Administrative or political action to deny access to a platform to express opinions

Deplatforming, also known as no-platforming, is a form of political activism or prior restraint by an individual, group, or organization with the goal of shutting down controversial speakers or speech, or denying them access to a venue in which to express their opinion. Tactics used to achieve this goal among community groups include direct action and Internet activism. It is also a method used by social media and other technology companies to selectively suspend, ban, or otherwise restrict access to their platform by users who have allegedly violated the platform's terms of service, particularly terms regarding hate speech.

Banking and financial service providers, among other companies, have also denied services to controversial activists or organizations, a practice known as financial deplatforming. The term deplatforming also refers generally to tactics, often organized using social media, for preventing controversial speakers or speech from being heard. Deplatforming tactics have included disruption of speeches, attempts to have speakers disinvited to a venue or event, and various forms of personal harassment including efforts to have an individual fired or blacklisted.

In the United States, banning of speakers on University campuses dates to the 1940s. This was carried out by policies of the universities themselves. The University of California, for example, had a policy known as the Speaker Ban codified in university regulations under President Robert Gordon Sproul, mostly, but not exclusively, targeting Communists. One rule stated that "the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda." This rule was used in 1951 to block Max Schachtman, a socialist, from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. But it was not always used against Communists (or socialists): in 1961, Malcolm X was banned from speaking at Berkeley as a religious leader, whereas the white Protestant evangelist Billy Graham spoke the next year. In 1947, former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace was banned from speaking at UCLA because of his views on U.S. cold war policy.[1]

Controversial speakers invited to appear on college campuses have faced deplatforming in the form of attempts to disinvite them or to prevent them from speaking.[2] The British National Union of Students established its No Platform policy as early as 1973.[3]

In the United States, recent examples include the March 2017 disruption by violent protestors of a public speech at Middlebury College by political scientist Charles Murray.[2] In February 2018, students at the University of Central Oklahoma rescinded a speaking invitation to creationist Ken Ham, after pressure from an LGBT student group.[4][5] In March 2018, a "small group of protesters" at Lewis & Clark Law School attempted to stop a speech by visiting lecturer Christina Hoff Sommers.[2] Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager documented their disinvitation, and others, in their 2019 film No Safe Spaces.[6] As of January 2020[update], the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a speech advocacy group, documented 440 disinvitation or disruption attempts at American campuses since 2000.[7][8]

Graduation speakers, in particular, have often been disinvited or forced to withdraw in the face of protests and other efforts to deny the opportunity to speak.[9][10] According to Inside Higher Ed, "Planned commencement speakers have been disinvited from or backed out of various talks in recent years amid pressure from campus groups usually students", as with Haverford's cancellation of a planned 2014 address by former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau.[11] Birgeneau's replacement as speaker, former Princeton president William Bowen, responded in his own address by calling the suppression of speech "a defeat, pure and simple, for Haverford no victory for anyone who believes, as I think most of us do, in both openness to many points of view and mutual respect."[9]

In addition to Birgeneau, other notably deplatformed commencement speakers in 2014 included International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, who withdrew after students circulated a petition at Smith College,[9] and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University. After Rice was announced as commencement speaker, a student group staged a sit-in and Rutgers' faculty council passed a resolution that labeled Rice a "war criminal", causing Rice to withdraw from the ceremony.[10] In some cases, opposition to a commencement speaker arises primarily from faculty members, as with Ursinus College's 2017 disinvitation of journalist Juan Williams, a political analyst for Fox News.[11]

Deplatforming efforts have also extended to corporate invitations. On March 26, 2019, Google announced an external advisory board to consider ethical issues around its artificial intelligence projects.[12] The board's eight appointed members included Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation.[13] Within days, 1,600 Google employees had signed an open petition seeking to remove James from the board.[14] Employees had stated on Google's internal message boards that a person with James' conservative views about climate change policy, immigration, and LGBT rights "doesn't deserve a Google-legitimized platform."[13][14] On April 4, Google dissolved the advisory board, stating, "It's become clear that in the current environment, [the board] can't function as we wanted."[12]

As early as 2015, platforms such as Reddit began to enforce selective bans based, for example, on terms of service prohibiting "hate speech".[15] According to technology journalist Declan McCullagh, "Silicon Valley's efforts to pull the plug on dissenting opinions" began around 2018 with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube denying service to selected users of their platforms, "devising excuses to suspend ideologically disfavored accounts."[16]

