BREAKING ALL THE RULES FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Infowars

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

ADL & SACHA BARON COHEN BECOME CHINESE CENSORS

Just why a roomful of serious-minded people decided to be lectured to about freedom of expression by a comic is hard to fathom. It was sort of like watching a football player on “Dancing with the Stars” – Cohen had no real talent as a rhetor, but he’s famous, and even when he scribbles outside the lines — folks get to say they saw him live and in person.

Cohen doesn’t like Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg. That’s fine. There are plenty of reasons not to like Zuckerberg. The fact that he won’t censor political advertising to suit the ADL is not one on those reasons.

Facebook gets immunity from suit for whatever it publishes, a privilege the press doesn’t enjoy. Facebook harvests data from users to sell to advertisers in a manner that is unaccountable. It pours its profits into the creation of proprietary algorithms that manipulate users, dividing people into silos it can target market at will. To add insult to injury, Facebook then decides on its own what content it will banish.

Because it is not a governmental entity, Facebook is not prohibited from engaging in content-based viewpoint discrimination. Thus, my client, Alex Jones is banned. The censors don’t like what he says. Want to listen to Mr. Jones or his show, Infowars? Then listen to Banned.Video. Facebook has shut Jones down.

Facebook’s power to shape desire, predict behavior and keep tabs of us is chilling.

This week, the BBC reported that China houses Uighur Moslems in indoctrination camps. You earn your way out of the camp by persuading your re-educators that you are reformed, that is, that you have learned Mandarin Chinese, lost your faith, and satisfied censors that you know how to behave. This is but an extreme version of what the Chinese are doing to their own people by means of social media – creating citizenship scores for its population. If you don’t satisfy the state-sponsored algorithm that your attitude is what the Chinese government want, you get less in terms of social services and access to goods.

Facebook is habituating us to accept the level of social control China takes for granted. That is what is terrifying about Facebook.

What is terrifying about Cohen and the ADL is that they are happy with this form of social control so long as they get to set the agenda.

Here, in condensed form, is Cohen’s argument:

1. People are free (sort of) to say hateful things on Facebook.

2. People like us – Cohen and the ADL – don’t like those hateful things said.

3. Therefore, we ought to be given the means to place limits on what can be said on Facebook.

Put bluntly – Cohen wants to be a censor. So does the ADL.

A better argument is to require that Facebook and other social media companies enjoying immunity from suit for what they publish be held to first amendment standards in deciding what they can and cannot publish. There is a body of first amendment law, principles that can be decided by jurists and that provide litigants with fair notice of what is and is not permitted. The first amendment is transparent in a way a stand-up comic and his cronies are not.

These are dangerous times from freedom of speech. The danger isn’t hate speech, whatever that is. We’ve always had vituperative speech in the United States. Hell, if someone were tarred and feathered or burned in effigy today, we’d probably declare a national emergency.

The danger is that social media creates an enormous capacity for social control. Zuckerberg misuses that ability now. Giving Cohen and the ADL the same power won’t make the world safe for freedom of expression, it will merely exchange one set of blinders for another.

I’m guessing the overlords in China watched the Cohen speech with approval. “He gets it,” they muttered. I wonder if his next gig will be in Beijing.

Read the entire article

Monday, April 22, 2019

READ THE FULL MUELLER REPORT NOW

Read the publicly released Mueller report by clicking this link.

President Trump and his administration have been cleared of collusion and obstruction by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The president celebrated this announcement with a meme mocking “radical left Democrats” and a compilation video detailing the collusion saga.

“This was an illegal takedown and hopefully somebody’s going to look at the other side,” Trump foreshadowed in the closing of the epic video.

Read the entire article

Friday, October 5, 2018

PayPal Dumps Alex Jones; Still Handles SPLC

PayPal finally joined other Big Tech giants in attacking Alex Jones and his Infowars empire, dumping the conservative conspiracy theorist from its site.

The leftist Internet purchasing platform, which handles buying and selling goods online, targeted Jones because he retails “hate speech.” This, we are told, violates PayPal’s policies.

The money-changing giant joined Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in waging war against Jones. The generalissimo in charge of the campaign was CNN’s senior media writer, Oliver Darcy.

No Policy Violation

PayPal’s notice gave Jones 10 days to find a new vendor to handle payments, The New York Times reported. “PayPal handles all transactions, including credit cards, for the Infowars online store.”

Yet Paypal admitted Jones did nothing wrong. “PayPal said it had made its decision not because of any policy violation but because Infowars’ ‘promotion of hate and discrimination runs counter to our core value of inclusion.’”

Said PayPal, “Our values are the foundation for the decision we made this week.”

PayPal, it seems, has joined the other tech giants in a war to destroy Jones.

Read the entire article