A Twitch streamer who in response to being permanently banned from the platform said theyd shoot people at Twitch HQ has, upon review, had their ban reduced to only 22 days.

Source: Alice: Madness Returns Part 1, Narcissa Wright, YouTube

RELATED:Apex Legends Streamer Captain Valenti Banned From Twitch For Threatening To Kill Players Entire Family, Mocking US School Shootings

Dexerto reports that Narcissa Wrights self-named account was banned on March 21st simultaneously resulting in a loss of her Twitch partnership after reportedly opening a link that contained nudity, subsequently displaying it to her audience.

While prior streamers who made similar missteps have usually been given only minor suspensions, Wright claimed hers was permanent.

One person shows up in discord and is being very troll, I decide to talk to them and find the humanity in them, tweeted the streamer. I screencap discord, and they blast me with a gross nsfw image. sort of forgot about images, was intending for a text chat, so I was nave (and foolish)? My mistake!

Source: Narcissa Wright Twitter

She further lamented, But then I get PERMANENT SUSPENDED and theres no human conversation, and like, Im going through some major st, I didnt wanna see a gross image or be told to kill myself, but I guess because I accidentally showed something gross I get fg destroyed and deplatformed.

Wheres the response, like idk, Wright bemoaned. Sorry for being impatient too, I just, need this stream. jesus.

Source: Narcissa Wright Twitter

RELATED:Dr. Disrespect To Sue The F*** Out Of Twitch Over His Permanent Ban

Continuing to rant in a series of now deleted tweets, Wright then threatened harm against both herself and Twitch staff, publicly voicing such sentiments as The internet is hell, real life is hell, too, @twitch makes me want to DIE!!!!!, and I want to kill myself and shoot people at the twitch HQ!!! hahahaah!!

In light of these posts, some began to speculate that these post-suspension comments had led to harsher penalties against her account, while others expressed concern for her mental health.

Source: Reddit

However, speaking to Dexerto, Wright clarified that her comments were not a legitimate threat, but rather just an edgy comment.

But I think if Twitch really cared about mental health they would have reached out and talked to me instead of suddenly deplatforming me, the streamer admitted. I dont own any weapons and the threat was non-credible. I did feel like self-harming though, and the tweet was my way of self-harming.

Source: ho ho ho ho, Narcissa Wright, YouTube

RELATED:Twitch Takes First Action Against Hot Tub Streams, Indefinitely Suspends Advertising Eligibility For Popular Streamer Amouranth

On the 23rd, in response to a user asserting Im pretty sure in the amount of time youve been posting about this you could have created a new account. Narcissa explained to another Twitter use that creating alternative accounts to evade the ban were not allowed.

She then shared a screenshot of her email inbox, showing permanent ban emails for at least two of her other Twitch accounts nw_smash_account_ffffffff, and banned_to_hell.

Source: Narcissa Wright, Twitter

In spite of Wrights comments on Twitter, Wright revealed on March 29th that Twitch had significantly reduced the terms of her ban.

After reviewing your case, we can confirm that the correct enforcement was issued, read an email sent by Twitch and shard by the streamer. However, given the details of your case, including the remorse expressed in your appeal, we have decided to reduce your suspension duration.

As such, the streaming platform informed Wright that her suspension has not been adjusted to expire 22 calendar days, though the strike will remain on your account.

Remorse & mercy, tweeted Wright. I feel grateful; thank you.

Source: Narcissa Wright, Twitter

RELATED:Twitch To Begin Banning Users For Off-Site and Offline Harassment Policy Violations

Born Cosmo Wright, the streamer has been an active speedrunner since at least 2012, even achieving the world speedrunning record for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with a time of 18 minutes and 10 seconds.

Wright held this record until 2015, when her time was beaten by 3.04 seconds.

Source: just chatting, Narcissa Wright, YouTube

In April 2016, after allegedly receiving abuse for undergoing hormone replacement therapy and announcing a move away from speedrunning due to hand pain, Wright deleted her Twitch channel only for it to spontaneously reappear three days later.

Wrights channel was also indefinitely banned in 2018 for violating the site s rules onNudity or Sexual Behavior/Attire.

In an interview with Vice, Wright theorized the reason for her ban could have been anything from reading documents regarding her sex change surgery, to streaming sexual scenes from anime, to wearing a shirt which visibly displayed shape of her nipplesto her audience.

