Censorship

Tuesday

Taylor Millard

Both parties want to control what you say on the internet

The long slog towards government regulation of social media is snaking its way towards reality. The House and Senate hold hearings this week on bills enacting rules on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. Many of these proposals revolve around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a rather innocuous 1996 law protecting online platforms from civil liability for hosting and moderating third-party content. Section 230 includes language praising “the vibrant and competitive free market” existing for the internet and tech companies, without state or federal government rules. It’s all about to change twenty-five years later, with both major parties seeking to get their pound of ideological flesh from Big Tech.

control

Monday

Teresa Mull

‘Let’s go Brandon’ is a rallying cry for freedom

“Let’s go Brandon” started in the most apropos way imaginable: NASCAR driver Brandon Brown was euphorically thanking Larry’s Lemonade and other sponsors for his win at the Talladega Superspeedway when the crowd erupted into a sing-songy “F*ck Joe Biden!” chant (because, why not?). The reporter — either purposefully or by mistake, we don’t know — did what the media does best and warped reality. “You can hear the chants from the crowd — ‘Let’s go Brandon,’” the reporter said. And so launched the meme that sank a thousand bipartisanships. “Let’s go Brandon” is now commonplace code for conservatives everywhere. It’s emblazoned on T-shirts, hats, banners, and billboards, and is plastered all over the internet.

brandon

Friday

Matt McDonald

The trouble with Trump’s new social network

“Start your own social media site,” goes the common refrain when conservatives complain about getting kicked off Facebook and Twitter. Well, now Donald Trump has. On Wednesday night, the former president announced the launch of the Orwellian-sounding “TRUTH Social” and “Trump Media & Technology Group.” “I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in the press release. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon.

truth social

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

Could the Chinese gaming clampdown backfire?

When the Soviet Union still existed, visitors to Eastern Europe would smuggle illegal books and magazines to visitors. As the Chinese government announces that young people are to be banned from playing video games for more than three hours a week, it is tempting to imagine people sneaking copies of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto into the PRC — perhaps inside DVD cases of lavish propaganda films such as The Founding of a Republic. OK, I’m aging myself here. I know most gamers now play online. I also know the Chinese are big fans. More than half the population enjoy gaming and China has the world’s most substantial market for games.

gaming

Friday

Rod Liddle

Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled

I was 14 or 15 when I first read Ray Bradbury, which is not a bad age to enjoy the man fully. It was the short story ‘Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar’, in which a lad called Tom does just that and it doesn’t end terribly well. Superficially, it is a silly story, but what hooked me from the outset was the vague yet pervasive sense of unease running throughout this minor small-town saga, disturbing the comfortable ennui of family life. Nothing spelled out — just a deepening disquiet, the common thread in all of Bradbury’s finest little vignettes. Back then, in the 1950s, the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation were hovering in the background, just beyond the edge of our eyesight, which perhaps explains the author’s state of mind.

bradbury

Monday

Dominic Green

Joe Biden’s digital serfs

The Biden administration intends to notify Facebook about ‘problematic’ postings, such as questioning the COVID-19 vaccine. Jen Psaki, the White House spokesperson, suggests that if you’re problematic on one social-media site, you should be banned from them all. Big Tech, meet Big Sister. I suppose this is still America. If Donald Trump had said he’d use extra-legal leverage over Big Tech, most of the media would be crying ‘fascism’. Brian Stelter would decry an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Jeffrey Toobin would bang one out about bypassing Congress and the law. Minor academics would op-ed in the New York Times about the classically fascist ‘collusion’ between government and big business.

digital

Thursday

Will Johnson

Why is Trump banned from Twitter when the Taliban isn’t?

