Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

As Its Influence Wanes, Increasingly Militant MSM Promotes … – Breitbart News

It is what Trumps victory said so clearly about the MSMs inability to influence public opinion and, by extension, the outcome of elections. What has also remained unspoken is the medias desperate and dangerous reaction to this waning influence.

As a 25 year media-watcher, I have never seen anything close to the propaganda campaign the national media launched to defeat Donald Trump last year. It was 24/7, it was coordinated across every news outlet, it was all-hands-on-deck. And Trump still won. Which can only mean that the medias influence has eroded to a point where, despite hurling every kitchen sink available, they suffered a humiliating loss last November.

Before I get into the grit of the nit, it is important to keep in mind that our media is nothing more than the communication branch of the Democrat Party. When you look at everything the media does the lying, the campaigns of personal destruction, the fake news, the focus on stuff like Melanias shoes this explanation is the only one that makes sense. The media is a full-blown leftwing political operation run, for the most part, by former Democrat operatives like Jake Tapper, George Stephanopolous, and Chuck Todd, as well as those related to Democrat operatives.

Knowing that, and knowing the long history of leftwing regimes (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Chavez, Castro), we know what a leftwing political operation does when its influence begins to diminish. Because their ideas are so unappealing and are proven failures, the left ultimately has no choice but to embrace violence and censorship. This truth is as old as the Bolshevik Revolution, and this is exactly what we are seeing unfold today in our own country. Rather than politicians, though, it is our media that has turned dangerously militant.

Rush Limbaugh is absolutely correct, the Democrat party is dead. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the partys two supposed leaders, are non-entities. From top-to-bottom, the party is a feckless pile of incompetence. Knowing this, the media has told Schumer and Pelosi to hold their beer as they seize the levers of power in the leftwing cause. As a result, the media has used billions of corporate dollars to launch a propaganda campaign to unseat Trump and to keep the divisive issue of identity politics thriving.

Naturally, this rabid pursuit of so-called social justice is meant only to serve what has always been the overriding goal of leftwing tyrants: control of our lives through a centralized government.

Nevertheless, this represents the least of our medias sins.

The media campaign to censor and silence the political right, most especially on the college campus and online, is being waged on two fronts: through the ever-expanding definitions of hate speech and the alt-right, and through large corporations.

At this point, pretty much every conservative position on abortion, homosexuality, border security, the police, affirmative action, immigration, terrorism, etc., has been labeled as hate speech by the establishment left and many in the media. Moreover, the holding of these beliefs makes you an automatic member of the alt-right, which aligns you with white supremacists.

Now that this phase is in place, now that mainstream conservative and Christian beliefs have been toxified as hate, whether they are already aligned with the media or because they have been bullied by the media into joining the cause, the mega-corporations that now control our primary means of communication the public square that is the Internet are instituting a wave of censorship.

Hiding behind the medias absurdly expanded definition of hate (or fake news), Americas Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, advertisers, and Web servers are blacklisting conservatives, banning populists, and outlawing their ideas. People are being disappeared from the public square or, out of fear of being disappeared, they no longer feel comfortable to speak freely.

The violence comes, of course, from the medias personal army of Brownshirts, the leftwing terrorists in Antifa. Just like Hitlers henchmen, Antifa spreads out across the country to violently silence speech that the left does not want heard. And it is not only against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Almost all of the chaos, rioting, and violence waged by Antifa over the past two years has been against everyday Trump supporters, everyday Republicans.

To encourage Antifas wave of violent suppression, our media either ignores and downplays their crimes, promotes their cause as righteous, blames their violence on Trump and his supporters, compares them to heroic World War II soldiers, or in the case of NBCs Chuck Todd, attempts to legitimize this violence against the political right.

Now, does anyone have any more question about why the media is so desperate to take away our Second Amendment rights?

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC.Follow his Facebook Page here.

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As Its Influence Wanes, Increasingly Militant MSM Promotes ... - Breitbart News

Google censoring the BIBLE? Censorship by Google and Facebook growing in the US – Catholic Online

Google censored Catholic Online's Daily Readings.

