Mediaboss Marketing

I dont tweet. I probably never will. As a former English professor, I am too steeped in the idea that you must provide well-reasoned support for your assertionsnot just blurt them out rapid-fire with as many typos as you can manage.

Despite my lack of interest in the venue, however, I have noticed the recent uproar surrounding Elon Musks takeover of Twitter. The left is furious because it appears that Musk will disallow the censorship of which they had grown so fond. No more can they rest easy in the knowledge that their poorly formed ideas and false narratives will be unequivocally protected from dissidents by thought-police algorithms and official banishments.

Meanwhile, the right, being the hand most often slapped by the corporate dictatorship that was Twitter, is eating its popcorn now and watching with glee the recent turn of events in Dystopia. It is cheering Musk on and preparing all its pent-up one-liners for the new free-speech-friendly virtual world.

I admit there is satisfaction in seeing the smug enraged, but that is a base, sectarian satisfaction, which probably misses the forest for the trees. Free speech is a double-edged axe, as is censorship. Unbridled free speech is an open marketplace for ideas, not all of which are good for people and some of which are downright dangerous for both body and soul. Sure, you can say, as the free-market economists do about corporations, that the bad will be defeated by their betters in the free market of discourse, but this is nave. In a very truly well-educated society, the best ideas may prevail, for the citizens of that land have the tools to evaluate arguments on their merits. But we do not live in a well-educated society, not by a long shot, and the peddlers of bad ideas are often expert propagandists. They need not defeat their opponents (those with good ideas) in open debateindeed, they are incapable of winning on those grounds. They need only control positions of power: in the media, including social media and entertainment, in education, medicine, agriculture, politics, and so on.

With a poorly educated, highly indoctrinated society such as we have, it is not the better ideas that will prevail in a free-speech environment; it is the more pervasive propaganda. Admittedly, censorship offers no better an alternative. As we have seen with Twitter and other big-tech entities during the so-called pandemic and 2020 elections, censorship is executed by the powerful, not the wise.

In the hands of a wise parent, however, censorship of what comes into the home and into the minds of the children is not just a useful tool; it is essential for the familys healthmental, physical, and spiritual alike. So too with a wise government, with wise teachers, with wise editors of media outlets, with a wise religious authorityall potentially disseminators of truth and protectors of persons. In their hands, strict limitations on the flow of harmful ideas into society can only serve to limit the damage and carnage on a fallen, and therefore vulnerable, race.

The problem, of course, is that we do not have many wise people in government, in education, in media, or in religious authority at present, and, in fact, a great many of them are actively engaged in the destruction of the moral and political orders. Therefore, the censorship they impose is exactly the wrong kind: they cancel truth rather than lies.

Which brings us back to Twitter: a dictatorially leftist organization controlling the lions share of bellicose one-liner communications. Not only does the platform itself inhibit real debate, but its owners could not resist flexing the muscle of their market domination, and they started openly banning users who did not align with their weak-minded politics. To focus on their acts of censorship, though, and to cheer Musks alleged intention of bringing free speech back to the playing field is to miss the point of the problem.

The real offense of Twitter is not censorship. It never was a kindly, public-service endeavor meant beneficently to allow folks everywhere to speak their minds and be heard. It was about money and political power, and the owners of political power do not typically give equal time to their opponentsnot in their own backyard. And if you think about it, why should they?

The trouble with Twitter is not censorship but false advertising, a bait-and-switch scam. Come on in, everyone! The water is fine, and the speech is free. You can make a splash and spar with anyone about anything you like. There is the appearance of no vested interest behind the offering.

That Elon Musk just paid $44 billion dollars for it should shatter that illusion.

Michael Larson

Top image by Mohamed Hassan, Pixabay

Read this article:
The Trouble with Twitter - Chronicles - A Magazine of American Culture

Earlier this month, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view.

Gitee released a statement later that day explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed, as all open-source code would need to be before being published from then on. The company didnt have a choice, it wrote. Gitee didnt respond to MIT Technology Review, but it is widely assumed that the Chinese government had imposed yet another bit of heavy-handed censorship.

For the open-source software community in China, which celebrates transparency and global collaboration, the move has come as a shock. Code was supposed to be apolitical. Ultimately, these developers fear it could discourage people from contributing to open-source projects, and Chinas software industry will suffer as a result.Read the full story.

