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Tom Leatherbury| Special to the Globe-News

To use his words, Texas Gov.Greg Abbott has a problem when it comes to censorship and double standards. Abbottrecently assertedthat Big Tech companies are the ones with a big problem when it comes to censorship and double standards, but those claims could be easily used to categorize one of the host of new laws that the governor encouraged the Texas Legislature to pass to compel speech the government approves and suppress speech the government disapproves the new social media censorship law, House Bill 20.

This unconstitutional law attacks the very companies that facilitate safety and well-being for their users by combating misinformation the same companies that Abbott is courting to bring good-paying jobs to Texas.

Abbott has praised House Bill 20, signed into law on Sept.9, 2021, for protecting Texans from wrongful censorship on social media platforms. The law prevents tech companies with 50 million monthly users or more from banning users based on political or religious viewpoints wherever those viewpoints are expressed. The law also requires multiple disclosures about content moderation practices and processes by these companies, sets a 48-hour deadline for the review and removal of illegal content, and creates nearly insurmountable obstacles for email service providers to block spam and other unwanted messages.

While the bills supporters may claim the law is protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans, in reality, the law tramples the free speech of private American companies. House Bill 20 is even more draconian than a recent Florida law that a federal judge held unconstitutional on multiple grounds and preliminarily enjoined from taking effect.

Judge Hinkles injunction against this Florida law set the record straight, stating that the First Amendment says "Congress"shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. The Fourteenth Amendment extended this prohibition to state and local governments. The First Amendment does not restrict the rights of private entities not performing traditional, exclusive public functions. In short, the First Amendment provides that a state government, like Florida and Texas, cannot abridge the speech rights of a private company, like Google.

The Florida federal court concluded that tech companies are private entities with First Amendment rights of editorial discretion and that state governments do not possess the power to disregard these rights. However, Gov.Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature do not seem to care about this federal court ruling or the United States Constitution. They disregarded both by passing House Bill 20 and signing it into law.

Texas taxpayers will bear the financial burden of watching House Bill 20 being declared unconstitutional now that NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association have filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas to invalidate House Bill 20.

Aside from infringing on companies constitutional rights, laws like House Bill 20 make it more difficult and expensive for companies to create enjoyable and secure products for users. Technology companies have stepped up and have made robust investments to keep products family-friendly, clean from hate speech and misinformation, and safe from illegal activity.

House Bill 20s drastic measures could easily impose significant additional costs on tech companies. Preventing companies from moderating content might score Texas politicians some cheap political points, but it will cost users and taxpayers severely. Texas officials should be empowering tech companies to continue their efforts to enhance safety from hate speech and misinformation, not disincentivizing them with costly, unfair, and unconstitutional laws and regulations.

Perhaps the largest insult to tech companies and Texans can be attributed to Abbotts double standards. He is using House Bill 20 to target and hurt the very companies that he is actively recruiting to invest in the state of Texas. On one hand, Texas is courting tech companies to bring good-paying jobs and economic vitality to the people of Texas, but on the other, the governor and other Texas officials are on a mission to punish the same companies who could bring those immense benefits to our economy.

It's time for Abbott to embrace the economic free market principles that have made Texas attractive to so many businesses and stop encouraging the passage of unconstitutional legislation.

Tom Leatherbury is the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and Texas counsel to Electronic Frontier Foundation in NetChoice v. Paxton, the constitutional challenge to House Bill 20. The views expressed are his own.

Excerpt from:
Leatherbury: Meet Greg Abbott: The governor of censorship and double standards - Amarillo.com

State legislatures are a greater threat to free speech than the social climate on college campuses

Will Katcher / Daily Collegian

With debates surrounding cancel culture and freedom of speech on college campuses growing more and more contentious, one group of academics claim to have found the magic solution: creating a new university. Condemning what they call a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship on college campuses, the group announced last week that they will be founding the University of Austin. While the Universitys backers are a diverse group of prominent higher ed critics, they all share a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a belief that it is time for something new. They allege that modern universities have sacrificed the pursuit of truth, and turned into breeding grounds for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach. By forming their own university, they hope to reestablish open inquiry as the central guiding principle of a university and promote greater diversity of thought.

But have universities really abandoned the principles of open inquiry for liberal orthodoxy? It quickly becomes apparent that such claims are quite strained. Consider the dire terms Pano Kanelos a former St. Johns University president and a founding trustee of UATX used to describe the state of higher education in his announcement last week: We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society.

The Stanford historian Niall Ferguson (another founding trustee) similarly wrote about the state of modern universities, saying, Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion. Is catastrophizing college culture really warranted, or is this yet another example of moral panic?