Source: Bonus Twitch Stream March 20th, Narcissa Wright, YouTube

What do you think of Twitch reducing Wrights ban? Let us know on social media and in the comments below.

NEXT: Twitch Permanently Bans Destiny For Hateful Conduct, Streamer Speculates It Was Over His Claims That Transwomen Shouldnt Compete With Ciswomen In Womens Athletics

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Streamer Who Threatened To Shoot People At Twitch HQ Has Permanent Ban Reversed Following Twitter Meltdown - Bounding Into Comics

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Culture secretary Nadine Dorries has announced a real terms cut forBBC funding, with plans to freeze the license fee for two years. There are several theories on the Tories motives. Are they strong-arming the BBC into shape? Reducing funding in retaliation for unfavourable coverage? Or is this a PR manoeuvre intended to appease hard right voters who think the broadcaster is too woke?

On the face of it, accusingthe BBC of having a left-wing slantwould suggest a woeful misreading of the political temperature. Its a talking point that wouldnt appear out of place on GB News. But while the idea that the institution is biased against Conservatives might be absurd, it would be foolish to dismiss the idea that the BBC has any political leaning in itself given it has a clear bias against the left.

The persecution complex is a right-wingers bread and butter. Delusions of maltreatment contribute to a grand victim narrative: mundanities become sinister anti-Conservative plots, evidence of a society that is actively hostile to their beliefs, as opposed to one literally governed by the Conservative Party. The objective of this is to garner sympathy, to convince the wider electorate that if their views are controversial enough to be censored by influential, wokeprogressives, then surely they must be worth listening to.

In 2022, these dishonest tactics manifest in discourse about a culture war. The term of the day is cancel culture, a mostly online phenomenon involving the supposed censorship of Conservatives by the aforementioned powerful progressives. This perceived political suppression ranges from online deplatforming, i.e. losing access to a social media account, to being barred from a venue or space such as a university campus.

JK Rowling is perhaps the most high profile, alleged case of cancel culture. The authors many, many controversial tweets about transgender women may not have hurt her bank account, but did lead to significant online backlash. Perhaps nursing a bruised ego,Rowling characterised this as cancel culture in an open letter, signed by various writers:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

If the power imbalance inherent in a cisgender celebrity millionaire smearing a historically oppressed community wasnt damning enough, the fact that said millionaire suffered no professional consequencesfor her comments should have fatally invalidated Rowlings notion of cancel culture. It didnt.

Read on...

Establishment media is a crucial component in this narrative of persecution, with the BBC used as both soapbox and scapegoat. Right-wing commentators and MPs alike use the platform of the broadcaster to condemn what they perceive as the left for the cancelling of their politics. Ironically, the BBC itself often becomes a scapegoat for these grievances a patsy for their image of a left which is somehowinstitutionally all-powerful and morally craven at the same time.

Even while being interviewed on Newsnight or Politics Live, Conservative figures argue that the broadcaster has a discriminative agenda; that its an arm of Big Journalism infringing on their freedom of speech, and that diversity quotas are corrupting its audience and programming. This is what informs right-wing support of the licence fee cut-off: as long as the BBC is cancelling Conservatives, it is a moral imperative to defund it.

Of course, this is all total rubbish.

If the media landscape of the past six years has shown anything, its that the BBCs coverage of historically oppressed peoples is far from impartial. Take recent BBC News articles on the transgender community, such as the notorious Were being pressured into sex by some trans women. When initially published, the piece featured comments by pornographic actress Lily Cade, herself accused of sexual misconduct, who later encouraged the lynching of trans women in a now deleted blog post. Clearly, transgender women arent even permitted to date freely withoutthe nations most popular, impartial news platform associating themwith sexual assault. But its apparently acceptable for the very samebroadcaster to use a cisgender woman accused of sexual assault as a contributor.

BBC News also has a dismal track record when it comes to their coverage, or lack thereof, during protests. Trans right activists were still protestingWere beingpressured into sex by some trans womenmonths after its publication, but theBBCneglected to report on any of such demonstrations, even while protestors rallied outside their Londonbroadcasting house. To acknowledge dissent is to legitimise it.

