Free Speech vs Censorship

Social media platforms have seen an unprecedented amount of censorship the past few years. Even before this started happening, we saw, on cable news channels, that people who questioned the story the government had put forth disappearing. For instance if you went on a mainstream news show in 2016 and dared to suggest that there was no evidence of Russia controlling our elections, as Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald or Izzy award winner Aaron Maté did on the show Democracy Now, they simply wouldn’t have you back on again. Both Glenn and Aaron had been regular contributors to Democracy Now. Aaron Maté was one of the show’s producers.

Of course we now know, thanks to Wikileaks revealing the emails of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, that the Hillary Clinton colluded with the DNC and many media outlets to rig the 2016 primary in her favor- something which Federal Judge William Zloch on August 25, 2017, held to be within the rights of the DNC corporation.

But then all of the social media platforms together banned Alex Jones, who is a fringe voice to be sure, and not someone I can say that I’ve ever found myself agreeing with, just to be clear. And then Milo Yiannopoulos, whom I personally find repulsive. So it was easy for some on the left to say “It’s just these fringe alt-right voices.”

But then they banned a sitting president. And whatever your take on President Trump, his words or even the January 6th riots, the tweets that he was removed from Twitter for did not even violate Twitter’s rules.

Twitter said that they interpreted the language of these tweets through the lens of the January 6th riots, and used that to decide that these tweets, which again did not violate the rules, were somehow inciting violence. Obviously saying you aren’t going to attend a function isn’t inciting violence, but Twitter CHOSE to view them that way and remove a sitting president from their platform, someone who any media or social media company should be working to make sure gets heard as widely as possible, even if they loathe what he says. The answer to misinformation is information, not censorship. The answer to bad speech is good speech.

When you silence voices, especially popular ones, they seek safe spaces and their followers will follow them, and whatever they have to say will be widely accepted within that echo chamber. This misses an opportunity to provide counter-information. Don’t think Democrats intentionally lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has now been verified by the New York Times? Then provide these people evidence to the contrary and show them what you think is true. Silencing them won’t change anyone’s minds and it certainly doesn’t, as Barack Obama said recently, create any kind of unity. Instead it creates a public image of unity by marginalizing everyone that disagrees, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. I’m not on the right and I can promise you that a lot of people on the left disagree with plenty of what Barack Obama or Joe Biden have to say about a myriad subjects.

So the argument in favor of censorship on social media, aside from the obvious hate of Trump, China or Russia, is that social media companies are private entities and can ban people who violate their rules. This is problematic for a number of reasons. The first is that, as I already showed, social media companies are banning people for posts or tweets that DON’T violate their rules, like Trump’s. Next is the fact that all of the major social media companies got their starts with the Defense Department and all of them have government contracts are intertwined with the government itself. You can see, when the government orchestrates a narrative push, like it did with protests in Cuba last year, that literally thousands of CIA-affiliated troll accounts will materialize seemingly out of nowhere to post the exact same phrases and hashtags, such as #SOSCuba. In 2019 it was even revealed that at least one senior member of Twitter’s staff, named Gordon MacMillan , who had editorial responsibility for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and who had worked for Twitter since 2013, was actually a British Army intelligence officer working as part of a brigade of intelligence officers who were responsible for conducting ‘non-lethal warfare’.

Additionally, there are numerous instances of government officials calling for social media to do their censorship for them. Congressional committees have called the heads of Facebook, Alphabet (Google) and Twitter to hearing numerous times and pressured them and bullied them into suppressing misinformation. But what does misinformation mean? It doesn’t mean something that’s false. Obviously people should have a right to be wrong about things or to have different opinions, even to lie if that’s what they choose to do. You can’t censor everyone who lies about something or made an error. Misinformation means whatever the government wants it to mean. If Republicans are in power (and they WILL be again) misinformation may take the form of anything the criticizes Donald Trump or it may take the form of calling leftists speech against billionaires “hate speech”.

It isn’t just these committee hearings, though. When President Trump was banned from Twitter, he moved to a social media company called Parler, and when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez intimated that Apple and the Google Play Store should remove Parler, they did, and Parler disappeared. White House Spokesperson Jen Psaki has not only repeatedly said that social media companies should be doing more about misinformation, the White House provided a list of dangerous individuals and groups that they asked Facebook to censor, and then said that other social media companies should ban them too, saying in a clarifying statement that a ban on one outlet should equal a ban on all outlets. This is scary stuff, particularly in the vein of the Biden Regime’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board.

