Category Archives: Censorship

Former President Donald Trump called on Congress to investigate the anti-American practice of censorship rampant across Americas corporations and big tech platforms.

Trumps comments came during Turning Point USAs Student Action Summit on Saturday in Tampa, Florida.Trump said:

But Ill talk about the next critical fight we need is for your energy to be put behind the battle to restore free speech in America. There is no such thing as a democracy that does not have free speech. We dont have free speech anymore. We have canceled culture we have fake news media that reports certain news incorrectly.

He also called out corporate media for its biased coverage of political issues and for being partners with the Democrats:

And if its positive about the other side, they make it much better and if its bad about the other side, they wont even report it. We saw that in the election where they wouldnt report bad news about the other side. Its a disgrace. The media has taken a place in our culture and our history that nobody ever thought would be possible. They are no longer respected.

Trump warned that if censorship continues to grow across the country, America will turn into Venezuela on steroids. He said:

If debate can be silenced, if dissent can be suppressed. If conservative ideas can be systematically shut down, then very simply, we do not have a free country anymor. Thats what happened with communism and various countries. Thats what happened with Venezuela.

Trump added that the next congress and the next president have a civic duty to be ruthless in going after this new censorship regime.

We have to, because if we do not destroy censorship, censorship will destroy America. Our country will rot from the corruption confusion, he urged.

As soon as we have the power. Congress should immediately launch a full scale investigation into the rise of totally anti American practice, Trump declared.

Link:
Trump Calls for Investigation into Anti-American Censorship

Laws barring businesses and schools from teaching anti-racist ideas, such as Floridas Stop WOKE Act, mimic the same intolerance displayed by woke progressives. The better path is to encourage open debate, not censorship.

The Stop WOKE Act prevents businesses, schools and other institutions from subjecting students and employees to training or teachings that promote various anti-racist ideas. These include the idea that a person, by virtue of his race, color, national origin or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously and the idea that virtues such as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular [group] to oppress members of another [group].

Under the law, teachers cannot teach these ideas to students, businesses cannot impose training that promotes these ideas, and licensing institutions or membership associations cannot require such training as a condition of a license or membership.

The ideas that Florida seeks to suppress are bad. The peddlers of wokism sow discrimination and division, blacklist dissenters, and scorn individual freedom. But we should not fight this illiberalism with more illiberalism. The Stop WOKE Act would trample free speech in its enthusiasm to oppose bad ideas.

The First Amendment protects ideas that we truly hate. Private businesses have a First Amendment right to tell their employees that all whites are privileged oppressors or that colorblindness is racist, though there may be some limits if training creates a hostile workplace. And while grade-school teachers may face curriculum constraints, college professors have a First Amendment right to argue that slavery was an essential rationale behind the American Revolution, or that minorities deserve reparations from white taxpayers who played no role in their oppression. Yet under the Stop WOKE Act, such speech is unlawful discrimination.

Conservative lawmakers should appreciate the problem with this approach, given their opposition to anti-discrimination laws that compel businesses to violate their beliefs, such as forcing a wedding photographer to work a same-sex marriage ceremony or city ordinances that seek to ban Chick-fil-A restaurants because of owners donations to support traditional marriage. The underlying principle is the same: Government cannot impose dogma on its citizens.

Government bureaucrats are not qualified to decide which ideas deserve protection and which deserve censorship and scorn. In the Supreme Courts words, If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

Not only do these laws violate the freedoms they purport to protect, but history warns that censorship often backfires. Consider what happened when the Nazi race-baiter Julius Streicher was imprisoned for accusing Jews of ritual murders in the Nazi newspaper Der Strmer. Not only did this fail to stop antisemitic speech, but Nazi propagandists won public support by spinning Streicher as a martyr. This recoil effect is visible today as progressive politicians whip up the left over conservative fearmongering about race.

Efforts to censor woke ideas are also based on the flawed premise that Americans are fragile and gullible. But the First Amendment assumes that citizens in a free society are tough enough to hear and reject offensive ideas. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained, Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.

