[Steve]

DHS Launches Unlawful Disinformation Board -

https://sovren.media/video/dhs-launches-...-1087.html

[Steve]

Stay Calm and Censor On: Elon Musk Summoned to Parliament to Answer for His Pledge to Restore Free Speech

I previously wrote about Hillary Clinton’s call on European countries to pass censorship laws to force social media companies like Twitter to regulate speech even after Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter. Now the Parliament has called on Musk to testify and to explain his alarming pledge to restore free speech.

The Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board head, Nina Jankowisz, previously called upon Great Britain to impose state censorship rules. That call has grown since Musk’s purchase. Until now, a unified front of corporate censors was able to maintain an extensive system of censorship with the encouragement of politicians and pundits, including Joe Biden and Democratic members.

The head of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Julian Knight has assured her countrymen that they can stay calm and censor on. She issued a letter for Musk to appear before the committee to answer for his terrifying suggestion of free speech …


https://www.globalresearch.ca/stay-calm-...ch/5779790

[Steve]

EU, U.K. join U.S. in launching online ‘disinformation’ policies

 - prompting concerns about ‘One-World Governance’ of Social Media
The EU’s Digital Services Act and the U.K.’s proposed Online Safety Bill are among the latest government policies designed to hold social media companies responsible for hate speech and “disinformation” posted by users, a move experts suggested could bring us closer to global government.
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the U.K.’s proposed Online Safety Bill are among the latest government policies designed to hold social media companies responsible for hate speech and “disinformation” posted by users.

Experts interviewed by The Defender expressed concerns about the potential slippery slope of regulations — in the U.S. and overseas — which, under the guise of “combating disinformation,” stifle the spread of information deemed inconvenient for governments and other powerful actors.
As reported by The Defender, in the U.S., these proposals include a government “disinformation board” and a bill pending before Congress, the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act.

The EU’s new regulations, experts said, may have far-reaching impacts beyond Europe.
Michael Rectenwald, author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said he can foresee a future in which such regulations might affect all speech — not just speech on social media platforms.
Rectenwald told The Defender:

“[T]he EU’s DSA represents a major step toward one-world governance of social media and Internet search and one step closer to global government.
“Since the distinction between ‘on-line’ and ‘off-line’ activity will lose all meaning as the Internet includes the Internet of Things and Bodies, the DSA may become the law of the land.”

Is EU’s Digital Services Act on collision course with Musk’s Twitter plans?
In timing that coincided with Elon Musk’s intent to purchase Twitter, the EU announced April 23 the passage of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA seeks to tackle the spread of “misinformation and illegal content” and will apply “to all online intermediaries providing services in the EU,” in proportion to “the nature of the services concerned” and the number of users of each platform.

According to the DSA, “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) and “very large online search engines” (VLOSEs) — those with more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU — will be subject to the most stringent of the DSA’s requirements…

https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopol...-policies/

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defen...2680c85b4b

[awakened53]

After subscribers quit, Netflix tells activist employees it’s time to support free speech

After Netflix has announced it’s bleeding subscribers, the company has started to make some changes. Netflix has issued a warning to employees in its new “Culture Memo.” It warned employees offended by “harmful” content on the platform to find work somewhere else.
The memo, obtained by Variety, which signals a change in Netflix’s culture, appears to have been triggered by backlash over a special by comedian Dave Chappelle and more. Activist Netflix employees staged a walkout over the company hosting the special that they deemed transphobic.
The new Culture Memo has a section titled “Artistic Expression,” which says that the platform will not censor some artists and voices even if their content is deemed “harmful.”
“If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the memo says. It adds that employees may have to work on the content they deem harmful and if they are not comfortable accepting such tasks they should find work somewhere else.
“Entertaining the world is an amazing opportunity and also a challenge because viewers have very different tastes and points of view. So we offer a wide variety of TV shows and movies, some of which can be provocative,” the memo states. It continues to say “we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with” and that it is upon the viewers to “decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
The employee who organized the walkout last October after the release of Chappelle’s “transphobic” special titled “The Closer,” was fired after leaking data.
Read more: After subscribers quit, Netflix tells activist employees it’s time to support free speech

[awakened53]

Head of Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Previously Compared Free Speech to “Fairy Dust”

