Re the US case that Michael cites, one effect would have been that Meta or
X or Google or Reddit etc could not consult with the CDC re COVID-19
health measures and vaccine misinformation. I suspect the Hunter Biden
allegations are BS. As for RFK jr, he's a dangerous zealot.
In addition to numerous social media companies, the injunction blocks the
government from communicating with three academic programs at Stanford
University and the University of Washington that study the spread of
misinformation online: the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality
Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Here is a release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which gives a
better background to this injunction:
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/government-needs-both-ability-talk-social-media-platforms-and-clear-limits-eff-argues
"[...]Even the biggest, best-resourced social media companies struggle
with content moderation, often frustrating users. In search of fairness
and consistency in their decisions, social media companies need to draw on
outside resources and expertise. This “networked governance” can include
trusted flagger programs, trust and safety councils, or external
stakeholder engagement teams, as well as as-needed consultations with
individual and organizational experts including government agencies.
Such government input does raise unique and worrisome First Amendment
issues, but it can’t be forbidden entirely, the brief argues.
“The distinction between proper and improper speech is often obscure,
leaving ample gray area for courts reviewing such cases to grapple in. But
grapple in it they must,” the brief says. “The district court did not
adequately distinguish between improper and proper communications in
either its analysis or preliminary injunction. The preliminary injunction
is internally inconsistent with exceptions that seem to swallow many of
its prohibitions. It does not provide adequate guidance to either the
government or to anyone else seeking to hold the government to its
proscriptions. This Court must independently review the record and make
the searching distinctions that the district court did not.” [...]"
See also:
https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_v._Biden
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/judge-ruling-biden-social-media-first-amendment-rcna92897
"[...] But multiple First Amendment scholars and free speech advocates say
the sweeping nature of the ruling, the result of a lawsuit brought by the
Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, is too broad and
hobbled by a partisan agenda. It’s predicated on rickety reasoning. It
conflates virtually any kind of discussion with censorship. And ultimately
it could end up protecting social media companies from legitimate
criticism. [...]
In the case of the Biden administration, many of those instances involved
administration officials sending emails and texts to Twitter staffers to
flag instances of misinformation and disinformation about Covid and the
elections that violated Twitter’s own policies. [...]"
Alayne
On Tue, 1 Aug 2023, Michael Goguen wrote:
Also, there was a court injunction (that now has a stay from another court)
against the USA Biden Administration for censoring American's (and
possibly other peoples', as well) social media posts on many issues, election
issues, fakzine issues, climate change, Hunter Biden's laptop
emails, so like ongoing legal and court issues, etc that were factually true,
so the injunction had been that the administration couldn't contact
the big tech companies that were doing the censoring, I noticed some censoring
started to decrease for awhile, or become more hidden, so Matt
Taibbi has talked about some of this in congressional or something hearings in
the USA, called 'the twitter files', documents exposed about usa
gov ordering twitter to censor certain things. RFK jr, who is running for
president of the usa for 2024, has also started a lawsuit againt the usa
gov for censoring him, and there were 12 people known as the 'disinformation
dozen' who were cited by the biden information and some of the groups
who were 'managing information' as sources for a lot of the 'supposed'
disinformation about fakzines, one of them was someone named J0seph
M3rc0la, who at one point had his bank accounts frozen by a bank he's been with
for something like 20 years, as well as other execs in his
business and family members (morgan chase bank), and he has recently had those
bank accounts 'closed' (so I might be confusing some information)
at any rate yeah so banks accounts were closed with no reason given on the
sudden, other alternative media groups, some of who were called
'foreign disinformation agents', were having their funding cut off by usa
interests, sometimes based on supposed embargoes of various countries
that were paying journalists for their media, so disclosures of corruption by
journalists, somewhat like julian assange type wikileaks
disclosures, essentially were getting defunded, like when wikileaks was having
paypal and other transactions blocked by those companies, etc,
including for trying to pay for legal fees for court cases, etc. Some of the
information the 'disinformation dozen' were sharing has been proven
to be true, and other groups, like the british medical journal, also made open
statements and comments, like to facebook, about some of their
journal article posts being called disinformation unfairly, without any
accountability by the social media groups doing the censoring, etc, so
things that were considered widely accepted, peer reviewed, etc, that were told
to be censored got censored even though it was blocking true and
important information, the argument is that if the tech governments and social
media 'did it on their own', they are not 'required' to give 'free
speech' on their platforms, and so supposedly the only reason there is even a
free speech/ censorship debate for this kind of abusive stuff
happening, is supposedly because in some cases, the usa gov or other
governments (eu has a law in place and was warning / checking with elon musk,
would twitter respect their laws of blocking certain things, and Elon Musk said
twitter would obey the law, etc, although some countries have
talked about blocking some social media companies completely if they do not
'respect' their 'laws' about 'unallowed posts/information').
Has anyone else been following any of this? The impacts of the Julian Assange
case, for doing journalism, could impact journalists worldwide,
criminalizing them (and allowing them to be like sent to the usa or other
countries for posting 'defense secrets' that expose crimes of those
countries, and basically put them in jail and try them for it, and it is
possible this could be done to include anyone who shares any information,
blogging etc, as 'criminal journalists', to be taken to said countries for
exposing crimes of the powerful, and then put in jail for it, etc.
So yeah, is this something anyone else has been looking into or would want to
discuss or anything? Is this online meeting stuff, or people would
prefer to do in person, or in person and everyone puts their cellphones in a
faraday cage... LOL eheheh anyways.
I guess I will see if this email goes through to the list.
Michael Goguen
--
Alayne McGregor
alayne at twobikes.ottawa.on.ca
The shyness is not unusual. If you weren't quiet, you wouldn't have so
desperately searched for a way to speak. The reason you have so desperately
pursued your work and your language and your voice is because you haven't had
one. - Bruce Springsteen, in _Renegades_