Law professor Glenn Reynolds dubbed 2018 the "Year of Deplatforming", in an August 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal.[17] According to Reynolds, in 2018 "the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don't like. If you rely on someone else's platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you're now at risk."[17] Reynolds cited Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes, and Dennis Prager as prominent 2018 victims of deplatforming based on their political views, noting, "Extremists and controversialists on the left have been relatively safe from deplatforming."[17]

Deplatforming has typically targeted individuals or organizations who use free accounts on social media platforms. In February 2019, McCullagh predicted that paying customers would become targets for deplatforming as well, citing protests and open letters by employees of Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google who opposed policies of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and who reportedly sought to influence their employers to deplatform the agency and its contractors.[16]

Supporters of deplatforming have justified the action on the grounds that it produces the desired effect of reducing what they characterize as "hate speech".[15][18][19] Angelo Carusone, president of the progressive organization Media Matters for America and who had run deplatforming campaigns against conservative talk hosts Rush Limbaugh in 2012 and Glenn Beck in 2010, pointed to Twitter's 2016 ban of Milo Yiannopoulos, stating that "the result was that he lost a lot.... He lost his ability to be influential or at least to project a veneer of influence."[18]

Twitter has been described as vulnerable to manipulation by users who may coordinate in large numbers to flag politically controversial tweets as allegedly violating the platform's policies.[20] The platform has long been criticized for its failure to provide details of underlying alleged policy violations to the subjects of Twitter suspensions and bans.[21]

In July 2018, Twitter was accused of "shadow banning" prominent Republican politicians and conservative users, as a result of its implementation of a "quality filter" to hide content and users deemed "low quality" from search results and to limit the visibility of their tweets.[22][23] Twitter later acknowledged the existence of the problem and characterized it as a software bug that it was working to correct, stating that its "behavioral ranking doesn't make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets".[24]

In February 2019, Canadian journalist Meghan Murphy filed a lawsuit against Twitter for permanently banning her in 2018 based on its policy against misgendering, which Murphy called "viewpoint-based censorship".[25][26]

On May 2, 2019, Facebook and the Facebook-owned platform Instagram announced a ban of "dangerous individuals and organizations" that included Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, along with Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and his organization InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Paul Nehlen.[27][28] Unlike the personal bans that removed the accounts of the named individuals, the ban on InfoWars as an organization extends to all users by prohibiting any content that contains or quotes material from InfoWars.[28] Facebook and Instagram stated that such content would be removed, regardless of who posts it, unless the post is made to explicitly condemn the content.[28]

Financial service providers have deplatformed controversial speakers and organizations by denying them business services such as credit card payment processing, effectively limiting their ability to raise funds, accept payments, or sell items online.

Retailers associated with the Seneca Nation of Indians and other native tribes in the state of New York were financially deplatformed during Eliot Spitzer's time as Attorney General of New York in 2006, as the state successfully ordered credit card companies and delivery services to refuse service to tobacco retailers on the Seneca Nation's reservations.[29] The deplatforming was part of a broader attempt to eliminate a price disparity between native tribes, which do not charge excise taxes on tobacco or gasoline sold by their members and have blocked state efforts to collect the taxes on their reservations (but have prosecuted non-native persons on the reservations for attempting to secure the same price protections), and the rest of the state, which charges high excise taxes, particularly on tobacco.[citation needed]

In 2018, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center at the request of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),[30] an advocacy group which had listed the organization as a hate group.[31][32] Robert Spencer, editor-in-chief of the publication Jihad Watch, had previously been deplatformed from Patreon under pressure from MasterCard.[30]

PayPal, an online payment and funding platform, has terminated accounts of organizations that were accused of advocating racist views or promoting "hate, violence and intolerance."[33] According to The Washington Post, PayPal banned at least 34 alleged hate groups in August 2017, after more than two years of "lobbying" by the SPLC.[33] In February 2019, PayPal terminated the account of activist Laura Loomer, who stated that she had also been banned from using GoFundMe and Venmo to raise funds, and from using Uber and Lyft.[34]

In February 2018, First National Bank of Omaha became the first of several companies to cut ties with the National Rifle Association.[35] A month later, on March 22, 2018, Citigroup announced that it would turn away business customers and commercial partners based on a new Citigroup policy restricting sales of firearms, applying the policy to clients seeking to "borrow money, use banking services or raise capital through the company".[35]

Chase Bank closed the accounts of alt-right activist Enrique Tarrio in February 2019, after which Tarrio was also deplatformed by credit card payment processors First Data, Square, Stripe, and PayPal, in addition to being banned from social media platforms.[36][37]

