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If the great campaigners for free speech of the past, such as Baruch Spinoza or Mary Wollstonecraft or Frederick Douglass, were alive today, they would surely declare the 21st century an unprecedented golden age. So suggests Jacob Mchangama in his new history of free speech.

Its a claim that might raise a few eyebrows. This, after all, is an age in which, from China to Saudi Arabia, dictatorial rulers imprison and kill political opponents with impunity. An age in which governments in formally democratic nations such as India use the judicial system to try to silence critics. An age in which more than 1,400 journalists have been murdered in 30 years. An age in which governments across the globe desperately seek ways of curbing speech on social media they consider dangerous. And in which, in the west, there is a constant debate about cancel culture and the erosion of academic freedom.

Mchangama, a leading campaigner for free speech, is not trying to dismiss the reality of contemporary censorship. He is suggesting, rather, that in historical terms, we have never been more free to speak our minds. But this leads to a paradox. The very fact that, certainly in the west, we live in far more open societies has led many to be sanguine and dismissive of the threat that restrictions on speech can impose upon us. The very success of historical struggles can obscure the lessons of those struggles.

Historically, the demand for free speech was at the heart of the fight for social justice. From the challenge posed by freethinkers in 10th-century Islam to the abolitionist struggle in 19th-century America, from the suffragette movement to campaigns for liberation from colonial rule, there has long been a recognition that democracy, social justice and free speech go hand in hand and that censorship was a weapon wielded by the powerful to stymie social change.

Today, though, the issues seem more confusing. Much censorship, particularly in liberal democracies, is imposed in the name of protecting not the powerful but the powerless or the vulnerable: laws against hate speech, for instance, or restricting the scope of racists or bigots. And where once the left was clearly opposed to censorship, many now support restrictions in the name of the progressive good. As the left has vacated the ground of free speech, the right and the far right have become encamped upon it. This has further distorted the debate, the cause of free speech coming to be seen as the property of the right, making many on the left even more wary of the idea.

One of the ironies, though, is that many arguments used today to defend speech restrictions as protections for the powerless are often the same as those once used by the powerful to protect their interests from challenge. When the US abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois, a southern newspaper blamed him for his own death, as he had utterly disregarded the sentiments of a large majority of the people of that place. A century and a half later, we heard the same arguments in calls for the banning of The Satanic Verses or in claims that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were responsible for their own deaths, because they, too, had disregarded the sentiments of many Muslims.

Or take hate speech. In the 1950s, there was a major debate about the wording of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one of the seminal documents of human rights, adopted by the UN in 1966. The draft proposal sought to prohibit any advocacy of national, racial or religious hostility that constitutes an incitement to violence. The Soviet Union wanted to delete the reference to violence and make any form of hatred illegal. Such a move, warned Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, would be extremely dangerous as any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred and consequently prohibited. Half a century on, Roosevelts warning seems highly prescient.

Instances in which the expansion of speech has facilitated the spread of obnoxious or dangerous ideas are well-documented: from the newly invented printing press giving fuel to witch-hunts in early modern Europe; to newspapers playing a major role in whipping up the racist frenzy that led to lynchings in 19th-century America; to the medias role in the 20th century in fomenting hatred against Jews in Germany and Tutsis in Rwanda.

Yet we can also see from the historical record that while it is necessary to legally curtail incitement to violence, trying to combat hatred more broadly through censorship can be both ineffective and dangerous. One of the deepest-held beliefs about the dangers of free speech is the Weimar myth: the belief that unrestrained freedom of speech allowed the Nazis to spread their poisonous ideas in 1920s Germany and that restrictions on speech and the suppression of antisemitic propaganda would have stalled the rise of Hitler. In fact, the Weimar republic, while constitutionally supportive of free speech, possessed what we would now call hate speech laws and powers to shut down newspapers. Hundreds of Nazis were prosecuted under these laws. Between 1923 and 1933, the viciously antisemitic newspaper Der Strmer was either confiscated or tried in court on 36 occasions and its editor, Julius Streicher, twice jailed.

Many scholars argue that despite such laws Weimar courts were unduly lenient towards hate-mongers and that judges sympathised with Nazi aims. Other studies suggest that such leniency was the exception, not the rule. Wherever the truth lies in this debate, the primary failure in preventing the rise of Nazism was not legal but political. And this is true of hatred and bigotry today.