Hinting she doesn’t believe it should even exist.
The head of what has been dubbed the Biden administration’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ previously compared free speech to “fairy dust” during testimony about social media censorship in front of the UK Parliament.
Yes, really.
Nina Jankowicz, recently appointed DHS ‘disinformation czar,’ made the comments while providing oral evidence regarding the implementation of the UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill, which will ban legal content which has “the potential to cause harm.”
After agreeing that the government should set minimum speech standards which ban “misogyny,” Jankowicz blasted alternative social media platforms for supporting “freedom of expression and fairy dust.”
She also said that government-connected communications regulators such as Ofcom should “be able to establish the minimum standards that would be applied to all platforms and incur fines.”


https://youtu.be/P3LjXP_OnIg

https://www.globalresearch.ca/head-biden...st/5780204

[awakened53]

Cult-Owned Fascist Labour and SNP Add ‘Health Misinformation’ to the Online Safety Bill to Stop Official Lies Being Questioned and Exposed

Labour and SNP politicians on the Committee currently scrutinising the Online Safety Bill laid an amendment to include “health-related misinformation and disinformation” as a recognised form of lawful but “harmful” speech, ratcheting up the censorship yet further. Mark Johnson has written about the illiberal move for UnHerd.
Civil libertarians often talk about a phenomenon known as the ‘ratcheting effect’. This is the idea that when it comes to the erosion of our liberties, the trajectory tends to head in one direction; in favour of state power at the expense of our rights and freedoms.
It is the reason why we draw red lines that should not be crossed. If you breach the principle of non-interference in people’s rights with a relatively minor incursion, what is to stop that minor incursion from escalating to something more significant in the future?
Yet with the Online Safety Bill, a censor’s charter which has been so long in the making the ratcheting effect is happening in real time. Last week, SNP and Labour politicians on the Committee currently scrutinising the Bill laid an amendment to include “health-related misinformation and disinformation’ as a recognised form of lawful but ‘harmful’” speech. This threatens to open a Pandora’s box of censorship.
The terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have grown to become part of the political lexicon in recent years. The concepts of being incorrect or misleading have been left behind for alternative terms, with loaded connotations. Yet they are malleable terms, often deployed in ways to discredit or silence another individual’s argument in the course of public debate.
Stoked by these fears, we have seen Big Tech increasingly taking on the role of online speech police in recent years. During the coronavirus era, this reached new extremes. At the beginning of the pandemic, Facebook took the step of removing content which promoted face masks as a tool to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Read More: Labour and SNP Add “Health Misinformation” to the Online Safety Bill

[Steve]

New dystopian law would give all social media users a ‘truth score’

Another manifestation of the social credit score rears its ugly head.

In another manifestation of the onerous ‘social credit score’ system, an amendment to a bill in the UK would mandate all social media users be given a ‘truth score’ that pre-determines the accuracy of their posts….

https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/scienc...uth-score/

https://summit.news/2022/07/11/new-dysto...uth-score/

[awakened53]

The Cancellers Are Getting Cancelled

This week brought welcome news that some of the purse-lipped, finger-wagging puritans who’ve been at the forefront of cancel culture – such as Gary Lineker, Frankie Boyle, and Dara Ó’Briain – are now at risk of being cancelled themselves. Those who live by the sword…
Lineker’s sin was to tweet the following after the victory of the England women’s football team on Sunday:
Not anything a normal person would object to – it was obviously a reference to the fact that Chloe Kelly removed her shirt to celebrate scoring a goal in added time – but the woke mob Gary has spent the last six years pandering to immediately turned on him. MailOnline has more.
The pun backfired and Lineker, 61, faced an immediate backlash on Twitter, not least from people who hadn’t seen how Kelly marked the historic goal.
He was accused of making a “puerile sexist joke’”and of “casual sexism”. One reply said: “Women did what you couldn’t and you reduce their victory to a bra joke! Your misogyny and jealousy betrays you!!”
Lineker swiftly deleted his tweet and explained: “It was just a play on words given the celebration. I do rubbish like that constantly on here, including on men’s football.
“I’ve deleted it as many people didn’t see the game so missed the context.”
Needless to say, deleting the tweet did little to placate his furious critics. For instance, Karen Ingala Smith, who describes herself as a ‘feminist‘ in her Twitter bio, replied: “Please apologise for and condemn the sexist responses to your now deleted badly judged tweet.”