There are better ways to grapple with bad ideas than censorship. Foremost, we should let ideas do battle on equal ground. As John Milton put it, rather than doubt the strength of truth, we should let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. Sometimes we are too quick to muzzle opponents because we dont trust our message. To foster debate, legislators should promote transparency by requiring schools to make training and teaching materials available to public scrutiny. And while lawmakers cannot tell businesses what to say to their employees, they can prohibit the government from rigging the debate by compelling students or employees to adopt or promote ideas they disagree with.

Free speech is a net gain for society, even when it protects odious ideas. In 1977, Jewish attorney David Goldberger defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors. Goldbergers courage stands in stark contrast to the ill-fated imprisonment of Julius Streicher. He understood two things we must remember: that the First Amendment does not play favorites and that truth need not fear its enemies.

Ethan Blevins (@ethanwb) and Daniel Ortner (@dortner1) are attorneys at Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans individual liberty and constitutional rights.

Excerpt from:
In fighting woke politics, censorship is not the answer - The Hill

In a report from TheBlock, the team behind the Ethereum (ETH) protocol Aave addressed the concerns about their address screening process. The decision to partner with compliance firm TRM Labs has been gaining a lot of attention after several high-profile personalities were blocked from accessing the platform.

These individuals and smaller users include TRON founder Justin Sun, Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano, CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong, and others. Over the weekend, these names were blocked from using Aave until an update to the platforms frontend re-instated some with access to the protocol.

As Bitcoinist reported, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on decentralized exchange Tornado Cash. This unleashed controversy in the crypto community and prompted some users to dust, and send small amounts of ETH to high-profile individuals as a form of protest, leading to some users being lockout by the protocols front end.

The team behind Aave confirmed that the address screening process is being implemented on the protocols website (frontend), but a deeper implementation would require community approval, according to the report:

The wallet monitoring here is only at the front-end layer, as for on-chain, contract-level [wallet monitoring] as it applies to the Aave Protocol, the Aave smart contracts are decentralized no one person or entity can change, control, update or shut down the protocol. For any change to occur to the protocol, an AIP (Aave Improvement Proposal) would have to be proposed, voted on, and approved by the Aave DAO.

Via their official Twitter, the team behind the Ethereum protocol claimed that the address screening system has been implemented to provide users with more security. This system identifies all users that have interacted with Tornado Cash, including dusted addresses.

The team behind the project confirmed that they implemented their address screening system following the U.S. Treasury sanctions on Tornado Cash. Aave claims that it will continue to mitigate any issues with this system and will continue testing the integration with TRMS API.

In that sense, and in light of recent events, Aave said:

The Aave Protocol is and remains decentralized and governed by the DAO. We encourage the community to remain engaged and actively fight for equitable finance. The Aave team will continue to innovate. We encourage the community to remain engaged and actively fight for open and fair finance.

Several digital rights organizations and crypto think tanks have expressed their concerns about the sanctions imposed on Tornado Cash, and the consequences: developers arrested, users blocked from certain platforms.

Coin Center is one of the organizations questioning the Treasurys decision as they believe it crossed a line and an important distinction between entities with the capacity to jeopardize the financial system and neutral technologies.

In a recent report, the organization claims that the sanctions are an overstepped of the institutions legal authority. Coin Center revealed that it will cooperate with other organizations to pursue administrative relief, and potentially challenge the sanctions in court.

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Why Aave Will Submit Address Censorship To A Community Vote - Bitcoinist

The news: Researchers have used deep learning to model more precisely than ever before how ice crystals form in the atmosphere. Their paper, published this week in PNAS, hints at the potential to significantly increase the accuracy of weather and climate forecasting.

How they did it: The researchers used deep learning to predict how atoms and molecules behave. First, models were trained on small-scale simulations of water molecules to help them predict how electrons in atoms interact. The models then replicated those interactions on a larger scale, with more atoms and molecules. Its this ability to precisely simulate electron interactions that allowed the team to accurately predict physical and chemical behavior.