We often forget, too, that the victims of censorship are more often than not minorities and those fighting for social change. From Indian climate change activists being charged with promoting enmity between communities to British police charging feminists with hate crimes, censorship in the name of preventing hatred is widely used to target social activists.

We are the inheritors of centuries of struggle against restrictions on what we are able to say. If we forget the lessons of those struggles, we are in danger also of letting the gains of those struggles slip away.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columist

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Freedom of speech was too hard won to be cavalier now about censorship - The Guardian

In the last six months, the American Library Association has seen a spike in book challenges and bans in both school and public libraries, mostly targeting books that center on race and LGBT identity. At the end of 2021, Wake County experienced its own high-profile censorship controversy.

Gender Queer, a graphic memoir about author Maia Kobabe's journey towards identifying as transgender, was removed from Wake County Public Library in December after complaints that it was pornographic. The removal was met with outrage from some in the Wake County community, including an open letter from librarians in protest. In response, WCPL announced on January 10 that they would return Gender Queer to the shelves and work on revising their removal policy.

In October of last year, a video surfaced of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's remarks calling books about LGBT identity filth. When many North Carolinians expressed outrage, Robinson defended his comments and targeted three books specifically for removal: Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, and George, which he described as pornographic and inappropriate for schools and libraries.

Last fall, Wake County residents complained about these same books. Jessica Lewis spoke on behalf of a group of parents at a December Wake County school board public meeting.

Why do our kids have access to this obscenity in our libraries? Who is going to be held accountable for this?" Lewis asked as she quoted segments of the books. "No matter what gender you are, these books have no business being in our libraries.

Nine mothers filed a criminal complaint against Wake County Public School System in December. Among them was Julie Page, who called the books R-rated, if not X-rated, and said that having them available in the public school system was a violation of state and federal statutes protecting minors from obscenity.

Wake County librarian Megan Roberts, who is also a member of the American Library Association, says that its difficult to accept the argument that these complaints arent about race and LGBT identity when they most often target books with those themes.

Although book challenges and bans have a long history, a representative of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom said they saw an "unprecedented" number of book challenges in the fall of 2021. From September 1 to December 1, the ALA received 330 book challenge reports, more than twice the number of reports for the entire year of 2020.

Six of the top ten most challenged books in 2020 were about racism, books which not coincidentally were also on many of the antiracist reading lists being passed around that year. The complaints described these books as "divisive" or "containing an anti-police message."

Last Thursday, Maus, the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, was banned by a Tennessee school district. In North Carolina, in just the last week, Dear Martin, about a Black student in a white school who writes letters to Martin Luther King, Jr, was pulled from assigned reading at a high school in Waynesville after a complaint. George, a children's novel with a transgender protagonist, was unsuccessfully challenged in Moore County.

Richard Price, associate professor of Political Science at Weber State University in Utah, is an expert in censorship, particularly through book challenges, and runs a blog called Adventures in Censorship. They agree with oft-banned childrens author Judy Blume, who has often said that book challenges were driven by fear.

When it comes to representations of people of color and civil rights concerns, or queer inclusion in literature, the attack is contextually about something else, said Price. They dress it up and claim it's about swearing, or the book has sex in it. But in reality, most of this is driven by parents who don't like seeing their world change.

Price sees this recent uproar as a confluence of three things: the nationwide moral panic about the myth that Critical Race Theory was being taught in schools, which picked up around 2019 with the release of the 1619 Project; then, the pandemic causing more tension between parents and schools with shutdowns, online schooling, vaccine and mask requirements; and in 2021, a return to in-person school in most districts.

Megan Roberts, Wake County librarian

The ALA has said that restricting access to books is a violation of minors First Amendment rights, but Price said that its not always simple. In the 1982 Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Pico, a plurality of judges ruled that a politically motivated removal of books violates free speech rights, but that removal based on grounds of pervasive vulgarity or educational suitability would be constitutional and that leaves room for interpretation.

Still, Price feels that schools and libraries have a responsibility to accurately represent the truth. There's no such thing as neutrality between inclusion and exclusion, said Price. So if you're telling me that I have to be politically neutral in a classroom, and that means I can never talk about LGBTQ people or issues, that's not neutral, that is exclusionary.

Megan Roberts, the Wake County librarian, doesnt believe that its the job of librarians to protect readers, no matter their age.

