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British veteran Darren Brady said Hampshire police were impeding his right to free speech by tracking him down for reposting a meme featuring the LGBT pride flag arranged in the shape of a swastika.

In viral footage of the arrest taken by political activist Laurence Fox who created the meme, officers tell the 51-year-old at his residence in Aldershot that someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.

A spokeswoman for the Hampshire Constabulary told The Federalist that officers confronted Brady following a report that an offensive image had been shared online. It is unclear who filed the report but officers visited Bradys home to establish the exact circumstances around the social media post.

Harry Miller, a former police officer and Bad Law Project CEO who was also arrested, said police first tried to extort Brady by demanding he pay around 80 for educational course so he could downgrade from a crime to a non-crime, which would still show up in a basic Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check.

Thats why when officers promised to return on July 28 to hear Bradys final answer about re-education, both Fox and Miller were on the scene to document what Miller dubbed the worlds worst shakedown. When officers arrived at Bradys house for a second time, the police spokeswoman said they were prevented from entering the address to discuss a potential resolution to the matter.

As a result, officers felt it was necessary to arrest a man at the scene so they could interview him in relation to the alleged offence, the spokeswoman continued. She also said a 57-year-old man, whom the Daily Mail identified as Miller, was arrested on suspicion of obstructing/resisting a constable in execution of duty.

He was released under investigation, and our enquiries are ongoing. Due to this being a live investigation we cannot comment further, the spokeswoman said.

Officers claimed to be investigating an alleged offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act (2003), a sweeping law that gives the United Kingdom government the authority to imprison someone if officials deem his online posts grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character, or if he knowingly makes a false post for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.

The spokeswoman made it clear that no further action is being taken against Brady but maintains that officers come to work every day to protect the public and were acting in good faith when they singled out Brady.

We are engaging further with our police and crime commissioner to make sure that we deploy our resource in a way that reflects need in our local communities, she concluded.

Donna Jones, the Hampshire police and crime commissioner, issued a statement criticizing her own force and voicing concern about both the proportionality and necessity of the polices response to this incident.

When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins dont always get a police response, something is wrong, Jones said before promising to write the College of Policing asking for greater clarification on how police should respond more appropriately in the future.

That hasnt stopped free speech critics such as Caroline Russell, a member of the Police and Crime Committee in the Greater London Authority, from demanding police look into Laurence Fox using pride flags to create nazi imagery and posting the images on a public platform.

This is a hate crime, Russell tweeted.

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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British Veteran Arrested For Reposting Meme That 'Caused Anxiety' - The Federalist

Newly unearthed documents obtained by America First Legal Foundation reveal that top U.S. health officials worked hand-in-hand with big tech companies to moderate content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The documents released Wednesday were obtained after America First Legal sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after filing a FOIA request for documents related to communications with big tech firms. They reportedly show that companies including Twitter and Facebook were repeatedly advised by the CDC on what to flag as misinformation and how to moderate.

One email from May 2021 shows CDC official Carol Crawford emailing a list of tweets to Twitter employees that the agency regarded as misinformation about vaccine shedding and microchips. Another email from one month prior shows Twitter senior manager for public policy Todd OBoyle asking Crawford to help identify certain types of misinformation. The employee adds that theyre looking forward to setting up regular chats.

Another instance reveals OBoyle commenting that it would be tricky to set up a meeting to discuss misinformation because Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying before Congress that week.

Facebook was also coordinating with the agency. Crawford sent the company a list of posts containing disinformation similar to the list she provided Twitter, and Facebook gave the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) $15 million in free advertising during the pandemic.

The company additionally set up a Misinformation Reporting Channel for CDC and Census Bureau officials to report posts to Facebooks team. The Census Bureau was involved because the CDC asked the agency to leverage their infrastructure to identify and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation.

Google appears to have gotten in on the action too. The CDC asked the search engine giant to include its vaccine finder page at the top of search results about the vaccine, and a Google employee said that they were working with the CDC to set up a Question Hub related to the pandemic.

Much of the information shared by the CDC and other top health agencies and officials in the early days of the pandemic turned out to be misinformation. CDC director Rochelle Walensky once said that vaccinated people wouldnt transmit COVID-19, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said vaccinated people were a dead end for the virus.

Fauci also said Americans shouldnt wear masks at the start of the pandemic, before quickly giving the exact opposite recommendation.

