We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. The erosion of free speech has been radically accelerated by the Big Tech and social media companies. The level of censorship and viewpoint regulation has raised questions of a new type of state media where companies advance an ideological agenda with political allies. The state media criticism was never more compelling than in the announcement of YouTube this week that it would now remove videos that question the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The election is over but YouTube will now scrub away any dissenting views that the election was marred by fraud. It now appears to be protecting history itself from things deemed disinformation — the ultimate calling of the corporate censor.
YouTube (which is owned by Google) announced “We will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election.” The company used the end of the “safe harbor” period for counting votes to justify censor those with lingering doubts or those who want to post explanations of why the count remains suspicious, including presumable an array of members of Congress who have called for investigations.
For free speech advocates, the move is a raw example of corporate censorship but Democrats and many liberals applauded the action. Indeed, the Columbia journalism dean has lamented that these companies are not cracking down on free speech to a greater extent and blaming their own greed for not being greater censors. It appears that Big Brother is now being embraced as a protector of truth.
Like the “false facts” removed by China’s censors, the Biden victory is treated like a state fact that cannot be challenged or questioned. As someone who has stated for weeks that Biden is the president-elect and criticized conspiracy theories, I do not subscribe to the view that the election was stolen. However, millions of votes — both Republican and Democrat — hold that view. Indeed, some polls show up to 90 percent of Republicans believe that election was not fair and honest. Roughly half of the country voted for President Donald Trump and many of them hold this view.
The best way to address such views is to expose them to debate and challenge. That is the value of free speech. Otherwise, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship of any views that you deem harmful or misleading.
This action notably occurs just weeks after companies blocked discussion of the Hunter Biden story. It was only after the election that the CEOs then said it was a mistake. Biden is now under federal investigation and the laptop and its disturbing emails now appear to be legitimate. Yet, Democratic Senators demanded more censorship as the CEOs were apologizing for spiking a legitimate news story that was damaging to Biden. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal declared that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demand an answer to this question:
“Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”
YouTube has eagerly embraced the call for censorship by Blumenthal and others. It is now protecting not the election but history from what it considers disinformation. It is the very Chinese model embraced directly or indirectly by some American academics and journalists. We are watching free speech drain away to the applause of those eager for less freedom.
What else do you expect from a socialist pile of nothing.
It gets discouraging writing here Jonathan. Sure would appreciate an answer from you once in a while.
IYO, is there nothing Trump could have done to pursue his contention that there is sufficient evidence to justify a legal cause of action to look closer at just what did happen to see whether or not corruption significantly influenced the accurate tabulation of the votes? Wasn’t there sufficient evidence to justify discovery?
Yes there was now nearing four weeks old Justfacts.com laid it all out and the fascist media refused to print it. Two sources.
Youtube, Google et al. know that the 2020 election must be considered real and legitimate by all the successfully indoctrinated “Stepford Citizens” because, when the DOJ (i.e. Deep Deep State) is done with the
Bidens, the newly ensconced and completely malleable Commie-Lie Ho-riss will need orders of magnitude more validation, she not being eligible and a “natural born citizen,” and she having obtained not one vote
and not one dollar in the primaries. Commie-Lie Ho-riss is the very definition of false.
___________________________________________________________________
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
– William Casey, CIA Director
Yeah, you right wing nuts are really being persecuted.
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Dan Bongino
2. Newsmax
3. Dinesh D’Souza
4. Dan Bongino
5. Ben Shapiro
6. CNN
7. Donald Trump For President
8. Newsmax
9. Ben Shapiro
10. Fox News
Joe Biden Friday ; You have weak sauce there. Do you work in the media industry by chance.
“Yeah, you right wing nuts are really being persecuted.”
You seem to forget a small detail, LWNJ, and that is if your team’s behavior wasn’t so criminally egregious and offensive our sites would go out of business.