Zeyi Yang

The must-reads

Ive combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Americas children are more anxious than everAnd it runs deeper than the pandemic. (NYT $)+ The relentless stream of bad news is making us all feel bad. (Wired $)+ How to mend your broken pandemic brain. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Digital surveillance programs make immigrants feel like prisonersTheyre touted as a more humane alternative to detention, but ankle tags carry stigma and stoke anxiety. (Coda Story)+ The CIA and US military are spending huge amounts of money on metaverse projects. (The Intercept)

3 The Wikipedia editor exposing the predatory world of cryptomaniaThat doesnt mean shes reveling in its current implosion. (WP $)+ Six months into the crypto crash, investors are making the same mistakes. (Motherboard)+ Fraudsters are using a deepfake of Elon Musk to steal crypto. (Motherboard) + This crypto reality dating show sounds like a parody of itself. (Input Mag)

4 A new ancestry-predicting DNA tool is solving missing-people mysteries But experts are wary that DNA phenotyping could further fuel racial discrimination in policing. (NYT $)+ Our museums are a treasure trove of genomic data. (Ars Technica)

Here is the original post:
The Download: Open source censorship in China, and US kids are more anxious than ever - MIT Technology Review

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is in the middle of a two-week visit to the United States, with the stated aim of boosting trade and tourism, after NZ ditched almost all its COVID-19 restrictions and reopened the border.

Ardern is accompanied by Trade Minister Damien OConnor and representatives from major NZ companies including dairy exporter Fonterra, meat processor Silver Fern Farms, and kiwifruit exporter Zespri.

In a press release, Ardern made clear that the US relationship is fundamental to us in political and security terms too. She will meet President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, and they will discuss New Zealands role in the US-NATO war against Russia, and in the growing preparations for war against China.

It is Arderns second overseas trip since the pandemic began. Last month, she visited Japan, where she signed an intelligence-sharing agreement, helping to bring Japan into closer alignment with the US-led Five Eyes spy network.

Arderns US visit has been overshadowed by the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. In response to these horrific events, she echoed the banal statements of Biden and other politicians, which are aimed at preventing any serious discussion of their underlying social and political causes.

In her commencement address to Harvard University graduates last Thursday, and during an earlier appearance on the Late Show, Ardern was applauded for mentioning New Zealands gun control measures. The countrys parliament banned military-style assault rifles following the March 15, 2019 terror attack, in which fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.

In her Harvard speech, Ardern said nothing about the role of far-right politicians, including Donald Trump, in fuelling Tarrants ideology. Instead, she blamed the attack on social media and promoted her governments push for global internet censorship, dubbed the Christchurch Call to Action.

Ardern lamented the declining influence of mainstream media outlets, that is, those which serve corporate interests, and urged social media companies to work with governments to develop responsible algorithms to stop disinformation.

What this means in practice can be seen in New Zealand, where the Labour Party-led government has already boosted the powers and resources of the Office of the Censor to rapidly take down online content deemed extremist. The real target of such measures is not the far-right, but working people, who are moving to the left.

New Zealand, like the US, is seething with class tensions. Ardern portrayed the country as a sort of identity politics paradise, telling her privileged audience: Almost 50 percent of our parliament are women, 20 percent are Mori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, and our deputy prime minister is a proud gay man.

She did not mention that her diverse Labour-Greens coalition government has used the pandemic to engineer the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in New Zealands history. Tens of billions of dollars have been handed to corporations and the banks, while real wages are going backwards amid the soaring cost of living. Nearly one in four children lives in poverty, while homelessness and reliance on charity are at record levels.

Workers are seeking a means to fight back, with a nationwide strike by 10,000 healthcare workers held earlier this month. Low-paid hospital workers face chronic staff shortages, made worse by the constant stream of sick and dying COVID-19 patients.

The New Zealand government is now following the US and other countries in removing all public health restrictions and allowing COVID to infect millions of people. While visiting the US, where hundreds are dying from the virus every day, Ardern promoted the lie that the pandemic is over, as she encouraged tourists to return to New Zealand.

In an interview which was basically an advertorial for New Zealand, Late Show host Stephen Colbert congratulated Ardern on the countrys relatively low COVID death toll of more than 1,000 people in a country of five million. Ardern explained that this was because we decided that we would try and eliminate, just get rid of COVID, using lockdowns and border quarantine measures.