There's definitely something in every library that will offend any reader, any person. But that's one of the reasons I think it's so important to have books on a diverse array of viewpoints, said Roberts. Representation is really important. And it's a way to understand yourself and those around you. And I think that matters, and everyone should be able to see themselves in a book at the public library.

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How a national debate over book censorship is playing out in North Carolina - WUNC

When Delhi University announced last August that it was dropping Mahasweta Devis short story, Draupadi, from the undergraduate English syllabus, students around the country began to share it online. Set around the Naxalite movement, Draupadi is a retelling of the powerful eponymous character from the Mahabharata. Mahasweta Devis Draupadi or Dopdi as she is called, is a rebel who is cornered by the police trying to put down forces she represents, and some of the reasons given for the story being dropped were that it was explicit, mentioned rape and showed the armed forces in poor light. In the U.S., school boards of various States have voted to keep out notable works of literature including John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men, Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrisons Beloved and most recently Art Spiegelmans Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus, on the holocaust.

Often, a ban is likely to put a book in the hands of more readers. As soon as a Tennessee school board announced that it was dropping Maus, just before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, sales began to soar on Amazon even as bookstores in the U.S. handed out free copies. The book tells the story of Spiegelmans ties with his father, Vladek, who survived a concentration camp, and moved to New York. Jews are presented as mice (maus is German for mouse) and the Germans as cats. Vladek and Art have an uneasy relationship but soon his father narrates to him how the noose began to tighten for Jews in Poland and the inevitable journey to a concentration camp. Vladek ends up in Auschwitz, and shows his son the number that was etched on his hand, 175113. The school board was apparently upset with the use of curse words and some nude imagery; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum criticised the ban, pointing out that Maus plays a critical role in teaching students about the Holocaust when millions of Jews were killed.

One of the most famous books to have been banned is of course James Joyces Ulysses, first serialised in an American journal, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on February 2, 1922. To mark 100 years of its publication, Shakespeare and Company has created an ensemble recording of the text read by writers including Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri and Jeanette Winterson, and other artists, musicians and comedians from across the world. The stream-of-consciousness novel, which profiles a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Bloom, has survived controversy, bans and legal action to be hailed as a monument to the human condition. India and other countries banned Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses, and Irans spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the writer in 1989 for the book, considered blasphemous of Islam. Rushdie was provided police protection in the U.K. where he lived then, and he chose an alias Joseph Anton (later the title of his memoir) and went into hiding before emerging years later to live in the U.S. George Orwells dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was banned in Russia till 1990.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Associations office for intellectual freedom, told The New York Times, that aggressively policing books for inappropriate content and banning titles could limit students exposure to great literature, including towering canonical works. Among the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, NYT reported. Writer Laurie Halse Anderson, whose young adult books have frequently been challenged, said pulling titles that deal with difficult subjects can make it harder for students to discuss issues like racism and sexual assault. By attacking these books, by attacking the authors, by attacking the subject matter, what they are doing is removing the possibility for conversation. In his 2021 book, Dangerous Ideas, Eric Berkowitz chronicles the cultural history of censorship and thought suppression through the ages, raising a pertinent question: Will the compulsion to silence the other ever be resolved?

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Censorship and its impact on reading - The Hindu

All factions, at certain points, succumb to the impulse to censor. But for the Democratic Party's liberal adherents, silencing their adversaries has become their primary project.

By Glenn Greenwald / Substack

American liberals are obsessedwith finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by liberals, I mean the term of self-description used by thedominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of hate speech to mean views that make us uncomfortable, and then demand that such hateful views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert,falsely, that the First Amendments guarantee of free speech does not protect hate speech. Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the hate speech framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading misinformation or disinformation. These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term terrorism, it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

When liberals favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC toThe New York TimesandThe Atlantic,spendfour years disseminatingone fabricated Russia story after the next from the Kremlin hacking into Vermonts heating system and Putins sexual blackmail over Trump tobounties on the heads of U.S. soldiersin Afghanistan, theBiden email archive being Russian disinformation, and amagical mystery weaponthat injures American brains with cricket noises none of that is disinformation that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVIDs origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assangestole classified documentsand caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This disinformation term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of disinformation and of its little cousin, misinformation. It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of disinformation. Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous to the point that it cannot be heard.