Deplatforming tactics have also included attempts to silence controversial speakers through various forms of personal harassment, such as doxing,[38] the making of false emergency reports for purposes of swatting,[39] and complaints or petitions to third parties. In some cases, protesters have attempted to have speakers blacklisted from projects or fired from their jobs.[12]

In 2019, for example, students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia circulated an online petition in an effort to remove Camille Paglia from the faculty.[40] Paglia, a tenured professor for over 30 years who identifies as transgender, had long been unapologetically outspoken on controversial "matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault".[40] According to Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic:

It is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty member at their own institution should be denied a platform. Otherwise, the protest tactics on display at UArts fit with standard practice: Activists begin with social-media callouts; they urge authority figures to impose outcomes that they favor, without regard for overall student opinion; they try to marshal antidiscrimination law to limit freedom of expression.[40]

Friedersdorf pointed to evidence of a chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom. Of the faculty members he had contacted for interviews, a large majority "on both sides of the controversy insisted that their comments be kept off the record or anonymous. They feared openly participating in a debate about a major event at their institutioneven after their university president put out an uncompromising statement in support of free speech".[40]

Ravelry, a site that describes itself as a "place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, weavers and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools, project and pattern information, and look to others for ideas and inspiration", announced a ban on "support of Donald Trump and his administration" on June 23, 2019.[41] As its stated rationale for the ban, which extends to forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content, Ravelry took the position that "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy", and stated, "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy."[42]

In December 2017, after learning that a French artist it had previously reviewed was a neo-Nazi, the San Francisco punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll apologized and announced that it has "a strict no-platform policy towards any bands and artists with a Nazi ideology".[43]

Link:

Deplatforming - Wikipedia

Progressives the voice of tyranny

Its time to cancel cancel culture. While many Canadians may not directly feel the effects of cancel culture at the moment, they surely will do in the near future.

The astonishing speed with which free speech platforms, websites, Youtube videos and Facebook pages that do not agree with P.C. far left/progressive woke ideology are being removed is now directly reminiscent of Soviet Russia and other similar regimes. It cant be denied now folks. Big Tech and extremists have now become the voice of tyranny.

And this is only one aspect of the problem. As most people already know, legitimate speakers have been removed from universities, intimidated and bullied by the mob into silence. Books are being banned or removed from shelves, and their promotion on Amazon and other sites prohibited. If you deviate from the accepted woke norm you can lose your job, face violence or have your family threatened. None of this even mildly resembles democracy or freedom, let alone the extension and protection of human rights we were all taught to revere. We need to wake up to the reality of what this means for us, understand its ramifications, and fight back.

While it might be tempting for some to think of this as somehow trivial it is anything but. Statues reflecting our history being pulled down, individuals being persecuted for Wrong Think and censorship as part of the deplatforming movement do not represent progress or the woke enlightenment, they represent tyranny and ideological fascism.

We need to restore the fundamental protections guaranteeing our right to disagree and be heard. In a society where there is only one right way of looking at things there can be no real justice, only the bullying tyranny of the self righteous. If there is a powerful quote that most aptly describes our sad potential future it is perhaps that of George Orwell. If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.

We cant let that happen. We must defend the right of people to both disagree and express themselves in the public forum. And the only way to do that is to cancel the cancel culture.

Perry Foster

Duncan

Letters

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Progressives the voice of tyranny - Cowichan Valley Citizen

Reddits r/The_Donald has long been a thinly veiled breeding ground for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all-around bigotry devoted to the 45th President of the United States. Today, after years of criticism, Reddit decided to take definitive action against the subreddit of 790,000 subscribers by banning it altogether.

The move is part of new policies and enforcement against hateful contentin the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that resulted in an initial ban of 2,000 communities today. Although only about 200 of these had more than 10 daily active users, other prominent subreddits banned today include r/chapotraphouse, a subreddit associated with a far-left podcast of the same name, and r/gendercritical, a subreddit for trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

Its about time.

To be clear, its not the first time Reddit has taken action against r/The_Donald. It was made an opt-in subreddit in 2019, was limited in features, and its posts were hidden from Reddits front pages. Still, the community continued to grow because ultimately it just took a couple of clicks to reach.

Reddit sites the subreddit as specifically having broken it rules 1, 2, and 8 of its newly refinedcontent policies. Number 1, specifically, reads as follows:

Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free ofharassment, bullying, and threats ofviolence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based onidentity or vulnerabilitywill be banned.

