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