Ardern said New Zealand had adopted this policy because we just couldnt stand the idea of our population being devastated when we could do something about it It was the right thing to do, it saved so many lives. She said the border had remained closed for the entirety of the pandemic, implying that the restrictions are being lifted now because the pandemic is over.

Arderns presentation was false from start to finish. Her Labour Party-led government, supported by the nurses and teachers unions, initially opposed a nationwide lockdown. The measure was announced in late March 2020, not out of altruism, but because the ruling class feared a mass movement developing among tens of thousands of healthcare workers and others, who were demanding action to stop the virus.

Ardern failed to mention that New Zealands elimination policy was abandoned last October, against the advice of public health experts, and that the Omicron variant has spread like wildfire. Following the instructions of the corporate and financial elite, which is totally unconcerned about protecting lives and views all public health measures as a barrier to profit-making, the NZ government has embraced the criminal policy of mass infection.

Quarantine-free travel is resuming just as New Zealand is in the middle of a deadly surge, which is expected to get worse as the country heads into winter. The vast majority of the more than 1,100 COVID-related deaths happened in the last three months, following the reopening of schools for in-person learning.

According to Worldometers, New Zealand recorded 20 COVID deaths per million in the past seven days, the eighth-highest weekly death rate in the world. More than one million people in the country have been infected, meaning there could be hundreds of thousands suffering from Long COVID.

Seeking to minimise the danger posed by the virus, Ardern joked with Colbert about her own recent infection, saying she got COVID for Mothers Day from her partner, and she did not recommend it as a gift.

The virus has, however, disrupted Arderns US trip. So far, three members of her delegation have tested positive, including Ministry of Foreign Affairs chief Chris Seed and Arderns chief press secretary Andrew Campbell. California Governor Gavin Newsom also revealed he had tested positive the day after meeting Ardern in San Francisco.

Despite this spate of infections, Arderns meeting with Biden is still scheduled to go ahead. As the world hurtles towards war, Ardern told the media that she would encourage greater US engagement in the Pacific region. This is meant to push back against Chinas growing influence and to defend the NZ ruling classs own interests in its neo-colonial patch.

Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter

Read more:
New Zealand PM in the US promotes internet censorship, downplays pandemic - WSWS

A record number of books have been banned or challenged in the U.S. in the last year, part of a push by conservatives torein in discussionof issues that some find distasteful. Now, author Margaret Atwood is responding to the rise in censorship by auctioning a fireproof edition of her novel "The Handmaid's Tale," which ranks among the most frequently banned books in the U.S.

In a video posted onSotheby's sitefor "The Unburnable Book," Atwood is shown with a flamethrower as she takes aim at the edition, which is printed on pages made from heat-resistantCinefoil, sewn together with nickel wire. The flames lick at the book, but the pages remain intact.

"I never thought I'd be trying to burn one of my own books ... and failing," Atwood said in a statement.

The edition is "designed to protect this vital story and stand as a powerful symbol against censorship," the auction site notes.

The auction, which places the expected sale range at $50,000 $100,000, will direct all proceeds to PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression and that plans to use the money to support those efforts. "The Handmaid's Tale," first published in 1985, is a dystopian vision of a future America where women are stripped of their rights and live under a theocracy that prizes them strictly for their reproductive abilities.

Interest in "The Handmaid's Tale" has increased amid a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that, if finalized, would pave the way for states to severely curtail abortion rights in the U.S. The prospect Roe v. Wade being overturned has sparked observations about the book's prescience and relevance to modern events.

"The Handmaid's Tale" has been among the most challenged publications in America, with the American Library Association (ALA) noting that it has been targeted for "vulgarity and sexual overtones."

Efforts to ban books have surged in the past year, with the ALA finding there were a record 729 challenges to more than almost 1,600 titles in 2021, double the number in 2020.

Atwood said in the statement that her book has been banned "by whole countries, as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries." She also expressed hope that society doesn't get to the point of "wholesale book burnings, as in 'Fahrenheit 451'," referring to the Ray Bradbury classic.

More recently, Barnes & Noble has faced pressure from a Virginia lawmaker and a congressional candidate to restrict sales of two books deemed "obscene" to minors without parental consent. The candidate, Tommy Altman, said he is running for Congress to protect freedom, including the right to free speech. One of the books the pair is aiming to restrict is the most challenged book of 2021, the memoir "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe.