As we approach the final withdrawal of all US and Nato forces from Afghanistan, it’s worth pointing out a shocking double-standard that has so far gone strangely unnoticed. How can it be that Twitter has banned a US president, who even in defeat garnered more than 74 million votes in 2020, yet still allows the Taliban to pump out propaganda on its platform? Let’s be clear. The Taliban is a hard-line Islamist group that extols jihad, opposes democracy and is engaged in a brutal war of attrition against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan. As Paul Wood noted in these pages on June 24, Twitter is the Taliban's preferred social media platform.

taliban

Monday

Amber Duke

What makes Jason Miller’s new social media app different?

GETTR, a new social media app helmed by former Trump senior adviser Jason Miller, officially launched on July 4 to much fanfare, with more than 500,000 users creating accounts in just a few hours. The app was created in response to gratuitous censorship by Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and promises not to censor users for their political opinions. Then president Donald Trump was notably banned from these platforms in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol Building. Miller told me during a phone interview the day before the launch that GETTR was 'founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting the political censorship and cancel culture that we've seen in US politics in the US media’.

Jason Miller (/Getty Images)

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

Right-wingers should stop concern-trolling the left

When YouTube banned the account of progressive advocacy group Right Wing Watch, you could hear the clink of champagne glasses among conservatives and reactionaries. ‘Epic backfire,’ scoffed the right-wing YouTuber TheQuartering. ‘Hahahahahahahahahaha!’, typed the noted documentarian Dinesh D’Souza, ‘isn’t it fun when you get a dose of your own suppository?’ ‘Congratulations once again to all the liberals and leftists — led by their journalists,’ wrote Glenn Greenwald, in more measured tones, ‘who urged censorship of political speech by Silicon Valley monopolists based in the belief that it would only be used to silence your adversaries and enemies but never your allies.’ In the time it took to fix a cheese sandwich, the Right Wing Watch account was restored.

right wingers

Wednesday

Meghan Murphy

Canada creeps towards totalitarianism

Canadians pride themselves on their ultra-progressive reputation. In contrast to the gun-loving, war-mongering, big government-hating, get-off-my-lawn-you-commie reputation of Americans, Canadians see themselves as North America’s kinder, gentler half. But that smug politeness has seen us sleepwalk into an Orwellian nightmare. We have never felt much of an affinity to free speech in Canada — saying what you really think is mean and individual rights are for people who don’t have a feminist drama teacher as prime minister. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that a new bill proposing to regulate speech on the internet is being pushed by our politically center-left Liberal party.

canada

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

Last chance to end the tech tyranny

What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets. So Amazon doesn’t ban books. It just makes them much harder to buy and read. If a private company chooses to do that, who are you to complain?

oligarchy tech capitalist pigs

Tuesday

Charlie Nash

Stitch-up: why will no one touch The Human Centipede director’s new film?

It’s no secret that political correctness has stunted pop culture. Comedians walk on eggshells for fear of offending the wrong person. A day hardly goes by without a public apology for old comments. Hollywood is perhaps furthest down this road to insipidity. It means creative types who enjoy pushing boundaries, offending viewers, making even the most hardy of us as uncomfortable as humanly possible, can’t thrive. One such person is the director Tom Six. In 2009, Six made popculture history with his shock-horror flick The Human Centipede — a movie about a Nazi-like German doctor who kidnaps and stitches his victims together, anus to mouth — as a sadistic experiment.

six centipede

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Twitter is in China’s pocket

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he furiously and mistakenly attempts to make his case for winning an election he did not win. Within minutes, Trump’s tweets are flagged as containing disputed information regarding the election. Twitter is very invested in babysitting the President of the United States, sometimes with cause. But the tech giant’s scrutiny of spurious posts from other governments is not as close: if Twitter will not label a tweet as containing false or ‘disputed’ information, it is by default suggesting that it is accurate. This is the dilemma Jack Dorsey has created for himself in assigning his company to be the absolute arbiter of truth.

chinese twitter china

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Unanswered questions for Big Tech