The courts have already determined that when government officials threaten or cajole or coerce private companies into doing their censorship for them, that this does constitute a violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, in the case of Norwood vs Harrison in a June 5, 1973 decision, said Congress “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish… For more than half a century, courts have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action.” So when Congress, or individual members of Congress pressure or threaten private companies into censorship, that becomes state action.

On February 8, 1963, in Bantam Books Inc vs Sullivan, a local book store was being pressured and harassed by the local zoning board and threatened with zoning harassment, to stop selling books that the board felt were inappropriate. The argument of the board was that they didn’t directly censor or try to regulate obscenity, but that they were merely informing the book store of their legal rights. The publisher sued the zoning board. The court said that although the board did not directly seize the books, that “the threat of invoking legal sanctions, and other means of coercion, persuasion and intimidation- the record amply demonstrates that the commission deliberately set out to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’ and succeeded in its aim.

These acts and practices deliberately and designedly stopped the circulation of publication in many parts of Rhode Island. It is true, as noted by the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, that Silverstein (the store owner) was “free” to ignore the commission’s notices, in the sense that his refusal to cooperate would have violated no law. But it was found as a fact, and the finding being amply supported by the record, binds us- that Silverstein’s compliance with the directives was not voluntary. People do not lightly disregard public officer’s thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around, and Silverstein’s reaction, according to uncontroverted testimony, was no exception to this general rule.” The court went then on to say “Their operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress.”

One way to censor dissenting voices without removing or silencing them is to create a separate algorithm for the voices you DO want people to listen and pay attention to, and then say that you are “elevating respectable, or authoritative, sources” as Google has been doing for years, but finally admitted a couple of years ago that they’ve been doing this since 2017, saying that they would prioritize authoritative sources (meaning corporate, pro-establishment sources) and that “While there will be slight variations, on average, 93% of the videos in global top 10 results come from high-authority channels.” So if you want to find a video on the US war on Syria and you use a Google search, you won’t find information from actual Syrians like journalist Richard Medhurst or even Eva Bartlett, an independent Canadian journalist who has gone to Syria and reported criticisms of US policy there or the OPCW investigation. Instead you will nearly always see a flood of reporting by pro-establishment, corporate voices who have not gone to Syria and are just reporting what they are told to report.

Another form is to put disclaimer labels on articles when they’re posted, such as putting state media labels on Russian or Chinese state sources, while NOT applying those same labels to the BBC, CBC, al Jazeera or Deutch Welle- all state owned media. The purpose here is to scare people away from Russian or Chinese media. Even journalists who work for the channels get this disclaimer, which is an attempt to de-legitimize what they have to say. At this point, I feel obligated to remind the reader that there are plenty of American journalists that work for RT, who have complete editorial control of their shows and writing and have never been told to be say pro-Russia or anti-American things. I’m talking not only of Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Chris Hedges and comedian Lee Camp, but also Dennis Miller, Larry King (R.I.P.), Ed Schultz and William Shatner.

If you are a mainstream, pro-government liberal posting on Twitter or YouTube, you will probably never experience any censorship and are wondering what all the hubbub is about. Either that or you’re pretty sure that only right wingers complain about censorship. This is simply not true. The list of leftists who have seen censorship is endless. Okay, it’s not endless, because there aren’t that many leftists, but I’m going to share several examples here, starting with myself. I am a leftist candidate for Congress in my district and right as the primary election season was starting I received FIVE restrictions from Facebook for one truthful post about Nazis in Ukraine with a genuine picture of NATO soldiers and the Nazi Azov Battalion, which posed for a picture together. I received a 2 or 3 day from posting, a week restriction from posting in groups, a restriction from posting on my page, a restriction from sharing posts AND a 30 day restriction from promoting ads, which was the most unfortunate part in my eyes. I have had Instagram mark two year old posts as suddenly a violation. I also used to do a panel show on what is now Revolutionary Blackout Network. We did an episode where we talked about the Yahoo article which reported that the CIA considered kidnapping Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and having British military get in a runway shoot-out with Russian military. Our video got taken down by YouTube mid-stream and we had to move to a lesser known channel to complete the show.