Thedata provinga deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democratsoverwhelmingly trust and lovethe FBI and CIA. Polls show theyoverwhelmingly favorcensorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs butalso by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives andexplicitly threatened themwith legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.

Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, the insurrection, and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, haveurged Silicon Valleytocensor morewhen asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call disinformation about COVID. Theycheered the use of pro-prosecutor tacticsagainst Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer whoshot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for anadditional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; havedemanded and obtained lengthy prison sentencesand solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek toimport the War on Terror onto domestic soil.

Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.

And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Googles YouTubepermanently bannedthe extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on thefree speech video platform Rumbleafter he received a seven-day suspension from Googles overlords for spreading supposed COVID disinformation. What was Bonginos prohibited view that prompted that suspension? Heclaimedcloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a viewsharedbynumerous expertsand, at least in part, bythe CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Googles permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.

It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani would produce video content for Rumble,The Washington Postimmediately publisheda hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called disinformation expert to malign Rumble as one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world and a place where conspiracies thrive, all caused by Rumbles allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated. (The narrative about Rumble is particularly bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovskicreated Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).

The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After thefirst wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment The Postreturned this week for round two, with apaint-by-numbers hit piecevirtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates, blared the sub-headline. Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, warned thePost. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.

ThisPostattack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a grift. Apparently, this political heiress who is one of the worlds richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves bycashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachsfor 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow wasshowered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC Newsdespite no qualifications believes she is in a position to accuseothersof grifting. She also appears to believe that despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform:

ThisPost-manufactured narrative about Substack instantly metastasized throughout the liberal sect of media. Anti-vaxxers making at least $2.5m a year from publishing on Substack, read the headline ofThe Guardian, the paper that in 2018published the outright liethat Julian Assange met twice with Paul Manafort inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and refuses to this day to retract it (i.e., disinformation). LikeThe Post, the British paper cited one of the seemingly endless number of shady pro-censorship groups this one calling itself the Center for Countering Digital Hate to argue for greater censorship by Substack. They could just say no, said the groups director, who has apparently convinced himself he should be able to dictate what views should and should not be aired: This isnt about freedom; this is about profiting from lies. . . . Substack should immediately stop profiting from medical misinformation that can seriously harm readers.

The emerging campaign to pressure Spotifyto remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, withtoo large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly afterThe Wall Street Journalreportedin September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogans shows be removed from the platform, Roganinvited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.

On Tuesday, musician Neil Youngdemandedthat Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Youngs music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotifypredictably sidedwith Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Youngs music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchellissueda similar demand.Allsortsofcensorship-madliberalscelebratedthis effort to remove Rogan, thenvowedtocanceltheir Spotify subscription inprotestof Spotifys refusal to capitulate for now; ahashtagurging the deletionof Spotifys app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged thateveryone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of historys largest and richest corporations, repeatedlylinked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.

Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,claimedThe Daily Mailwhich, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.

One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. Spotifylost $4 billion in market value this week after rock iconNeil Youngcalled out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, is howThe San Francisco Chronicleput it(that Spotifys stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):

It is worth recalling that NBC News, in January, 2017,announcedthat it had hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News with a $69 million contract. The network had big plans for Kelly, whose first show debuted in June of that year. But barely more than a year later, Kellys comments about blackface in which she rhetorically wondered whether the notorious practice could be acceptable in the modern age with the right intent: such as a young white child paying homage to a beloved African-American sports or cultural figure on Halloween so enraged liberals, both inside the now-liberal network and externally, that they demanded her firing. NBC decided it was worth firing Kelly on whom they had placed so many hopes and eating her enormous contract in order to assuage widespread liberal indignation. The cancellation of the ex-Fox News hosts glossy morning show is a reminder that networks need to be more stringent when assessing the politics of their hirings,proclaimedThe Guardian.

Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own.

Indeed, it was once assumed that Silicon Valley giants steeped in the libertarian ethos of a free internet would be immune to demands to engage in political censorship (content moderation is the more palatable euphemism which liberal corporate media outlets prefer). But when the still-formidable megaphones ofThe New York Times,The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and the rest of the liberal media axis unite to accuse Big Tech executives of having blood on their hands and being responsible for the destruction of American democracy, that is still an effective enforcement mechanism. Billionaires are, like all humans, social and political animals and instinctively avoid ostracization and societal scorn.

Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a companys future viability.