Why it matters: If researchers could model how ice forms more accurately, it could give a big boost to weather prediction overall, especially those involving whether and how much its likely to rain or snow. It could also aid climate forecasting by improving the ability to model clouds, which affect the planets temperature in complex ways. Read the full story.

Tammy Xu

China has censored a top health information platform

China has censored DXY, the countrys leading health information platform and online community for Chinese doctors. On August 9, DXY fell silent across its social media channels, where it boasts over 80 million followers. While Weibo offered the vague explanation that the platforms five channels had violated relevant laws and regulations, Nikkei Asia reported that the order came from regulators and wont end without official approval.

In the increasingly polarized social media environment in China, healthcare is becoming a target for controversy. The suspension has met with a gleeful social reaction among nationalist bloggers, who accuse DXY of receiving foreign funding, bashing traditional Chinese medicine, and criticizing Chinas health-care system, illustrating just how politicized health topics have become. Read the full story.

Zeyi Yang

Podcast: How to craft effective AI policy

Link:
The Download: AI to predict ice, and healthcare censorship in China - MIT Technology Review

With the U.K.'s Conservative Party closing in on deciding who will inherit the mess left by Boris Johnson's tenure as prime minister, that country's governing apparatus will soon get back to the important business of intruding into people's lives.

At the top of the to-do list is the long-coming Online Safety Bill which, as has become traditional for legislation, does nothing that its title suggests. In fact, those who offend the government with their online speech or efforts to protect privacy may soon be a lot less safe.

"If the Online Safety Bill passes, the U.K. government will be able to directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn't like," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Joe Mullin cautioned last week. "The bill empowers the UK's Office of Communications (OFCOM) to levy heavy fines or even block access to sites that offend people. We said last year that those powers raise serious concerns about freedom of expression. Since then, the bill has been amended, and it's gotten worse."

The Online Safety Bill is sold as a measure to protect children from predators and pornography, society from terrorists, and the public from all sorts of vaguely defined "harmful" content that might offend sensibilities, but it takes on that enormous task in an inevitably broad way. Mullin is far from the first civil liberties advocate to warn of the dangers inherent in allowing the British government's regulatory Office of Communication, commonly called Ofcom, sweeping powers over people's use of the internet.

"There are many reasons to be concerned about the #OnlineSafetyBill, the latest manifestation of which has just been launched, to a mixture of fanfares and fury," Paul Bernal, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia Law School, warned in March. "The massive attacks on privacy (including an awful general monitoring requirement) and freedom of speech (most directly through the highly contentious 'legal but harmful' concept) are just the starting point. The likely use of the 'duty of care' demanded of online service providers to limit or even ban both encryption and anonymity, thereby making all of us lessand in particular childrenless safe and less free is another. The political control of censorship via Ofcom is in some ways even worseas is the near certain inability of Ofcom to do the gargantuan tasks being required of itand that's not even starting on the mammoth and costly bureaucratic burdens being foisted on people operating online services."

That's a lot to worry about packed into a few words. But that's because the Online Safety Bill takes on a vast challenge in trying to make the internet "safe" from a vast array of dangers real, potential, and imaginary. Bernal attributes the overreach to lawmakers' obsessive concern with the online world's flaws. He likens it to a fixation with warts on a human face "and a desire to eradicate them with the strongest of caustic medicine, regardless of the damage to the face itself."

Bernal may be excessively charitable in attributing this massive piece of legislation to an honest misunderstanding of the online world. In June, Jacob Mchangama, founder of the Danish think tank Justitia, noted that the Online Safety Bill is part of a wave of legislation around the world that seeks to control the internet, including the European Union's recently adopted Digital Services Act.

"These regulatory efforts follow in the footsteps of the German Network Enforcement Act of 2017 and oblige online platforms to remove illegal content, including categories such as hate speech and glorification of terrorism, or risk huge fines," Mchangama wrote. "However, in liberal democracies committed to both equality and free expression, this approach raises a number of questions and dilemmas. Moreover, current hate speech laws have already caused collateral damage to political speech and protests in Europe. Further restrictions risk significantly suffocating pluralism and open debatethe flow of vital oxygen without which democracies cannot thrive."