Yeah, r/The_Donald is was well beyond that threshold. If youre lucky enough to have never come across content from the subreddit, you can read this piece by my colleague Tristan Greene on what it was like reading r/The_Donald every day (spoiler: unpleasant). The subreddit didnt just give free passes to the occasional troll or bigot, it was a community that made attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups the norm.

While some will worry that the ban will stifle free speech and diverse political opinion, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on a call that political speech continues to be safe but all communities, including our political communities, have to abide by our policies, according to The Verge. Lets not forget Reddit used to also allow communities featuring sexually suggestive content with minorsalso in the name of freespeech.

You might think well, arent the same people just going to go elsewhere? Of course.Reddit will probably lose thousands ofusers over its new policies, many of whomwill likely find other grimy corners of the internet to fester in. And todays ban is neither all-encompassing there remain many subreddits that are arguably more harmful than some on the list nor likely to be without a myriad of detractors.

But hate spreads when it is normalized and given a platform, especially one as large and young-leaning as Reddit. Deplatforming hatehas been shown to be effective. The previous attempts at curbing r/The_Donalds message just werent enough. Good on Reddit for finally taking a stance, even if theres still more work to do.

Read next: How aliens could use black holes to power an intergalactic civilization

Why is queer representation so important? What's it like being trans in tech? How do I participate virtually? You can find all our Pride 2020 coverage here.

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Reddit bans r/The_Donald and 2000 other hateful subreddits because it was about time - The Next Web

The world may easily need more Dick Masterson, that is but the comedian and catchphrase (namely, that the world needs more Dick) seems to have miscalculated the sustainability and longevity of his business in the face of one behemoth payment processing entity that disagrees and it is called Mastercard.

Masterson announced that his Patreon alternative crowdsourcing project was being shuttered after 18 months due to payment processing for it now being down permanently.

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And Masterson suggested it was largely because of Mastercards dominance and resulting diktat of terms in the payment services business.

Dubbing it New Project 2, Masterson was looking for a way to let his audience directly support his work and the work of others, as opposed to going through Patreon riddled with a number of controversies accusing this leader in the crowdsourcing industrial complex of deploying censorship and stifling creators on a number of occasions while at the same time establishing itself as the go-to in this particular branch of the tech and online economy.

However, Mastersons own project did not fold because of competition he says it was the work a global credit card processing system blacklist controlled by Mastercard something known as the MATCH list.

And since New Project 2 as a business found itself on that blacklist, that also meant the site could no longer process credit cards, collect subscriptions, and consequently, keep this business model afloat.

Apparently, New Project 2 was hit with code 10 of MATCH violation of standards. And thats as bad as things get, he suggests because not even offshore banks will work with businesses affected by this rating.

Announcing the news, Masterson said that the motive behind launching the now abandoned New Project 2 had been to provide a clear view into how digital deplatforming works. But he added that he feels he has not been successful because the very nature of deplatforming in the US depends on the financial system, which in itself is not transparent.

Describing what he refers to as censorship working in reverse, Masterson describes a system rigged at all levels to get rid of any loopholes for avoiding censorship and other stumbling blocks faced by small and medium (digital) businesses.

Companies and banking partners are incentivized to censor proactively to abide by ill-defined requirements of the PATRIOT Act, left over policies of Operation Choke Point, and to protect staggering capital investments in credit card certification of questionable necessity, Masterson said on Twitter, adding:

They are held hostage. There is no customer support and no warnings given. Its guess work done in a blackbox.

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Dick Masterson says Patreon alternative New Project 2 is closing after getting blacklisted by Mastercard - Reclaim The Net

This Independence Day, Disney is giving America a big-ticket birthday gift: the musical Hamilton. After handing over a head-turning $75 million, the company will stream a filmed version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway megahit on its Disney+ channel. It could be just what the doctor ordered as an antidote to the nations gloomy mood, or it could be the oppositeanother cultural touchstone swept up and spit out by the vortex of the Great Awokening.

That second scenario may sound absurd. After all, Hamilton is the beloved masterpiece of the diversity revolution, an ode to the countrys multiracial future and to immigrants [who] get the job done! Its cast was almost entirely nonwhite, with one notable exception: a campy, mincing King George III. Miranda himself, son of Puerto Rican parents, played the musicals namesake hero, Alexander Hamilton. Audiences were swept up in the mischievous chutzpah of casting black actors as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the clever rap couplets evoking the thrill of youthful revolution. Rap is the voice of the people of our generation, and of people of color, Miranda, winner of a MacArthur genius grant, has proclaimed. Hamilton won a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, and 16 Tony Awards. The show has grossed well over $500 million. Beyonc, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Sondheim, Jay Z, and a long list of other luminaries number among his fans. On social media, followers are counting the days and minutes until the television event. What could go wrong?