Read More: The Cancellers Are Getting Cancelled

[awakened53]

Repression, Terror, Fear: The Government Wants to Silence the Opposition

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Lockdowns.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
This is the language of force.
This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.
These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.
At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.
In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.
That’s when everything went haywire.
When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.
On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.
On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.
Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, and police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, police failed to do their jobs.
In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatingsbefore eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”
“Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville,” reported ProPublica.
Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”
In this way, police who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence failed to do either.
Indeed, a 220-page post-mortem of the protests and the Charlottesville government’s response by former U.S. attorney Timothy J. Heaphy concluded that “the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety.”
In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.
The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.
And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.
This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.
Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.
Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.
It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.
They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.
They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.
They want us silent, servile and compliant.
They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Why else do you think Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?
This is how it begins.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.
Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
So what’s the answer?
For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.
Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.
Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.

[awakened53]

The Horrendous Damage of Censorship

There has always been a hunger for new discoveries and revelations of the truth, but often, in the past, it took great effort to get past the “agenda”—there has always been one.
Think of the Daniel Ellsberg exposure of The Pentagon Papers as well as many pieces coming out of Viet Nam during the ‘60s by a group of idealist journalists covering the war there. None of these were popular publications with the editors (or the powers that be), and had their difficulty getting published, but they were not altogether censored.
Then jump a few decades ahead and think of Julian Assange, still being held against his will for his revealing publications in WikiLeaks on war crimes committed by the United States. And we certainly must not forget the courageous work of Edward Snowden who exposed illegal CIA surveillance in the summer of 2013 having The Guardian, in the UK, and The Washington Post, in the US, publish his story.
Again, although unusual considering today’s climate that his story was published in two particularly prominent instruments of the state, Snowden himself was declared an alleged traitor by the US and has dodged extradition to this day. The screws tightened as the years rolled by—now so tight practically nothing gets through.
There is a lot more than this, of course. And today the censoring of highly qualified professionals and journalists who have pertinent and quite important information to share with the public has become so blatant it brings to mind the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s and Soviet censorship during Stalin’s reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.
It is impossible to know how devastating to a culture this sort of censorship is. One can only imagine what it would be like to live in a country where not a speck of information came to you that was not controlled by the state. The state could literally tell you anything and you would have to believe it. Or would you?
I believe one of the distinct differences between now and then is that people did not buy everything that was thrown at them by official word in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia (or the dozens of other such totalitarian regimes spread throughout the world before and since.) Today, although censorship is rampant in the Western world, stuff does get through.
The Internet is not so clamped shut that nothing of contrarian content gets to the eyes and ears of the masses. Actually, very little is stopped cold in its tracks. If you look hard enough, you can find just about anything. Why is this so? —probably because there is no real need to shut it out completely, the people are trained to ignore it.
In Germany or Russia during the height of their censorship efforts, a person could be shot for holding alternative news (truth). And if it did get out, it most definitely was listened to or read and was fervently consumed, but maybe not by everyone. There were always staunch Soviets, Leninists, Stalinists, and in Germany, Nazis who were loyal to the cause. I would venture to say that most of these people under the psychological thumb of their handlers.
The brainwashing effort is so successful here and now, that even if alternative news is available to the public through some alternative news source, it simply is rejected and scorned. This in itself is a form of censorship—the destruction of information’s reliability and the people’s ability to trust.
Anything not officially approved is tainted. The mark of a piece of information’s “unreliability” is its absence (removal, “fact-checked,” banning, etc.) from the usual pop-social news sources such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube as well as the mainstream news sources such as CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
What is occurring is a sort of double whammy. Block (censor) these alternative news items from the approved news conveyors and it is thus marked and if it shows up elsewhere it is immediately considered unreliable, conspiracy material, and untrustworthy—misinformation.
This same process occurs with the news conveyance entities as well as the actual human source (the experts, the witnesses, the scientists, etc.). Since people are not desperately looking for non state-sanctioned news material, the state does not have to worry about such news items leaking out. The minions (sheep) are adequately brainwashed to not be the least bit interested in anything the state does not approve.
The horrendous damage is obvious. Considering the volatility of the world today, information is vitally important. And when a silent enemy is created and released on the public (the manufactured virus), the only way to control its state defined “death ray of destruction” is to acquire information about it—unfortunately only information the state supplies and sanctions.

Read More: The Horrendous Damage of Censorship