The one bright spot in all this and it is a significant one is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism. In response to thePostattack, Substackissued a gloriously defiant statementre-affirming its commitment to guaranteeing free discourse. They also repudiated the hubristic belief that they are competent to act as arbiters of Truth and Falsity, Good and Bad. Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse, read the headline on the post from Substacks founders. The body of their post reads like a free speech manifesto:

Thats why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to ourhands-off approachto content moderation. While we havecontent guidelinesthat allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.

Alengthy Twitter threadfrom Substacks Vice President of Communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey was similarly encouraging and assertive. Im proud of our decision to defend free expression, even when its hard, she wrote, adding: because: 1) We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That cant happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong. Regarding demands to de-platform those allegedly spreading COVID disinformation, she pointedly and accurately noted: If everyone who has ever been wrong about this pandemic were silenced, there would be no one left talking about it at all. And she, too, affirmed principles that everyactual, genuine liberal not the Nancy Pelosi kind reflexively supports:

People already mistrust institutions, media, and each other. Knowing that dissenting views are being suppressed makes that mistrust worse. Withstanding scrutiny makes truths stronger, not weaker. We made a promise to writers that this is a place they can pursue what they find meaningful, without coddling or controlling. We promised we wouldnt come between them and their audiences. And we intend to keep our side of the agreement for every writer that keeps theirs, to think for themselves. They tend not to be conformists, and they have the confidence and strength of conviction not to be threatened by views that disagree with them or even disgust them.

This is becoming increasingly rare.

The U.K.s Royal Society, its national academy of scientists, this monthechoed Substacks viewthat censorship, beyond its moral dimensions and political dangers, is ineffective and breeds even more distrust in pronouncements by authorities. Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online. There is, they concluded, little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformations harms and such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet andexacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.

As both Rogans success andcollapsing faithand interest in traditional corporate media outlets prove, there is a growing hunger for discourse that is liberated from the tight controls of liberal media corporations and their petulant, herd-like employees. That is why other platforms devoted to similar principles of free discourse, such as Rumble for videos and Callin for podcasts, continue to thrive. It is certain that those platforms will continue to be targeted by institutional liberalism as they grow and allow more dissidents and heretics to be heard. Time will tell if they, too, will resist these censorship pressures, but the combination of genuine conviction on the part of their founders and managers, combined with the clear market opportunities for free speech platforms and heterodox thinkers, provides ample ground for optimism.

None of this is to suggest that American liberals are the only political faction that succumbs to the strong temptations of censorship. Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools andlargely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would not define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.

There are indeed examples of right-wing censorship campaigns: among the worst arelaws implemented by GOP legislatures and championed by GOP governorsto punish those who support a boycott of Israel (BDS) by denying them contracts or other employment benefits. And among themost frequent targets of censorship campaignson college campuses arecritics of Israeland activists for Palestinian rights. But federal courts have beenunanimously striking downthose indefensible red-state laws punishing BDS activists asan unconstitutional infringement of free speech rights, and polling data, as noted above, shows that it is the Democrats who overwhelmingly favor internet censorship while Republicans oppose it.

In sum, censorship once the province of the American Right during the heyday of the Moral Majority of the 1980s now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.

Glenn Greenwald is the author of several bestsellers, including How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. His most recent book is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and was the founding editor of the media outlet, The Intercept. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, Rolling Stone and various other television and radio outlets. He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I. F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

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Greenwald: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship - Scheerpost.com

Photo credit: Tumisu, via Pixababy.

Editors note: See also, The Rise of Totalitarian Science, 2022 Edition.

A leading science organization, the Royal Society (Britains equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences), has put out a reportdiscouraging social media censorship,with special reference to theCOVID-19pandemic:

The Royal Society, the U.K.s academy of sciences, published a study of online scientific and health misinformation Wednesday, investigating its root causes and brainstorming possible solutions. The scientists concluded that censoring content deemed to be misinformation is often harmful and antithetical to the principles of scientific inquiry

The report found that online censorship risked pushing misinformation underground and off of major social media platforms, where it is less likely to be exposed to countervailing opinions. Censorship also risks removing or suppressing content that may be true or helpful to the evolving scientific understanding of certain concepts.

The Royal Society report seeks to establisha rational basis for public trustin science:

While misinformation isnt a new problem and uncertainty and debate are intrinsic parts of sciencethe internet has drastically magnified the speed and scale at which poor quality information can spread.

