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A divided House on Friday approved legislation that would mandate that schools make library catalogs and curriculums public, and that they obtain parental consent before honoring a students request to change their gender-identifying pronouns, part of a Republican effort to wring political advantage from a raging debate over contentious social issues. New York Times

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I support the passage of the Parents Bill of Rights because I believe every parent should have the right to be involved in their childs school, whether through censoring curriculum, banning books, or blocking kids from choosing their own pronouns.

The Parents Bill of Rights will mandate that teachers post their full curriculum online so parents can root out the harmful content corrupting our childrens young mindslike sex ed, the scientific method, and the Civil Rights Movement. This is also the only way to stop teachers from carrying out their insidious fixation on hiding LGBTQ+ propaganda in school. A French teacher has no business telling kids that its normal and acceptable for adjectives to be gender-fluid.

Its shocking what the schools are trying to force-feed our children, even the youngest ones. In my district, kindergarteners spent a whole morning studying spelling by having a wedding for the letters Q and U. Newsflash: some of us believe that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman, not between a consonant and a vowel. Some of us dont want our kids to see Q in a wedding dress and get the idea that its okay for letters to dress in drag.

The Parents Bill of Rights will force public schools to offer at least two parent-teacher conferences a year. Sure, most schools already provide that, but this law is really going to snap the few stragglers back in line. In addition to the conferences, this bill will grant parents full access to the whole school at anytime. (This proviso was put in place because I was once denied entry to a locked janitors closet when I simply wanted to inspect it for hidden books about Kwanzaa.)

Perhaps most importantly, the Parents Bill of Rights says that schools must make their detailed budget available because, for all we know, our schools could be spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion, when what most parents want are homogeny, inequity, and exclusion. Schools could be spending money on making safe spaces when what we actually want for our kids are spaces filled with sharp objects, spiders, and disrespect for personal pronouns.

You may say, Wait, arent school budgets already regularly posted online, as well as emailed to parents, reported on in the local newspaper, and discussed at length in board meetings that are open to the public and can be attended in person, via Zoom, or by CB radio? Yes, they are, but its not my fault that I like to attend only the part of the meeting when parents yell in unison about critical race theory, something I do not understand but am definitely against.

The Parents Bill of Rights additionally guarantees that schools must provide parents with a list of all the books in the library, which will be extremely helpful to me because I have yet to figure out how to use the schools already available online card catalog. I need that list so I can demand that the librarian remove and burn all the books with authors whose last names I cant pronounce and also because I know they must be hiding those Kwanzaa books somewhere.

Look, schools are locking us parents out, and not just because of that scene some of us made at the Scholastic Book Fair about the lack of fair and balanced science books that present the flat earth theory. The truth is, even though we can schedule parent-teacher meetings anytime we want, even though schools are constantly begging for parent volunteers to come to campus and get involved, and even though I personally have received so many texts, emails, newsletters, parent portal messages, and Remind App push notifications from my kids school last week that my phone melted, we have absolutely no idea what is happening in our kids classrooms.

Our only choice is to support the Parents Bill of Rights so that we can move forward, forget about the schools, and start needlessly targeting a different public institution once it is passed.

Read the original here:
We Need the Parents BIll of Rights Act So We Can Censor Curriculum and Ban Books - McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Last December, Elon Musk, with the help of Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang and several other journalists, began releasing a series of internal documents from Twitters operations during the 2020 election and pandemic. The documents confirmed what many conservatives already knew deep down: that Twitter was actively suppressing free speech on behalf of the federal government.

Matt Taibbis two latest Twitter Files drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbis investigation revealed that Stanfords Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against stories of true vaccine side effects and true posts which could fuel hesitancy.

The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company: Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one directionshutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.

Snippets of the Stanford-related parts of Taibbis thread are below:

In short, the Stanford Internet Observatorys Virality Project had countless peoplemostly Stanford studentsreporting millions of Twitter posts that didn't comply with their standards. Even posts that were factually true faced censorship if they didnt conform to the subjective whims of SIO officials.

The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities, social media companies, and the federal government, all working to censor free speech. We at the Review take Stanfords actions to suppress speech very seriously. Stanford cannot be allowed to sweep this gross violation of fundamental freedoms under the rug. The University must answer for their actions.