Its hard to deny that there are some problems with speech and censorship on campuses, but the main question is one of scale. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-partisan organization that tracks issues of freedom of speech, has observed a substantial increase in targeting incidents among scholars, which is when institutions take punitive action against faculty for exercising their freedom of speech. This can include demands for an investigation, demotion, censorship, suspension and even termination. FIRE notes that while there were 24 targeting incidents in 2015, that number rose to 113 in 2020.

All of this does merit some attention, but not the apocalyptic rhetoric of some of UATXs backers. As Adam Gurri notes in Liberal Currents, the number of incidences observed by organizations like FIRE are still quite small compared to the huge populations theyre drawn from.

FIRE also observes that these incidences are more often from people who are more politically left-leaning than the person targeted. It seems to me that this may be caused by a significant imbalance between the number of liberal and conservative professors at most universities.

Another issue with the rhetoric of many UATX affiliates is that they fail to recognize the variety of approaches to free speech and intellectual diversity at different universities. Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, responded to the announcement of UATX by acknowledging the problem of groupthink at elite universities, but pushed back on the notion that this occurs at all universities. The American higher education system is already immense, Roth writes. And once you look past those elite colleges, youll see a huge range of philosophies and politics. He goes on to list several examples of these varying approaches, including that of his own University where they have sought to hire more scholars from conservative, libertarian and faith-based backgrounds to promote greater intellectual diversity.

But the largest problem with UATX is that it misrepresents these issues as the most pressing threat to Americas democracy. While its valid to highlight the negative consequences of rash cancel-culture cancelations and advocate for greater intellectual diversity on college campuses, the primary threats to free speech arent coming from universities theyre coming from state legislatures.

Eleven bills in nine states have been passed banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 classes and another 18 bills are still pending. These bans have been called educational gag orders by the free speech organization PEN America (standing for Poets, Essayists and Novelists), since they effectively make it impossible to teach an accurate narrative of race politics in American history classes. Some of these same states have also passed electoral reforms that make it easier for state legislatures to overturn the popular vote if they claim there was voter fraud. Its abundantly clear that the most immediate and dangerous threat to U.S. democracy comes from these efforts on the right. Complaints about college cancel culture are, at best, secondary issues and at worst, dangerous distractions.

Benjamin Schnurr can be reached at [emailprotected] and followed on Twitter at @Ben_Schnurr.

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The new anti-woke university is built on false claims that social censorship plagues college campuses - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Column By Melissa Martin

Every person has a story. Every person is a story. Our world is laced and leathered together by stories about humanity; the rights and the wrongs. Threads of history wrap around and around and around a never-ending spool of narratives.

And while we anger at the silencing of stories in communist countries, we dare not fathom the suppressing of the pen in America. How can censorship take root and live in the United States, a great country built upon a foundation of civil liberties? By igniting and fanning fear during a pandemic, thats how.

We witnessed the shushing, hushing, and crushing of written words by the private sectors, Facebook and Twitter, concerning the 2020 presidential election. But, the flames of internet censorship continue to blaze.

Jessica Berg Wilsons husband said Twitter censored Jessicas obituary. Doctors diagnosed her withvaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia(VITT). And VITT is a rare, and sometimes fatal, blood-clotting condition triggered by COVID vaccines. How interesting that the Twitter fact-checkers failed to check the facts. Visitclarkcountytoday.comfor more of this story.

According to a recent article inThe Washington Post, YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists. Since when is questioning any medical information a crime? Since when is an opposite belief or opinion about medical treatments considered an enemy to democracy? Since megalomaniac Anthony Fauci rolled out his pandemic plan as the truth, the light, and the way for healing.

But, theres a sticky wicket. Social Media platforms are private companies and legally able to establish rules within their communities. And this includes censorship of content. Thats a big fly in the ointment.

Has Big Brother entered the Whitehouse? Is George Orwells dystopian 1949 novel,Nineteen Eighty-Four,coming to pass? Biden allied groups, including theDemocratic National Committee, are planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively, and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.Visitwww.politico.com.

What actions can citizens take to protect civil liberties?

Write to your state representatives. Write Letters to the Editor of your local and state newspapers. Join organizations that promote freedom of speech and freedom to write.

Thirty states are in the process of enacting laws against internet censorship.

The Stop Social Media Censorship Act passed Floridas Republican-majority House and Senate. DeSantis signed it into law, but a judge blocked it.

In Wisconsin, Assembly Bill 589 would prevent the censorship of media enterprises based on the content of their publication or broadcast.Assembly Bill 530 would prevent the censorship of posts by or about political candidates and elected officials.

Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Visitpen.org.

