Call it election interference, censorship, or simple editorializing, but Twitter and Facebook's throttlingof several New York Post articles this week has drawn lots of criticism.

The storiesallegethat Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Bidens son, introduced Ukrainian energy adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to his father after receiving acushy$50,000 a month board seat at the company Burisma. (Other outlets have contested the report).

There is no question that the social networks in question made a bad call. Disabling the link on the various platforms made even more people seek it out, creating a Streisand Effect of mass proportions.

But the content of the articles isn't what really matters.

The reaction to the New York Post report reveals just how much pressure is put on social networks to perform roles far beyond what they were intended for. We want them to simultaneously police speech online, keep the networks free for open discussion, and be mindful of fake news" that spreads rapidly.

So, it is important to understand why Facebook and Twitter felt they had to censor the story in the first placeand why all of us are actually to blame. For the last several years, campaigners, activists, and politicians have primed us all to accept the byzantine expectations and regulations put on social networks.

From Netflix documentaries such asThe Social Dilemma andThe Great Hack to the criticisms of surveillance capitalism, many voices are callingfor further regulation of social media networks.

Some on the Right smirk as Sen. Josh Hawley pens legislation torepealSection 230 of the Communications Decency Act or tobaninfinite scrolling on social media apps. Meanwhile, some on the Left cheer as technology CEOs aredraggedbefore congressional committees and castigated for allowing Trump to win in 2016.

This week, it wasrevealed that the New York State Department of Financial Services wants a dedicated regulator to oversee social media platforms. Other states will likely follow suit.

But what were all too loath to admit is that these firms do what any of us would do when under scrutiny: they pivot, they engage in damage control, and they aim to please those with pitchforks outside their doors. Its the same whether its Black Lives Matter or President Trump.

Facebook has committed toendingall political advertising online (hurting non-profit advocacy groups like mine) and Twitter already implemented a similar policylast year, lauded by political figures such as Hillary Clinton and Andrew Yang.

Of course, when tech giants censor or delete stories that we perceive to advance or hurt our political team, we are all up in arms. But protecting a free and open internet means not using punitive regulations or policies to hamstring social networks because of the scandal of the day.

Internet policy remedies dreamed up in Washington, D.C. will almost always end up hurting those of us who dont have power or deep pockets. It harms the small businesses that use social networks for advertising, and it sets up more roadblocks for ordinary users who simply want to check in with friends and family.

Big Tech isnt powerful because it has money, but because it has delivered superior products, those that have left platforms such as AOL, Myspace, and Yahoo in their wake.

Social networks have evolved from places to connect and share information across borders to intellectual and political battlefields where we wage digital wars.

Of course, there should be regulation in some respect. But it should be smart regulation that keeps platforms relatively free and open and provides incentives for future innovation. The powerful platforms of today can afford to comply with cumbersome rules, while new market entrants cannot.

That means that with every new proposal to roll back Section 230 protections or require quasi-governmental fact-checking functions around Election Day, were depriving consumers of choice and entrepreneurs of the ability to innovate.

Of course, targeted censorship of certain accounts or stories on social media networks is bad. But policy "solutions" dreamed up by technologically illiterate bureaucrats and power-hungry politicians would no doubt be even worse.

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How Not to Respond to Twitter and Facebook's Alarming Censorship of the New York Post | Yal Ossowski - Foundation for Economic Education

opinion

Oct. 15 To the Editor:

Lately, if you have noticed, opinion letters submitted to the editor from those on the left have far outweighed those sent in by writers on the right. It has come to my attention that a number of letters forwarded for publication by right leaning writers never made it to print. In recent months, two of my submissions were not published. Reasons given were they either inflammatory or not fact based. For the record, my letters are always steeped in fact and, yes, many contain a certain edge.

In contrast, I look at at letters sent in by those on the left. They are not hard to identify. A great proportion of these letters are merely opinions not backed by any facts. Many are inflammatory and contain lies and innuendos. Just look at submissions made by Robert Azzi. His letters, which contain indecipherable parables, are laser focused when it comes to disparaging the President. Yet, every week or so he is granted space to inject his venom. My last letter countered one of Azzis offerings but the opinion editor never let it see the light of day. I do wonder if the lefts letters are treated in the same fashion.

Now I look at the New York Posts expose which alleges that Hunter Biden got his hands caught in the Russian and Chinese money jars. The question then becomes what did Joe Biden know and when did he know it. If true, Joe Biden instantly becomes a counterintelligence threat to this country. The Russian hoax pales in comparison to possibilities raised here. What is particularly unnerving is the fact this story is being treated in an Orwellian manner by media platforms. It is being censored. The media, corrupt as it is, is all in on Biden winning the Presidency. It is Big Tech that calls the shots on just what news it wants to see and hear. This alone should scare you half to death but I guess if youre left-leaning you care less about the censorship which is now taking place.

Fosters, I believe, is contributing to the censorship issue by cherry-picking what opinion letters it wants to publish. Well thought out letters from the right side of the ledger see the waste paper basket while outrageous letters from the left find their way to print. 1984 has finally arrived and the thought police are roaming around the social media platforms. Soon enough the mantra you might hear is Censorship is the cornerstone of a free society. Is journalism dead? Fosters, look in the mirror and honestly answer the question. Live free or die.

Dan Hurley

Dover

Editor's note: Our papers receive more than 100 letters each week and we do our best to publish all of them. If your letter does not appear in a timely manner please send a follow-up email to opinion@seacoastonline.com and we'll track it down. We do reserve the right to edit letters for length, clarityand to verfify statements of fact. While we try to publish all letters in print and online, the longer the letter the more difficult to run it in print.

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Opinion/Letter: Left-wing media is censoring the truth - Seacoastonline.com

Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathis decision to opt out of 800, a biopic on Sri Lankan cricket player Muthiah Muralitharan, was not surprising, coming as it did in the aftermath of a week-long social media storm kicked up by the film and political fraternity. The actor put out a cryptic tweet on Monday, indicating that he is drawing stumps just when he was getting ready to spin a dream role. It came in response to a request from Muralitharan to step down and end the controversy.

The initial bouncer came from Tamil filmmaker Bharathiraja last week, when he asked the actor to junk the project, saying it was based on the life of the cricketer who had glorified the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka in 2009.

Soon, more voices in the gallery lent support to this cry. Muralitharan, a Tamilian whose ancestors had gone to Sri Lanka as plantation workers during the 19th and early 20th centuries, is seen to be a supporter of MahindaRajapaksa, the prime minister of Sri Lanka, and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa, its current president. The plantation workers, referred to as estate Tamils, live in central Sri Lanka while the Jaffna Tamils or Eelam Tamils consider themselves descendants of the old Jaffna kingdom and mostly live in north and east Sri Lanka.