And who could forget the multiple occasions on which the BBC publicised images of Kill the Bill protestors, after they were circulated by Avon and Somerset Police? A state broadcaster rolling CCTV close-ups of wanted anti-authoritarian protestors like something out of a dystopian police state. Articles like these have laid bare a reactionary bias that legitimises transphobic tropes, and a contempt for those who reject the Conservative status quo.

Arguably even more pervasive is the BBCs ideological bias. For some, the broadcasters red scare-style vilification of Jeremy Corbyn defined the past two elections. BBC News coverage of Labours recent election campaigns continues to be scrutinised, including at an academic level. The former Labour leader and his manifesto were often presented with, at best, an air of exaggerated incredulity, and, at worst, downright cynicism.

The BBCs complaints division responds to criticism on occasion, but never in good faith. For example, former director-general Tony Hall dismissed allegations of bias as conspiracy theories in the aftermath of the 2019 General Election. Also,Newsnight was accused of manipulating a headshot of Corbyn wearing a capto associate him with communist Russia, by photoshopping a Kremlin backdrop and a shade of Soviet red onto the image. Instead of addressing these complaints, BBC editors only responded to the lesser allegation that they had visually exaggerated the shape of the Labour leaders hat. Theirexplanation was a simple technical distortion, a result of the image [being] projected on to a large curved screen as reported by the Guardian, though this didnt explain the colour alteration and background image.

The subtle yet brazen bias of the BBCs reporting is perhaps not all that surprising given the senior figures at the broadcaster withlinks to the Conservative Party. But that isnt changing the minds of anyone on the right. The online behemoth that is cancel culture is a profitable one, generating more political and social capital with every contrived scandal.

The reality is that the BBC isnt cancelling right-wingers. Theyre providing them with a pulpit; giving commentators access to the most popular news platform in the country, from which they broadcast an incredibly powerful faux victim narrative. Cancel culture isnt something wielded against the right, certainly not by the BBC rather, its used to undermine and incite violence against the left. Threatening the status quo makes you fair game: transgender people, young protestors, and anyone further left than the most moderate of social democrats are all subject to incendiary smear campaigns.

Conservative diehards who pride themselves on being frank and outspoken have established themselves as puritans of the online realm. They tell themselves that the entire British establishment is out to get them for their traditional right-wing values, but then condemn media for being inclusive or progressive. They are fundamentally the ones addicted to cancel culture. They clutch their pearls at anything which doesnt fit with their worldview and beliefs, which often includes queerness, Black and Brown people, and sincerity. All the while, they characterise themselves as the only people brave enough to tell it how it is amidst a sea of sensitive snowflakes. The outrage surrounding the BBCs wokeness and political correctness before it (a lineage that stretches back to Mary Whitehouse) is simply the cultural indignation of bigots, dressed up as sensible, no-nonsense populism. Prejudice disguised as pragmatism.

Many British political moderates seem to be reluctant to criticise a broadcaster which has essentially become a right-wing propaganda platform. Some feel unwilling to turn on this world-beatingservice, because the alternative is joining a critical voice that is, currently, predominantly right-wing. But its important to keep in mind that the Conservatives campaign against the BBC, ridiculous as it may be, doesnt mean that the BBC is in the right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Hand-wringing about optics is useless: if the BBC is allowed to continue its arbitrary, McCarthyist crusade against the left, then speaking out against biased reporting will always be an uphill battle.

Establishment media will never view even the most moderate of left-wing principles as legitimate, so why worry about the consequences of opposing the establishment? Dont be tentative to resist an institution that will never approach you with the journalistic impartiality it affords your opponents. Instead, criticise the BBC!

As a progressive, consider that a de facto state broadcaster that has consistently conflated your politics with Stalinism might, in fact, deserve to lose its funding.

More:

If the BBC is cancelling anyone, it's cancelling the Left - The Canary

Anne Applebaum, an author whose Central European perspective and longtime aversion to Russian revanchism I share, has an almost comically pessimistic piece in The Atlantic positing that, "Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them."

The essay serves as a useful reminder that civilizational apocalypticism is hardly limited to the right-populist Flight 93 Election set and that the centrist/interventionist fun-house-mirror image has not learned the post-9/11 lesson that wise policy does not automatically tumble forth from mashing the Do Something button.

"Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors' territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence," Applebaum warns in a statement that has never not been true since the advent of nations. "North Korea can attack South Korea at any time, and has nuclear weapons that can hit Japan. China seeks to eliminate the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group, and has imperial designs on Taiwan."