The report highlights how online misinformation on scientific issues, like climate change or vaccine safety, can harm individuals and society. It stresses that censoring or removing inaccurate, misleading and false content, whether its shared unwittingly or deliberately, is not a silver bullet and may undermine the scientific process and public trust. Instead, there needs to be a focus on building resilience against harmful misinformation across the population and the promotion of a healthy online information environment

The media release adds,

In the early days of the pandemic, science was too often painted as absolute and somehow not to be trusted when it corrects itself, but that prodding and testing of received wisdom is integral to the advancement of science, and society.

This is important to bear in mind when we are looking to limit scientific misinformations harms to society. Clamping down on claims outside the consensus may seem desirable, but it can hamper the scientific process and force genuinely malicious content underground.

Heresthe open-access report.

The Royal Societys stance is wise. For one thing, terms like misinformation (and fake news) have become manipulative terms of art, to justify cracking down on unpopular (but not disproven or even disprovable) viewpoints. Trust in science, as they emphasize, should berationaltrust, alert to evidence and aware of the possibility that strongly held views can be mistaken.

But there is another factor to consider. If we look at for example the COVID news vortex, the difficulty is thatmuch information that was later thought to need correction was in fact purveyed by official sources,not by conspiracy sites or social media.

Consider the case ofAnthony Fauci. One freelance writer startedkeeping track ofhis rapid shifts in opinion:

To start, we need to focus on Dr. Faucis perspective on the virus itself and its risk to the United States. In late January 2020, Fauci said that COVID was a very, very low risk to the United States, Holden wrote. I think it goes without saying that his perspective has evolved since.

One big, obvious area of flipping is around the benefits of wearing a mask. Dr. Fauci originally said that masks werent effective & publicly encouraged Americans not to buy them (guidance he doesnt regret). Now even vaccinated people need to wear masks, Holden wrote to accompany images of various headlines showing changing positions on masks.

Those are hardly the only examples.

Official sources, includingDr. Fauci,have, at times, attempted to persuade the public that the claim that the COVID virus originated at a Level 4 virus lab in Wuhan was just aconspiracy theory.But for anyonefamiliar with the circumstances,there was no reason to dismiss the idea. If there was any conspiracy, it was on the part ofrespected, major institutions:

From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now a string of unearthed emails the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in itsJanuary 11, 2022 letter is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails dont prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.

Yet shortly afterward, the lead virologist suddenly proclaimed a different view:

In a February 4, 2020 email, he derided ideas about a lab leak as crackpot theories that relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.

But Wade notes,

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committees January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation.

The rest of his article details how the United States came to be involved in the Wuhan research.

But for the rest of us, the key question should be: In this atmosphere, do we really want Big Tech companies deciding what constitutes a crackpot theory and then censoring information that is currently unpopular with government?

Its not just news-dominant COVID where this sort of thing happens. Recently, a court reporter at National Public Radio (NPR) appears to have dropped a fake news story on the public concerning face masks on the U.S. Supreme Court. Theclaim, made by NPRs Nina Totenberg apparently relying on a single anonymous source was that Justice Gorsuch didnt mask despite Justice Sotomayors COVID worries, leading her to telework instead of sit at the bench.

That led to a wild flurry of denunciations of Gorsuch on social media, as might be expected. The only problem is, the claim apparentlywasnt true.Not only did the two justices concerned deny the story but the chief justice, Roberts, discredited the story as well.

Reliance on a single, anonymous source is the sort of thing one might expect of an ignorable Facebook page or discreditable blog. So if NPR turns out to be doing it, there is certainly something unjust about targeting a social media account with vastly less reach and prominence.

There is no a priori reason to believe that censorship targets are chosen simply because they are especially wrong or dangerous. Politicized situations simply do not work that way.

Considering the current high state of public anxiety aboutCOVID-19,the consequences of attempts to control misinformation could lay the foundations for a totalitarian state. Consider the results ofa recent poll:

Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

Yet if we look at the actual history of official statements about anything to do with COVID, the proposal that these respondents support would merely ensure that, should government prove wrong about something once again, anyone who talks about it will face fines or imprisonment. And thats the signature of a totalitarian state.

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Royal Society: Don't Censor Misinformation; It Makes Things Worse - Discovery Institute