The tech companies have purchased the town square and where the town square was once a place for one to voice ones opinion, Tech has hung up a no trespassing sign. Yes, they are private companies but they are public utilities every bit as much as gas and electric companies. Could my electric company turn off my power because I tout I claim there was election fraud and this elections was stolen from Trump? Can I be kicked off an Airline that declares it self a “One World Carrier” because they do not like the message on my T-shirt. Speech must be protected and those that would deny me my right of speech are in the same category as those that would discriminate against me based on my race, religion or creed or Nationality.
This is pure EVIL and MONOPOLISTIC practice by the YouTube.. If true.. None has to agree to the views they don’t like.. But one simply can’t deny the right of the others to speak..
As Churchill had said, “It is courageous to stand up and speak .. However, it is equally courageous to sit down and listen”..
Clearly YouTube is a Coward.. It is EVIL and Lacks Courage.. They should be held accountable by the Law .. More competition , with some support to the competition, must be introduced to break You Tube’s Evil Monopoly..
Required legislations must be introduced by the Congress.. This is going too far… USA is in grave danger.. Something must be done .. Fast..
I personally don’t see the US ever united again. The hatred by both parties is just to severe. You can cast blame on a virus but there is plenty of blame to go around. We can argue how long the Roman Empire lasted but around 1000 years. It ended when Caesar declared himself dictator and was then assassinated in 44BC. Today Russia, China, and the Muslim world are all empires working to overthrow the US. Are they working together? Unknown. Is the US still the beacon of freedom? Again debatable. I think the US is self destructing slowly but surely. Smart kids from all over the world have always come to the US for a good education and then found good jobs and stayed, even brought their families here. That is changing fast. Now many go back for better jobs and better pay. I hate to say it but freedom can be bought. Let’s say you have over 10 million dollars. You can afford to live anywhere in the world, buy land, a castle, and go dark, disappear, live under the radar screen become an ex-patriot. A lot of Americans are doing that today because they see the US committing suicide slowly. Open borders, decimate the military, defund the police, destroy monuments, burn the flag, take a knee when the National anthem is played, only black lives matter, free education, your first job pays at least 100,000$/year with a free 4 bedroom new house plus 2 new Mercedes and very low taxes plus a 20% increase in salary every year plus the job for life plus free healthcare…sounds like a government job right! That’s what the younger generation wants and they will vote for that life and future. I guess as long as the US can print dollars all is well. Of course social security will be eliminated and the sooner us old farts die off the better. We are just a drain on society. I guess. I’m painting a bleak picture because I believe it is bleak.
The Member States of the United Nations seriously undermined the credibility of the Organization with their mishandling of 9/11; with their controlled demolition of Kyoto II vegan methane control; and with their hasty roll-out of substandard Sustainable Development Goals. The judgment of God is at hand in the eyes of believers worldwide; the human species verges on extinction in the eyes of top scientists; and the future of UN Intelligence appears to be in conflict with both the masses and elites.
Big Tech and Big Media may be nipping disinformation in the bud:
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-election/
Or premature and misguided censorship may end up pouring fuel on the flames of right-wing discontent:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-republican-party-twitter-election-results-death-overturn/
For prospective DNI Haines: will Big Tech censorship and Big Media reporting turn “Stop the Steal” from today’s “disinformation movement” into tomorrow’s “far-right terror group”?
For Professor Turley: will the Supreme Court of the United States defuse the crisis?
Ah Jonathan understands how it will go. those citizens who do not fall into line will be punished
it was all clear how the censorship would work back when they suppressed “9/11 truthers”
this is just a reply, with bigger and better AI censorship routines to do the hard work on social media.
for now we only have tools of nonviolent mass resistance to use
and the best one is this: STOP PAYING TAXES
the idea catches on
I see someone else’s handy dandy form and link it here
https://nwtrcc.org/PDFs/template_letter-to-IRS.pdf
JOIN OUR PEACEFUL PROTEST AGAINST THE IMMORAL FEDERAL TYRANTS!
FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRES!
Saloth Sar
Yeah Kurtz! More corporate tax cuts, right! Fight the Dollaraires!