Censorship is a growing problem in cyberspace. Media outlets and content producers across the web are learning the hard way that if Goolge and Facebook disagree with your opinion, you will be silenced and run out of business. It is time to regulate social media to protect free speech.

Censorship by Google and Facebook is stifling free speech in America.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- In some countries, posting a meme that is critical of the government will get you arrested and put in jail. What happens after that depends on where you live. You could walk free after a short time, or you could be put to death.

As Americans, we have always cherished our right to freedom of expression. It is such an important right, we enshrined it in our Constitution as the First Amendment.

For over two hundred years, the public forum created by the First Amendment has been jealously guarded against all infringement.

But in the past few decades, the public forum has changed. It has moved into cyberspace where private corporations rule. Today, Google dominates the realm of internet searches as well as the advertising market, and YouTube, which it owns. Facebook dominates social media.

Whereas a few decades ago, most people got their news and information via the newspaper and television, today most people consume media on their mobile devices. They use the internet to access Google, YouTube, and Facebook, and this is where they get their news and information.

The problem is that Google and Facebook have started to aggressively censor content across the web. And they're turning to questionable organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center to tell them how to do it. The result is overbearing censorship, particularly of conservative media.

In 2014, as the Islamic State conquered a swathe of territory across Syria and Iraq, the terrorists released a series of gruesome propaganda videos to terrorize the rest of the world. These videos were swiftly censored. Google, YouTube and a host of smaller media providers often removed these videos within minutes to hours of their posting. The justification was that the blood and gore violated their terms of service. They often added they did not want to provide the terrorists with a channel of communication that could be used to promote terrorism.

For some time, censorship was restricted to that kind of content, but within the past two years, it has steadily grown.

Soon, any content critical of Islam or that dealt with terrorism was subject to censorship. The restrictions have since spread further. Today, any kind of content that is considered offensive, hateful, or that could inspire hatred or violence is subject to censorship.

Most of the content facing censorship comes from the right wing of the political spectrum. Neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront have been booted entirely off the web. But the censorship does not end with Nazis.

Last week, a conservative group, The Liberty Conservative, was ordered to remove a piece that explained the difference between the Alt-Right movement and actual Nazis. Google deemed the piece offensive, and demanded they take it down.

The Liberty Conservative relented and removed the piece. Had they refused, Google would have kept all of their advertising revenue from their Ad Sense account. Ad Sense is Google's advertising platform that pays content providers, such as The Liberty Conservative for displaying ads on their webpages. Many media outlets rely on this money to stay in business.

This is how Google gets away with claiming they are not censoring content. The Liberty Conservative could have kept their piece published, but Google would not have paid them, and in turn, they would not have the money to pay their staff. This would have put The Liberty Conservative out of business. But technically, they could have kept the piece published.

This kind of censorship is known as "soft censorship."

Google also has the power to bury websites it doesn't like in search results.

A similar occurrence took place in the last month on Catholic Online. Google demanded the removal of several daily reading videos from YouTube because they were somehow deemed offensive. These videos were mere Bible readings from the Catholic lectionary. They contained no commentary or editorial. There was no homily or sermon. They were simply passages from the Bible.

Catholic Online was able to compromise and remove advertising from those videos, but the alternative was to either have their entire channel shut down, or be paid nothing from ad revenue as long as the videos were up. This has driven Catholic Online to develop an alternative media strategy for itself, which will be announced shortly.

The problem with these cases is that Google, a private corporation, is deciding what speech is acceptable in the public forum. That's because the public forum has moved from the newspaper and television and into cyberspace, but we have few laws which regulate cyberspace.

It is time for the U.S. federal government to enter cyberspace and set boundaries for Google and Facebook. This is common in other parts of the world where Google and Facebook already censor their content to order. People in countries like China use Google too, but Google censors their results to satisfy the demands of Chinese law.

Google could do the same in the U.S., but in reverse. They could be compelled to censor less content hosted in the United States as long as that content would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. They could be banned from soft censorship.

Google and Facebook are monopolies, much like cable and electric companies. As such, they should be regulated to ensure the service they provide meets the expectations of a free and just society.

