FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Floyd's jury was quoted as being too scared by BLM to acquit.
ACLU's long corrupt history of ignoring 2ndA firearms rights precedes
it, now ACLU exposes its biased hypocrite self again re: censorship...

BLM is one of the most cherished left-liberal causes, and the ACLU now
relies almost entirely on donations and grants from those who have
standard left-liberal politics and want and expect the ACLU to advance
that ideological and partisan agenda above its nonpartisan civil
liberties principles. Criticizing BLM is a third rail in left-liberal
political circles, which is where the ACLU now resides almost
entirely, and thus it again cowers in silence as another online act of
censorship which advances political liberalism emerges.
...
And now we have arrived at the truly depressing and tawdry place where
the ACLU is afraid to apply its long-stated principles to denounce
Facebook's censorship because the censorship in question happened to
be an article that reflected poorly on the sacred-among-liberals BLM
group. In the place of brave lawyers and activists defending the
constitutional rights and civil liberties even of those people and
groups most despised, we have instead a corporate spokesman emailing
The New York Times with excuses about why it cannot and will not speak
up about a major censorship controversy that has been brewing for two
weeks. In that decline one finds the ACLU's sorry trajectory from
stalwart civil liberties group into a lavishly funded arm of the
Democratic Party's liberal political wing.


https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstains-from

ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From Online Censorship Controversy: This
Time Over BLM


Enormous sums of money have poured into racial justice groups since
the May, 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police
Department. “The foundation widely seen as a steward of the Black
Lives Matter movement says it took in just over $90 million last
year,” according to a February Associated Press review, while at least
$5 billion was raised by groups associated with that cause in the
first two months alone following Floyd's death.
A person holds a placard with he words No Pride without Black Trans
Lives at the Black Trans Lives Matters' march in London. (Photo by
Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Two weeks after the Floyd killing, The New York Times said that the
“money has come in so fast and so unexpectedly that some groups even
began to turn away and redirect donors elsewhere,” while “others said
they still could not yet account for how much had arrived.” Propelled
by the emotions and nationwide protest movements that emerged last
summer, corporations, oligarchs, celebrities and the general public
opened their wallets and began pouring money into BLM coffers and have
not stopped doing so.

Where that money has gone has been the topic of numerous media
investigations as well as concerns expressed by racial justice
advocates. AP noted that BLM's sharing of financial data in February
“marks the first time in the movement’s nearly eight-year history that
BLM leaders have revealed a detailed look at their finances.” That
newfound transparency was prompted by what AP called “longstanding
tensions boil[ing] over between some of the movement’s grassroots
organizers and national leaders — the former went public last fall
with grievances about financial transparency, decision-making and
accountability."

In December, ten local BLM chapters severed ties with the national
group amidst questions and suspicions over the handling of activities
and finances by one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, who had
assumed the title of Executive Director. On April 10, The New York
Post published an exposé on what it called Cullors’ “million-dollar
real estate buying binge.” The paper noted that as protests were
unfolding around the country, the BLM official was “snagging four
high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property
records,” including a California property valued at $1.4 million. The
article also revealed that the self-described Marxist and her partner
“were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit at the Albany,” an
“elite enclave laid out on 600 oceanside acres,” which “features a
private marina and designer golf course.” The Post included photos of
several of the properties obtained from public real estate listings.

In an interview about that Post story with Marc Lamont Hill, Cullors —
except saying she has not visited the Bahamas since the age of 15 —
did not deny the accuracy of the reporting, but instead justified her
real estate acquisitions. She denied she had taken a salary from the
BLM group, pointing to other income she earns as a professor, author,
and a YouTube content creator as the source of this sudden outburst of
real estate purchases. She denounced the Post reporting as "frankly
racist, and sexist.”

So that seems like a perfectly healthy cycle for covering a
controversy, obviously in the public interest. In the wake of concerns
from activists about where this massive amount of BLM money has gone,
The New York Post did its job of unearthing the splurge of real estate
acquisitions by the person who controls and directs BLM's budget and
who has been a target of accusations and suspicions from activists.
Cullors then had the opportunity to publicly provide her side of the
story concerning her aggressive and ample financial investments.

