Senate Whistleblower Exposes The Tech Left Speech Cartel, Claims Facebook, Twitter, Google Units Team Up On Content To Ban

https://illicitinfo.com/admin/senate...edium=facebook

I think we can file this one under ‘no duh.’ For those of you who are on Facebook, which is likely the majority of the readers we have left (until Facebook completely deplatform Illicit Info) you know that the ‘platform for all ideas’ is really anything but. Not to sell you on Spreely, but this is what caused us to build Spreely over 2 years ago. We saw where social media was headed, and we knew it was going to get ugly and turn into a digital prison filled with censorship and deplatforming. If you have not signed up for Spreely yet, I hope you will, it’s just like FB, except we allow all political speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment.

Anyway, back to the story at hand. Senator Hawley, one of the handful of people in Washington who even pretend to understand or care just how dangerous the Silicon Valley technocrat’s control over the flow of information is, told America what we all, already suspected … there is a Speech Cartel that works together to decide who can, and who can not speak on the major social media platforms.

Fox News reported:

‘Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Tuesday pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a newly revealed whistleblower complaint alleging that Facebook employees coordinate with Twitter and Google employees to make certain content moderation decisions.

Hawley said a former Facebook employee “with direct knowledge of the company’s content moderation practices” contacted his office about an “internal platform called Tasks that Facebook uses to coordinate projects, including censorship.”

“The platform reflects censorship input from Google and Twitter, as well,” Hawley alleged. “…Facebook censorship teams communicate with their counterparts at Twitter and Google and then enter those companies’ suggestions for censorship onto the Task platform so that Facebook can follow up with them and effectively coordinate their censorship efforts.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook uses the Tasks system for “people coordinating all kinds of work across the company,” adding later that the company did “coordinate on and share signals on security-related topics,” such as “a terrorist attack or around child exploitation imagery or around a foreign government creating an influence operation.”

…

The Missouri senator went on to ask whether Facebook, Twitter and Google employees coordinated content moderation decisions regarding “individuals, websites, hashtags [or] phrases to ban.”

“Senator, we do not coordinate our policies,” Zuckerberg said, adding later, however, that he “would expect that some level of communication.”‘

If you think the deplatforming and censorship on Facebook is bad now, just wait until the Democrats get control of the White House and both chambers of the legislature. Those who continue to stay on Facebook are in for a rude awakening, however, luckily, their actions surrounding the recent election have woken many people up to what Facebook is really about. Sites like Spreely and Parler have exploded with growth in the last few weeks.

I hope you will take a moment to create an account on Spreely and start building yourself an escape hatch from the Speech Cartel’s grasp before it’s too late …

Some fuckin' exposition, dilby. Here's a scoop for you: safe spaces won't do you any good. Won't make you a better man. What would Adolf Meyer have to say about you selling your comfort corner? Crybaby.


If you keep balling like a bitch, the salt you taste in your tears, will be matched by the salt I pour in your weak mental wound.





Progress in Teaching Psychiatry


https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...stract/2653725

No real physician is altogether specialist and no real specialist fails to define his share as part of the great problem of helping the sick and troubled patient. The psychiatrist may at last say that he has found himself. Instead of being singled out from the rest of physicians as what used to be called an asylum man, pure and simple, he has found his sphere in the special study of the patient as a person, the special study of the total activities and total behavior, the kind of thing which cannot be singled out as merely the function of any one detachable organ, not even of the brain by itself.

Rest assured I'll make it funny.

Have a mushroom.

Another bullshit commentary from a site that doesn’t even purport to report the truth. It says so in the first Graf of its description.

Illicitinfo is a website featuring opinion, political, and social commentary on the day’s news. Illicitinfo is not in the business of breaking news, rather we comment on news that other sources have broken and/or reported on first. Illicitinfo should not be considered an unbiased news source, rather we publish my opinions and interpretations of the day’s news. Again, Illicitinfo publishes commentary and OPINIONS by conservative and libertarian bloggers, not unbiased news reporting.Power To The Publisher LLC is owned and operated by Mark Sidney who also owns and operates the Facebook Pages “Donald Trump Is Our President” and “Hillary For Prison“ and ‘Mark Sidney.’

They at least have the decency (or court ordered obligation) to let you know that they’re likely feeding you bullshit.

Yet Dilbert just can’t seem to plug up the flow of bullshit coming from his account.

If you know it’s bullshit, OP, why do you still post it?

I know. He's a sadist!