Former TYT journalist Jordan Chariton has also had streams taken down mid-stream, including reporting on the Flint water crisis and live on-the-ground reporting of the January 6th protest turned riot. He also faces suppression by the YouTube algorithm, which doesn’t put his very good reporting on the same level as network channels that uncritically repeat government lies all the time.

Primo Radical, formerly Primo Nutmeg, has received several strikes from YouTube and had videos taken down that were several years old, seemingly based on the answers his guests gave to questions. Recently he had an episode titled “Jimmy Dore Uncensored” which perhaps not surprisingly, got taken down. Because his previous two strikes were given to him based on old videos, Primo has no way of knowing when or whether his next strike will come, causing him (and others too) to start also doing their shows on outlets like Rumble or Rokfin where there isn’t censorship (yet).

Jimmy Dore struggled for years against the algorithm which favored his former channel, TYT, over him even though he constantly exposed their straight out lies. Somehow TYT, a provably dishonest show, was considered authoritative. Why? $20 million from Clinton donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, which moved the show toward the center, even in the words of the founder, who I will not name here. Since the beginning of the Covid outbreak there has been a ton of disinformation coming straight from government officials and mainstream media, much of it later admitted to. Jimmy fought valiantly to keep having the conversations that the establishment badly wanted us not to have, which was to question the things we were being told about Covid-19, the vaccines, masks and Dr Fauci himself. Dore even had medical professionals on, including one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which Dr Fauci had suppressed for political and financial reasons. Dore received several strikes from YouTube and now is sure to clarify, when he reports what the head of the CDC says, or someone else “That’s not me saying it, that’s Dr Rachel Walensky” and when he reports studies that show the vaccines may not be as effective on current strains, has to repeat for YouTube that “This is what the study shows, but YouTube says that vaccines are effective.” Now I understand that we’re not all consuming the same information about this subject in particular, but my point is that these conversations need to happen. Science isn’t loyalty to a position and suppressing those who disagree, science is constantly challenging a position to make sure that it’s correct.

And then there’s Lee Camp, an American doing American News for Americans and labeled a foreign agent because he did it on RT. RT was permanently shut down because of the censorship and the hateful mail and comments the workers were getting for working for a Russian news outlet. Lee Camp has a contemporary leftist voice. He doesn’t say anything the rest of the leftists aren’t saying. He had complete control over his show, was never told what to say or not to say, and had his channel taken down. Lee still has his YouTube channel, Moment of Clarity, and is starting a new show on MintPress News called Behind The Headlines, but guess what? His views and opinions haven’t changed at all since he lost his job at RT. It seems that his opinions weren’t really Russian at all, but his own.

I can’t talk about left voices being censored without mentioning Joe Rogan, who the entire mainstream seemed to have rooted for him to die from Covid when he announced that he was taking ivermectin. I don’t want to get distracted by that controversy, but what happened to Joe was that he was slandered by “an authoritative source”- CNN, which told its viewers that he was taking horse de-wormer, despite getting a human prescription from a doctor (who was also human) and they doctored a video of him to make him look greener than he was. Suddenly there were millions of people who were convinced that Joe Rogan was a right-winger, even though that’s very far from the truth. “I’ve never voted Republican in my life” said Rogan, who previously endorsed Bernie Sanders. A doctored video of him talking about the ’N’ word, without sharing the context of the remarks characterized him as a racist. He had been talking about it in a general way, many years prior, and had already apologized for it and hadn’t realized at the time that it could be taken out of context and used to slander him. This led into a push to get Rogan deplatformed from Spotify, in an effort that appears to have been motivated out of envy, on the part of the doctored film maker, and the greed of Jeff Bezos, who wanted him to move to Amazon.

Another form of suppression, which is really more of an economic attack through slander, is to write hit pieces, as the new Czar of disinformation Nina Jankowicz did against the Grayzone, writing that they create “their own hysteria and spread incredibly damaging disinformation. It calls popular protests “color revolutions” and papers over Stalinist crimes against humanity.” Color revolutions are what they are. I don’t think this term even originated from the Grayzone, which is far more reliable for its integrity than any mainstream source, and is far more informative. What the Grayzone is incredibly damaging to is establishment narratives, such as that Assad gassed his own people, which has been debunked thanks to the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté or that Venezuela had no toothpaste or other products because goods couldn’t get into the country, which Max Blumenthal exposed by simply going to Venezuela and showing the viewer that they were there.