Notably, the U.K. isn't exactly short of censorship powers even before adopting the Online Safety Bill. Earlier this year, Reason's Scott Shackford highlighted the case of Joseph Kelly of Glasgow, who was criminally convicted for mocking the death of 100-year-old Captain Sir Tom Moore, a military veteran and high-profile fundraiser for the National Health Service. In the United States, under the protections of the First Amendment, such behavior would have earned criticism. In Britain, that drunken tweet brought prosecution and community service in lieu of jail time.

Yet, British lawmakers think they have insufficient power to punish people on the internet.

Like the German Network Enforcement Act (widely known as NetzDG), the Online Safety Bill would offload much of the enforcement burden to social media companies and online services. Under that approach, government bureaucrats slap private companies with stiff fines if they fail to intervene to the government's satisfaction. The EFF's Mullin points out that the bill grants exceptions for "recognized news publishers" and other established media; smaller operators, then, are at the greatest risk of scrutiny and penalties if they guess wrong about officials' opinions of what content promotes terrorism, child abuse, or "psychological harm." That creates an incentive to muzzle more rather than less.

"The Network Enforcement law and its imitators create big incentives for social media companies to overregulate online speech and risk pushing extremists towards platforms that are even harder to survey," Justitia's Mchangama observed in 2020.

"When governments around the world pressure websites to quickly remove content they deem 'terrorist,' it results in censorship," Mullin adds. "The first victims of this type of censorship are usually human rights groups seeking to document abuses and war."

At least for now, the First Amendment shields Americans from similar attempts to control online activity. But North America as a whole isn't entirely immune. When the Online Safety Bill was first introduced last year, Canada's ruling Liberals proposed a similar measure. It died as the government called a general election, which the ruling party (barely) won. The government threatened to reintroduce the legislation, but that plan has been delayed by the inability of experts to agree on what should be regulated and how. Some members of the panel seem concerned about intruding on freedom, while others want private communications controlled, not just public postings.

"The advisory panel tasked with making recommendations for Canada's pending legislation on online safety has failed to come to an agreement on how online harms should be defined, and whether dangerous content should be scrubbed from the internet altogether," the Toronto Star reported July 9.

But an inability to define harmful speech and the legitimate boundaries of regulation didn't stop German and EU lawmakers, and it's not really slowing legislators in the U.K. Canadians are well-advised to look to Britain and Europe to see where their country is likely to go in terms of online government intrusion. The U.K.'s Parliament is expected to resume consideration of the Online Safety Bill this fall. If the measure becomes law, as seems likely, Britons online will be a little less safe.

Visit link:
U.K.'s Online Censorship Bill Causes More Harm Than It Prevents - Reason

In the run-up to Novembersmidterm elections, Twitter is priming itself to go on a censoring spree in the name of fighting misinformation.

What could possibly go wrong?

The social media platform made the announcement Thursday that it was activating enforcement of our Civic Integrity Policy for the 2022 U.S. midterms.

The tech giant said it would institute so-called prebunks, information designed to counter misleading narratives, on top of putting its finger on the scale to prevent tweets containing misinformation from reaching users through notifications.

Twitter plays a critical role in empowering democratic conversations, facilitating meaningful political debate, and providing information on civic participationnot only in the U.S., but around the world, the company concluded. People deserve to trust the election conversations and content they encounter on Twitter.

This new policy is ripe for abuse. Twitter has proven time and again it cannot be trusted to serve as a neutral judge of what is or isnt misinformation.

The most obvious example of this failure to act neutrally is the botched handling of the Hunter Biden laptop case.

Twitter was perfectly comfortable prebunking the story before the 2020 presidential election. It aggressively blocked the New York Post story reporting on Hunterslaptop and prevented anyone from linking to it on the site.

That decision may very well have altered the results of the election.