That indeed sounds scary. Now rewrite that passage after spinning the wheel and landing on any other year in history. Here's a stab at 1948: "North Korea can attack South Korea at any time (and in fact will in 1950, leading to 3 million deaths, including 54,000 Americans). China is on the verge of a communist revolution, and the Soviet Union just engineered a coup in Czechoslovakia and a blockade of West Berlin while beginning the process of Stalinist show trials across all its imperial holdings. Five Arab nations have attacked the newly formed country of Israel, Mahatma Gandhi has just been assassinated, India and Pakistan remain at war, South Africa has just instituted apartheid, the Greek civil war rages on, and most of Europe still lies in shambles." Do I really need to go on?

We are always, one supposes, only one bad sneeze away from an all-out thermonuclear war, so I get why that can make some people jittery in 2022. (Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't helping such anxieties by generating such headlines as "Russian planes 'armed with nukes' chased out of Swedish airspace.")

But it shows a shocking lack of faith in the wealth, power, and institutions of the free world to gaze upon Putin's military stalemate against a drastically outgunned non-nuclear power with no usable security guarantees and declare that unless democracies make some big changes pronto, Asia's brutal, behemoth backwaters will not just continue murdering people in their neighborhoods but literally "destroy" us all.

Like political apocalypticism everywhere, this rhetorical device is designed to frighten people into supporting choices that in calmer times would be unthinkable. And like panicked (or opportunistic) proposals after 9/11, Applebaum's are filled with government-led force and mobilizations, including those patterned directly on what didn't work 20 years ago.

"Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11," she writes, unpromisingly, "we now need to pull together the disparate parts of the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge."

Where to start? "The Department of Homeland Security is a mess of misconduct and ineptitude," J.D. Tuccille wrote here in 2019, keying off an inspector general report. In fact, a former senior DHS official wrote a detailed piece for Reason in 2015 about "why we should eliminate" it.

And though it's largely been memory-holed, 9/11, too, saw the creation of a bunch of new government-funded, foreign-language, please-don't-call-it-propaganda media outlets. How did those go? Here are our findings from 2011:

In the last ten years you have paid for theAl-HurraTV network, theSawaradio network and theteen magazineHi, among other State Department media ventures in the Arab nations. The TV network hasfailed to gain viewers and its costs have been going up. The State Department's inspector general says the radio station hasfailed to fulfill its mandate. At least the teen magazine wasallowed to go out of business.

Applebaum wants to "stop autocracies from distortingknowledge," but democracies do plenty of distorting on their own, as anyone who has followed Washington's COVID-related messaging can attest. Governmental attempts to quash disinformation very easily become governmental successes in quashing dissent.

A perhaps-surprising commonality between Applebaum and the American populists who tend to despise her is that both camps think trading with China was a mistake. "Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy," she italicizes. But Russia's invasion, and its subsequent ejection from the liberal trading order, suggests another conclusion entirely: Maybe autocratic countries, seeing the privations exacted on Russia not just by members of the World Trade Organization but by individuals and companies, will take more seriously the negative consequences to aggressive, murderous imperialism.

As Cato Institute Director of General Economics and Trade Scott Lincicome told me recently, "The literature on the connection between trade and peace is pretty darn good. It doesn't say that trade and economic interconnectedness prevents armed conflict; it just simply reduces the chances of it. And there are all sorts of reasons for that."

Reasonable liberals can agree to disagree (or agree to be ambivalent) about trading with authoritarians. But Applebaum has fire in her eyes:

[W]e can go much further, because there is no reason for any company, property, or trust ever to be held anonymously. Every U.S. state, and every democratic country, should immediately make all ownership transparent. Tax havens should be illegal. The only people who need to keep their houses, businesses, and income secret are crooks and tax cheats.

This is illiberal authoritarianism in the name of fighting illiberal authoritarianism. More plainly, it's nuts. Hungary is a democracy (albeit one that Applebaum claims is "at war with us," which is an awkward move from a NATO ally)does she really believe that only crooks in Budapest have cause to keep some of their assets out of the prying eyes of Viktor Orbn's government?Financial privacy, which has its roots in Calvinists fleeing religious persecution, is a bulwark not just against despotic governments but also against liberal democratic governments capable of behaving despotically, which is to say, all of them.

