Category: Censorship

In Summary

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I feel compelled to say something about President Trump and recent events, but realize that I would merely be repeating things I’ve said in my few most recent posts. So I will briefly summarize, and then move on to other things in 2021.

1. The President did not meet any legal definition of incitement.

2. The President’s claim that the election was stolen has not actually been thoroughly investigated, much less disproven. The narrative — that the courts rejected it so it can’t be true — is nonsense: evidence is examined in trial, not in pre-trial review. We simply don’t know the extent of the fraud, and we don’t know that the President is wrong — nor to what extent.

3. I condemn unlawful riots, regardless of the motivation of the rioters. I condemn the 500+ riots of 2020 brought to us by a demonstrably false claim that police disproportionately kill young black men and do so with impunity. I condemn the one riot of 2021 brought to us, I believe, by people who believe the as yet unresolved claim that fraud determined this election.

4. If the President has been “unpresidential,” I can live with that: at no time since his inauguration has he been treated in a presidential fashion. Having never been shown the respect due his office, I won’t fault him for his behavior now.

5. And, finally, I think that there is no sense or justice for impeaching a President for making a claim that hasn’t been disproven and may be true or mostly true, and who has committed no crime.

—–

Powerful institutions silence opposing voices so that they can lie with impunity. The truth can defend itself: being the truth is always its greatest strength, and it will almost always prevail — if it is allowed to speak. This is why tyrants control the press, imprison dissidents, and force confessions.

The gravest injustice this year is not the 501st lawless riot. It is the silencing of so many voices by powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Be wary of anyone who tells you that depriving people of their voice is in everyone’s best interest.

“The Fourth Branch of Government”

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Last night Amazon, Apple, and Google shut down Twitter’s competitor, a small social media company called “Parler.”

Twitter has been blocking and censoring conservative voices for a long time. When they became blatant about it, and particularly after blocking the nation’s fourth largest newspaper for running a factually correct story that was critical of candidate Biden’s son Hunter, people began leaving Twitter and moving to Parler, which promised free speech without bias and censorship.

So the tech giants shut Parler down.

They have “reasons.” Tyrants always have “reasons” until they don’t need reasons anymore and can just do what they want.

Don’t let anyone convince you that this is just or right. We have very narrow laws that limit certain kinds of speech. They’re narrow for a reason, the product of centuries of legal wrangling and debate. What the tech giants are doing is saying that the laws aren’t good enough, and that, “for the common good,” it’s necessary to restrict speech beyond what the law prohibits. They’re taking it upon themselves to decide which protected speech is worthwhile and which is not, and to prohibit us from engaging in the kind they don’t think is worthwhile.

There is a new elite rising, a class of smart, young, educated, well-paid person who believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to say things that experts — that is, that their preferred experts — think are incorrect. They think that their superior intelligence, information, and judgment give them the right to silence views they consider harmful or irresponsible.

They will go on at great length to make their case, but it always come back to this: free speech is good, but only if it’s the *right* speech. Laws aren’t sufficient to protect us from wrong thinking, and so they’re going to help out. For the common good. For the people.

Tell them to stuff it.

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As one of those smart young technocrats commented yesterday on one of my posts:

“We are witnessing the halted of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking….”

So let me ask you: do *you* remember voting for Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon to represent you, to govern you, and to decide what you can and can’t say? Can you find this “fourth branch of government” in the Constitution?

Utterly Absurd

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In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote of a future featuring “atomic bombs,” in which “it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” That was thirty-one years before Trinity — before the detonation of the first atomic weapon in the sands of southern New Mexico.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrentheit 451, written in 1953, described ear-buds, those ubiquitous little earphones everyone wears today. He called them “seashells,” but we’d recognize them today — as we would the insular cocoon they created for the perpetually distracted wife of that novel’s protagonist.

Arthur C. Clarke predicted the geostationary orbit, that distance from the Earth — about 22,236 miles — at which a satellite will circle the planet precisely once each day, and so appear fixed in the sky above the same point on the Earth’s equator. He introduced this idea in 1945, more than a decade before the Russians shocked the world by placing the first artificial satellite, the short-lived Sputnik, in a far lower orbit. (In 1960, Clarke would feature the still-nonexistent geosynchronous communication satellite in his short story I Remember Babylon, which presaged, among other things, satellite television and broadband pornography.)

Science fiction writers predict the future. That’s their job. They get it wrong more often than right (a good thing, considering the prominent role of alien invasions and global catastrophes in the genre) but they do sometimes get it right — or get it wrong, but in ways that foreshadow our evolving reality.

H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke are acknowledged giants of science fiction. Not so Albert Teichner, a World War II veteran who most likely passed away in 1989, though biographical information is scarce. But the handful of stories Teichner wrote includes Cerebrum, a fanciful account of Facebook and Snapchat which he penned in 1963.

No, of course it isn’t really about modern social media, nor even the internet. But it does imagine a future in which everyone is networked with everyone else, their instant messaging coordinated by a central switching authority called, prosaically enough, “Central Switching.” It’s a world in which people are constantly connected, are distracted from the world around them by their non-stop mental messaging, and, having instantaneous access to every fact, know less and less, and grow lazier with each passing year.