But then something quite unhealthy and unusual occurred. Five days
after publication of that Post article, the Substack journalists Shant
Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani reported that Facebook was banning the
sharing of that article worldwide on its platform — similar to what
Twitter and Facebook did in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election
to The New York Post's reporting on the Biden family's business
dealings in China and Ukraine. The Substack reporters noted that
Facebook ultimately confirmed the worldwide ban of the Post's
reporting to The New York Times’ media reporter Ben Smith, justifying
it on the ground that the article “revealed personal details about
[Cullors] and her residence in violation of Facebook’s community
standards.”
Message received by Facebook users attempting to post The New York
Post article about Cullors’ real estate acquisitions

In his weekly New York Times Sunday night media column, Smith returned
to this subject. When a Facebook lawyer justified the censorship by
citing an alleged policy that the tech monopoly will ban any “article
[which] shows your home or apartment, says what city you’re in and you
don’t like it,” Smith expressed extreme skepticism:

    The policy sounds crazy because it could apply to dozens, if not
hundreds, of news articles every day — indeed, to a staple of
reporting for generations that has included Michael Bloomberg’s
expansion of his townhouse in 2009 and the comings and goings of the
Hamptons elites. Alex Rodriguez doesn’t like a story that includes a
photo of him and his former fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, smiling in front
of his house? Delete it. Donald Trump is annoyed about a story that
includes a photo of him outside his suite at Mar-a-Lago? Gone.
Facebook’s hands, the lawyer told me, are tied by its own policies.

    Presumably, the only reason this doesn’t happen constantly is
because nobody knows about the policy. But now you do!

Smith was additionally disturbed that Facebook was, in essence,
overriding the editorial judgment of news outlets, which grapple every
day with how to strike the balance between ensuring the public knows
of information in the public interest and protecting a person's right
to privacy. For obvious reasons, public figures and organizations —
which both BLM and Cullors undoubtedly are — are deemed to have a
lower expectation of privacy when it comes to what is newsworthy. That
is why, for example, the extramarital affairs of Donald Trump or Bill
Clinton are deemed newsworthy whereas, outside of the
dead-but-returning Gawker sewer, the sex lives of private citizens are
not. Yet Facebook accords no deference to the editorial judgments even
of the most established media outlets. Instead, they told Smith,
“Facebook alone decides.”

Whatever one’s views are on this particular censorship controversy,
there is no doubt that it is part of the highly consequential debate
over online free speech and the ability of monopolies like Facebook to
control the dissemination of news and the boundaries of political
discourse and debate. That is why Smith devoted his weekly column to
it. And yet, when Smith approached the standard free speech advocacy
groups for comment on this story, virtually none was willing to speak
up. “Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the
company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial
calls,” he wrote.

Among those groups which insisted that it would not comment on
Facebook's censorship of the Post's BLM story was the vaunted, brave
and deeply principled free speech organization, the American Civil
Liberties Union. “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into
that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this
point in time,” emailed Aaron Madrid Aksoz, an ACLU spokesman. Smith
said “the only criticism he could obtain came from the News Media
Alliance, the old newspaper lobby, whose chief executive, David
Chavern, called blocking The Post’s link ‘completely arbitrary’ and
noted that ‘Facebook and Google stand between publishers and their
audiences and determine how and whether news content is seen.’”

How is it possible that the ACLU is all but invisible on one of the
central free speech debates of our time: namely, how much censorship
should Silicon Valley tech monopolists be imposing on our political
speech? As someone who intensively reports on these controversies, I
can barely remember any time when the ACLU spoke up loudly on any of
these censorship debates, let alone assumed the central role that any
civil liberties group with any integrity would, by definition, assume
on this growing controversy.

In lieu of the traditional, iconic and organization-defining
willingness — eagerness — of the ACLU to defend free speech precisely
when it has been most controversial and upsetting to liberals, what we
now get instead are cowardly, P.R.-consultant-scripted excuses for
staying as far away as possible: “We don’t have anyone who is closely
plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say
at this point in time.” That sounds like something Marco Rubio's
office says when asked about a Trump tweet or that a corporate
headquarters would say to avoid an inflammatory controversy, not the
reaction of a stalwart civil liberties group to a publicly debated act
of political censorship.