Suck it, Lev.




















Pacino!

No disrespect to De Niro.

What, the big social boards censoring their platforms?
Lets see, private companies
Revenues from advertisers
Umm, ok, I get it.
But, why is this recent news?
It's been this way since day one.

These SOCIAL platforms are limiting and suppressing free speech! Cant wait for the major lawsuits that are coming for them!

Today, 09:22 AM Remove user from ignore list
Yssup Rider

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Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm

I'm happy on the inside. A sadist on the outside.




Be careful where you get your poison. Your social media might be information.













Masks!

Discuss.

Today, 09:22 AM Remove user from ignore list
Yssup Rider

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e9500... bah humbug!

expanding on post #1

https://quillette.com/2020/12/03/why...vate-property/

Published on December 3, 2020

Why Do Progressives Support the Unfettered Use of Private Property?
written by Samuel E. Miller

In mid-October, Twitter took the unprecedented step of preventing its users from sharing a link to a New York Post story reporting allegations about the Biden family’s foreign financial interests. Whenever controversies about social media censorship arise, a mantra is repeated in their defence, usually by progressives: these are private companies and, as such, they can regulate speech on their platforms however they wish. Notice that this claim does not simply maintain that companies can restrict information in pursuit of specific policy aims (like thwarting criminal activity such as human trafficking efforts or combating terrorist networks). Instead, they can restrict expression on their platforms simply because those platforms are company property.

Among the most familiar responses to this argument is the view that, even though these tech giants are private entities, they function like public forums in which free expression should be upheld. Here, I spell out a different approach: that while social media companies are indeed private entities, they should nevertheless be unable to regulate non-criminal activity on their platforms for a variety of moral and legal reasons.

Do social media platforms have a moral responsibility to limit expression?

Two justifications are usually presented for enforcing speech codes on social media, both of which implicate policy aims. The first has to do with combating crime and terrorism. The second involves censoring what has become widely known as “misinformation.”

Of these two policy aims, combatting crime seems the more palatable, not least because online activity that amounts to criminal or terrorist behavior is easier to define and identify than misinformation. If an activity is criminal in the real world, combatting online behavior that facilitates it (or virtual conduct that is itself criminal, like the distribution of child pornography) is a legitimate pursuit. It remains debatable whether social media companies should have the ability to enforce criminal laws through censorship or termination of accounts or be required to act in concert with government enforcement agencies to combat criminality. Nevertheless, it is broadly uncontroversial that criminal behavior should not be exempt from enforcement simply because it’s facilitated by digital communications technologies.

More controversial is the emerging pattern of regulating legal behavior and expression, like the dissemination of “misinformation” and speech we find disputable, uncomfortable, or politically distasteful. Tech giants have assumed responsibility for curbing this type of expression, presumably to protect factual information and to cultivate an informed citizenry. But should they be endowed with this weighty responsibility? Consider the following LinkedIn post which demonstrates the complexity of the task at hand (typos in the original post have been retained):

Pompeo’s West Bank trip would be unthinkable for any other US Secretary of State. Pompeo is a joke internationally, the stress in the Middle East goes way beyond anti-semitism, one factor was the Brits bringing in 350,000 immigrants between 1920 and 1947 into the region of Palestine. After the Ottoman Empire fell, the Arabs thought the land would go back to the them, but no, a secret treaty (sikes Picot) by the Europeans divided the land between the UK, France, with ascent of Italy, and Russia as colonial powers. The UK was pushed out of the region in 1947 and the US was left with much of the mess.

At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with this post. Yet, many of its author’s assertions are incorrect. For instance, the British didn’t “bring” 350,000 (Jewish) immigrants into Palestine between 1920 and 1947. A British White Paper, published on May 17th, 1939, stipulated that, despite the persecution of European Jews, Britain would cap Jewish immigration into Palestine at 15,000 per year for five years, a total from which illegal immigrants would be deducted. This was done to pursue the letter of the Balfour Declaration (which sought to balance the interests of European Jewry with those of the Palestinian Arabs). The British government, in other words, attempted to curb Jewish immigration into post-Ottoman Palestine and was harshly criticized by Zionist leaders at the time for doing so.

Errors like these may not be readily identified by readers (including social media personnel) unfamiliar with the subject. So does this post amount to “misinformation”? The post was composed and uploaded to an online platform by its author. It was also written in a way that portrays its claims as indisputable and, based on the numerous “likes” it received, one can assume that it influenced or at least reinforced others’ opinions on a politically charged topic. When does the willful publication of factually disputable content become sanctionable as misinformation rather than simply being wrong?