Taibbi called the SIO-Twitter relationship, the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations and dubbed it the Censorship Industrial Complex. Others refer to this phenomenon as the cathedral. With the rules of online discourse being nebulous at best, without a serious investigation into what happened at Stanford, it is doubtless that a sinister combination of universities, media and government can and will take advantage of the confusion and flippantly restrict speech again if given the chance.

It appears Stanfords Virality Project took issues with anyone who was an enemy of the states, and more explicitly Faucis, narrative about the coronavirus and subsequent vaccines. Any posts that brought up the lab leak theory (now the primary COVID origin thesis), were dubbed by SIO as keen to foment distrust in Faucis expert guidance and in American public health officials and institutions. People who dared question the Fauci-manufactured status quo narrative were censored. SIO even branded reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway and natural immunity, as troublesome violations of disinformation policies.

If this is truly what the term disinformation means, perhaps we should no longer define it in terms of what is and isnt true. Instead when we hear the word we should think of it as anything that isnt in the federal governments formal narrative: thought crime. The Virality Project stated that because the post-vaccine death of a Virginia woman named Drene Keyes inspired anti-vaccine comments, it became a disinformation event. They warned against people asking questions, alleging it was a tactic commonly used by spreaders of misinformation. Doubting, or even just examining, the prevailing narratives on COVID got citizens repressed by a para-governmental entity.

However, this is not about Stanfords attempt to combat falsity, misinformation, disinformation or whatever word you want to use to describe harmful lies. This is about Stanford suppressing free speech by preventing any views other than their own from being sharedeven when they knew, by their own admission, that they were true. People did get sick from vaccine side-effects. Young and healthy people did die from myocarditis after being vaccinated.

The Stanford Internet Observatory and Project Virality wanted to cover that upnot because it wasnt true it was and they knew it. They covered up the truth because they wanted to preserve their narrative. The truth would exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci, too much for SIO. When given the choice between truth and Fauci, Stanford chose Fauci.

These projects operate with seemingly super-government authority, and yet, even in the cases of supposed NGO status, they undoubtedly find their way back to some government branch. Renee DiResta, through SIO, has done work with DARPA (the Department of Defenses Research center) and Global Engagement Center (a state department disinformation research center).

During a Stanford Cyber Policy Center lecture in 2019, she was introduced by Alex Stamos as having worked for the CIA. Hailed as a warrior against Russian misinformation, it would appear that DiResta and Stanford are in fact working with the federal government to censor American citizens. Of course, in the style of a totalitarian, the SIO encouraged the targeting of specific individuals, not posts.

English rugby player and former Cambridge Captain Rod Bishop was flagged by a DiResta-adjacent project, Hamilton 68, for Russian Influence in one of the projects more glaring blunders. Nonsense, he replied, Im supporting Ukraine.

Nonetheless, projects like SIOs project Virality are deeply insidious and set a dangerous precedent for the future of online discourse. Stanfords hand in them and the extent to which they censored important, relevant and true information is deeply disappointing and troubling. When an extra-governmental institution acts with impunity against the First Amendment rights of Americans and suppresses information that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, one might expect a dark and shady underground alliance of evil to be behind it. In 2023, it seems all roads lead to Palo Alto.

With free speech on campus recently under attack at the law school, the university censoring faculty that wouldnt go along with the lockdown narrative, and now their role in censorship on social media, it is fair to question if the winds of freedom still blow at Stanford. It is up to the University to take concrete steps to reassert that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle.

Follow this link:
Stanford's Dark Hand in Twitter Censorship - Stanford Review

American sports leagues are no strangers to disputes over how teams, players, and upper level management can express themselves, whether those fights center on NFL players decision to protest during the national anthem or an NBA executives tweet expressing support for human rights in Hong Kong.

Now the NHL finds itself in the crosshairs of the latest free speech fight: How should it handle team-run Pride nights when five percent of its players hail from a country that aggressively criminalizes so-called propaganda about LGBTQ rights and communities?

Its a challenge facing teams across the league as theyre forced to weigh their intention to engage in certain forms of expression specifically having players wear Pride-themed jerseys during on-ice warm ups against valid fears that players and their families could face repercussions within Russia for partaking in Pride nights in the United States.

