Facebook bans American trucker convoy group

The group had been gaining tens of thousands of members per day and was calling on all truckers in the US to form a convoy to protest COVID-19 mandates. Organizers were planning to begin the convoy in California and end in Washington DC.

However, Lee described Facebook’s actions as a “stunt” and added that this “is exactly why Americans are fed up.”

The QAnon policies that Facebook cited when banning Convoy to DC 2022 were blasted when they were first introduced with lawyers, journalists, and authors warning that they were arbitrary and gave Facebook an unchecked license to censor.

“Facebook just shut down our page,” Brian Brase, one of the organizers of Convoy to DC 2022 tweeted. “Apparently we don’t fit their agenda. People United is scary I guess. Convoy is still on.”

Facebook’s decision to boot the Convoy to DC 2022 group follows another convoy that’s protesting vaccine mandates, the “Freedom Convoy” in Canada, going viral on social media after mainstream media outlets downplayed the convoy and suggested that Russia was behind it.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has banned a rapidly growing grassroots protest movement that’s being shunned or disparaged by the mainstream media. Anti-critical race theory groups, anti-lockdown groups, groups supporting exceptions to COVID vaccine mandates, and more have also been booted from the platform as they gain traction and attract lots of new members.

In addition to banning specific groups, Facebook has introduced new censorship rules that make it harder for group members to see each other’s content.

The White House praises Spotify “misinformation” labels, demands more

White House press secretary Jen Psaki even added that, “there’s more that can be done,” in a press conference this week.

The new Spotify labels will be based on many of the recent Big Tech labels where a label will be attached to a piece of content that goes against the ideas of government authorities.

“This disclaimer is a positive step but we want every platform to continue doing more to call out mis and disinformation while also uplifting accurate information,” Psaki said, when asked about the new Spotify label policy.
“Our view is it’s a good step,” Psaki added. “It’s a positive step, but there’s more that can be done.”

Psaki asked online platforms to do more to combat “misinformation.”
“That certainly includes Spotifly (sic)” she said, pronouncing the audio platform incorrectly.

Watch the video here.

Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie support D.C bar “closed” for not introducing vaccine passports

Big Board is a bar and restaurant that had its liquor license revoked and was then ordered to shut down by the state after it refused to implement a divisive vaccine passport system.

“I’m proud of the owner for not submitting,” Paul said.

Congressman Massie praised the owner Eric Flannery for pushing back against the affront to civil liberties.

“I’m just a little old bar owner,” Flannery said. “I’ve been down here for ten years and I love everybody who comes.”

Flannery pushed back against having staff check medical passports at the door. “The government doesn’t send me a paycheck…I am not an agent of the government to do this,” Flannery said in a video from The Daily Signal. “If they want to come down and check people’s medical status, they’re more than welcome to.”

Flannery has been one of the most vocal opponents of vaccine passports in the D.C area.

Speaking to The Daily Signal, Senator Paul said, “If you came to me and you said you’re going to take my liberty ‘but I’m going to keep you from dying and I’m gonna keep you from the plague’ you might have an argument. You’d still be wrong.”

Senator Paul said that people can make their own decisions, adding, “Don’t go to the restaurant. If it’s really deadly, stay home.”

NSA admits exploitable loophole that helps it spy on US citizens without a warrant

According to a report released this week by the Office of the Inspector General, the intelligence agency has not been strictly following those rules.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows intelligence agencies to gather foreigners’ communications, including emails and phone calls, without having to get warrants.

The law does prohibit the surveillance of Americans. But, it has a massive loophole that allows intelligence agencies to search for information on Americans if “a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”

This loophole is very easily exploited.

In the report, the Inspector General “revealed a number of concerns involving identifiers used as query terms against FISA Section 702 data.”

Investigators for the NSA’s office of the inspector general found out that queries in the database for search terms, or “selectors,” for Americans “did not always follow NSA procedural and policy requirements.”

Additionally, a tool that automatically blocks queries with US persons selectors did block some selectors.

Civil liberties and privacy activists insist that Section 702 should be amended to require intelligence agencies to get warrants before searching for any information on an American citizen. The groups argue that such surveillance on Americans is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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Ottawa City Councillor requests lawsuit to seize GoFundMe funds raised for Canada’s Freedom Convoy

After first having GoFundMe temporarily block the release of some of the funds that Canadians have donated to help support the livelihoods of the truckers taking place in the demonstration, GoFundMe began to pay out the funds, with the first payment of $1M in Canadian dollars being released, the campaign organizer tweeted on Friday.