Most interestingly, it’s a world in which one can be cut off from the great switching center, isolated from the perpetual stream of information and communication, and, so disconnected, become a social outcast and pariah.

That, at least, is nonsense. After all, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that the powers behind the internet could ever flex their digital muscles to reward and punish the consumers of their virtual wares?

I mean, Google, for instance. They wouldn’t do something like that.

OpenTwitter: A Wish List

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People who care about the free exchange of ideas — of any ideas, not merely the ideas that conform to the popular orthodoxies — are frustrated by a seeming paradox: though we are a free people living in an era of unparalleled connectivity in which the communication monopoly represented by old-fashioned media has effectively been destroyed, a small number of high-tech gatekeepers can, and sometimes do, impose their ideological restrictions on the rest of us.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and the various social media companies these giants own, collectively control the vast majority of public online content. They are all left-leaning technology companies that periodically suppress content they consider objectionable; that content is, more often than not, conservative. Though they each post a statement of content guidelines or community standards, the actual censorship strategies they use are opaque, and often seem arbitrary and subject to the whims of activists. In particular, conservative voices are routinely de-platformed — blocked, filtered, suspended — for seemingly trivial reasons, though high profile users are typically quickly re-instated, usually with a perfunctory apology for the “error.”

There is an obvious danger to the concentration of so much arbitrary editorial authority in the hands of a very few technology companies, particularly when they all broadly subscribe to the same left-leaning orthodoxy. Much was made of a bit of Russian “fake news” propaganda aimed at influencing the 2016 election. Any of the social media giants can, in an instant, have a greater impact on the information available leading up to an election than the Russians could ever dream of achieving.

I want a social media alternative that is effectively immune to institutional bias. It should have the following qualities.

  1. It should be free, open source, and easy for anyone to use. It should be available as web service, a PC-based application, and on mobile devices.
  2. It should be distributed, without any central data repository that would necessarily make it vulnerable to the owner of that repository. This means that it should be either a peer-to-peer system in which the information is stored in the individual computers of all of the users, or federated, meaning that an arbitrary number of servers together store the network’s contents, and anyone can add a server and become a repository.
  3. As a true platform, the system should impose no limitations on the content posted. All filtering/censoring/content restriction should be chosen by the user, and should be completely transparent to the user. Users may choose to “subscribe” to content filters created by others, but should always be able to determine what those filters restrict, and always be able to suspend or disable those filters.
  4. It should be possible to “white list” specific content providers, or collections of providers assembled by others, so that their content is never blocked. Further, it should be possible to receive notifications when content filters to which a user subscribes attempt to block that user’s white-listed providers; in general, it should be easy to discover when those you’ve trusted to filter your content are making choices with which you might not agree.
  5. Every implementation should adhere to these standards of openness, and an automated mechanism should exist to verify the compliance of any web site or application that claims to be a part of this social media system.

There are several open source social media platforms available, and a growing collection of interface standards. I don’t know how close any of them are to what I want, but I’m looking into them. Perhaps conservatives can get behind an alternative and begin to create a robust, truly open network that doesn’t suppress the discussion of ideas that challenge the left’s orthodoxy.

Why I Left Facebook

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Four years ago a cartoon contest was held in Garland, Texas. Organizers encouraged contestants to draw political cartoons in response to a terrorist attack by Islamic supremacists on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian newspaper, in January of 2015, in which a dozen people, including the newspaper’s publishing director Stéphane Charbonnier, were murdered.

This is the winning cartoon, drawn by a fellow named Bosch Fawstin.

On May 7, 2015, I posted the cartoon on Facebook, and added the following comment:

This was the winning drawing from the Garland, TX cartoon contest.

Bosch Fawstin, an ex-Muslim, drew the cartoon. As the cartoon suggests, and as Mr. Fawstin said, “I do it because we have been told we can’t.”

Having survived one Islamic supremacist attack, Mr. Fawstin has now gone into hiding.

* * * * *

I encourage everyone to quietly, and even politely, repost pictures of Mohammed. And I think they should do so with a note saying, in effect: “I really don’t care about Islam. I really don’t want to offend Muslims. But too many Muslims have asserted a right to tell me what I can and cannot say about Islam. That is unacceptable to me. It is part of our culture and heritage that we are free to say whatever we like about any faith, any ideology, any idea. And I am not willing to surrender that right, just to avoid offending Muslims. Or Buddhists. Or Hindus. Or Christians. Or even atheists. I am posting this picture to tell Islam that I do not consider it special, and to deny that it has any authority over me.”

Today I received a notification from Facebook. It read as follows:

An important message about your photo
Due to local legal restrictions, we limited access to your photo in Pakistan.

To which I replied, in what will be my last post on Facebook:

Facebook today has a market capitalization of just over half a trillion dollars. If they would rather censor Americans than risk offending the illiberal Islamist regime in Pakistan, then to hell with them. I’m glad I left.