Though they are both Tamils, their caste dynamics and role in the political landscape are varied. Films as a medium of creative expression have now become frequent targets of crowd censorship. Trolling and hounding in social media has been dictating the narrative of art and the artists creative expression, and, unfortunately, been succeeding in its pursuit, the recent pulling down of a jewellery advertisement being a case in point.

The latest pressure on Sethupathi is no different, as it comes from chauvinists who claim to preserve native pride. The point being missed is that the biopic is on the sportsman, tracking his rise in becoming a world-class spinner who bagged a record 800 wickets in Test cricket, a feat that is yet to be matched. His journey involving hard work and determination would have been inspirational to the enthusiastic, cricket-crazy subcontinent. A final word to be noted is that Muralitharan is the mentor of IPLs Sunrisers Hyderabad team owned by the Sun Network, whose Kalanithi Maran is the grand-nephew of former CM M Karunanidhi.

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800 and falling prey to crowd censorship - The New Indian Express

The Posts hyping of the story as some cataclysmic bombshell was overblown. While these emails, if authenticated, provide some new details and corroboration, the broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the U.S. Government to influence Ukrainesinternal affairs.

Along with emails relating to Burisma, the New York Post also gratuitously published several photographs of Hunter, who has spoken openly and commendably of his past struggles with substance abuse, in what appeared to various states of drug use. There was no conceivable public interest in publishing those, and every reason not to.

The Posts explanation of how these documents were obtained is bizarre at best: They claim that Hunter Biden indefinitely left his laptop containing the emails at a repair store, and the stores owner, alarmed by the corruption theyrevealed, gave the materials from the hard drive to the FBI and then to Rudy Giuliani.

While there is no proof that Biden followed through on any of Hunters promises to Burisma, there is no reason, at least thus far, to doubt that the emails are genuine. And if they are genuine, they at least add to what is undeniably a relevant and newsworthy story involving influence-peddling relating to Hunter Bidens work in Ukraine and his trading on the name and power of his father, now the front-runner in the 2020 presidential election.

But the Post, for all its longevity, power and influence, ran smack into two entities far more powerful than it: Facebook and Twitter. Almost immediately upon publication, pro-Biden journalists created a climate of extreme hostility and suppression toward the Post story, making clear that anyjournalisteven mentioningit would be roundly attacked. For the crime of simply noting the story on Twitter (while pointing out its flaws), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was instantly vilified to the point where her name, along with the phrase MAGA Haberman, were trending on Twitter.

(That Habermanis a crypto-Trump supporter is preposterousfor so many reasons, including the fact that she is responsible for countless front-page Times stories that reflect negatively on the president; moreover,the 2016 Clinton campaign considered Haberman one of their most favorable reporters).

The two Silicon Valley giants saw that hostile climate and reacted. Just two hours after the story was online, Facebook intervened. The company dispatched a life-long Democratic Party operative who now works for Facebook Andy Stone, previously a communications operative for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, among other D.C. Democratic jobs to announce that Facebook was reducing [the articles] distribution on our platform: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article. The long-time Democratic Party official did not try to hide his contempt for the article, beginning his censorship announcement by snidely noting: I will intentionally not link to the New York Post.

Even more astonishing still, Twitter locked the account of the New York Post, banning the paper from posting any content all day and, evidently, into Thursday morning. The last tweet from the paper was posted at roughly 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

And then, on Thursday morning, the Post published a follow-up article using the same archive of materials, this one purporting to detailefforts by the former vice presidents son to pursue lucrative deals with a Chinese energy company by using his fathers name.Twitter is now alsobanning the sharing or posting of links to that article as well.

In sum, the two Silicon Valley giants, with little explanation, united to prevent the sharing anddissemination of this article. As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce put it, Facebook limiting distribution is a bit like if a company that owned newspaper delivery trucks decided not to drive because it didnt like a story. Does a truck company edit the newspaper? It does now, apparently.

That the First Amendment right of free speech is inapplicable to these questions goes without saying. That constitutional guarantee restricts the actions of governments, not private corporations such as Facebook and Twitter.

But glibly pointing this out does not come close to resolving this controversy. That actions by gigantic corporations are constitutional does not mean that they arebenign.

State censorship is not the only kind of censorship. Private-sector repression of speech and thought, particularly in the internet era, can be as dangerous and consequential. Imagine, for instance, if these two Silicon Valley giants united with Google to declare:henceforth we will ban all content that is critical of President Trump and/or the Republican Party, but will actively promote criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Would anyone encounter difficultly understanding why such adecreewould constitute dangerous corporate censorship? Would Democrats respond to such a policyby simply shrugging it off on the radical libertarian ground that private corporations have the right to do whatever they want? To ask that question is to answer it.

To begin with, Twitter and particularly Facebook are no ordinary companies. Facebook, asthe owner not just of its massive social media platform but also other key communication services it has gobbled up such as Instagram and WhatsApp, is one of the most powerful companies ever to exist, if not the most powerful. In June,the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law launched an investigation into the consolidated power of Facebook and three other companies Google, Amazon and Apple and just last week issued a sweeping reportwhich, as Ars Technica explained, found:

Facebook outright has monopoly power in the market for social networking, and that power is firmly entrenched and unlikely to be eroded by competitive pressure from anyone at all due to high entry barriersincluding strong network effects, high switching costs, and Facebooks significant data advantagethat discourage direct competition by other firms to offer new products and services.

In his New York Times op-ed last October, the left-wing expert on monopoly powerMatt Stoller described Facebook and Google as global monopolies sitting astride public discourse, and recounted how bipartisan policy and legal changes designed to whittle away antitrust protections have bestowed the two tech giants with a radical centralization of power over the flow of information. And he warns that this unprecedented consolidation of control over our discourse is close to triggeringthe collapse of journalism and democracy.

It has been astonishing to watch Democratsover the last twenty-four hours justify this censorship on the grounds that private corporations are entitled to do whatever they want. Not even radical free-market libertarians espouse such a pro-corporate view. Even the most ardent capitalist recognizes that companies that wield monopoly or quasi-monopoly power have an obligation to act in the public interest, and areanswerable to the public regarding whether they are doing so.

That is why in both the EU and increasingly the U.S., there are calls from across the political spectrumto either break up Facebook onantitrust and monopoly grounds or regulate it as a public utility, the way electric and water companies and AT&T have been. Almost nobody in the democratic world believes that Facebook is just some ordinary company that should be permitted to exercise unfettered power and act without constraints of any kind. Indeed, Facebooks monumental political and economic power greater than most if not all the governments of nation-states is themajor impediment to such reforms.

Beyond that, both Facebook and Twitter receive substantial, unique legal benefits from federal law,further negating the claim that they are free to do whatever they want as private companies. Just as is true of Major League Baseball which is subject to regulation by Congress as a result of the antitrust exemption they enjoy under the law these social media companies receive a very valuable and particularized legal benefit in the form of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields themfrom any liability for content published ontheir platforms, including defamatory material or other legally proscribed communications.