He showed his letter to the city manager, announcing the request.
The email reads:

“I want to voice my support for the notion of City initiating actions against the GoFundme funds to cover City expenses from incidents from the protests. (Police costs, businesses and residents for clean-up, promotion for our City, and messaging to support downtown residents, and funds for local groups who were victimized over the weekend) Please advise on actions we can and will take.”

Online fundraising for civil liberties causes is becoming an increasing challenge as the platforms themselves, the payment processors, and even hostile government action continue to hamper attempts to fundraise for causes.

Spotify embraces Big Tech’s “content advisory” labels

Now, in the wake of the unsuccessful bid by artist Neil Young to get rid of Rogan and his $100 million podcast from Spotify, for covering and conversations around the pandemic in a way Young didn’t like, the streaming platform is looking for ways other than directly undermining its own business to stay on the good side of the censorship monster.

For now, the demands Spotify will be meeting while still trying to appear as a good home for creators and not yet another cesspool of censorship masquerading as a major platform, is by adopting a series of measures eerily reminiscent of how Big Tech first introduced the slippery slope of its by now massive and unprecedented campaign of online censorship.

In a blog post on Monday, co-founder and CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek writes that his company will not take the role of content censor, and that this is a point important to him personally; yet, Ek goes on to describe how censorship by any other name will start to be given prominence.

Ek says that while Spotify has had “rules” in place for years, now the time has come to enforce them in a “more transparent manner” – and these have now been published as Platform Rules.

As has become customary, “widely-accepted” information is equated with factually correct, and now Spotify will add an advisory to every podcast episode about Covid – which will seek to take the listeners’ attention from what they came to Spotify for – to listen to that episode – and to something called “Covid-19 Hub.”

This is where Spotify will provide what YouTube and Twitter have used for years: “authoritative and data-driven facts” (even though “facts,” the fullness of time reveals, often turn into theories, even if they come from “trustworthy scientists and academics and physicians”).

Spotify users won’t have to wait for long for this new feature, as it is coming worldwide in the coming days. Creators, meanwhile, will have a new item to read in the Platform Rules – what they should not post about Covid, and how their content makes them “accountable.”

Ek basically recalls that Spotify has always been on the mainstream side of the multiyear controversy that is Covid, and the response to it, and adds that the company has donated to vaccine awareness groups, the WHO, and COVAX.

Many who were hoping this was a major “now or never” moment to remove Rogan from a big platform and cut off his access to his audience are now disappointed that Spotify is doing “too little too late” and “not enough” with this set of new tools – but depending on the kind of pressure the company continues to find itself under, we could easily see these “baby steps” into yet another full-blown censorship campaign. Creators, in particular, should watch these developments closely.

In the meanwhile, others look at the big political picture and the reason why Rogan elicits such strong reactions. For one thing, he continues to be an independent creator who is taking on, and beating the ratings that previously only large, corporate broadcasters and figures could count on. Therefore, depending on where you sit, he is either a hope for the future of the media, or a massive threat.

Observes like Glenn Greenwald see the obsessive need of US liberals do deal with those disagreeing with their talking points in a radically illiberal manner: by vilifying them as proliferating lies, i.e., “misinformation and fake news,” as well as “hate speech” – and then simply have the example of these ideological and political opponents removed from pretty much everybody’s view with demonetizing and bans.

Greenwald sees the accusation of hate speech (and even the outright lie that the US Constitution’s First Amendment doesn’t protect that type of speech, too) as having given way to an even more “elastic” term – “misinformation.” A lot more can be controlled and censored under that claim.

Hw writes that if a current major star follows suit and calls for Rogan’s removal, “it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect.”

“The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it,” he writes.

Joe Rogan responds to Spotify outrage; “Many of the things that we thought of as ‘misinformation’ just a short while ago are now accepted as fact”

In the video, Rogan apologized to those who felt offended and then made some interesting statements about the state of public discourse in today’s world and about why his show, which is the number one podcast in the world, is worth listening to.

Watch the video here.