In this particular case, it is not difficult to understand the cause
of the ACLU's silence. They obviously cannot defend Facebook's
censorship — affirmatively defending the stifling of political speech
is, at least for now, still a bridge too far for the group — but they
are petrified of saying anything that might seem even remotely
critical of, let alone adversarial to, BLM activists and
organizations. That is because BLM is one of the most cherished
left-liberal causes, and the ACLU now relies almost entirely on
donations and grants from those who have standard left-liberal
politics and want and expect the ACLU to advance that ideological and
partisan agenda above its nonpartisan civil liberties principles.
Criticizing BLM is a third rail in left-liberal political circles,
which is where the ACLU now resides almost entirely, and thus it again
cowers in silence as another online act of censorship which advances
political liberalism emerges. Indeed, BLM is an organization which the
ACLU frequently champions:

    No matter how you say it, BLACK LIVES MATTER. pic.twitter.com/KBlyoUA8fR
    — ACLU (@ACLU) January 4, 2021

Like so many liberal-left media outlets and advocacy groups, the ACLU
was suffering financially before they were saved and then enriched
beyond their wildest dreams by Donald Trump and the #Resistance
movement he spawned. “The American Civil Liberties Union this week
laid off 23 employees, about 7 percent of the organization’s national
staff,” announced The Washington Post in April, 2015. But in the Trump
era, the money flowed in almost as quickly and furiously as post-Floyd
money to BLM. In February, 2017, said AP, the group “is suddenly awash
in donations and new members as it does battle with President Donald
Trump over the extent of his constitutional authority, with nearly $80
million in online contributions alone pouring in since the election.”
So that is the donor base it now serves.

The ACLU's we-know-nothing routine for abstaining from commenting on
Facebook's censorship of the BLM article is, for so many reasons,
preposterous. The group funds what it calls its Speech, Privacy, and
Technology Project, and some of its best lawyers oversee it. Clearly
they focus on these issues. And the ACLU in general has taken a firm
and borderline-absolutist position against online censorship by
Silicon Valley monopolies: principles whose application to this
particular case would be easy and obvious. The ACLU has a section of
its website devoted to “Internet Speech,” and its position on such
matters is stated explicitly:

    The ACLU believes in an uncensored Internet, a vast free-speech
zone deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that
afforded to traditional media such as books, newspapers, and
magazines….The ACLU has been at the forefront of protecting online
freedom of expression in its myriad forms. We brought the first case
in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared speech on the Internet
equally worthy of the First Amendment’s historical protections.

In a July, 2018 article published on the group's site entitled
“Facebook Shouldn't Censor Offensive Speech,” the group praised
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's controversial pledge “to keep Facebook
from diving deeper into the business of censorship” as “the right
call.”

Unlike in response to the BLM controversy, the ACLU had no trouble
back then recognizing that “what's at stake here is the ability of one
platform that serves as a forum for the speech of billions of people
to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own
determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is
offensive.” The ACLU's stated policy on these controversies could not
have been clearer: “given Facebook’s nearly unparalleled status as a
forum for political speech and debate, it should not take down
anything but unlawful speech, like incitement to violence.” In light
of that principle, how is it remotely hard to denounce Facebook's
censorship of the Post's article given that it does not even arguably
fall within the scope of those narrow exceptions?

Because the ACLU still employs a few old-school civil libertarians
among its hundreds of lawyers and staff, those employees manage to do
work and express views that are consistent with the ACLU's old-school
civil liberties agenda even when contrary to the interests of liberal
politics. But the tactics used by the ACLU in those cases to downplay
or hide those aberrations are as transparent as they are craven.