The NHLs Russian players have legitimate reason to be concerned, and this is not the first time the league has tangled with Russian politics. Two years ago, the New York Rangers stood by player Artemi Panarin after allegations surfaced that he assaulted a woman 10 years earlier. Team leaders claimed the accusations were false, and were in fact a retaliatory measure to punish Panarin for his open support of imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Decades earlier, Alexander Mogilny made the dangerous decision to defect from the Soviet Union to the United States, the first player to do so, where he joined the Buffalo Sabres. Mogilny feared for his family, and later faced extortion threats.

Teams should not allow Russian law to determine how their organizations acknowledge Pride or any other movement.

In recent years, Russia has amped up its censorship and persecution of perceived LGBTQ activism, detaining advocates and banning books, film, and art with similar themes.

In response, teams including the Minnesota Wild, the New York Rangers, and most recently the Chicago Blackhawks have made the wrong calculations and decided to entirely abandon Pride warm-up jerseys from their programming out of fear of retaliation against their Russian players.

FIRE has long expressed concerns about the role foreign governments play in changing the parameters of free expression in the United States, frequently warning colleges that the Chinese government cannot be allowed to dictate what is said on the quad and in the classroom. Institutional self-censorship is not the way to protect foreign nationals at greater risk due to oppressive laws, nor is it a solution American organizations should look to as an easy-out when faced with complex cross-border free speech controversies.

The same principles apply here: Teams should not allow Russian law to determine how their organizations acknowledge Pride or any other movement.

Instead, players should be free to choose, as their consciences or personal circumstances dictate, whether they partake in team expressive activities.

Russian NHL players are not a monolith. And while they face different legal concerns than many of their teammates, they are not playing hockey in Russia. They are playing hockey in Canada and the United States, where Russian laws do not apply. They should be allowed the choice to take part in Pride night and some have decided to do so, like the Pittsburgh Penguins Evgeni Malkin or the San Jose Sharks Alexander Barabanov and Nikolai Knyzhov.

Thats what makes free expression meaningful in the first place: the ability to decide for oneself which values to espouse and which to reject, rather than having others choose for us.

Vladimir Putin and the Russian government should not make that choice for Russian players or their non-Russian peers in free countries.

Teams now weighing whether to allow foreign law to dictate organizational expression and decision making should look at how others, like the Philadelphia Flyers, handled this issue. In January, player Ivan Provorov abstained from wearing a Pride warm up jersey, citing his Russian Orthodox faith. Provorov is Russian, but its unclear if he maintained concerns about violating Russias laws governing pro-LGBTQ expression as well as his personal religious tenets.

Though it wont come without controversy, as the Flyers can attest, this is the best path to navigate these challenges in a free, pluralistic society where players will have a multitude of reasons from personal belief to foreign legal repercussions for wanting to speak or to stay silent.

Though Provorov did not join his teammates in skating in Pride jerseys, the rest of the Flyers team chose to partake. And that was the right outcome: Provorov chose for himself. Russian law didnt choose for his teammates.

Here is the original post:
Russian censorship laws should not dictate expression in the NHL - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Dont say, said Carla Kaplan, a Northeastern professor of womens, gender and sexuality studies. Dont say gay. Dont say trans. Dont say racism.

Dont say anything that could possibly cause the least discomfort to straight white men, Kaplan continued. Dont make them in any way uncomfortable with their massive unearned privileges. Indeed carry those privileged backpacks for them. Well, we say no way. We are through that.

The event, Dont Say: On Censorship and Organizing for Progressive/Feminist Speech, took place during the ninth annual Womens History Month Symposium at the John D. OBryant African American Institute Cabral Center on Friday.

The three panelists examined the implications of right-wing attacks on trans, gay, feminist, and racial justice initiatives and identities while outlining how feminists can push back.

The panelists, Paisley Currah, Martha Hickson and Karsonya Whitehead, have long histories of being on the front lines of exposing those privileges and analyzing attempts to silence minorities, Kaplan said. They are pushing back and refuse to be silenced, she said.

Kaplan quotes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., saying, Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Hickson, the North Hunterdon High School librarian in New Jersey, noted the recent rise in book bans across the country.

Attempted book bans in 2022 nearly doubled from 2021 nationally, hitting an unprecedented 20-year record, according to the American Library Association. There was also a major increase in Massachusetts, with 45% reporting challenges at schools and public libraries last year, targeting 57 titles. In 2021, the association reported nine cases with 10 titles targeted.

Books arent only being targeted in red states, Hickson said. In New Jersey, parents attended a Board of Education meeting to complain about two books: Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.