Per The Washington Times:

Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6% of Biden voters would have changed their minds if they had known about [the Hunter Biden laptop], easily enough to flip results in key states. Another survey by The Polling Company showed that even more Biden voters in seven swing states 17% would have switched their votes if they had been aware of the laptop and other stories.

Not content to indirectly impact the results of an election, Twitter literally takes its marching orders from Democrats.

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who was smeared as a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist, obtained documents revealing the White House demanded the site ban him.

Berenson said on his Substack that according to internal Slack conversations between Twitter employees, Andrew Slavitt, a senior member ofBidens COVID-19 response team, had mentioned Berenson specifically as a source of COVID-19 misinformation and encouraged the platform to ban him.

The Daily Signal reached out to Twitter for comment but did not receive a response.

On top of colluding with the Democrats to eliminate their opposition online, Twitter has permitted blatant lies surrounding elections to stay posted, so long as they benefit the Democrat Party.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted in May 2017 following President Donald Trumps election victory that our election was hijacked, while in April 2020, future White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted about how Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stole the election from Stacy Abrams.

Isnt that misinformation?

Despite both tweets being blatantly false and calling into question the integrity of legitimate elections, Twitter has allowed the tweets to stay up with no markings or warnings.

And were supposed to trust it can be neutral for the midterms?

Heritage Foundation policy analyst Will Thibeau sees the extreme danger in allowing Twitter to unilaterally act as unelected and unreliable arbiters of truth.

While the meat of Twitters announcement details efforts to protect against deception about election results, times, and locations, the platform gives themselves broad leeway to protect against misleading information about the procedures or circumstances around participation in a civic process, he told The Daily Signal. What political conversation on Twitter wouldnt fall under this scope in an election year?

He continued:

In 2021, the Media Research Center found Twitter censors Republican Members of Congress 53 times for every instance of censorship applied to a Democrat Representative. By wrapping their effort to censor information in an announcement on the civic process, Twitter is, once again, laying the groundwork to de-platform voices who dont align with the political ideology of Silicon Valley.

The Daily Signal is the media arm of The Heritage Foundation.

Its clear that Twitter cant be trusted to fairly and neutrally judge what is considered misinformation. It has proven time and again that all it cares about is promoting the radical lefts policies and political goals.

Now, more than ever, there must be reforms to how Big Tech platforms like Twitter are allowed to operate.

Twitter claims it wants to ensure fair elections take place around the world.

Then it should open source its algorithms to ensure people know exactly whats going on behind the scenes, as well as provide details into its content moderations and decisions.

How better to ensure that everything is fair if people know they wont be censored for political speech that offends the sensibilities of coastalelites?

If Twitter wants to be viewed as a reputable source of information, it needs to prove to the American people it deserves that trust.

Its previous behavior should make everyone suspicious.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and well consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular We Hear You feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Read more here:
Twitter Vows to Fight 'Election Misinformation.' More Censorship Incoming. - Daily Signal

After being smeared by Big Tech censorship partner The Dispatch as a frequent purveyor of bad information for calling out the Pfizer CEO for not being fully vaccinated last year, Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson was exonerated by an admission in the CEOs own book but not before being deplatformed by Twitter.

Robinson published an article on her Substack on Monday morning triumphantly declaring, I Was Right About The Pfizer CEO! after journalist Jordan Schachtel noted that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla admitted to canceling his March 2021 trip to Israel because he had not yet received his second Covid-19 jab.

In his book Moonshot: Inside Pfizers Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible, published in March of 2022, Bourla confirmed that he declined to advise researchers in Israel in early March of 2021 because he was not in compliance with the countrys two-jab requirement.

Getting vaccinated had created a crisis of confidence for me, Bourla wrote. I chose to wait until my vaccination might be used to encourage those with vaccine hesitancy later on.

Shortly after that cancellation, Bourla received his second jab.

In August of 2021, Robinson tweeted a link to a report explaining why Bourlas plans changed. Robinson emphasized that, out of all people, it was the Pfizer head who was not fully vaccinated.