Clown
Corporate taxes are taxes on the poor, ignorant one. That’s why working class people benefitted most from the Trump tax cuts.
Joe Biden Friday….. please take the clown hat off before you beclown yourself with your Marxist propaganda speak. You apparently have zero clue as to how business works when it comes to passing on additional financial burdens. It’s the main reason PRICES GO UP….. ergo costing more to the consumers because of goobermint theft.
Sworn eyewitness testimony is NOT hearsay, and there’s plenty of sworn eyewitness testimony documenting fraudulent behavior. I would sincerely hope that EVERY citizen of this Country, Democrat or Republican, would want an honest election, no matter who wins. Obviously at least half of the country does not feel this election was honest and free of fraud, enough fraud to have skewed the results.
The question I would have for you, Mr. Turley, and I ask this with the utmost of respect (I have become a huge fan recently), is when you say “As someone who has stated for weeks that Biden is the president-elect and criticized conspiracy theories, I do not subscribe to the view that the election was stolen”, are you saying that there was no fraud at all, that all of the evidence (and there is plenty of it if one bothers to look) has been completely fabricated, that hundreds upon hundreds of affidavits and other court-admissible evidence is all a farce, and that all the people who are claiming that there has been fraud are collectively lying? Because that is the essence of the position you have taken. A reasonable person would have to acknowledge that there are question marks, and I have to assume that you take your position for fear that to admit that maybe, just maybe there was some fraud, that you too will be censored. Many can’t pychologically go there, are unwilling to at least give a non-partisan brief review of some of the claims and want to paint the other side of the aisle as demented and sophomoric for just entertaining that something may be wrong. If the evidence was fabricated, the current ‘winning’ side wouldn’t have to hide, censor or belittle those who counter the ‘official’ results, as the facts would back them up. Any behavioral scientist would have field day with this scenario.
I’m sensing in this comment an unwillingness to listen carefully for nuance. JT has been quite clear that all valid claims (i.e. back up by real factual evidence) be investigated to their conclusion, including filing charges where crime was committed. At the same time, he has come to the conclusion reached by election officials in the states that, while there inevitably was cheating and irregularities (every election has some), their numerical extent is not sufficient to overturn the state outcome…not even in one state.
If you parse the preceding paragraph as arguing “there was no fraud”, then you are spinning what you read to fit a false narrative you wish to maintain.
The largest fraud numerically (so far) is the one in Orange County CA, where a man is under indictment for absentee ballot fraud, having applied for some 8000 absentee ballots on behalf of homeless people, though with no intent for them to fill out and sign their ballots.
Can we agree that this happened? Can we also agree that Biden narrowly eked out a win, much the same way Trump did in 2016?
Or, are we only allowed to choose from one of two hyperpartisan “pseudo-realities”, where there is no stomach for even listening to and registering counter-narrative information?
Clinton got smashed because Constitutional Centrists mostly unaffiliated did not want a far left extremist in office. There was an an all out effort to listing her as the number one target. That group was the number one in size provider of votes filing 40%. The Democrats or Socialists to be more exact were their second target and RINOs third.
It wasn’t any thing like the massive effort to cheat used by the Socialists.
Republicans provided ‘some’ of the votes needed to elect President Trump and went so far as to disavow him after he had been selected.
Since then; they have cleaned up their act getting rid of two dozen RINOs while the Democrats went full socialist communist.With some effort to move to Constitutional Democrat and much effort to get votes anyway possible as per the near month old Just Facts offering of their anti Constitutional during the election and since the election. Dump those unqualified to take the oath of office they have NOT near enough votes to take office.
t
DDP, please post accounts from recognizable sources citing victories by Trump campaign in established courts.
Anon: “. . . post accounts from recognizable sources citing victories . . .”
Or you could use your own two eyes.
Better yet quit falsifying the question and give one unassailable a source on victories not won by the far left JustFacts.com
Ask the question right and it comes out Biden is a loser loser loser.
Instead of turningi the question into a lie. dump victories and insert defeats as the source of Justfacts.com has shown.