President Joe Biden himself has spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, saying in July 2021 that Americans wont get COVID-19 if theyre vaccinated. (RELATED: Biden FDA Commissioner Says Misinformation Is Leading Cause Of Death In America)

This isnt the first time federal agencies and officials have been exposed coordinating with big tech to censor speech. Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki once said that the administration was working with Facebook to flag alleged disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

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Internal Documents Reveal CDC Worked With Big Tech To Censor COVID-19 Speech - Daily Caller

from the just-knock-it-off-already dept

So, we just had a post mocking the Democrats for whining about Hulu refusing their issue ads, and falsely calling it censorship. And now we have Republicans issuing a bullshit blustery threat letter to Google not to limit searches for sketchy fake abortion centers.

If youre unaware, malicious anti-abortion folks have set up fake abortion centers, which they call crisis pregnancy centers, that are masquerading as actual abortion providers, but which are only there to lie to vulnerable patients about their options, and push them to give birth. Last month, Democrats (again, deeply questionably) told Google that it should demote search results pointing to these misleading centers when people are searching for abortions. As Ive argued for years, politicians have no rights trying to dictate anything about search results or content moderation. Coming from politicians there is always an implied threat that if these search results dont come out the way the politicians want, they may take action in the form of legislation.

And, now, a bunch of Republican Attorneys General have sent this ridiculous threat letter to Google with the opposite type of threat, saying that they will take action if Google does limit the search results to these centers. The letter is hilarious in that it whines about politicians seeking to wield Googles immense market power by pressuring the company to discriminate against pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in Google search results when these Republicans are doing the exact same thing just in the other direction.

Unfortunately, severalnational politicians now seek to wield Googles immense market power by pressuring the companyto discriminate against pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in Google search results, in onlineadvertising, and in its other products, such as Google Maps. As the chief legal officers of ourrespective States, we the undersigned Attorneys General are extremely troubled by this gallinglyun-American political pressure. We wish to make this very clear to Google and the other marketparticipants that it dwarfs: If you fail to resist this political pressure, we will act swiftly to protectAmerican consumers from this dangerous axis of corporate and government power.

Note that the letter from Republicans is much more explicit in the threat (and its coming from Attorneys General, so actual law enforcement agents, rather than elected legislature members who have much less power to act on their own).

The letter is chock full of nonsense.

Complying with these demands would constitute a grave assault on the principle of freespeech. Unbiased access to information, while no longer a component of Googles corporatecreed, is still what Americans expect from your company.

Thats bullshit. Its a search engine. The entire point is bias. It is literally ranking the search result to try to bring up the most relevant, and that, inherently, means bias. The attacks on free speech are not from Google trying to serve up more relevant search results, but from politicians of both parties sending these competing threat letters to try to pressure Google into modifying search results to get their own preferred search results shown.

This is what people are talking about when they say that all this politician jawboning and grandstanding is working the refs. As we noted last year, the bipartisan attacks on the internet are really all about trying to control the flow of information in their favor, and leaning on powerful companies to try to get their own side more prominence.

And, of course, Google itself has contributed to this somewhat. For years it took a completely hands-off approach to directly modifying its search results, noting that the algorithm returned what the algorithm returned. Yet almost exactly a decade ago, we noted that, for the first time, Google was caving to outside pressure to modify its search results when it promised the MPAA that it would start demoting websites based on DMCA notices.

We warned that this would open the floodgates of others pressuring Google to make modifications to demote sites they disliked, but now its reaching new and ever more ridiculous levels, with politicians of both major political parties screaming take it down from one side and leave it up from the other, with both sides threatening to take some form of punitive action if theyre not obeyed.

All of this is dangerous. All of this is government interfering with the 1st Amendment rights of sites to display information, content, and expression how they best see fit. Both the Democrats and Republicans need to stop this ridiculousness. Stop demanding how sites operate.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, control, crisis pregnancy centers, democrats, jawboning, republicans, search, search rankings, working the refsCompanies: google

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Politicians Whining About Censorship Are All Just Trying To Dictate The Terms Of Debate - Techdirt

Meta's third-party fact-checkers have flagged as "false information" posts on Instagram and Facebook accusing the Biden administration of changing the definition of a recession in order to deny that the U.S. economy has entered one. This is yet another reminder that the project of purportedly independent fact-checking on social media is a highly partisan one, in which legitimately debatable opinions are passed off as objective truth.