When three Silicon Valley monopolies united to remove the social media
app Parler from the internet in January, 2021 after influential
Democratic lawmakers demanded it — one of the most brute acts of
monopolistic censorship yet — an ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, was cited in
The New York Times as labelling Parler's destruction “troubling,”
telling the paper: “I think we should recognize the importance of
neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the
internet.” But on the ACLU's highly active and influential Twitter
account — the group's primary platform for promoting its work,
expressing its views, and soliciting donations, where it has two
million followers and often tweets up to fifty times a day — the group
said absolutely nothing about the removal of an entire social media
app from the internet:

Indeed, the ACLU — outside of a few token, hidden statements — has
chosen to play at most a minor role in the key free speech
controversies of the day, ones focusing on such weighty matters as
internet freedom and online censorship over our political debates by
Silicon Valley monopolies. Over the last four years, as Facebook's
censorship has expanded rapidly, the ACLU has said little to nothing
about it — including remaining in utter silence about the
extraordinary decision to censor pre-election reporting on Hunter
Biden's laptop and what it revealed about Joe Biden's business
dealings. Last month, Substack reporter Michael Tracey reviewed the
ACLU's prior 100 tweets and found that 63 of them were about trans
issues while a grand total of one was about free speech and none about
due process. A comparison of the number of ACLU statements on online
censorship controversies to its manifestations on trans issues
similarly reveals a fixation on the latter with very little interest
in the former:

It goes without saying that the ACLU has every right to devote a huge
bulk of its institutional resources and public advocacy to the cause
of trans equality if it chooses to do so. But what that reveals is
that the group is becoming exactly what its leaders always vowed it
would never be: just another garden-variety liberal political advocacy
group. After all, there is no shortage of extremely well-financed LGBT
groups doing the same advocacy on trans issues. Those LGBT groups
shifted their focus almost entirely to trans issues when they won the
entire agenda of gay and lesbian equality with the Supreme Court's
2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in all fifty states, and
supporting trans rights is the mainstream, standard view of Democratic
Party leaders and liberal activists.

The ACLU's refusal to engage with growing online censorship is
baffling even from the perspective of its liberal politics given that
radical leftists are increasingly (and predictably) the targets of
tech censorship alongside anti-establishment right-wing voices. Just
yesterday, the highly popular trans YouTube host Natalie Wynn of
Contrapoints complained that one of her past episodes had just been
demonetized and urged: “Free speech should be reclaimed as an
essential leftist issue. We should not surrender the most fundamental
civil right to Google LLC in the name of deplatforming rightists and
curtailing harassment.” Wynn's last video, rebutting the views of J.K.
Rowling on trans issues, featured Wynn's list of the telltale signs of
“indirect bigotry” toward trans people, and she included "free speech
advocacy,” but — as happens to so many people — Wynn has apparently
reconsidered that view and has discovered the centrality of free
speech values now that her own speech is targeted. But agitating for
more online political censorship still remains a cause deeply popular
among establishment liberals, further explaining the ACLU's reluctance
to involve itself in these controversies on the side of free
expression.
ACLU page touting its advocacy of trans and nonbinary rights

What always distinguished the ACLU in the past — and what gave it
credibility with judges in courtrooms — was its devotion to and focus
on non-partisan free speech, free press and due process causes that
were too unpopular or controversial for other groups to touch,
particularly liberal groups who could not afford to offend the
political sensibilities of Democrats. There are still some isolated
occasions when the ACLU does such things — such as when it spoke up in
defense of the NRA against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's efforts to
target the group with destruction or when the ACLU recently denounced
parts of the Democrats’ H.R.1 “reforms”— but the ACLU largely hides
those exceptions on its most popular public platforms, and they are
becoming increasingly rare.

And now we have arrived at the truly depressing and tawdry place where
the ACLU is afraid to apply its long-stated principles to denounce
Facebook's censorship because the censorship in question happened to
be an article that reflected poorly on the sacred-among-liberals BLM
group. In the place of brave lawyers and activists defending the
constitutional rights and civil liberties even of those people and
groups most despised, we have instead a corporate spokesman emailing
The New York Times with excuses about why it cannot and will not speak
up about a major censorship controversy that has been brewing for two
weeks. In that decline one finds the ACLU's sorry trajectory from
stalwart civil liberties group into a lavishly funded arm of the
Democratic Party's liberal political wing.