The parents called Hickson a pedophile, pornographer and groomer of children for allowing these books in the library. But after rallying the community and students, the school board voted to keep the books.

They operate under the banner of what they call parental rights, which is an effort to restrict students exposure to only topics, authors and content that match their narrow worldview, Hickson said. But in the process, they are trampling on the First Amendment rights of children, parents and families who experience the world differently.

Hickson pointed to an old newspaper clipping of Robert Dalton, who was the paid censor in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. It was his job to remove magazines, paperbacks and comic books from newsstands if he thought theyd lead to juvenile delinquency.

Hickson and Dalton are related.

Hes not just the city censor, Hickson said. Hes my great-grandfather.

We must not stop trying, she continued. I invite everyone listening to me today to please become an angelic troublemaker and join me in trying to end book banning.

Even though censorship has happened throughout history, for many it feels completely new, as if the country is in an unprecedented bad moment, Kaplan said.

Why is that, she asked?

Highly organized issues that werent discussed before are now being brought to the forefront of national discussion, the panelists agreed.

People feel like they need to take a stand, said Whitehead, a professor at Loyola University in Maryland and part of the National Womens Studies Association.

But, it is an anti-Black, racist, and sexist, transphobic and homophobic stance that this country has been since its very foundation, is where we are, Whitehead said. It is not new.

Beth Treffeisen is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email her at b.treffeisen@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @beth_treffeisen.

Read more here:
Experts Weigh in on the Growing Censorship Movement in America - Northeastern University

Last week, I wrote about an unsuccessful challenge to the activities of the Office of Elections Cybersecurity within the California Secretary of State's office:Is The California Secretary of State Monitoring What You Publish Online? In that case,O'Handley v. Weber,2023 WL 2443073, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Secretary of State did not violate federal law when it notified Twitter of tweets containing false or misleading information that potentially violated the company's content-moderation policy.

More recently, Judge Terry A. Doughty, who sits in the Western District of Louisiana, refused to dismiss claims for "alleged coercion by the Biden Administration and various government agencies and officials of social-media companies, urging those companies to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left". In thismemorandum ruling, Judge Doughty distinguishesO'Handleyas follows:

More recently, inO'Handley v. Weber, No. 22-15071, 2023 WL 2443073 (9th Cir. Mar. 10, 2023), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit clarified the distinction between government expression and government intimidation. There, the California Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC), headed by the California Secretary of States office, flagged posts on Facebook and Twitter as erroneous or misleading social media posts.Id. at 3. The companies removed most of the flagged posts, leading the plaintiff to file suit alleging, among other things, violation of the First Amendment.Id. at 2. Noting the distinction between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce, the court stated that government officials do not violate the First Amendment when they request that a private intermediary not carry a third partys speech so long as the officials do not threaten adverse consequences if the intermediary refuses to comply.Id. at 6 (citations omitted). Because the plaintiff failed to allege any threat or attempt at coercion aside from the takedown request, the court held that the plaintiff failed to allege state action through significant encouragement or coercion.

Here, Plaintiffs have clearly alleged that Defendants attempted to convince social-media companies to censor certain viewpoints. (Footnote omitted)

Judge Doughty gave the following examples of some of the alleged threats made by the defendants:

Further, the Complaint alleges threats, some thinly veiled and some blatant, made by Defendants in an attempt to effectuate its censorship program. One such alleged threat is that the Surgeon General issued a formal Request for Information to social-media platforms as an implied threat of future regulation to pressure them to increase censorship. Another alleged threat is the DHSs publishing of repeated terrorism advisory bulletins indicating that misinformation and disinformation on social-media platforms are domestic terror threats. While not a direct threat, equating failure to comply with censorship demands as enabling acts of domestic terrorism through repeated official advisory bulletins is certainly an action social-media companies would not lightly disregard. Moreover, the Complaint contains over 100 paragraphs of allegations detailing significant encouragement in private (i.e., covert) communications between Defendants and social-media platforms. (Footnotes omitted)

If the defendants ultimately lose, the outcome of this case may simply be that the government will continue to suppress disfavored speech but will do so with seven veils instead of one. It stands to reason that any request from a government agency might reasonably be perceived as including an implicit threat. If the government asks, however nicely, companies may feel the pressure to accede if for no other reason than to stay in the good graces of law makers and regulators.

Original post:
Ninth Circuit O'Handley v. Weber Government Censorship - The National Law Review