FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american-wrong

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/facebook-and-twitter-cross-a-line-far-more-dangerous-than-what-they-censor/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSB_fQHbSiA "Media: We're not going to
do our job"

https://twitter.com/EvanMcMullin/status/1336839561486487553
Executive Director of @StandUpRepublic. Former: CIA ops officer, GOP
policy director, independent presidential candidate.
"One of the most critical to-do items for the American democracy
movement over the next four years will be to more effectively counter
domestic anti-democracy disinformation. If possible, it should be done
on both the supply and demand sides. We can't ignore this issue any
longer. 5:06 PM - 9 Dec 2020"


"
The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire
Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further
radicalize Trump voters
Matt Taibbi	Dec 11	539	1,236	

Start with the headline: Supporting the 2020 U.S. Election. YouTube in
its company blog can’t even say, “Banning Election Conspiracy
Theories.” They have to employ the Orwellian language of politicians —
Healthy Forests, Clear Skies, “Supported” Elections — because Google
and YouTube are now political actors, who can’t speak plainly any more
than a drunk can walk in a straight line.

The company wrote Wednesday:

    Yesterday was the safe-harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential
election and enough states have certified their election results to
determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any
piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads
people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome
of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election... For example, we will remove
videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to
widespread software glitches or counting errors.

This announcement came down at roughly the same time Hunter Biden was
announcing that his “tax affairs” were under investigation by the U.S.
Attorney in Delaware. Part of that investigation concerned whether or
not he had violated tax and money laundering laws in, as CNN put it,
“foreign countries, principally China.” Information suggestive of
money-laundering and tax issues in China and other countries was in
the cache of emails reported in the New York Post story blocked by
Twitter and Facebook.

That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually
everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an
aristocratic snort, a la Christiane Amanpour:

That tale was not Russian disinformation, however, and Biden’s
announcement this week strongly suggests Twitter and Facebook
suppressed a real story of legitimate public interest just before a
presidential election.

How important was that Hunter Biden story? That’s debatable, but the
fact that tech companies blocked it, and professional journalists
gleefully lied about it, has a direct bearing on YouTube’s decision
now to bar Trumpist freakouts over the election results.

If you want a population of people to stop thinking an election was
stolen from them, it’s hard to think of a worse method than ordering a
news blackout after it’s just been demonstrated that the last major
blackout was a fraud. Close your eyes and imagine what would have
happened if Facebook and Google had banned 9/11 Truth on the advice of
intelligence officials in the Bush years, and it will start to make
sense that Trump voters in Guy Fawkes masks are now roaming the
continent like buffalo.

The YouTube decision also came on the same day that former CIA officer
Evan McMullin tweeted this:
Evan McMullin 🇺🇸 @EvanMcMullin
One of the most critical to-do items for the American democracy
movement over the next four years will be to more effectively counter
domestic anti-democracy disinformation. If possible, it should be done
on both the supply and demand sides. We can't ignore this issue any
longer.

December 10th 2020
526 Retweets3,014 Likes

McMullin was the Never-Trump conservative who ran for president in
2016 and received glowing coverage from The Washington Post and other
outlets as the man who “stands a fair chance of stealing the red state
of Utah from GOP nominee Donald Trump.” The same outlet that blasted
Jill Stein’s “fairy tale candidacy” had Josh Rogin write a slobbering
blowjob profile of McMullin just before the 2016 election, hailing his
“steady personality, honesty, and work ethic” and gushing at the
possibility that he might become the first third-party candidate to
win a state since 1968. “That,” Rogin noted without irony, “might be
his most successful covert operation.”

Intelligence officers like McMullin have spent much of the last four
years conditioning the public to accept the idea that aggressive steps
need to be taken to stop “foreign disinformation” or “foreign
interference,” in the media landscape most of all. A move to stop
“domestic anti-democracy disinformation” on “both the supply and
demand sides” (wtf!?) is a serious escalation of that idea.

Signs pointed to this moment coming. This past August, the office of
the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment that
foreign countries were seeking to spread “disinformation” in the
run-up to the election. In October, Virginia Democrat (and former CIA
official) Abigail Spanberger piggybacked on that report and introduced
a bill designed to cut down on “foreign disinformation.”

The law among other things would require that political ads or content
produced by foreign governments be marked by disclaimers, and that
companies should remove any such content appearing without
disclaimers. It would also expand language in the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA) requiring that any content intended to
influence U.S. citizens politically be reported to the Department of
Justice.

Stipulate that this is all above board, that there’s nothing odd about
the Department of Justice monitoring political ads, or registering
content creators, or permanent bureaucrats in intelligence agencies
publishing their takes on which presidential candidate is preferred by
conniving foreign adversary nations. The United States has survived a
long time without such procedures, but sure: an argument can be made
that any country has an interest in alerting its citizens to foreign
messaging.

Where it gets weird is when the effort to stamp out “foreign
interference” is transferred to the domestic media landscape.
Intelligence agencies, think tanks, and mainstream news agencies have
been preparing us for this concept for years as well. This dates back
to the infamous 2016 Washington Post story hyping PropOrNot, a shadowy
organization that identified a long list of homegrown American news
sites like Consortium, TruthDig, Naked Capitalism, and Antiwar.Com as
vehicles for “Russian propaganda.”

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal two years ago insisted the
Russians in attempting to disrupt our lives “will use American voices.
No longer the broken English, no longer the payment in rubles. They
will become ever more astute in their attacks.” Think-tanks began
hyping ideas about “domestic-origin disinformation” and foreign
countries “co-opting authentic American voices.”