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is currently in FBI possession. The purported contents of the laptop which were released selectively in several news stories by the Post include private emails and photographs. These have yet to be proven as forgeries or inauthentic. Swiftly cable news pundits and liberal-leaning journalists began wondering whether the laptop, the repair service in Delaware, or the source of the leak to the Post were part of a foreign campaign to influence the presidential election. But the DNI, FBI, DOJ and State Department all said there was no evidence to support those theories.

new york post big tech

Wednesday

Jarvis Dupont

My open letter to Twitter

Dear Twitter,The other day I spotted an elderly man not wearing a mask in the pharmacy. He had a badge pinned to his shirt which proclaimed him to have COPD, absolving him of his responsibility to do the decent thing. At first glance everything looked legit, but to my keen eyes, the kerning on his medical exemption badge was all wrong. A friend of mine is doing a graphic design course and after discreetly WhatsApping them a close-up, they confirmed to me it was indeed a clever forgery. I immediately opened my Twitter app so that I could broadcast me shaming him to my 128,000 followers, but my plan was abruptly scuppered. I tapped the familiar icon and was confronted with a message telling me that my account, MY account had been suspended! SUSPENDED! Can you imagine that?

twitter

Wednesday

Rick Santorum

President Trump should bend — but not break — Big Tech

Americans’ increasing focus on this fall’s elections has awakened in me a tinge of nostalgia for the good old days of campaigning — before the internet changed everything. As a conservative running for the US Senate in 1994, I remember being able to connect with thousands of voters to respond to my opponents’ dishonest attacks, the press’s deceitful characterizations of my positions, local television refusing to cover my campaign events, and the character assassinations by the newspaper editorial boards. Actually, I don’t remember that, because I had no way to reach thousands of voters except by paying those same media outlets millions of dollars to buy ads.

trump

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Facebook is right. Twitter is wrong

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots. That raised all sorts of hell from a bombastic President, as well as more questions than answers. There are several problems with Twitter deciding to put its thumb on the scale of ‘truth’ on its social platform. The site has previously come under enormous scrutiny over widely perceived political and ideological bias. The charges against the company include its unfair and unbalanced actions in banning conservative or politically right-leaning accounts, as well as shadow-banning and limiting views and engagements on trending topics which it deems problematic.

facebook

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

Facebook now jails me for sharing my own Spectator columns

Welp, another 30 days in the gulag. How will I ever survive this time? About a year ago, I stopped using Facebook almost entirely, deleted the app from my phone, and ceased to accept new ‘friends,’ as a few thousand requests continue to pile up in my inbox. It got to a point that, even while self-censoring, nearly every time I opened my mouth on the platform I got slapped with a ban. There was nothing I could do: someone at Facebook clearly has me on a list and, really, Facebook is lame. I’m not sticking around some tyrant’s house if he doesn’t want me there. But friends encouraged me to say. I’m ‘letting them win’, my friends said, if I deleted my account, as though they haven’t already won.

chadwick moore spectator

Monday

Will Lloyd

Dave Rubin is here to solve ‘95 percent’ of the internet’s problems

The dream of a free internet — if it was ever more substantial than a fantasy — is crumbling. This decade began with the Arab Spring and the belief that technology powered movements for liberty across the globe could triumph over despotism. Instead the decade closes with the growing realization that technology is driving events in unpredictable ways. Confused, people are left feeling less not more in control of their lives. And a sketch is being made — however faintly — for a new form of despotism: Big Tech. Big Tech is unaccountable, opaque and deeply embedded within the lives of billions. Since 2016 it has been dumped on from both the left and the right, and former Big Tech workers.

locals dave rubin

Tuesday

Melissa Chen

The NBA tosses an alley-oop for China’s censors

The co-creators of South Park have once again demonstrated why the cartoon remains, after 23 seasons, remarkably astute at delivering shrewd political commentary. Its 299th episode, ‘Band in China’, parodies China’s extreme censorship, restricted internet, and the capitulation of the American entertainment industry to cater to the political interests of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), which in an ironic case of life imitating art, got the show banned in China and virtually scrubbed from its firewalled internet.

south park nba