No company can claim such massive, unique legal exemptions from the federal law and then simultaneously claim they owe no duties to the public interest andare not answerable to anyone. To advocate that is a form of authoritarian corporatism: simultaneously allowing tech giants to claim legally conferred privileges and exemptionswhile insisting that they can act without constraints of any kind.

Then there is the practical impactof Twitter and Facebook uniting to block content published by a major newspaper. It is true in theory that one can still read the suppressed article by visiting the New York Post website directly, but the stranglehold that these companies exert over our discourse is so dominant that their censorship amounts to effective suppression of the reporting.

In 2018, Pew Research found that about two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) get news on social media sites. One-in-five get news there often. The combination of Facebook, Google and Twitter controls the information received by huge numbers of Americans, Pew found. Facebook is still far and away the site Americans most commonly use for news.About four-in-ten Americans (43%) get news on Facebook. The next most commonly used site for news is YouTube [owned by Google], with 21% getting news there, followed by Twitter at 12%.

While Twitter still falls short of Facebook in terms of number of users, a 2019 report found that Twitter remains the leading social network among journalists at 83%. Censoring a story from Twitter thus has disproportionate impact by hiding it from the people who determine and shape the news.

The grave dangers posed by the censorship actions of yesterday should be self-evident. Just over two weeks before a presidential election, Silicon Valley giants whose industry leaders and workforce overwhelmingly favorthe Democratic candidate took extraordinary steps to block millions, perhaps tens of millions, of American voters from being exposed to what purports to be a major expos by one of the countrys oldest and largest newspapers.

As the New York Times put it in an article in March about the political preferences of tech leaders: Silicon Valley has long leaned blue. Large numbers of tech executives, including Facebooks second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg, were also vocally supportive of Hillary Clinton in 2016. At the very least, the perception, if not the reality, has been created that these tech giants are using their unprecedented power over political and election-related information to prevent the dissemination of negative reporting about the presidential candidate they favor. Whatever that is, it is not democratic or something to cheer.

The rationale offered by both Twitter and Facebook to justify this censorship makes it more alarming, not less. Twitter claimed that the Post article violates its so-called Hacked Materials Policy, which it says permits commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them but do not include or link to the materials themselves; in other words, Twitter allows links to articles about hacked materials but bans links to or images of hacked material themselves.

Thecompanyadded that their policy prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization because, they said, theydont want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials.

But that standard, if taken seriously and applied consistently, would result in the banningfrom the platform of huge amounts of the most important and consequential journalism. After all, alarge bulk of journalism is enabled by sources providing content obtained without authorization to journalists, who then publish it.

Indeed, many of the most celebrated and significant stories of the lastseveral decades the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video and war logs, the Snowden reporting, the Panama Papers, the exposs from the Brazil Archive we reported over the last year relied upon publication of various forms of hacked materials provided by sources. The same is true of the DNC and Podesta emails that exposed corruption and forcedthe 2016 resignation of the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee.

Does anyone think it would be justifiable or politically healthy for tech giants to bar access to those documents of historic importance in journalism and politics? That is what the Twitter policy, taken on its face, would require.

For that matter, why is Twitter not blocking access to the ongoing New York Times articles that disclose the contents of President Trumps tax returns, the unauthorized disclosure of which is a crime? Why did those platforms not block links to the now-notorious Rachel Maddow segment where she revealed details about one of Trumps old tax returns on the ground that it was content obtained without authorization? Or what about the virtually daily articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and others that explicitly state they are publishing information that the source is unauthorized to disclose: how does that not fall squarely within the banning policy as Twitter defined it yesterday?

Worse still, why does Twitters hacking policy apply to the New York Post story at all? While the Posts claimsabout how these emails were obtained are dubious at best, there is no evidence unlike the award-winning journalism scoops referenced above that they were obtained by virtue of hacking by a source.

Facebooks rationale for suppression that it needs to have its fact checking partners verify the story before allowing it to be spread poses different but equally alarming dangers. What makes Mark Zuckerbergs social media company competent to fact check the work of other journalists? Why did Facebook block none of the endless orgy of Russiagate conspiracy theoriesfrom major media outlets that were completely unproven if not outright false?

Do we really want Facebook serving as some sort of uber-editor for U.S. media and journalism, deciding what information is suitable for the American public to read and which should be hidden from it after teams of journalists and editors at real media outlets have approved its publication? And can anyone claim that Facebooks alleged fact-checking process is applied with any remote consistency given how often they failed to suppress sketchily sourced or facially unreliable stories such as, say, the Steele Dossier and endless articles based on it? Can you even envision the day when an unproven conspiracy theory leaked by the CIA or FBI to the Washington Post or NBC News is suppressed pending fact-checking by Facebook?

Twitter is not opposed to hacked materials and Facebook is not opposed to dubiously sourced stories. They are opposed to such things only when such storiesanger powerful factions. When those power centers are the ones disseminating such stories, they will continue to have free rein to do so.

The glaring fallacy that alwayslies at the heart of pro-censorship sentimentsis the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never ones own views. The most cursory review of history, and the most minimal understanding of how these tech giants function, instantly reveals the folly of that pipe dream.

Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek toundermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies.

Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease thosethey perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

That is why Facebook accepts virtually every request from the Israeli Government to remove the pages of Palestinian journalists and activists on the grounds of incitement, but almost never accepts Palestinians requests to remove Israeli content. It is the same reason Facebook blocks and censors governments adverse to the U.S., but not the other way around. They are going to heed the interests ofthepowerful at the expense of those who lack it. It is utter madness to want to augment their censorship powers or to expect they will use it for any other ends.

Facebook and Twitter havein the past censored the content or removed the accounts of far-right voices. They have done the same to left-wing voices. That is always how it will work: it is exclusively the voices on the fringesandthe margins, the dissidents, those who reside outside of the factions of power who will be subjected to this silencing. Mainstream political and media voices, and the U.S. Government and its allies, will be fully free to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation without ever being subjected to these illusory rules.

Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations.

But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overloads and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.

To observethat those who are cheering for this today because they happen to like this particular outcome are being short-sighted and myopic is to woefully understate the case. The only people who should want to live in a world where Mark Zuckerberg andSundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos have a stranglehold on what can be said and heard are those whose actions are devoted to the perpetuation of their power and who benefit from their hegemony.

Everyone else will eventually be faced with the choice of conformity or censorship, of refraining from expressing prohibited views as the cost for maintaining access to crucial social media platforms.The only thing more authoritarian than the acts of Facebook and Twitter yesterday is the mentality that causes ordinary people to cheer it, to be grateful for the power and control they have long wielded andyesterday finally unleashed.