But at the time of Robinsons tweet, Big Tech censors and their partners jumped at the opportunity to take down someone who regularly questioned the Covid-19 shot. Twitter added a context warning to Robinsons tweet, and The Dispatch published a false article attempting to refute the reporter.

In the fake fact check, Dispatch fact-check editor Alec Dent shamed Robinson for sharing that Bourla has not been vaccinated against coronavirus months after the trip was canceled. He lamented that the misleading tweet went viral.

A Newsmax correspondent tweeted a story about Albert Bourla without noting it was from March, the subheadline of the article states.

Dent cited a statement from Steven Danehy, director of media relations at Pfizer, who denied that Bourla was not fully vaccinated as proof that Robinson was lying to thousands of people on Twitter.

That is categorically false. Dr. Bourla has been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Danehy said in a statement.

Dispatch editor and CEO Stephen Hayes amplified Dents article and noted that Robinson is a frequent purveyor of bad information.

[She] tweeted yesterday that the CEO of Pfizer had to cancel a planned trip to Israel because he was not fully vaccinated, Hayes wrote. The Pfizer CEO was fully vaccinated in March.

But even though Robinsons tweet didnt occur until months after the canceled trip, Bourlas book confirms she was right: The CEO had to cancel a planned trip to Israel because he was not fully vaccinated. Theres nothing misleading about it. Robinson clearly did not forget how The Dispatch targeted her for reporting the truth and hinted in her recent Substack that she plans to take legal action.

Did The Dispatch receive any funding from Big Pharma or its affiliates? Or from the federal governments HHS to push the COVID vaccines? My attorneys will be asking them such questions very soon, Robinson warned.

The Dispatch has a longstanding partnership with Big Tech to suppress and censor conservative voices. During the 2020 election cycle, The Dispatch colluded with Facebook to block two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, which detailed then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harriss support of abortion on demand up until the moment of birth. The Dispatch rated the ads partly false because they said 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.

After The Federalist published an article detailing the censorship, the Dispatch claimed that even though its main Twitter account retweeted the article, it was accidentally published in draft form 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, Hayes wrote. As a result, the viral post was assigned a partly false rating that we have determined is not justified after completing The Dispatch fact-checking process.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Excerpt from:
The Dispatch Smeared Reporter Who Called Out Not-Fully-Vaxed Pfizer CEO - The Federalist

NEW YORK The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) released the following statement in response to todays horrific attack on Salman Rushdie, a brave defender of free speech. The NCAC is an alliance of 59 national nonprofit organizations that is committed to the non-partisan defense of free expression.

Todays horrific attack on author Salman Rushdie during a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution is deeply disturbing. Although the motive for the assault remains unknown, it inevitably raises the suspicion that it was an attempt to punish Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, which the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned as a blasphemy of the Muslim religion in 1989. Khomeini issued a fatwa that called on Muslims to kill Rushdie, who was forced into hiding. He spent almost a decade under police protection.

Mr. Rushdie has bravely defended freedom of expression throughout his career, determined not to be silenced by fear and encouraging others to speak out. An established advocate for writers protections, Mr. Rushdie is founding president of the International Parliament of Writers (which has since evolved into the International Cities of Refuge Network), which offers resources and shelter to artists and writers at risk of persecution. At the time of the attack, Mr. Rushdie was participating in a public discussion on the role of the United States as a refuge for artists and writers in exile.

Mr. Rushdies famous refrain, What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. underscores the key democratic tenets-the right to disseminate and access ideas, the right to public debate, and, crucially, the right to disagreewhether it be with fellow civilians, institutions, or governments.

We hope for his speedy recovery.

About National Coalition Against CensorshipSince its inception in 1974, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has functioned as a first responder in protecting freedom of expression, a fundamental human right and a keystone of democracy. Representing 59 trusted education, publishing, and arts organizations, NCAC encourages and facilitates dialogue between diverse voices and perspectives, including those that have historically been silenced.

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National Coalition Against Censorship Deplores Assault on Rushdie - Blogging Censorship

Charita Goshay wrote one of her usual insightful articles in The Repository on July 24about the proposed "divisive subjects bill" ("Ohios divisive subjects bill a dangerous drift toward censorship"). She outlined rightful concerns that the bill would stifle the horrid parts of our history and would lead to censorship.