Such is the madness of this Jacobin moment that a 2015 progressive musical now looks quainteven problematic. Hamilton is a rousingly, unabashedly patriotic work; American exceptionalism [set to] hip-hop, as Terry Teachout put it in his Wall Street Journal review. Since audiences first jumped to their feet to applaud the show, the history Miranda relied on has been toppled like so many statues. The New York Times has endorsed the view that the nations birth celebrated in the play occurred not in 1776 but in 1619, with the arrival of the first African slaves on American shores. Following the curriculum now endorsed by the paper of record, educators are preparing to teach the young that the American Revolution was fought for the primary purpose of protecting slavery, and that the revolutionaries Miranda celebrates eventually signed the Constitution, whose main purpose was to codify black peoples enslavement. Can millions of teenagers and their parents continue happily to sing the name of one of the Founding Fathers in good conscience?

Equally problematic for the current moment is Mirandas embrace of the American dream. [T]he ten-dollar Founding Father without a father / Got a lot farther by working a lot harder / By being a lot smarter / By being a self-starter; the cast raps in the opening scene. But every red-blooded progressive knows that the American dream of upward mobility is a myth, designed to blame the poor for their own sorry condition. [A]nother immigrant, comin up from the bottom? Sounds like fake newsor false consciousness.

Thats the way a number of black scholars viewed the show from the beginning. Soon after the musical opened, Harvard historian Annette Gordon Reed listed its sins. Hamilton was no man of the people, she argued; he was an elitist and crypto-monarchist. Nor was he innocent of racism; he bought and sold slaves for his in-laws and, though a founder of the Manumission Society, had, at best, a tepid interest in abolition. Moreover, the musical is silent about the fact that George Washington owned slaves, an omission that even third-graders will have no trouble spotting these days.

The playwright and fellow MacArthur grant recipient Ishmael Reed has dedicated the past few years to de-platforming the musical, which he compares with the Confederate-nostalgic Gone with the Wind. He believes that the shows multiracial cast is a con to distract audiences from the brutal reality of American racism. Last year, he staged a play called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in which the ghosts of slaves and Native Americans come back to correct the lies of the bewildered Hamilton creator. I think the corrective would be to close the show, he has concluded.

Hamilton critics are not limited to old-timers. I cant believe Lin-Manuel Miranda convinced me that the founding fathers were good people, one young woman tweeted last week. When Miranda took his musical to Puerto Rico to raise money for the stricken country after Hurricane Maria, students and employees at the University of Puerto Rico, where the production was to be staged, rebelled. He wants to help the community of Puerto Rico as a whole? He needs to sit down and talk to us and stop coming across as a white savior, one activist scoffed. And so it is that an ur-progressive, Hispanic rap artist canand willbe accused of white privilege.

Should Hamilton attract the social-justice mobs now that it will be streamed on cable, skeptics of the woke will be tempted to take pleasure in yet another example of the revolution eating its own. That would be a mistake. Miranda is facing the tragic dilemma familiar to the intuitively moderate man caught in an extreme moment. Recently a group in favor of change for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] theatermakers has circulated a petition demanding more diversity on Broadway. It has already amassed 80,000 signatures. We have watched you [the white powers-that-be of Broadway] pretend not to see us, they write. We have watched you amplify our voices when we are heralded by the press, but refuse to defend our aesthetic when we are not, allowing our livelihoods to be destroyed by a monolithic and racist critical culture. Miranda has yet to sign. But the progressive who has spun his considerable talents into capitalist gold faces the choice of signing or losing his Black Lives Matter cred.

Miranda is a unique cultural figure, a magician who made diversity palatable to New Jersey matinee clubs and midwestern tourists, while also enlivening American history for high school kids from the Bronx. His friendly, open demeanor and mild nerdinesshe adores American musical theaterhas undoubtedly added to his crossover appeal. For years now, the auteur has been posting gmorning and gnight tweets, little pep talks for me and you as he puts it, adored by fans for their sweet quirkiness. Last year, he played Bert the Cockney chimney sweep, a role that previously belonged to the old-school actor Dick Van Dyke, in Mary Poppins Returns. Somehow, he manages to be both mensch and resolute progressive. In the days of corporate wokeness, Disney and Miranda seem made for each other.