Applebaum's radical government-imposed-transparency proposal is going nowhere, thankfully. But the mindset behind it is a perennial vice.When a situation or a bad actor becomes intolerable, there is a temptation among those empathetic with the victims to let exasperation overwhelm intellect, to drive a bulldozer through every real and imagined bureaucratic, legalistic, diplomatic, or otherwise real-world obstacle.

But those obstacles are often key planks of the liberal order Applebaum claims to be defending. Dismantling them makes liberalism less worth defending.

There have been such acts of impatience all around these past five weeks, both governmental and private. Deplatforming RT, canceling performances by Russian musicians, indicating that due process niceties might be dispensed with in the seizing of Russian oligarchs' propertynone of this is helpful. Lowering judicial standards and engaging in acts of collective punishment is a grotesque way of objecting to a lawless ruler inflicting deadly collective punishment as we speak.

It's not just possible but preferable to keep our liberal-democratic wits about us even as our hearts break. Russia has a long and ugly history of inflicting brutal war and authoritarian rule on countries that have the bad luck of living near the bear. A century-plus of that has produced a diminished and unloved country flanked by examples of the wealth, democracy, and resolve that come with true independence from Moscow. We need not fear such atavistic outliers; we should recognize them for the Potemkin bullies they are and mindfully protect the liberalism they're too blinkered to embrace.

See more here:

No, We Don't Need To Become More Like Putin To Contain Him - Reason

from the back-to-basics dept

Obviously over the past few years theres been all of these debates about the content moderation practices of various websites. Weve written about it a ton, including in our Content Moderation Case Study series (currently on hiatus, but hopefully back soon). The goal of that series was to demonstrate that content moderation is rarely (if ever) about censoring speech, and almost always about dealing with extremely challenging decisions that any website has to deal with if they host content from users. Some of that involves legal requirements, some of it involves trying to keep a community focused, some of it involves dealing with spam, and some of it involves just crazy difficult decisions about what kind of community you want.

And yet, there are still those who insist that any forms of content moderation are either censorship or somehow against the principles of free speech. Thats the line we keep hearing. Last week in the discussion regarding Elon Musks poll about whether or not Twitter supported free speech, people kept telling me that the key point was about the principles of free speech, rather than what the law says. This discussion also came up recently with regards to the various discussions on cancel culture.

I understand where this impulse comes from because I had it in the past myself. Over a decade ago I was invited to give a talk to policy people running one of the large user-generated content platforms, and it was chock full of former ACLU/free speech lawyers. And I remember one of them asking me if I had thoughts on when it would be okay for them to remove content. I started to say that it should be avoided at almost all costs when they began tossing out example after example that began to make me realize that never is not an answer that works here. I still recommend listening to a Radiolab episode from a few years ago that does an amazing job laying out the impossible choices when it comes to content moderation. It highlights how not only is never not a reasonable option, but how no matter what rules you set, you will be faced with an unfathomable number of cases where the right answer or the right way to apply a policy is not at all clear.

Lawyer Akiva Cohen recently had a really worthwhile thread that explains why the entire concept of a philosophical commitment to free speech is somewhat meaningless if you think its distinct from government consequence. The key point that he makes is that once you separate the principles or the philosophy of free speech from legal consequences, youre simply down to debating competing speech and associations:

I think thats exactly correct, and why I keep pointing out that so much of the talk about cancel culture is often really about people who want to be free from the social consequences of critics speech. And the issue with content moderation is that its people wishing to be free from the social consequences of others association choices. A key part of actual free speech includes the right to associate or not to associate. And compelled speech goes against that.

But I want to take this argument even further, because it seems like many people believe that even if you recognize that concept, content moderation is somehow inherently incompatible with support for free speech. And I can understand the first order thinking that gets you there: content moderation involves taking down or otherwise restricting some speech, and so that automatically feels like it must go against free speech.

But the reality is a lot more nuanced, to the point that content moderation clearly actually enables more free speech. First, lets look at the world without any content moderation. A website that has no content moderation but allows anyone to post will fill up with spam. Even this tiny website gets thousands of spam comments a day. Most of them are (thankfully) caught by the layers upon layers of filtering tools weve set up.

Would anyone argue that it is against the principles of free speech to filter spam? I would hope not.

