacy and incitement to violence.”

Dershowitz rejects the common view that Trump was “a uniquely dangerous and evil president, whose actions justified extraordinary measures, even measures that compromised constitutional rights and values.” Not the least example of this way of thinking, argues Dershowitz, was the letter signed by 144 constitutional scholars in early February in the run-up to the second impeachment trial. The professors claimed that “any First Amendment defense raised by President Trump’s attorneys would be legally frivolous.” As Dershowitz observes, it is one thing to say that it would have been mistaken. But by declaring such a defense “legally frivolous” — the Code of Professional Responsibility prohibits lawyers from advancing such arguments and subjects those who do so to the possibility of disciplinary sanctions — the professors, Dershowitz maintains, themselves sought to chill speech by means of specious reasoning.

“The Trump presidency,” Dershowitz emphasizes, “accelerated a repressive trend that had begun years earlier.” It would be more accurate to say decades earlier. Undergraduates whose parents were not yet born in 1965 when Herbert Marcuse published “Repressive Tolerance” today believe, as the Frankfurt School theorist taught the ’60s generation, that tolerating conservative opinions is unjust because they are false and perpetuate oppression. The new forms of censorship — speech codes, trigger warnings, microaggressions, free-speech zones, selective application of hate speech and disinformation and misinformation standards, and now mandatory teacher training that affirms that “colorblindness” is an expression of “white supremacy” — did not arise out of nowhere. They are the progeny of the view promulgated by Marcuse’s heirs in the humanities, social sciences, and law schools — professors who regard themselves as activists and advocates whose principal job is not to understand the world in its many-sidedness but to change it in accordance with an ideology they exempt from scrutiny.

The new censors cannot be defeated by counter-censorship, which would only intensify the problem. Instead, fathers and mothers must take their parental and civic responsibilities seriously by participating in the reform of K-12 education to ensure that students are taught early on and regularly that we learn to formulate responsible opinions by mastering the facts and listening attentively to a variety of points of view. Consumers must exercise greater selectivity in the social media platforms they patronize to impel companies to apply their rules about posting impartially and to treat like cases alike. Professors who know better, but who have sat on the sidelines, must rise to the defense of free speech. Philanthropists and foundations must continue to build alternative educational institutions that prize free speech as indispensable to the pursuit of truth. And political leaders must step forward to straightforwardly explain at every opportunity that free speech is not a luxury in a free society but essential to its health and prosperity.
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more at the link

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first two pages of the Dersh's new book

 

that's fine. you and others still seem to be missing the big picture, but that's alright. the idea in this thread remains the suppression of free speech by non-governmental actors. One poorly written state law does not resolve that larger issue

 

the bigger picture--the forest for the trees--is censorship by non-governmental actors, i.e., censorship that is not covered under the First Amendment. Look at Dershowitz's third point:



that's the big picture

that's the difficult question