Update: Oct. 16, 2020, 6:18a.m. ETLateThursday evening, Twitter announced changes to its Hacked Materials Policydesigned to address concerns that its policy as stated and as applied to the Post articles would result in the banning of crucial reporting based on hacked materials or other unauthorized disclosures. Explainedby Vijaya Gadde, a top Twitter executive, the new rules now provide that Twitterspolicy applies not to articles by news outlets reporting on hacked materials but only in those cases when the hacked material is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them. Additionally, going forward, Twitter will label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared. Gadde said specifically that the changes are intended to address the concerns that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers and others in ways that are contrary to Twitters purpose of serving the public conversation.

There are still serious concerns about what Twitter did in this particular case and how these rules will be appliedto future cases, but these changes are a commendablyresponsive effort to minimize the dangers of this policy and alleviatethe concerns raised by journalists and transparency advocates.

More here:

Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line in Censorship - The Intercept

(Pixabay)

Today is a doozy: Facebook and Twitter decided that their users shouldnt see or be able to read a particular article in the New York Post, and why so many Democrats perceived the Post story as a traumatic flashback to former FBI director James Comeys letter about Hillary Clinton on October 28, 2016.

There Is No Credible Reason for This Kind of Targeted Suppression

The editors of National Review have something important to say about the way two of the largest and most prominent social-media companies, Facebook and Twitter, decided to effectively block access to a news article in the New York Post.

Andy Stone, Facebooks policy communications manager (and, per his bio, a former staffer for Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the House Majority PAC), announced that the social-media giant would begin reducing the distribution of aNew York Postinvestigation into emails purporting that Joe Biden met with a top executive from the Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings at the behest of his son Hunter Biden.

Bad idea.

Instead of simply asking pertinent questions, or debunking thePosts reporting, a media blackout was initiated. A number of well-known journalists warned colleagues and their sizable social-media audiences not to share the story.

By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, thePost, and many others for retweeting the story.

There is no credible reason for this kind of targeted suppression. Over the past five years there have been scores of dramatic scoops written by major media outlets such as theNew York Times, theWashington Post, and CNN that were based on faulty information provided by unknown sources that turned out to be incorrect. Not once has Facebook or Twitter concerned itself with the sourcing methods of reporters. Not once did it censor any of those pieces.

The editors conclude the mentality at work in the high commands of Facebook and Twitter further damages the reputation of Big Tech. For another, it renders the industry more susceptible to a new regulatory regime already being championed by some in Congress. Mostly, however, it just makes the story theyre trying to suppress a far bigger deal.

Last night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey offered a tweet conceding, our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why were blocking: unacceptable.

He linked to a series of tweets from the corporate account declaring:

The images contained in the articles include personal and private information like email addresses and phone numbers which violate our rules. As noted this morning, we also currently view materials included in the articles as violations of our Hacked Materials Policy. Commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them but do not include or link to the materials themselves, arent a violation of this policy. Our policy only covers links to or images of hacked material themselves. We know we have more work to do to provide clarity in our product when we enforce our rules in this manner. We should provide additional clarity and context when preventing the Tweeting or DMing of URLs that violate our policies.

If you believe that news organizations should never publish anything that was not legally obtained or distributed, you would bar the publication of the Pentagon Papers and President Trumps tax returns.

Note that according to the New York Post, the information wasnt hacked by any traditional definition: The email is contained in a trove of data that the owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware said was recovered from a MacBook Pro laptop that was dropped off in April 2019 and never retrieved. The computer was seized by the FBI, and a copy of its contents made by the shop owner shared with The Post this week by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, the dynamic at work in the New York Post story about the emails regarding Biden is the same as the New York Times scoop about the presidents tax returns. That computer repair shop in Delaware has legal access to the files in the computer (because they were presumably hired by the FBI to fix something) but not legal authority to distribute whats in those files. The New York Times source has legal access to the presidents tax returns, but not legal authority to distribute whats in those tax returns. There is no moral distinction, just a partisan one.

The distinction between being a platform and being a publisher is impossible to ignore, and the longtime insistence from those big tech companies that theyre not publishers is no longer operable. For years, they insisted they were no more responsible for what gets written on Facebook then the people who build bathroom stall walls are for someone writing for a good time call Jenny at 867-5309.

The spectacularly wrongheaded decision-making at Facebook and Twitter is going to set off a lot of deliberately obtuse semantic arguments about whether or not what the companies did can legitimately be labeled censorship, driven by those who insist that only government actions can constitute censorship.

As we all know and are unnecessarily reminded every time one of these controversies comes down the pike, Facebook and Twitter are private companies. Users sign on to operate under the companies rules and judgment. The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee you a right to speak your mind on a private companys online platform. If you go to the New York Times and say, I have a terrific and important freelance article or op-ed or letter to the editor, and the Times declines to run your submission in its pages, no one believes theyve been censored.

But the companies touted themselves as neutral, minimally restrictive platforms and have, year by year, morphed into publishers with broader (and vaguer) limitations on what can be posted and shared on their sites. As I wrote back in 2018, when Apple, Google, Facebook, and Spotify erased most of the posts and videos on their services from raving lunatic/radio- and web-show host Alex Jones, none of the people who run these companies are constitutional scholars specializing in First Amendment cases, nor did they ever aspire to be in that role. They set up and joined these companies to make money and now theyre in the weird position of American Public Discourse Police.

Facebooks slogan used to be, make the world more open and connected. Twitters slogan was, see whats happening. They sold themselves on the notion that you could have a platform, and make your voice heard, no matter who you were. They clearly envisioned a society full of pleasant, relatively polite stamp collectors and poodle owners and wildlife photographers and Trekkies, groups of individuals who would want to connect and share their passions and who would do so in an amiable, harmonious, focus-group-pleasing way that could never harm others.

Except society isnt just made up of nice people with noncontroversial interests and hobbies. Our world has more than a few lunatics, hate groups, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, violent criminals, and every other unsavory type, and much to the surprise of these companies, they want their voices heard, too! They may be particularly driven to share their views online, because people are so unreceptive to their views when they share them offline.

And for a long while, most people didnt mind Facebook and Twitter and the rest taking a tougher stance to remove lunatics, hate groups, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, violent criminals, etc. Although sometimes the line between the dangerously unacceptable and simply odd or outlandish is hard to draw. QAnon is a nutty conspiracy theory, but so is the idea that Trump has been an asset of Russian intelligence since 1987. Smart, seemingly normal people can buy into conspiracy theories.

Now that theyve built their user base, Facebook and Twitter and other social-media companies want to change the rules. They want to limit what sorts of political news stories can be shared, which was never how they sold themselves or what they promised. No one complains about the New York Times refusing to publish a letter to the editor, because the Times never sold itself as the place where everyone has a voice and everyone gets a chance to speak their mind.