But once youve admitted that its okay to filter spam, youve already admitted that content moderation is okay youre just haggling over how much and where to draw the lines.

And, really, the spam example is instructive in many ways. People recognize that if a website is overrun with spam, its actually detrimental for speech overall, because how can anyone communicate when all of the communication is interrupted or hard to find due to spam?

So moderating spam seems to quite clearly enable more free speech by making platforms for speech more usable. Without such moderation, the platforms would get less use and people would be less likely to be able to speak in the same manner.

Now lets expand that circle out as well. Theres increasing evidence that when you have a totally freeform venue for free speech, it makes many people hold back and not join in. For all the talk of cancel culture that relies on claims that people are somehow afraid to speak their minds, they should maybe consider that the problem might not be cancel culture, but that some people dont want to have to constantly debate their beliefs with every rando who challenges them.

In other words, a full open forum is not all that conducive to free speech either, because its too much.

Instead, what content moderation does is create spaces where more people can feel free to talk. It creates different communities which arent just an open free for all, but are more focused and targeted. This actually ties back into the Section 230 debate as well. As the authors of Section 230 have explained, when they wrote that TheInternetand otherinteractive computer servicesoffer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity they did not mean that every website should host all of that content itself, but rather that by enabling content moderation, distinct and diverse communities could form. As they explained:

In our view as the laws authors, this requires that government allow a thousand flowers to bloomnot that a single website has to represent every conceivable point of view. The reason that Section 230 does not require political neutrality, and was never intended to do so, is that it would enforce homogeneity: every website would have the same neutral point of view. This is the opposite of true diversity.

To use an obvious example, neither the Democratic National Committee nor the Republican National Committee websites would pass a political neutrality test. Government-compelled speech is not the way to ensure diverse viewpoints. Permitting websites to choose their own viewpoints is.

Section 230 is agnostic about what point of view, if any, a website chooses to adopt; but Section 230 is not the source of legal protection for platforms that wish to express a point of view. Online platforms, no less than offline publishers, have a First Amendment right to express their opinion. When a website expresses its own opinion, it is, with respect to that expression, a content creator and, under Section 230, not protected against liability for that content.

In other words, the concept of free speech should support a diversity of communities not all speech on every community (or any particular community). And content moderation is what makes that possible.

The internet itself is an incredible platform for free speech, and we should be fighting to keep that wider internet open and free from too much regulatory burden and limits. But part of the reason the internet is such an incredible platform is that on the internet, anyone is able to find different communities that they feel are appropriate for them. Or to create their own without first having to get permission.

The people who demand that someone elses community must conform to their standards arent supporting principles of free speech, theyre demanding others bend to their wills.

And if thats the case, its going to end up shutting down a lot of speech. This is where the association part of free speech comes in. I dont want to host a ton of spam on Techdirt so I filter it. If I were required to host all that spam and not moderate it, I would shut down our comments, because otherwise theyd be useless.

Similarly, if we force websites to host all content in the name of free speech those websites are much less likely to want to continue offering that service to the public. Because now theyre offering something different than what they wanted to offer, and now they have to deal with spam, abuse, harassment and other nonsense that is driving away many of their other users.

The end result then, is that you get fewer places for speech, rather than more. And that is an attack on the principles of free speech.

None of this means that there arent reasons to criticize particular moderation policies or decisions. But we can debate them based on the specifics: why this policy or that decision may be problematic for reasons x, y, and z. But to simply state that those policies are against free speech is meaningless.

Filed Under: cancel culture, content moderation, free speech, principles of free speech, section 230

More:

Why Moderating Content Actually Does More To Support The Principles Of Free Speech - Techdirt

OPINION:

How has the Ukraine crisis affected political life in the West? Deeply but contradictorily. Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion wakened sleeping populations to eternal power realities, exacerbated leftist de-platforming and bizarrely enhanced his appeal on the right.

Power realities: A century-long peace following the Napoleonic wars left Europeans mentally unprepared for the carnage of World War I; similarly, the 77-year peace after World War II bred a faulty European assumption that trade and diplomacy could solve the continents problems. Military strength was seen as anachronistic as slavery. Slogans such as There is no military solution and War never solved anything prevailed.