As time passed in the Trump years, we started reading on a regular
basis that Russian propaganda efforts would be harder to detect,
because they would be routed through people appearing on the outside,
like Nexus 6 replicants, to be ordinary human Americans. In late
February earlier this year, at the peak of the preposterous campaign
to depict Bernie Sanders as a favorite of the Kremlin, David Sanger of
the New York Times warned that Russians were purposefully sending
messages through “everyday Americans” because “it is much harder to
ban the words of real Americans.”

When The Bulwark, basically the reanimated corpse of Bill Kristol’s
Weekly Standard, wrote some weeks back about Donald Trump holding a
“maskless anti-democracy disinformation rally straight out of Vladimir
Putin’s dreams,” that language wasn’t accidental. This was part of a
P.R. campaign, years in the making, preparing us for the idea that
domestic voices can be just as dangerous as foreign ones, and
similarly need to be stamped out.

The YouTube announcement is the latest salvo in the fight against
“domestic anti-democracy information,” and the first of many problems
with it is its hypocrisy. Do I personally believe the 2020 election
was stolen from Donald Trump? No. However, I also didn’t believe the
election was stolen from Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the Internet
was bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories nearly identical to
the ones now being propagated by Trump fans:
Daniel Nazer @danielnazer
It's stunning how perfectly the Palmer Report's coverage in 2016
matches today's MAGA conspiracies. But Democratic state AGs were not
stupid enough to submit it to the Supreme Court.

December 9th 2020
88 Retweets362 Likes

Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election
had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton
voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote
tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at
the peak of the Russiagate madness. Two years later, one in three
Americans believed a foreign power would change vote tallies in the
2018 midterm elections.

These beliefs were turbo-charged by countless “reputable” news reports
and statements by politicians that were either factually incorrect or
misleading, from the notion that there was “more than circumstantial”
evidence of collusion to false alarms about Russians hacking
everything from Vermont’s energy grid to C-SPAN.

What makes the current situation particularly grotesque is that the
DNI warning about this summer stated plainly that a major goal of
foreign disruptors was to “undermine the public’s confidence in the
Democratic process” by “calling into question the validity of the
election results.”

Our own domestic intelligence agencies have been doing exactly that
for years now. On nearly a daily basis in the leadup to this past
Election Day, they were issuing warnings in the corporate press that
you might have reason to mistrust the coming results:

Amazing how those stories vanished after Election Day! If you opened
any of those pre-vote reports, you’d find law enforcement and
intelligence officials warning that everything from state and local
governments to “aviation networks” was under attack.

In fact, go back across the last four years and you’ll find a
consistent feature of warnings about foreign or domestic
“disinformation”: the stern scare quote from a bona fide All-Star
ex-spook or State official, from Clint Watts to Victoria Nuland to
Frank Figliuzzi to John Brennan to McMullan’s former boss and buddy,
ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden. A great many of these figures are now
paid contributors to major corporate news organizations.

What do we think the storylines would be right now if Trump had won?
What would those aforementioned figures be saying on channels like
MSNBC and CNN, about what would they be speculating? Does anyone for a
moment imagine that YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook would block efforts
from those people to raise doubts about that hypothetical election
result?

We know the answer to that question, because all of those actors spent
the last four years questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election
without any repercussions. The Atlantic, quoting the likes of Hayden,
ran a piece weeks after Trump’s election arguing that it was the duty
of members of the Electoral College to defy voters and elect Hillary
Clinton on national security grounds. Mass protests were held to
disrupt the Electoral College vote in late December 2016, and YouTube
cheerfully broadcast videos from those events. When Electoral vote
tallies were finally read out in congress, ironically by Joe Biden,
House members from at least six states balked, with people like
Barbara Lee objecting on the grounds of “overwhelming evidence of
Russian interference in our election.”

In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to
protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about
stolen elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even
to file lawsuits challenging the validity of presidential results, so
long as all of this activity is sanctified by officials in the right
party, or by intelligence vets, or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New
York Times, etc.

If, however, the theories are coming from Donald Trump or some other
disreputable species of un-credentialed American, then it’s time for
companies like YouTube to move in and wipe out 8000+ videos and nudge
people to channels like CBS and NBC, as well as to the home page of
the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. This is
a process YouTube calls “connecting people to authoritative
information.”

Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only
real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie.
Imagine if these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we
disallow published claims that the Missile Gap was a fake? That the
Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged? How about Watergate, a wild theory
about cheating in a presidential election that was universally
disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until it wasn’t? It’s not
hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech platforms to
quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned water
systems to war crimes.

There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are
official truths, but those are political rather than scientific
determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level. The
people who created the American free press understood this, even
knowing the tendency of newspapers to be idiotic and full of lies.
They weighed that against the larger potential evil of a despotic
government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson called a “standing
army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without
any regard for truth.”

We allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in
silly religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone
establishing one officially mandated silly religion. With the press,
we put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those
things are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an
aristocratic political establishment having a monopoly on those
abuses. By allowing some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s
exactly the system we’re building.

Most of blue-state America is looking aghast at news stories about 17
states joining in a lawsuit to challenge the election results.
Conventional wisdom says that half the country has been taken over by
a dangerous conspiracist movement that must be tamed by any means
necessary. Acts like the YouTube ban not only don’t accomplish this,
they’ll almost certainly further radicalize this population. This is
especially true in light of the ongoing implication that Trump’s
followers are either actual or unwitting confederates of foreign
enemies.

That insult is bad enough when it’s leveled in words only, but when
it’s backed up by concrete actions to change a group’s status, like
reducing an ability to air grievances, now you’re removing some of the
last incentives to behave like citizens. Do you want 70 million Trump
voters in the streets with guns and go-bags? Tell them you consider
them the same as foreign enemies, and start treating them accordingly.
This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong policy, guaranteed to make things
worse.
"