They might as well update the user agreement language: User agrees to believe all denials from Joe Biden regarding anything involving his sons international business partners.

The Traumatic Flashbacks of Comeys Letter

Why did the tech companies, and quite a few big names in mainstream journalism, go to DefCon One on a story with evidence suggesting Biden lied about meeting a Ukrainian politician?

Allow me to suggest that yesterday, a lot of people had flashbacks to FBI director James Comey sending a letter to Congress announcing the reopening of the email probe on October 28, 2016, eleven days before the November 8 election.

The fact that President Trumps margin over Hillary Clinton was so narrow he won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Pennsylvania by 49,543 votes, and Wisconsin by 27,257 votes means that any one factor can plausibly be labeled the decisive one. Many Democrats reacted to Clintons shocking loss by looking for the most convenient explanation possible. For some, it was Russian disinformation on social media. For others, it was Jill Stein siphoning off votes that Hillary Clinton deserved. For others, it was that the country was full of racist deplorables, even though many of these voters had just cast ballots for Barack Obama twice.

But I suspect quite a few Democrats chose to believe that it was Comeys letter which decided the election. Never mind that Comey wrote another letter, two days before the election, declaring that the reopened investigation had found nothing new or incriminating. (Yes, 24 million Americans cast early ballots in 2016, but thats out of 136 million total votes in the presidential election.)

This is one of the reasons political journalism matters. What happens is important; what we choose to learn from what happens is almost as important. Many elite progressives chose to learn the lesson that late-breaking news stories that look bad for the Democrat can elect the worst Republican in the world, and thus that scenario must be prevented, at any cost.

If a person believes that a big scoop involving the FBI looking into emails of the Democratic nominee led to Trumps election . . . how do you think they will react to the New York Post announcing this week they have a big scoop involving the FBI looking into emails of the Democratic nominee?

ADDENDUM: In the middle of all this, keep in mind that Joe Biden does not believe that Burisma was attempting to influence U.S. policy when they hired his son, that his son was hired on his own merits, and not because his father was vice president, but because hes a very bright guy.

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Censored and Suppressed - National Review

Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, revealed in a late September blog post that the company would prohibit employees from debating political or social issues, deeming this a distraction from the companys mission.

Armstrong doubled down on his position during a virtual all-hands held on October 1, billed as an AMA (for ask me anything), from which Motherboard obtained audio. The AMA was meant to further explain the companys new apolitical direction for those who might consider accepting a severance package that was offered to any employee who felt uncomfortable. Executives also explained when and where dissent would be appropriate, and explained why they required employees to delete specific political Slack messages.

This, at a company that works with cryptocurrencies intended to replace government banking systems in order to create a more free world.

Are you a Coinbase employee who knows more about the company's new direction and how it's being handled? Using a non-work phone or computer, contact Edward Ongweso Jr securely on Signal at (413) 225 2938, or emailedward.ongweso@vice.com.

During the meeting, Armstrong claimed there is a silent majority at Coinbase that agreed with his decision but feared reprisal from colleagues. Armstrong and Coinbase leadership, however, failed to soothe fears that this policy would police employees if they voiced opinions that did not align with Armstrong or this silent majority.

One former Coinbase employee who left the company after the AMA and to whom Motherboard provided anonymity due to fear of industry reprisal said that these assurances were insufficient and workers feared surveillance and censorship.

These fears are not unfounded. Emile Choi, Coinbase's chief operating officer, explained that at least two employees were asked to delete Slack posts, and that HR head L.J. Brock proactively reached out to employees to explain why their posts would be taken down. He had a very productive conversation with both of them and they understood the context, she said.

One employee asked if Coinbase leadership thought that this was taking away employee power to start a discussion except with 300 character questions in an AMA format. It seems like Coinbase is stunting internal discussion.

Choi said that the entire executive team was aligned on Armstrongs post and policy, and that the new culture is focused on what unites us and what we face in the world, which is building toward our mission, Choi said. The goal was not intended to be harsh, it wasnt intended to land in a way where people felt they were being policed.

She then explained that the place for political discussion or dissent was in dedicated Slack channels for sensitive topics: While you cant try to sell folks on your belief the Flying Spaghetti Monster should be elected president, you can establish a channel where people interested in electing the Flying Spaghetti Monster can share their thoughts.

Theres fear from employees about monitoring in all channels, including private ones, the former Coinbase employee told Motherboard. The biggest fear is that employees will be confronted on what they say or do on their work and personal deviceswork systems are often on personal devices. This already happened when writers of old Slack posts were confronted by leadership and asked to delete posts.

Problems have been building at Coinbase for the past year, which culminated in a June 4 walkout that followed another company-wide AMA shortly after the killing of George Floyd by police. During that AMA, Armstrong resisted the idea of making a public statement in support of Black Lives Matter, but backtracked after the walkout and posted a series of messages in support of BLM on Twitter later that day.

Fast forward to late September, and Armstrongs announcement that political discussions at work are not acceptable and anyone uncomfortable may leave. According to the company, it lost 60 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce as a result of this decision.

One of the earliest questions raised in the AMA was What counts as political? Armstrong avoided specifying what topics could lead to discipline or firing, but offered work visas and employee resource groups as examples of incidentally political but primarily work-related things that were a totally appropriate conversation to have at Coinbase.

One employee shared their concern that a ban on political topics at work would mainly serve to silence people whose lived experiences point to systemic problems. For some, sharing their own personal experiences and traumas can be advocating or seen as advocating for certain causes, the employee wrote. Can we really support each other with those policies being kept outside of this workplace?

The former employee that Motherboard spoke with said that there is a disconnect between Coinbases supposedly apolitical direction and the inherent politics of a company working to build a new financial system.

Crypto is political, so the sense is that doing this stems from leadership (Brian) not agreeing with certain political stances. Its easier to just prohibit any discussion at all, said the former Coinbase employee.

It comes off to employees as being ruled in fear because social issues arent a distraction, they added. They cause the financial problems that crypto wants to fix. You cant fix one without the othertheyre hand-in-hand. The root is the social issues.

On top of banning discussion and forcing employees to delete Slack messages, the AMA revealed other instances of opaqueness on the part of management. When an employee asked if management would share the results of internal surveys and feedback around the new policy, Choi said no and explained, It's really meant to be feedback for the seniors.

There has been talk among former and current employees of creating a #deleteCB campaign, the former employee told Motherboard, hoping to help people move their money to more socially responsible platforms and competitors that have been trying to get in contact with Coinbase workers: "It's rooted in the understanding that we can't collectively fix the financial problems that crypto tries to solve without addressing the underlying social issues that create the problem in the first place."

The former employee, who said they have been in contact with workers who chose to stay, said that some Coinbase workers feel they must shut up and be complicit unless they want to risk losing their jobs.