Meanwhile, the non-West remains focused on the timeless verities of military might. Here, President Xi Jinping attempts to make China a great power hegemon. There, Mr. Putin creates two new peoples republics and repeatedly invades neighbors to reestablish the Russian empire. Leader Kim Jong-un builds up North Koreas nuclear arsenal and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei aspires to do the same for Iran. Lesser tyrants in Venezuela, Syria and Burma deploy the armed forces to brutalize their own peoples.

Ignoring these many signs, many Westerners woke in shock on Feb. 24 to news of the Russian invasion. It turns out that crude power is not outmoded, that trade does not displace war. With unwonted speed, Switzerland terminated a neutrality going back to 1815 and sanctioned Russia. Sweden and Finland, long skittish about joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, suddenly showed interest.

Most significantly, Germany overnight undid over 50 years of Ostpolitik. Chancellor Olaf Scholz increased military spending with a one-time infusion of 100 billion and pledged to spend more than 2% of Germanys GDP on the military, even specifying that percentage in the constitution. To appreciate the context of this shift, note that Germanys main battle tanks declined from 5,000 in 1989 to 300 at present. He also pledged to create energy reserves for coal and natural gas, buy F-35 warplanes and build LNG facilities. The New York Times rightly called these moves an astonishing and sudden reversal to decades of German foreign policy. For the moment, delusional passivism is untenable.

De-platforming: Putins outrageous actions confirmed and enhanced the lefts trend to exclude dissent. The International Chess Federation banned Sergey Karjakin, a Russian chess champion, from competing because he expressed support for the invasion. One Russian symphonic conductor, Tugan Sokhiev, temporarily resigned from the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse. Another, Valery Gergiev, lost his position at the Munich Philharmonic because he did not respond to a demand from Munichs mayor that he within three days condemn Mr. Putins brutal war of aggression.

Most strikingly, opera singer Anna Netrebko did unhesitatingly condemn the invasion, but not Mr. Putin by name: I am opposed to this senseless war of aggression, and I am calling on Russia to end this war right now to save all of us. We need peace right now. Perhaps she feared mentioning Mr. Putin out of fear for her family or some other legitimate concern. No matter: The Metropolitan Opera of New York City fired her, with General Manager Peter Gelb saying that Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Mr. Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward. Miss Netrebko then preemptively canceled scheduled appearances at three major European venues, and Centre Stage Artist Management dropped her as a client.

The European Union demanded that search engines basically boycott any websites connected to Russias government, including its RT and Sputnik media, and any reproduction of their content. On their own initiative, tech giants changed their algorithms to punish Russia.

The trend became slightly absurd. Alexander Malofeev, 20, condemned the war in Ukraine as terrible and bloody but was nonetheless canceled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, which declared it inappropriate to present him. The Peoria Symphony Orchestra replaced a work by the Russian Rachmaninoff with one by the German Beethoven. The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra deleted Tchaikovsky works from its program. The University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy canceled a lecture series on Fyodor Dostoevsky. Many other symbolic acts, such as dumping vodka with Russian-sounding names or renaming Russian dressing, rounded out the foolishness.

These precedents suggest a fearsome trend: clients dropped unless they endorse Black Lives Matter, students expelled if doubtful about anthropogenic climate change, employees fired for not signing petitions condemning Islamophobia, shops forced to close due to legal action for an unwillingness to recognize gay marriage, states losing business over transgender toilets.

Meanwhile, the crackdown on criticism of Islamism continues. In the same Germany that found its resolve versus Russia, Michael Sturzenberger was fined 800 for his unacceptable thoughts about Islam. The mainstream right can expect to find itself evermore de-platformed and excluded.

Putinism: The rights growing fury at these and other leftist policies inspires a soft spot for Mr. Putin, most visibly in the United States, though also clearly evident in France and Canada. The American trend started with the Tea Party movement, then followed with the election of former President Donald Trump, the stolen election of 2020, resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine and now the invasion of Ukraine.

Tucker Carlson, the television host, pithily articulated this sentiment: Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Mr. Carlson went to ask whether Mr. Putin had promoted racial discrimination in schools, made fentanyl or attempted to snuff out Christianity.

Mr. Putin himself cannily played to this sympathy, presenting himself as a right-wing stalwart who represents traditional values. One month after invading Ukraine, he devoted a whole speech to what he called cancel culture and audaciously likened the leftist criticism of author J.K. Rowling (because of her views on transgenderism) to the West canceling Russia, an entire thousand-year-old country. Rejecting this overture, Ms. Rowling responded with #IStandWithUkraine, but the comparison did find some favor.