Even the New York Times has been doing these hit pieces, as they have to Benjamin Norton, founder of the outlet Multipolarista who is an absolute encyclopedia of information about international affairs. Which recently smeared Norton as a “conspiracy theorist” for saying things about the Ukrainian government that the New York Times itself had previously said in articles going back several years, and then by highlighting the fact that the story got picked up by the Chinese media, which was deliberately highlighted to imply that Norton is connected to the Chinese government without actually saying it (he’s not connected to any government). This is an economic attack, an attempt to discredit Ben so that people won’t read his writing and eventually deprive him of his ability to make a living.

Another form of economic attack to suppress voices the establishment doesn’t like, which I’ve never seen before, is being done by PayPal, which has started refusing donations to some lefty journalists like MintPress News, Caleb Maupin, Mnar Adley, Alan McLeod and Consortium News. Again, this is an attempt to deprive workers of their livelihoods.

Censorship has even happened to Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald in the outlet that he, himself, founded- the Intercept. In the month leading up to the 2020 election, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was being heavily suppressed by the entire establishment, and may even have led to the election of Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Glenn Greenwald wrote a story and brought it to his editor at the Intercept, which again, he actually founded, and was not allowed to publish it. Being of the highest integrity, Glenn left his own outlet. That’s how divisive censorship is.

All of the voices that I’ve just talked about being censored are left wing voices, but some people (who rely on mainstream media) seem to be under the impression that only the far right is censored. As I have just explicitly detailed, this is definitely an issue that affects the left, but I agree that it affects right wing voices, too. It’s not okay to censor people that you disagree with. That’s not to say that you can’t block them, so you don’t see their posts, but it is wrong to suppress people’s voices. Free speech applies to all of us. As Noam Chomsky said “If we do not believe in free speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all.” It is a mistake to assume that censorship is okay if it’s only on the other side. Whatever applies to one side WILL eventually apply to the other.

How would mainstream Democrats act if Republicans were in control and all the social media companies decided to deplatform Joe Biden while he was still in office for a tweet saying that he would not be somewhere they thought he should be? Certainly it’s beyond dispute that, thanks to his failing mental capacities, he has made countless incorrect statements about Covid, about Russia and Ukraine, about economic policy, campaign promises he’s failed to keep, Republicans, all manner of topics. How would Democrats respond? How would they respond if the Republican establishment demanded that Mehdi Hassan or Jake Tapper be fired critically analyzing the US war on Syria (not that they would do that)? How would they respond if Republicans label Senator Bernie Sanders an alt-left purveyor of hate speech against the rich? Precedent matters. If you can do it, so can the other side.

Barack Obama gave a speech, just recently, about censorship and disinformation, saying that “disinformation is eroding democracy”, but the greatest purveyor of disinformation is the government itself, followed by the media. Silencing dissenting voices, who are questioning the things they’ve been told, is not protecting the truth, it is suppressing it. If a YouTube host did a show about how France was getting ready to invade Indiana soon, we’d all know it wasn’t true. The censors aren’t afraid of lies. The lies are what they are protecting.

Obama, in his speech, went on to say that solving the disinformation problem “can help tamp down divisions and build the trust and solidarity needed”. If I tell you a lie and then remove your ability to call me out for it, does that “tamp down divisions” or build trust? Hell no! If I told you my favorite sports team was going to destroy your team in the coming game and then suppressed your voice to respond, would that make you root for my team? Of course not. This isn’t unity, it’s a show of unity, being put on to keep the masses in line.

Just a few days ago, the Biden Regime announced that it has taken censorship to a new level. The government has created a Disinformation Management Board, which a vague mission statement about immigration. This government is going in a very scary direction, and we all need to loudly oppose this assault on our right to free speech. If you think suppressing misinformation is just about silencing right wing racists, I’m sorry, but you’ve been lied to and swallowed the Kool Aid. This is about protecting criminality and the ability of the wealthy to take public money that should be spent on housing, healthcare and education. Censorship isn’t how you protect the truth, it’s how you “hide lies”, to borrow a term from our new censorship czar. I’ll say it again: the answer to misinformation is information.

Thanks for reading.

• Information about Supreme Court decisions taken from the reporting of Glenn Greenwald