From my experience and discussions, the most frightening thing about this is the timing. Were in a pandemic, theres a political election, said the former Coinbase employee. Many did not leave because even though there was a generous severance offer, its still so scary to go back out in the market right now. People felt trapped.

Coinbase acknowledged Motherboards request for comment and said these accusations are quite extreme and absolutely false. In a follow up call the company declined to go on the record and would not be specific about what allegations it believed are false. It then missed a deadline to respond to our request for comment. We will update if we hear back.

See original here:

Coinbases New Direction Is Censorship, Leaked Audio Reveals - VICE

Facebook censored two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Lists, claiming the videos contained partly false information about Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden and VP Nominee Kamala Harriss views on late-term abortions.

The ads, which focus on the Democratic Partys position in support of abortion on demand and up until the moment of birth, were labeled by independent fact-checkers who claim to look carefully into claims from elected officials, reports from the media, and disinformation on social media to help you understand whats true and whats not.

The independent fact-checker, was NeverTrump website, The Dispatch, which labeled the ads as partly false because Biden has not explicitly stated that he supports late-term abortions, even though he has repeatedly said he wants no restrictions on a womans right to choose.

Biden has not expressed support for late-term abortionswhich, while not being a medical term, generally refers to abortions performed at 21 weeks or later. And neither candidate has voiced support for abortion up to the moment of birth, the fact-check reads.

Both Biden and Harris, however, have been very clear that they do not want restrictions on abortions, implying that late-term abortions would be approved.

Despite his flip-flopping on the issue, Biden now supports the revoking Hyde Amendment which would allow taxpayer-funding of abortion and advocates for federal funding of Planned Parenthood. He even claimed that he would make Roe v. Wade the law of the land if he is elected in November.

The only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation makingRoe the law of the land, said Biden. Thats what I would do.

The Dispatchs explanation of SBA Lists claims even quotes Biden saying that he votes for no restrictions on a womans right to be able to have an abortion under Roe v. Wade.

As National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru notes, both Biden and Harris have sponsored bills that appear to keep abortion late in pregnancy legal even if the Supreme Court were to change its mind.

Harris supported the Womens Health Protection Act, which would codify Roe v. Wade and remove state restrictions on abortions and remove a prohibition on abortion after fetal viability. As a senator, Biden sponsored legislation to make abortion legal after viability in cases needed to protect health, but without ever defining what health protections that entailed.

The censorship comes just two days after Facebook announced it would be limiting distribution of the New York Posts bombshell story detailing former vice president Joe Bidens knowledge of his son Hunter Bidens foreign business dealings.

Big Tech and the media are teaming up to run interference for the Biden-Harris campaign on what is a losing issue for Democrats their shameful support for abortion on demand through birth, said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. This is the latest example of Facebook censoring political speech and is perfectly timed to shut down SBA Lists vital digital communications as we work to reach eight million voters in key battlegrounds in the final days before Election Day.

This is not the first time the pro-life advocates were censored by Facebook. In 2018, SBA List ran an ad criticizing Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen for his abortion position, urging voters to consider the Republican candidate and now-Senator Marsha Blackburn. The ad was originally shut down by Facebook, but eventually reinstated.

When Facebook shut downsimilaradsof ours in 2018, they were forced to admit we were wrongly censored andapologized, Dannenfelser said. Now they have outsourced their censorship to the anti-Trump press, continually waging a suppression campaign specifically targeting pro-life conservative voices. We refuse to be silenced.

The group also keeps a running list on their website which shows almost 20 times pro-life information was censored by big tech.

Update: Shortly after this article was published, the Dispatch issued a statement claiming that the fact check was still in draft form and was accidentally published by the editorial staff.

The fact-check was published in error and in draft form, before it had been through final edits and our own internal fact-checking process, Editor and CEO of the Dispatch Stephen Hayes wrote. As a result, the viral post was assigned a partly false rating that we have determined is not justified after completing The Dispatchfact-checking process.

The Dispatch says that they have lifted the rating from the ads and apologized to the Women Speak Out PAC.

Despite their claims that the publication of the fact check was an accident, the Dispatch received backlash for retweeting the fact check article, which was posted to social media by the reporter three days before it was taken down.

Internal Facebook fact-checking procedure also requires fact-checking tags to be directly assigned by a person, which means that this partly false rating along with the link back to the Dispatchs article was personally approved by someone at the Dispatch or Facebook.

Anti-Trumper Jonah Goldberg, the Dispatchs editor-in-chief, however, failed to claim personal responsibility for the previously stated editorial error.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

The rest is here:

NeverTrump Website The Dispatch Colludes With Big Tech To Censor SBA List's Pro-Life Ads - The Federalist

Ask any tech investor what makes companies like Google and Facebook so insanely valuable, and you'll hear the magic "p" word: because they're platforms.

Geekwire, for instance, devoted a whole podcast last year to "Platform Power: the hidden forces driving the world's top businesses." Platforms, said MIT's Michael Cusimano, "generated roughly the same amount of revenues [as other firms, but] were almost twice as profitable and also much more valuable." Everyone wants to be a platform these days. Uber's not a taxi company--it's a platform! Airbnb: platform. Twitter: platform. Amazon: platform. Etc.

The thing about online platforms is that they're supposed to function as meeting grounds for users without the company itself needing to get too involved, which is what keeps costs down and makes the economics so attractive. Libraries, actually, are old-school platforms. No one would sue a library, for instance, for defamation as a result of a book or magazine it distributed--they'd sue the author or publisher, and the law protects libraries that way.

And that brings us to this week's Big Tech censorship controversy. Facebook and Twitter yesterday took the extraordinary step of limiting users from sharing a New York Post front-page story about the Biden family's dealings in Ukraine. Facebook said it was waiting on outside fact-checkers to review the story's claims. Twitter, by the end of the day, said the problem was the photographs of emails posted with the story and that they didn't want to encourage hacking. Jack Dorsey later admitted their communication about the situation "wasn't great."

As expected, this sent up howls over censorship, bias, double standards, and free speech. But the real issue is whether these companies are platforms, or publishers. And by acting as publishers yesterday--intervening in how political speech gets treated--the companies are at risk of losing the "platform" protections that have underpinned their success.

I mentioned libraries; bookstores and newsstands have also traditionally been exempt from defamation claims. So when internet platforms came around, Congress offered them the same treatment, in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This gave online platforms immunity for users' defamatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful content. But, "they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication--not curators of acceptable opinion," as City Journal has noted.

Yes, the platforms are encouraged to moderateoffensivespeech--so they can't get in trouble for removing content that is, for instance, "obscene," "excessively violent," or "otherwise objectionable." But courts have ruled that "otherwise objectionable" does not include political speech.