Summing up: The near-universal Western condemnation of Russias invasion has improved military resolve even as it further degraded political life.

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. 2022 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

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Putin's invasion scrambles the West - Washington Times

TVA building solar farm in Jackson, Tennessee

The Tennessee Valley Authority has joined with Meta (formerly the Facebook company), Jackson Energy Authority (JEA) and Silicon Ranch to begin construction of a new 70-megawatt solar facility to support Meta's regional operations with 100% renewable energy.

The $90 million McKellar Solar Farm is part of TVA's Green Invest program, which helps customers meet their sustainability goals with new utility-scale solar projects to supply all of the customer's electricity needs. Doug Perry, TVA's senior vice president of commercial energy solutions, said TVA has already committed $3 billion to add 2,000 megawatts of new solar to its power grid since 2018.

"This public-private partnership with Meta and Silicon Ranch demonstrates the strength of TVA's community energy model to attract capital investment and high-quality jobs into the communities we serve while helping businesses meet their sustainability goals," Perry said during a groundbreaking for the new solar facility earlier this week.

Nashville-based Silicon Ranch, which built a similar solar array at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, will fund, own and operate the McKellar Solar Farm. Construction of the solar facility is expected to create more than 350 construction jobs.

"The more than 850 megawatts of new solar energy we are developing with TVA is an important part of our goal to support our global operations with 100% renewable energy," Urvi Parekh, head of Renewable Energy at Meta, said in a news release about the project.

Macy's distribution center adds 2,800 Carolina jobs

Macy's Inc. announced plans Thursday to build a distribution and online order fulfillment center in central North Carolina that ultimately will employ about 2,800 people.

The department store and online retail giant said in a news release that it will invest $584 million in the project in China Grove, northeast of Charlotte.

The logistics center and warehouse operations, which will open in 2024, will provide automated services for orders to be shipped directly to consumers, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper's office said. The center will handle 30% of Macy's digital supply chain capacity when fully operational, the company said. New York-based Macy's had narrowed potential center sites to North Carolina and South Carolina, according to a document provided by the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

"This state-of-the-art facility will support growth of our business as a leading omnichannel retailer," Macy's chief supply chain officer Dennis Mullahy said in a news release.

DeSantis wants to end Disney's 'special privileges'

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed his support Thursday for ending Disney's "special privileges" in Florida, saying the entertainment giant's political sway is waning.

DeSantis has been battling the Walt Disney Co. over its opposition to HB 1557, officially titled Parental Rights in Education but known by many as the "don't say gay" bill.

"As a matter of first principle, I don't support special privileges in law, just because a company is powerful, and they've been able to wield a lot of power," he said at an event in West Palm Beach.

His comments came after state Rep. Spencer Roach, R-North Fort Myers, tweeted that lawmakers have met twice to discuss repealing a 1967 state law that allowed Walt Disney World to establish its own independent government through the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

DeSantis didn't list specific policy proposals, but he mentioned a last-minute exemption the company got in legislation last year as an example of special treatment. Lawmakers excluded companies that operate theme parks from a bill that sought to stop social media outlets from de-platforming political candidates.

State Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, said at the time the exemption was aimed at making sure the Disney Plus streaming service "isn't caught up in this."

Inflation gauge up 6.4% in past year

Inflation continued to run at the fastest pace in 40 years in February, fresh data released Thursday showed, at a moment when war in Ukraine and continued supply chain disruptions tied to the coronavirus promise to keep prices rising.

Prices as measured by the personal consumption expenditures index rose 6.4% in the year through February, up from the 6.1% increase in the year through January and the fastest inflation rate since 1982.

Prices climbed 5.4% after food and fuel costs, which can be volatile, are stripped out, the data showed. That pace was also faster than the prior month's reading, which was 5.2%.

The pace far exceeds the 2% annual inflation the Federal Reserve targets. While central bankers expect rapid inflation to cool by the end of the year, falling to 4.3% by the final three months of 2022, that rate would still be too quick for comfort.

Compiled by Dave Flessner

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TVA builds solar farm in Tennessee to supply Meta with renewable power and more business news - Chattanooga Times Free Press