Few people like Nazis. Few people care to click into webpages emblazoned with swastikas. However, the same First Amendment that protects hateful content also protects content like daily Bible readings.

We the people ought to decide what is permissible in the public forum of ideas, not some private corporation. It's time to end soft censorship and intimidation by private firms, lest we find ourselves in some kind of Orwellian future where the only acceptable content are cat videos and Google-Southern Poverty Law Center approved propaganda.

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Pope Francis Prayer Intentions for AUGUST 2017Artists. That artists of our time, through their ingenuity, may help everyone discover the beauty of creation.

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Google censoring the BIBLE? Censorship by Google and Facebook growing in the US - Catholic Online

Promoting good science without censorship – Washington Post

By Jane Bambauer By Jane Bambauer August 30

My last two posts summarized the extent to which the First Amendment should constrain the government when it seeks to censor weak scientific claims. To the extent that the government uses advertising restrictions in order to promote good science, free speech doctrine has already begun to get in the way.

This could nudge federal agencies and other lawmakers to use other means to promote research and consumer knowledge. Thats a good thing. The government could do much more than it currently does using its own powerful voice and by using other non-censorship regulations. Here are a few examples:

1. Funding and supporting more independent research.

One of the greatest drawbacks to our current system of food and drug testing is that we rely on self-interested companies to produce the bulk of research that regulators and consumers must use to make important decisions. This is so in part because randomized controlled trials the gold standard for research are very costly. The companies that are likely to profit from positive research findings are the most eager to fund it.

But for the company, the research is only worth its costs if it comes out the right way. Randomized controlled trials can be gamed, and often are. Although controlled trials are supposed to avoid the selection effects that can mar studies of observational data, they can be distorted if researchers put conditions on study participants that ensure all the research subjects are unusually healthy, and therefore unusually likely to respond well to medicines and to avoid side effects. Independent researchers would have more interest in selecting the pool of research subjects in a way that better represents the future users of the product.

It is unrealistic to expect that the National Institutes of Healthand other federal research organizations will receive large enough budgets to run all clinical trials themselves. But more can be done with post-market observational data. While observational studies will always raise questions about whether there are sufficient controls to ensure that an effect is truly causal, they do have the virtue of coming from the real world and reflecting what has happened in the field. Randomized controlled trials, by contrast, reflect the population of patients who happened to come down the pipeline and are willing to consent to an experiment. Controlled trials also tend to be quite small because of their costs, and they may lack the power to detect rare but important therapies or side effects.

Compared withcontrolled trials, analysis of observational data is cheap. The federal government should encourage researchers to access medical data and link them to other consumer databases in order to uncover latent health benefits and risks. Instead, federal privacy and research law tends to do the opposite, discouraging data collection and erecting barriers to access.

2. Publicizing or certifying the findings of independent or well-conducted research.

The government can also use its voice to promote the research that meets its favored scientific standards. Rather than using censorship rules, the government could certify health claims that meet its evidentiary standards, and allow manufacturers to proudly mark that certification in its advertising. The government can also contribute to consumer education more actively through its websites or through public service campaigns in the mainstream media.

3. Using ex-post liability and safe harbors.

Regulators could also rely more heavily on ex-post enforcement than the modern regulatory state typically does. Strict liability and ex-post fines for products that prove to cause harm can do a lot to motivate research and caution by manufacturers. The government could also create strong incentives to engage in pre-market research using safe harbors from the fines and liability that would otherwise apply if a product turns out to be dangerous for its anticipated use.

4. Mandating disclosures about the evidence base (or lack thereof.)

The government could also make better use of rules requiring companies to provide disclaimers or other information.The compelled speech doctrine seems to bemore forgiving than the free speech rules that apply to censorship, at least when compelled disclosures are used to provide relevant, purely informational content. Thus, the state could require companies that choose to makescientific or health claims in their advertising to provide the evidence supporting and contradicting each of their claims on a website or through a central clearinghouse.

Mandated disclosures have a tendency to proliferate quickly, though, and they dont always have salutary effects. In the next post, I will address some serious limits to the ability for mandated disclosure to effectively educate consumers.