It would seem, in other words, that by limiting political speech, especially in such a high-profile way this week, Facebook and Twitter are practically asking to lose their Section 230 protections. If they did, they would suddenly become liable for everything "published" on their websites; I don't see how they could survive that. Still, investors don't seem too concerned. Shares of each are off only about 2% today after monster gains this year.

A final point: both Trump and Biden have come out in favor of repealing Section 230 altogether, and it would seem to have plenty of public support. But why should that even be necessary? Section 230 could continue to protect online platforms that are genuinely open forums from litigation, while those like Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) who choose to moderate speech would lose that protection.

Perhaps that would be the fairest way to "punish" and/or regulate Big Tech; let it fall victim to its own success. Only by becoming so central to the political dialogue and getting sucked into it themselves have these companies now put their entire business model at risk.

More coming up around 2 p.m! See you then...

Kelly

P.S. Click here to listen to The Exchange as a podcast.

Twitter: @KellyCNBC

Instagram: @realkellyevans

Original post:

Kelly Evans: The Big Tech censorship confusion - CNBC

Even as the world wrestles with a pandemic and overbearing public health measures, some legislative bodies are taking the opportunity to tighten the screws on speech they don't like. Several bills have passed, others are pending, and one was gutted by court review, but all represent new fronts in government efforts to impose censorship.

For free speech advocates, the luckiest break might have been the fate of a law passed by the French National Assembly in May. While existing requirements give companies 24 hours to take down content alleged by the government to glorify terrorist activity or to constitute child pornography, the new law would have changed that to one hour. In addition, online publishers would have been allowed a day to remove so-called "hate speech."

"The same 24-hour obligation would have applied to content reported for violation of a law that criminalizes speech that promotes, glorifies, or engages in justification of sexual violence, war crimes, crimes against humanity, enslavement, or collaboration with the enemy; a law that criminalizes sexual harassment; and a law that bans pornography where it could be seen by a minoramong others," reports Jacob Schulz at Lawfare. "The law did not carve out any exceptions; the 24-hour rule would have applied even in the case of technical difficulties or temporary surge in notifications."

In June, France's Constitutional Court struck down the vast majority of the law as an unconstitutional threat to freedom of expression. That's really the only good news to report so far.

France's blocked hate-speech law was inspired by Germany's notorious NetzDG law, which makes online platforms liable for illegal content.

"Germany's Network Enforcement Law, or NetzDG requires social media companies to block or remove content that violates one of twenty restrictions on hate and defamatory speech in the German Criminal Code," Diana Lee wrote for Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. "In effect, the NetzDG conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators," with millions of euros in fines hanging over their heads if they guess wrong.

That model of delegated censorship has proven to be as infectious as a viral outbreak, taking hold in over a dozen other countries.

"This raises the question of whether Europe's most influential democracy has contributed to the further erosion of global Internet freedom by developing and legitimizing a prototype of online censorship by proxy that can readily be adapted to serve the ends of authoritarian states," Justitia, a Danish judicial thinktank, warned in a 2019 report.

It's no surprise when countries like Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela emulate intrusive legislation from elsewherethey don't need much encouragement. But we've already seen that French legislators followed in Germany's lead, and lawmakers in the U.K. are poised to do the same.

"In the wrong hands the internet can be used to spread terrorist and other illegal or harmful content, undermine civil discourse, and abuse or bully other people," fretted a 2019 British government paper on "online harms." The paper specifically cited NetzDG as a potential legislative model.

Last week, British lawmakers debated the very broad powers that the government seeks.

Their proposals "introduce a new concept into law'legal but harmful' for online speech," cautions Ruth Smeeth of Index on Censorship. "It's conflating what is already illegal, such as incitement and threat, with speech which we may disagree with, but in a free society is, and should be, legal."

Austria is also considering a NetzDG-inspired law that would require the removal of "content whose 'illegality is already evident to a legal layperson'" explains Martin J. Riedl, a native Austrian and Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism and Media. The law would further encourage compliance by "forbidding their debtors (e.g., businesses who advertise on platforms) to pay what they owe to platforms" that don't conform to the law.

That's expected to encourage even more "overblocking" by platforms worried that they'll face a financial death penalty if they guess wrong as to content's legal status.

Still, Austrians may not be able to out-flank their role models. Germany this summer moved to make NetzDG even more restrictive by adding mandatory "hate speech" reporting requirements.

Brazilian lawmakers, too, are considering legislation that started as NetzDG-inspired before morphing into a campaign against so-called "fake news" (because, apparently, any excuse for controlling speech is a good excuse when you work in government).

"It is vague on the matter of what's considered fake news, which it describes as false or deceptive content shared with the potential to cause individual or collective harm," wrote Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia for the MIT Technology Review. "This ambiguity leaves it to the state to decide what kind of content is considered false or potentially harmful, and could allow those in power to manipulate the definition for political gain."

The U.S. faces its own speech- and privacy-threatening legislation in the form of the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act of 2020. The legislation, which was introduced in the House of Representatives last month, invokes children and the dangers of child pornography on its way to threatening platforms with the loss of Section 230 protection against liability for content posted by users if they don't adopt government-dictated "best practices."

"The EARN IT bill would allow small website owners to be sued or prosecuted under state laws, as long as the prosecution or lawsuit somehow related to crimes against children," warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We know how websites will react to this. Once they face prosecution or lawsuits based on other peoples' speech, they'll monitor their users, and censor or shut down discussion forums."

This world-wide wave of censorship legislation piggy-backs on pandemic-related concerns about the quality of information and the safety of communications available to people confined to their homes. It has sometimes been passed by legislatures empowered by health-related states of emergency. Yet again, a crisis eases the way for governments to accumulate powers that would face greater resistance in happier times.

"Governments around the world must take action to protect and promote freedom of expression during the COVID-19 pandemic, which many States have exploited to crack down on journalism and silence criticism," the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression warned in July.

That timely heads-up is hampered only by the fact that governments are well aware of the situationand consider it a feature, not a bug.

Continue reading here:

German-Style Internet Censorship Catches On Around the World - Reason

The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the paper of record, tweeted a condemnation on Sundayof one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens.Their denunciationwas marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company rules against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people,is towoefullyunderstate the case.

What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Projects principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: that the countrys true birth date is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the 1619 Project has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums,while numerousscholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown Universitys Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the articleskey claims long afterpublication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let aloneexplaining why it made them.

In sum, the still-raging political, historical, and journalistic debate over the 1619 Project has become a majorcontroversy. In his Friday column, Stephens addressed the controversy by first noting the Projects positive contributions and accomplishments,then reviewed in detail the critiques of historians and other scholars of its central claims, and then sided with its critics by arguing that for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize the 1619 Project has failed.