The answer is we don’t know—and neither do the tech companies themselves. The history of Mandatory Palestine is just one of innumerable sensitive political issues prone to controversy, even among experts. Does this mean there aren’t better and worse (or even right and wrong) answers to such questions? No, but it is clear that social media companies are ill-equipped to arbitrate on questions of fact and shouldn’t impose half-baked orthodoxies onto the public by dismissing unpopular or disputable content as “misinformation.”

Even if a piece of information or an argument enjoys widespread assent, strong ideas do not need an authority to bolster them—these ideas and arguments must stand on their own and justify themselves on the basis of their own evidentiary support and logical coherence. The most reliable bulwark against an uninformed populace isn’t top-down information control undertaken by private companies, but the protection of the free exchange of all ideas and questions among curious citizens.

Do social media platforms have a legal right to limit expression?

For the sake of this discussion, let us grant that social media platforms are in fact private companies rather than “functionally public places.” Are these companies therefore able to do whatever they like with their private property? In other property contexts, such a suggestion would be absurd.

Owners of real property know that both contractual covenants and statutes can restrict freedom of use. Just because property is privately held, that doesn’t mean the owner can use it in any way he likes. Restrictive covenants and zoning laws, for example, limit the use of property in a number of ways—a regulation may prevent the owner using land for commercial purposes; a local statute may cap the height of new buildings; a covenant may prohibit the construction of more than one residential unit on a piece of land. There are also common law limitations on the use of private property when the rights of other property owners or the general public are encroached upon, like when a property owner maintains a nuisance. Finally, the free use of private property is restricted by laws governing landlord-tenant relationships—renters’ rights laws have broadened in recent decades across the US, and rental agreements prevent landlords from evicting tenants arbitrarily.

Why should limitations to the otherwise free use of private property not extend to private property owned by tech giants? Congress could, for example, enact a statute prohibiting social media companies from tampering with non-criminal speech on their platforms. The federal legislature could also conceivably impose special penalties for censoring non-criminal speech on the basis of political affiliation. Such statutes would apply, for example, to Twitter’s selective enforcement of internal speech codes on the basis of its users’ apparent political views. The New York Post article was suppressed, ostensibly on the basis of concerns about unverified and illegally released materials, while a New York Times tweet which cited a report about Trump’s illegally leaked tax returns was left untouched.

Further, the fact that users exchange valuable data for what is essentially a possessory interest in using a platform could also justify imposing statutory limits on tech companies’ internal enforcement mechanisms, perhaps informed by the landlord-tenant framework. While lease agreements are flexible in terms of covenants they can include, contractual provisions are rendered unenforceable if they contravene law. Absent criminal activity (the enforcement of which should arguably be left to government anyway), statutes akin to renter’s rights laws could ensure that social media companies wouldn’t be able to, for example, arbitrarily “lock” accounts until users comply with a company’s protean speech codes—a policy defended by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a recent Senatorial hearing. At any rate, it is unlikely progressives would be as strident in their support for social media companies’ unfettered use of their property if speech codes were being enforced in the other direction.

Conclusion

We learn by actively conversing with others, and arguments are strengthened (and also revealed to be unpersuasive) when pressed and exposed to conflicting information. Even beyond the realm of factual dispute, adult members of a multicultural society will invariably differ in terms of their values, which inform and are informed by political, moral, and religious commitments. Tech companies are not equipped to rule on messy and complex disputes over truth. But, more importantly, they have neither a moral nor a necessary legal imperative to do so—even on their own platforms.


Samuel E. Miller is a JD candidate at the University of Iowa and holds an MA from the University of Chicago. He can be reached at millersamuele@gmail.com.

What, the big social boards censoring their platforms?
Lets see, private companies
Revenues from advertisers
Umm, ok, I get it.
But, why is this recent news?
It's been this way since day one. Originally Posted by Unique_Carpenter

dilbert is bitching about a platform that monitors/suspends users that break their stated rules on a platform that monitors/suspends users that break their stated rules.

These SOCIAL platforms are limiting and suppressing free speech! Cant wait for the major lawsuits that are coming for them! Originally Posted by winn dixie

You do not have free speech right on private property.

Does your silly ass think you are afforded free speech here on eccie?

Wtf is wrong with you? You sound ignorant AF. And like a titty baby. Start your own platform if you don't like your current options.