Based on the framework she detailed in her article, I don't see incompatibility between teaching history and eliminating hate in the curriculum. The history of slavery should be taught. Part of that lesson would be the justification used by slaveholders to practice slavery. The only reason for exposure to that rationale for slavery would be to expose how terribly wrong it was, not to defend it. End of the history lesson.

If the curriculum were then to go on to promote the idea that because some whites owned slaves all white people are oppressors, that would be prohibited, according to Charita's outline. It should be prohibited as being terribly wrong and terribly divisive.

As for censorship, it's here. Many news media and social media outlets already filter, slant, or ignore items they don't wish to feature. Recently, President Biden wanted to establish the Disinformation Governance Board. It had a narrow purpose, but many things with a narrow, well-intentioned purpose morph into something ghastly. Who knows where that would have gone? Fortunately, the effort has been paused. Censorship has no place here, but it is becoming more commonplace.

Donald J. Groom, Plain Township

Read the original post:
Letter to the editor: Don't filter history or news; that's censorship - Canton Repository

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is calling for the Espionage Act to be repealed amid a federal investigation into the possible mishandling of government records and classified documents that were found at former President Donald Trump's Florida home.

"The espionage act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI. It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment," Paul wrote.

The statement comes less than a week after the FBI search at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Investigators took multiple sets of classified documents from the property. The search warrant lists three laws that appear central to the federal investigation, including one that's part of the Espionage Act. So far, neither Trump nor any of his aides have been charged in the investigation.

This would be the first time in U.S. history that a former president has been known to be investigated under the Espionage Act, but it's not the first time the law has been under scrutiny, experts say. Indeed, though Trump has not been charged with any wrongdoing, holding onto classified documents is against the law.

The Espionage Act was passed in 1917, a few months after the U.S. entered World War I. The original law made it illegal for people to obtain or disclose information relating to national defense that could be used to harm the U.S. or benefit another country.

That description has helped prosecute some spies, but increasingly it has been used to threaten or put to trial those who leak sensitive information, Sam Lebovic, a history professor at George Mason University, told NPR.

During the Obama administration, eight people were charged with leaking national security secrets to the media under the Espionage Act more than all the previous administrations combined. At least six more leakers were charged during the Trump administration, according to Lebovic.

Over the years, press freedom advocates have grown concerned that administrations cherry pick what leaked information is deemed a threat to national security.

"Government officials leak classified information to the press all the time. That's how huge amounts of journalism happen," Lebovic said. "Most of it is let go and allowed to happen. Only the instances that really upset the government in power are the ones that are prosecuted."

Heidi Kitrosser, a law professor at Northwestern University, told NPR the danger with the act is that it's too vague and broad.

The law does not explicitly define what "national defense" is or what information could threaten it, she added. Although the U.S. has since created a classification system, there is still a lot of room for interpretation.

More concerning to Kitrosser, the law does not explicitly care about public interest or whether the leaker in question had good motives. That's why a broad spectrum of people can be under threat.

"If the act had a public interest defense, that would give us some kind of focal point around so that we could draw a distinction between somebody leaking information about abuse of a government program to the American media versus someone storing highly classified secrets in a resort hotel," she said.

Yes but it would be difficult for the law to be applied the same way today, Lebovic said.

The anecdote referred by Paul has to do with an early section of the law that targeted people who spoke out against the war.

Roughly 1,000 people were jailed for criticizing World War I but that effort drew intense criticism, according to Lebovic. In 1920, lawmakers repealed the harshest censorship sections of the law. Over the coming decades, the rise of the First Amendment movement also helped protect dissident speech.

That being said, Lebovic said the Espionage Act still raises some concerns about censorship and dissent.

"There's been a shift in the way censorship works, that the government no longer censors expression or opinion or speech. It now censors information," he said.

Excerpt from:
Why Rand Paul wants the Espionage Act to be repealed - NPR