Without weighing in on the merits of Stephenss critiques, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not, it is hardly debatable that his discussing thisvibrant multi-pronged debate issquarely within his functionas a political op-ed writer at a national newspaper. Stephens himself explained that he took the unusual step of critiquing his ownemployerswork because the 1619 Projecthas become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, contending that avoiding writing about it out of collegial deference is to be derelict in our responsibility to participate insocietys significant disputes.

But his colleagues in the New York Times Guildevidentlydo not believe that he had any right to express his views on these debates. Indeed, they are indignant that he did so. In a barely-literate tweet that not once buttwice misspelled the word its as its not a trivial level of ignorance for writers with the worlds most influential newspaper the union denounced Stephensand the paper itself on these grounds:

It is a short tweet, as tweets go, buttheyimpressively managed to pack it with multiple ironies, fallacies, and decreestypical of the petty tyrant. Above all else, thisstatement, and the mentality it reflects, is profoundly unjournalistic.

To start with, this is a case of journalists using their union not to demand greater editorial freedom or journalistic independence something one would reasonably expect from a journalists union but demanding its opposite: that writers at the New York Times be prohibited by management from expressing their views and perspectives about the controversies surrounding the 1619 Project.In other words: They are demanding that their own journalistic colleagues be silenced and censored. What kind of journalists plead with management for greater restrictions on journalistic expression rather than fewer?

Apparently, the answer is New York Times journalists. Indeed, this is not the first time they have publicly implored corporate management to restrict the freedom of expression and editorial freedom of their journalistic colleagues. At the end of July, the Guild issued a series of demands, one of which was that sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.

For those not familiar with sensitivity reads: consider yourself fortunate. As the New York Times itself reported in 2017, sensitivity readershave been used by book publishers to gut books that have been criticized, in order tovet the narrative for harmful stereotypes and suggested changes. The Guardian explained in 2018that sensitivity readers are a rapidly growing industry in the book publishing world to weed out any implicit bias or potentially objectionable material not just in storylines but even in characters. It quoted the author Lionel Shriver about the obvious dangers: there is, she said, a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship.

As creepy as sensitivity readers are for fiction writing and other publishing fields, it is indescribably toxic for journalism,which necessarily questions or pokes at rather than bows to the most cherished, sacred pieties. For it to be worthwhile, it must publish material reporting and opinion pieces thatmight be potentially objectionable to all sorts of powerful factions, including culturally hegemonic liberals.

But thisis a function which the New York Times Union wants not merely to avoid fulfilling themselves but, far worse, to deny their fellow journalists. They crave a whole new layer of editorial hoop-jumping in order to get published, a cumbersome, repressive new protocol for drawing even moreconstraining lines around what can and cannot be said beyond the restrictions already imposed by the standard orthodoxies of the Times and their tone-flattening editorial restrictions.

When journalists exploit their unions not to demand better pay, improved benefits, enhanced job security or greater journalistic independence but instead as an instrument for censoring their own journalistic colleagues, then the concept of unions and journalism is wildly perverted.

Then there is the tattletale petulance embedded in the Unions complaint. In demanding enforcement of workplace rules by management against a fellow journalist they do not specify which sacred rule Stephens allegedly violated these union members sound more like human resources assistant managers or workplace informants than they do intrepid journalists. Since when do unions of any kind, but especially unions of journalists, unite to complain that corporate managers and their editorial bosses have been too lax in the enforcement of rulesgoverning what their underlings can and cannot say?

The hypocrisy of the Unions grievance is almost too glaring to even bother highlighting, and is the least ofits sins. The union members denounce Stephens and the paper forgoing after one of its [sic] own and then, in the next breath, publicly vilify their colleagues column because, in their erudite view, it reeks. This is the same union whose members, just a few months ago, quite flamboyantly staged a multi-day social media protest a quite public one ina fit of rage becausethe papers Opinion Editor, James Bennet, published an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton advocating the deployment of the U.S. military to repress protests and riots in U.S. cities; Bennet lost his job in the fallout. And many of these same union members now posturing as solemn, righteous opponents of publicly going after ones colleagues notoriously mocked, scorned, ridiculed, and condemned, first privately and then publicly, another colleague, Bari Weiss, until she left the paper, citing these incessant attacks.

Clearly this is not a union that dislikes public condemnations of colleagues. Whatever principle is motivating them, that is plainly not it.

Ive long been a harsh criticof Stephenss (and Weisss) journalism and opinion writing. But it would never occur to me to take steps to try to silence them. If they were my colleagues and published an article I disliked or expressed views I found pernicious, I certainly would not whine to management that they broke the rules and insist that they should not have been allowed to have expressed what they believe.

Thats because Im a journalist, and I know that journalism can have value only if it fosters divergent views and seeks to expand rather thanreduce the freedom of discourse and expression permitted by society and by employers. And whatever one wants to say about Stephenss career and record of writing and Ive had a lot of negative things to say about it harshly critiquingyour own employers Pulitzer-winning series, one beloved by powerful media, political and cultural figures, is thetypeof challenge to power that many journalists who do nothing but spout pleasing, popular pieties love to preen as embodying.

Therehas never been a media outlet where I have worked or where I have been published that did not frequently also publish opinions with which I disagree and articles I dislike, including the one in which I am currently writing. I would readily use my platforms to critique what was published, but it would never even occur to me take steps to try to prevent publication or, worse, issue pitiful public entreaties to management that Something Be Done. If youare eager to constrict the boundaries of expression, why would you choosejournalism of all lines of work? Itd be like someone whobelieves space travel to be an immoral wasteof resources opting to becomean astronaut for NASA.

Perhaps these tawdry episodes should be unsurprising. After all, one major reason that social media companies which never wanted the obligation tocensorbut instead sought to be content-neutral platforms for the transmission of communications in the mold of AT&T turned into active speech regulators was because the public, often led by journalists, began demanding that they censor more. Some journalists even devotesignificant chunks of their careerto publicly complaining thatFacebook and Twitterare failing to enforce their rules by not censoring robustly enough.

A belief in the virtues of free expression was once a cornerstone of the journalistic spirit. Guilds and unions fought against editorial control, notdemandedgreater amountsbe imposed by management. They defended colleagues when they were accused by editorial or corporatebosses of rules violations, not publicly tattled and invited, even advocated for, workplace disciplinary measures.

But a belief in free expression is being rapidly eclipsed in many societal sectors by a belief in the virtues of top-down managerial censorship, silencing, and enhanced workplace punishment for thought and speech transgressions. As this imperious but whiny New York Times Guildcondemnationreflects, this trend can be seen most vividly, and most destructively, in mainstream American journalism. Nothing guts the core function of journalism more than this mindset.

Update: Oct. 11, 2020, 8:40p.m. ETThe New York Times Guild moments ago deleted its tweet denouncing Stephens and the paper, and thenposted this:

Read more here:

The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues - The Intercept