Last week, the White House published an online article disputing the standard definition of an economic recession: i.e., two consecutive fiscal quarters in which GDP growth was negative.

"Both official determinations of recessions and economists' assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the dataincluding the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes," wrote the White House. "Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this yeareven if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarterindicates a recession."

This post has been widely sharedand in some cases, mockedon social media. Graham Allen, an Instagram personality, posted a video reacting to the post in which he asked Siri to define the termrecession. Siri's definition: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

But Allen's video is currently obscured on Instagram; users can still watch it, but they first have to click past a disclaimer that it contains "false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers." A similar label has appeared on some Facebook posts that also take issue with the Biden administration's wordplay.

The fact-checker is Politifact, a fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute. Politifact is an official third-party fact-checking apparatus for Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. This means that PolitiFact is not like any ordinary website that offers a critique of a political narrative: PolitiFact's critiques are enforced by social media platforms.

In this instance, PolitiFact has rated as false the claim that "the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession." PolitiFact acknowledges that the Biden administration's efforts to spin current economic conditions as something other than a recession are political in nature. Nevertheless, the fact-checkers conclude that since the White House is citing the National Bureau of Economic Research's official definition, the administration is on solid footing.

Phil Magness, director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research, thinks PolitiFact is playing games.

"In this case, PolitiFact's 'ruling' is compounded by the fact that they have previously invoked the very same definition of a recession2 consecutive quarters of GDP decline in previous rulings to either provide cover to exaggerated Democratic claims about an impending recession or tear down Republican claims to the same effect," he tells Reason.

In a recent op-ed forThe Wall Street Journal, Magness explained that the NBER is not the "official arbiter of recessions"; on the contrary, the federal government has often used the general definition preferred by most lay people, as well as Siri:

Mr. Biden's economic advisers are certainly free to make the case for a revised determination. The NBER takes a more holistic approach, in part because some recessionary events are shorter than two quarters or manifest in nonconsecutive quarters. But this rationale worksagainstthe White House's current argument, which seeks to delay acknowledging a recession even if a two-quarter decline is observed this year. The NBER committee has previously acknowledged recessions that fell short of a strict and sustained two-quarter contraction. This last happened during the 2000 dot-com bust, which played out in nonconsecutive quarterly drops.

While recognizing its limitations, the traditional definition of a recession provides a functional rule of thumb to interpret events as they unfold. The NBER determination is a rigorous and reputable historical indicator for dating the beginning and end of business-cycle troughs, but it isn't suitable for real-time policy determinations.

This is hardly the first time that the social media fact-checking industry has failed to add clarity to a contentious issue. Last year, PolitiFact rated as false the claim that COVID-19 is 99 percent survivable for most age groups.

"Experts say a person cannot determine their own chances at surviving COVID-19 by looking at national statistics, because the data doesn't take into account the person's own risks and COVID-19 deaths are believed to be undercounted," wrote PolitiFact.

Regardless of what "experts say," it is certainly the case that individual persons can estimate their likelihood of surviving COVD-19 based on national statistics. The disease's age discrimination is extreme: The overwhelming majority of young, healthy people are not at significant risk, especially when compared with elderly Americans. This was a curious fact-check, and it was hardly the first.

Science Feedback, another of Meta's fact-checking partners, wrongly labeled as false one of my own articles about the efficacy of mask mandates in schools. Not only was the fact-check incorrect, but it also introduced a new error: The fact-checker suggested that my article had erroneously claimed masks don't work to stop the spread of COVID-19 in schools. In actuality, my article had only asserted that there wasn't much compelling evidence that mask mandateshad made a difference. (A year later, this distinction is moot, since even COVID-cautious public health officials now admit the cloth masks required in most schools do practically nothing to thwart the variants.) After I pointed out the mistake to Facebook, Science Feedback removed the "false information" label.

These are concerning mistakes. Media organizations routinely get things wrong, but the premise of fact-checkers was supposed to be that they are somehow above the fray, only weighing in when something can be proven or disproven quite definitively. Instead, they are often making dubious judgment calls on issues where reasonable disagreements exist.

"The fact-checking industry has become a partisan arbiter of political disputes, using claims of expertise that its writers do not actually possess to censor and shut down challenges to the political left," says Magness.

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Facebook, Instagram Posts Flagged as False for Noting Biden's Recession Wordplay - Reason