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Promoting good science without censorship - Washington Post

Anti-Corporate Voices Claim Google Censorship | The Daily Caller – The Daily Caller

Anti-corporate voices across the ideological spectrum are claiming that Google is attempting to silence them for their political positions.

Barry Lynn, a senior fellowat the New America Foundation a think tank funded by Google says he lost his job this week as a result of his research critical of Google, which Lynn says should be considered a monopoly.

Every day I see people waking up to the power of Google, Facebook and Amazon. We have to do something as a people, we have to do something through our government and address the power of these companies, Lynn told The Guardian. The number of congressmen and others making statements on Capitol Hill about this is growing very rapidly. The number of businesses who are saying that something must be done about the power of these companies and the way they use their power.

On the far-left, the World Socialist Web Site is claiming a 70 percent drop in referrals from Google searches and that the sites news articles and essays on politics, history and culture are being systematically blocked. The group claims a Google algorithm change in April led to its content being blacklisted.

In an article published Wednesday, the WSWS claimed that the top 45 search terms that formerly led readers to the WSWS are now blocked by Google. The socialist website says Google is wrongfully censoring them under the guise of fighting fake news.

Also this week, a right-wing website called The Liberty Conservative claims to have received a letter from Google threatening to suspend advertising revenue from the site unless it pulled down an article written by an organizer of last months white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum, Shane Trejo wrote inan articleposted to The Liberty Conservative on Wednesday. Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.

Trejo claimed the article contained no offensive content and was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis.

The site often runs alarmist articles about the influence of corporations in American politics. (RELATED:Google And Facebook Co-Sponsoring Protest Of Pro-Life Womens Health Care Clinic)

Trejo said the site had to comply with Googles strong-arming tactics for the time being as a result of financial constraints.

An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive, he explained.

Conservative website PJMedia first highlighted Trejos claims in an article later featured on the Drudge Report.

Google has yet to return TheDCs request for comment for this article.

The latest accusations of censorship follow Googles controversial firing of an engineer, James Damore, for writing a memo criticizing Google as an ideological echo chamber.

My firing neatly confirms that point, Damore wrote in a Wall Street Journal column following his firing.

How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

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Anti-Corporate Voices Claim Google Censorship | The Daily Caller - The Daily Caller

Anti-Censorship Bot For Detecting Deleted Posts on Reddit Gets Censored – Bitcoin News (press release)

A bot called censorship notifierwas recently released on Reddit. It was built to scan for censored posts, but it has now been censored from discussion threads. A recent r/btc post by the bot creator explained its purpose, but also provided information that users from r/bitcoin wanted it silenced or removed. Apparently, they complained to r/bitcoin mods about the bot in the hopes of squelching it. This caused the bot to get disabled.

Also read:Bitcoin Is Becoming a Popular Investment for Middle-Class Americans

The bots creator post read, New bot in testing. Notifies people in/r/bitcoinif their comments or posts get silently removed, or greylisted into the moderator-review queue.

The post further mentioned that the goal of the bot is to collect data of censorship for the purpose of having useful statistics about moderation habits. However, almost anything a user posts on the bot will be monitored by moderators. The bots creator said they are open to feedback and suggestions. The bot elaborated:

I am open to feedback and suggestions (though it will take some time to implement things). Be aware that anything you post here will almost certainly be read by the moderators of/r/bitcoin. In the next few weeks the plan is to have the bot automatically collect and periodically publish useful statistics on/r/btcand/r/bitcoin.

As a result of complaints about the bot, the bots basic functionality was disabled. However, the creator of the bot decided to enable it with an opt-in service. Now users can simply private message the bot and type please message me about removed comments and posts, and the bot will work. Users can private message stop to cease receiving messages.

Overall, the bot has received controversial reception from Reddit users. Some are miffed at the idea that a bot will record what posts get deleted or greylisted. One user was so upset he believed the bot was built to brainwash him. He took a screenshot of the bot and said, I sent the mods a screenshot of this. You tried to brainwash the wrong guy. Fuck you.

What do you think about Reddit censorship problems? Will bots help mitigate some of the problem? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Anti-Censorship Bot For Detecting Deleted Posts on Reddit Gets Censored - Bitcoin News (press release)