Rogan asked that people try to ignore many of the “disparaging” headlines that are trying to misrepresent his show.

“Many of the things that we thought of as ‘misinformation’ just a short while ago are now accepted as fact,” he added.
Rogan said:

“I think there’s a lot of people that have a distorted perception of what I do, maybe based on sound bites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading ‘dangerous misinformation,’ specifically about two episodes — a little bit about some other ones — but specifically about two. One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone.

Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology, and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to mRNA vaccines.

Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people, and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that — those episodes in particular — those episodes were labeled as being ‘dangerous,’ they had “dangerous misinformation” in them.”

Rogan then commented about the recent trend in calling things “misinformation” as a way to get things censored.

“The problem I have with the term ‘misinformation,’ especially today, is that many of the things that we thought of as ‘misinformation’ just a short while ago are now accepted as fact. Like, for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘If you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you could still spread COVID,’ you’d be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.

If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said, ‘I think it’s possible that COVID-19 came from a lab,’ you’d be banned from many social media platforms. Now, that’s on the cover of Newsweek.All of those theories that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been accused of [spreading] ‘dangerous misinformation.’”

Turkey’s Erdogan threatens media for publishing stories that go against the country’s “core values”

Erdogan chose to react via the Official Gazette, Reuters reported, and focus his message on the need to “think of the children.” The president called for legal measures to be put in place as a way to protect the country’s culture, and make sure children are not negatively influenced by what he considers “harmful content” in all types of media.

Erdogan stopped short at identifying the content he was referring to, but those are said to mean the kind that undermines Turkey’s national values and disrupts family and social structure. This is interpreted to mean content that might in any way flaunt Erdogan’s ruling party’s Islamic values, including on issues like LGBT, or criticize him personally or his rule.

Whatever the clear policy behind the latest warning may be, it should not be hard to enforce, given that in Turkey – a NATO member who is hopeful of joining the EU – some 90% of the most influential media are either state-owned or allied with the government.

This “consolidation” happened particularly around the time of a failed attempt to dethrone Erdogan in 2016, when he came back with a vengeance, imposing more and more control on the way information was disseminated in that country.

The authorities, for their part, continue to deny that the measures introduced in the wake of the coup have had long-term consequences, including on freedom of religion – something critics would not agree with.

In Turkey, the regulator who exercises oversight and also direct removal of content, i.e., carries out censorship, is RTUK. Some of its activities in the past have been to fine outlets or have them delete content sees as “erotic,” offensive to the president, or referring to LGBT.

The work of journalists has also been criminalized in tens of thousands of cases. Only last week, journalist Sedef Kabas was jailed ahead of her trial for posting a proverb seen as unfavorable to Erdogan’s image.

Germany backs down on threat to ban Telegram

Even though this may not be getting widely reported by mainstream media in Germany, and elsewhere, anti-lockdown gatherings are quite frequent, and those behind them like to use independent and secure apps like Telegram to organize and coordinate.

But that got them in trouble with Faeser, who seemed determined to pin “trigger warnings” such as “hate speech” and “online violence” on Telegram and thus quickly vilify the app, with the goal of getting rid of it all together.

Faeser even found a law that she said Telegram was “violating,” thus justifying banning the service in the country – and where the state apparatus couldn’t reach, she naturally expected collaboration from massive corporations like Google and Apple.

Those two, the way the minister envisaged running Telegram in Germany into the ground, would kick both apps from their store. This would critically lower Telegram’s visibility and accessibility to (regular) users.

It didn’t take long for Faeser to realize that she would at the very least have to rephrase her plan of mass-scale, coordinated censorship, from what seemed like the flimsiest of accusations.

According to the German press, Faeser is now seeking to distance herself from the previously clearly stated desire to “switch Telegram off” – claiming that was never her goal.

No, Faeser told Der Spiegel, the idea was just to “increase the pressure” on Telegram – but to deliver what? Ostensibly whatever Germany threatened to make the app do by force?

It’s not clear at this time what caused Faeser to walk back her previous radical comments – maybe she’s had a “democratic epiphany” and realized that this shutting down of communication channels is simply how things are done in democratic countries.

Reports say that Berlin is now exploring other ways to try to achieve the same goal – but this time, perhaps come off a little less radical, and ridiculous.

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