"To see [Atwood's] classic novel about the dangers of oppression reborn in this innovative, unburnable edition is a timely reminder of what's at stake in the battle against censorship," Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement.

Trending News

See the original post here:
Fireproof "Handmaid's Tale" edition is up for auction: A "symbol against censorship" - CBS News

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

"1984" had its Ministry of Truth, the Soviets had their Gulag. Todays Russians, like their kindred spirits among the American left, may be less overt in policing speech but dont let a less visible barbarity fool anyone into believing that the goal is any less of an assault on free speech.

Current Russian law punishes speech or public engagement that questions Russias invasion of Ukraine or even protests that call it a war. As University of Massachusetts Amherst Associate Professor Lauren McCarthy puts it, "public activities aimed at discrediting the use of Russias military," become "a criminal offense if committed twice in a year."

WAPO ED BOARD ON DISINFORMATION GOVERNANCE BOARD: DHS ERRORS 'A SHOWCASE IN SOME OF THE WORST PRACTICES'

Russian law also criminalizes "spreading false information about the Russian military." What qualifies as misinformation? Apparently, calling Russias "special operation" in Ukraine by its more common name war qualifies as a crime.

In order to have a police force large enough to spy on an entire nation, Russia has ominously created "anonymous denunciation websites." The Venetian Doges, who encouraged citizens to rat out other citizens by dropping anonymous notes in the mouth of the lion (Called: bocche dei leone) would be jealous of todays technology.

In America, we have not yet granted government the police power to criminalize misinformation, but not for trying. The American Left believes that the public should be protected from anyone who questions COVID-19 orthodoxy.

If a scientist, or an elected official, questions evidence for forcing booster vaccines on teenagers, the speech police want those questions forbidden.

Recently, I went to the Senate floor to protest a policy that commands booster COVID vaccines for the pages, pointing out that there is no scientific evidence that a booster lessens hospitalization or death for teenagers and it certainly doesnt prevent transmission.

WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan agrees with me and has stated:"There is no evidence right now that healthy children or healthy adolescents need boosters. No evidence at all."

And yet, the Democrat and Republican overlords actually forced the pages to leave the Senate floor when I spoke, so that their young minds wouldnt be tainted with what I presume they felt was disinformation. Only when I threatened to reveal the names of those involved in this ambush on Constitutional speech did they consent to allow a few pages back on the floor.

The Pandemic has caused an epidemic of efforts to police speech. The Biden Administration has, for now, shuttered the Disinformation Governance Board.

But dont for a moment accept that the lefts infatuation with censorship is over. If fact, the left is quite peeved that everyone seems to have misinterpreted their noble goals.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whined in committee that Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had government agencies doing exactly the same type of speech monitoring. If true, that just means the problem is more widespread than we thought.

To Mayorkas and the left, they want us to believe that they will be the nice speech police. In fact, they really want to farm out the police work to big tech. Axioss Felix Salmon recognizes this conceit when he calls Big Tech "the fourth branch of government," for effectively shutting down President Trumps access to social media.

Former White House Press Secretary Psaki admitted as much, when she recently "urged Facebook to move more expeditiously to find and remove misleading content before it is consumed by a large number of users," National Review reported.

Psaki elaborated that what the White House seeks is "robust enforcement strategy" that combines the reach of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to "provide transparency about the rules." By rules, we must assume, she means censorship that will be guided by Big Brother but enforced by Big Tech.

According to Psaki, the government will helpfully flag the problematic posts as disinformation and ask the Facebook to police away the bad information.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER

What could go wrong?

I wish this authoritarian urge to censor speech would die along with the Disinformation Governance Board. But I fear the impulse to regulate human behavior via unlimited regulation of the economic sphere has simply found its way down the slippery slope to regulating speech.

For sure, there are still liberal minds who recognize the dangers of censorship but the once vaunted and revered concept of free speech is under assault like never before. Journalist Matt Taibbi writes eloquently on the subject: "The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of experts. Its anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

For now, Bidens Ministry of Truth is dead but free speech advocates on the right and the left need to zealously guard and defend a right so precious that its not an overstatement to claim that our free society depends on it.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM SENATOR RAND PAUL

See the article here:
Biden's censors want Russian-style speech controls and they haven't given up - Fox News