TheFree Expression Network (FEN)is an alliance of organizations dedicated to protecting the First Amendment right of free expression and the values it represents, and to opposing governmental efforts to suppress constitutionally-protected speech. Visitncac.org.

The First Amendment Coalition is a nonprofit public interest organization dedicated to advancing free speech, more open and accountable government, and public participation in civic affairs. Visitfirstamendmentcoalition.org.

We cannot allow freedom of speech or any civil liberties to be erased by anybody, no matter how powerful or greedy or corrupt.

If all printers were determined not to print anything until they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.Benjamin Franklin

Melissa Martin is an opinion editorial columnist, author, and educator. The opinion in this editorial is her own.

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Editorial: Erasing the freedom to disagree - The Gila Herald

From 4th to 20th February, 2022, China will host the 24th Olympic Winter Games and, although access to pre-Olympic events for foreign journalists has been very limited in the recent months due in particular to the Covid-19 pandemic, the sports and general press of the whole world will give the event very wide coverage.

On this occasion, RSF recommends journalists who travel to China to avoid downloading applications that could allow the Chinese authorities to monitor them. RSF also recommends that media outlets, publishers, and social networks denounce any editorial interference or pressure from the regime and continue their investigations into Beijing's attacks on press freedom (see the details of the recommendations below).

"The Olympic Games provide President Xi Jinping with a dream opportunity to restore his image and try to make people forget his catastrophic human rights records, including press freedom and the right to information, says RSF East Asia Bureau head, Cdric Alviani. It is legitimate for the media to cover this major international event, but they must be wary of the regimes manipulation attempts and protect their journalists from surveillance and possible pressure.

China, the world's largest prison for journalists with at least 127 detained, ranks 177th out of 180 in the 2021 RSF World Press Freedom Index, just two places above North Korea, a country in which journalism is synonymous with state propaganda. President Xi Jinping, in power since 2013, has restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which to freely access information is not a right, but a crime.

The sports world is particularly worried about the fate of international tennis champion Peng Shuai, a Chinese citizen who was apparently placed under house arrest after accusing a former deputy prime minister of rape on the 2nd November 2021 on the Chinese social network Sina Weibo, an event to which which the regime responded with an all-out censorship campaign.

RSFs recommendations:

1. Recommendations for journalists

2. Recommendations for media outlets, publishers, and social networks

These recommendations are extracted from a report entitled "The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China" that will be published by RSF in early December 2021. This publication will detail the system of censorship and information control put in place by the Beijing regime and the threat it poses for press freedom and democracy in the world.

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Beijing Winter Olympics: RSF urges press to protect themselves against surveillance | RSF - Reporters sans frontires

China's internet censorship machine has expanded to include crypto media outlets and mining pools in a continued attempt to minimize Chinese users' exposure to the crypto market ecosystem.

Chainnews, one of the major Chinese crypto media outlets established since 2017, is now shutting down all channels of content production and distribution.

Meanwhile, Chinese internet service providers have taken further steps to detect and block domestic miner IPs from connecting to major mining pool services, based on a China Telecom document seen by The Block.

These moves are signs that China is not loosening its grip over the crypto industry even if its most severe crackdown efforts ever since the summer has already dampened retail interests and forced businesses and executives to either cut ties with the Chinese market or physically move overseas.

Earlier this month, the mobile apps and web domains of at least three major Chinese language crypto media outlets Chainnews, ODaily and BlockBeats all became inaccessible almost at the same time. Since then they have switched to their official Telegram channels to distribute newsflashes to subscribers and changed to new web domains.

Yet still, after much thought, Chainnews editor-in-chief said in his WeChat news feed on Friday that the platform is shutting down entirely and expressed his genuine gratitude toward everyone in the community that has been with it over the years. Other outlets like ODaily and BlockBeats are still operating on new web domains but their mobile apps are inactive, which has limited their readership reach on the mobile front.

This comes months after popular market information sites such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko and TradingView were blocked by China's Great Firewall.

According to a recent document made by China Telecom and seen by The Block, the top Chinese internet service provider has come up with a detailed solution to detect domestic miner IPs that have communicated with mining pools' URLs.

Based on its ongoing detection, it can either cut off the internet service to specific IPs or manually blacklist the URLs that mining pools use to connect with individual equipment.

As of writing, the domains of almost all the 10 biggest mining pools by real-time hash rate for both Bitcoin and Ethereum are not accessible from IPs inside China, based on The Block's verification.

Among them, F2Pool, ViaBTC, BinancePool and BTC.com have seen sharp real-time hash rate declines by around 10% for either Bitcoin or Ethereum over the past 24 hours.

2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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China's crypto censorship reaches over news outlets and mining pools - The Block Crypto