Unless he gets canceled.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images

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Will the Social-Justice Mob Cancel Hamilton? - City Journal

Twitter is being sued for allegedly conspiring with Saudi authorities by blocking accounts of its critics, a law firm handling the case on behalf of the plaintiff has announced.

Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, is the one behind the lawsuit that contains allegations of unauthorized access to his content on the platform. Al-Ahmed, a Saudi scholar, lost his citizenship and had to seek asylum in the US after supposedly exposing major news stories such as the Pentagons botched translation of the 9-11 Bin Laden tape and the video of Daniel Pearls murder.

And in addition to reportedly facing kidnapping and assassination attempts, Al-Ahmed and a number of his followers also faced censorship and deplatforming on Twitter.

The Institute for Gulf Affairs is a rights group based in Washington DC, while the law cited in the suit against Twitter is the Stored Communications Act. This legislation is meant to shore up US Constitutions Fourth Amendment rights when it comes to wire and electronic communications and transactional records.

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We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

What Twitter did, according to Al-Ahmed, was suspend his account, and those of many of his 36K followers, and then forward their private information and direct messages to the Saudis.

This resulted in revealing the identities of their critics to the authorities in Saudi Arabia all the way to, according to an email Al-Ahmed sent to Twitter, exposing them to arrests and torture. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges breach of contract and economic harm suffered by the plaintiff thanks to Twitters actions taken against him.

In an email to Twitter, Al-Ahmed says he wrote: People that I keep in contact with via twitter alone have been arrested and now being tortured by the Saudi monarchy henchmen.

The Saudi scholars legal representative said that Twitter in this way not only breached its own rules by giving personal information to a foreign government but also failed to properly supervise its employees who were behind this move.

This refers to Saudi spies allegedly managing to get jobs at Twitter, to then use the platform to further interests of their true employer by using Twitters internal tools to access data of Saudi governments critics.

To make matters seemingly even worse for the US social network, according to the lawsuit, all this was happening against the backdrop of Twitter having entities controlled by the Saudi government among its largest shareholders.

Continued here:

Twitter sued for allegedly conspiring with Saudi Arabia government to shut down dissenting voices - Reclaim The Net

A former white supremacist from Ohio got a huge swastika tattoo on his chest covered up with a rose in honor of Juneteenth saying he now proudly supports the Black Lives Matter movement.

Dickie Marcum, a 34-year-old steelworker from Cincinnati, cried tears of joy after inking away the vile symbol and explaining to his daughter, Daddy doesnt hate people anymore, he wrote in a now-viral Facebook post.

When I came home and my wife saw the cover-up, she started crying and hugged me and kept saying that shes so proud of me, he said. Im proud of myself, but I still feel shame for ever getting it.

In a lengthy confession about what led to his racist beliefs, Marcum said he first got the tattoo 13 years ago.

In high school, he was bullied by some black students and later began socializing with people who used racial slurs, solidifying his ignorant world view.

After a black man was convicted of kidnapping and attacking his then-girlfriend in 2007 an experience that left him blinded by hate he said he got the tattoo.

When I heard what a black man had [done], I was blinded by hate and immediately shut down and all I could think about was how much I hate them, he said. Its a really stupid way to think, and I cant justify how I felt and Im not going to, I was an idiot and I held onto that tattoo for 10 years as punishment to myself.

For years he was too embarrassed to go swimming for fear people would see the swastika.

Because I lived almost 20 years having that mentality, I felt like I deserved the shame that I felt, he said.

But working in construction alongside folks of different races helped him learn that people are more than their skin color.

Marcum finally went under the needle again last week at Silkworm Tattoo in Hamilton, Ohio, which offered discounts for customers covering up intolerant images in honor of Juneteeth, a holiday celebrating the official end of slavery.

My daughter doesnt really know what that [swastika] symbol is, so I explained that the tattoo meant that daddy didnt like people, and now she knows daddy doesnt hate people anymore, he said.

He then showed off his new ink social media, issuing a public apology to everyone he hurt.

Now, he feels a weight has been lifted and the responsibility to vocally support minorities.

Im absolutely in love with this tattoo and I think a rose was a lovely choice because it represents love and growth, and I think thats a perfect representation of who I am now, he said.

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Black WaPo editor claims white women 'lucky' to be called 'Karen' - Filmy One