From Suggested Guidelines to Police-Enforced Laws

The progression of censorship

In my last article, I featured videos of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testifying before the House Judiciary Committee regarding online censorship in general and the CTIL Files in particular. Today, I want to zoom out a little and discuss how this censorship apparatus operates in the real world.

First of all, we know from the covid debacle that when multiple governments respond to a problem in the same way, SOMEWHERE we’ll find proof of coordination. (You can’t get 100 humans to agree on ANYTHING, much less EVERYTHING!) When it came to covid response, we saw this in both the US and Europe. (One of the silver linings of The Swamp is its need to explain everything like a Bond villain.)

When it comes to censorship, governments and pseudo-governments around the world know their citizens won’t accept blatant censorship coming from the governments themselves. In America we enjoy a clearly worded First Amendment that (supposedly) prevents such governmental censorship, but even in parts of the world without such strong legal protections, governments must at least pretend to care about free speech.

This means in order to implement the censorship the liars want (because who else needs to censor, if not the liars?) they must first create “guidelines” detailing exactly how and why people should be censored — while leaving the actual censorship (mostly) up to the private platforms themselves. (At least at the beginning.)

It’s at this intersection of coordination and censorship we find this:

Yes, our friends at UNESCO don’t only create “guidelines” for how journalists should report on immigrants, the organization also knows just how to “moderate” social media platforms. And like all Bond villains, UNESCO has thoroughly explained the plan in this 59-page manual.

Reading through the entire thing (which I don’t recommend, to be honest), it’s clear the “DEI” generation has moved from college into the real world. This entire set of guidelines are simply feel-good terms attempting to obfuscate the REAL goal of the regulation — establishing an “acceptable” framework that forms the basis of the censorship industrial complex. (These guidelines stress “responsibilities” of governments, companies, and users — some might call that ‘getting the camel’s nose under the tent’.) Over and over, the guidelines repeat that the speech rights of others should always be respected — but we know that’s not how the system operates in reality.

Let’s take this section of guidelines and compare it to the real world:

Anybody who’s been banned from social media and filed an appeal knows there’s exactly zero transparency involved in the process. Often, the company doesn’t even tell you what the offensive content is or that it’s censoring you for saying it. Appeals from banned users receive automated rejection replies so quickly it’s hard to believe a human is even looking at the case — not a surprising result considering the same people who banned you preside over your appeal. (The “private market” version of ‘government has investigated government and found government did nothing wrong’.)

Once these standards are in place, it signals the next phase of censorship — adoption of the standards by governments around the world. (In fact, many of the tools implemented by the CTIL were going to be handled by the Disinformation Governance Board before the whole plan melted back into the shadows.) I’ve briefly talked about hate speech laws in Ireland, but the Emerald Isle is far from the only country under assault from hate speech laws.

One of the world’s worst authoritarian covid responses was in Australia, which is looking to regulate free speech under the guise of fighting misinformation. (Sound familiar?) On the fact sheet for the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, the government is very clear about what types of speech should be regulated:

So……basically everything?

See, they just want to prevent the spread of disinformation! So if they need to boot you off of Twitter or yank away your bank account — even though what you say is true — that’s what they’ll do! But don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll be SUPER sympathetic when you appeal their decision — after all, governments are well-known for coming clean when they screw up.

In practice, we see this censorship apparatus when we look at the “lab leak” theory during 2021. Government-funded “fact checkers” pointed to “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” and pressured social media companies to remove anybody who (correctly) stated that the paper was part of the gain of function coverup. (Later, we found Fauci pressured the authors as well…..I wonder why!)

The actual truth of the situation didn’t matter to the censors, who had their orders: Ban lab leak “truthers”…..who got banned by the hundreds or thousands.

But then a funny thing happened: Joe Biden and his administration demanded a deeper investigation into the matter. Did Biden get banned from Twitter just like numerous others who were simply two steps ahead of the rest of the country?

Of course not — the censorship complex simply changed the rules.

ABC News was helpful enough to link the events for me!

THIS is how the censorship industrial complex operates in reality. If you’re saying the approved things, you can lie and lie and lie while your detractors get banned. If you flip on a dime, the people who got banned yesterday for saying THE SAME THING YOU’RE SAYING TODAY will stay banned. After all, yesterday the lab leak was “debunked” — so what if it’s not debunked today?

Any remaining notion that regulation of speech will be even-handed should be obliterated with this recent real-world example of “hate speech” on college campuses. For years, we’ve heard from well-credentialed idiots in “higher education” that words are literal violence (but silence is also violence) and therefore speech should be regulated by Top Experts (meaning themselves).

Go onto campus saying “women should compete against women” and you’re hounded by the whole school for your hate speech — but when it comes to calling for the genocide of Jews….well, that speech requires IMPORTANT CONTEXT.

Full hearing here.

The funny (funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha) thing about this video is that the college officials are actually correct about when speech turns into threats — at least from a First Amendment/free speech perspective. The problem is that they’re obviously quite full of shit because they’ve been calling all manner of completely legal speech on campus a threat for the last decade or so — it’s only on this particular question that they see the need for ‘context’. (Maybe the context is they don’t want to get run out of town by the New Red Guard!)

And predictably, these colleges are going to “learn” the wrong lesson and implement hate speech rules across campuses nationwide, as the Wharton Board of Advisors suggests:

Maybe when these regulations are turned against the very people who created them, they’ll finally understand that freedom of speech is too important to leave in the hands of “experts” — especially those who have reasons to stretch the truth or outright lie.

This is running a little long, so I’ll leave the discussion of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Alex Jones for another day. (It’s super interesting, I suggest watching it if you have the time!) Suffice it to say that Jones — as perhaps the first “cancellation” — has a whole lot to say about censorship and where it’s coming from.

Until then, enjoy your weekend, Screamers!

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Edit: Bonus teaser for a really great interview with Michael Shellenberger from The Shawn Ryan show!

Part 1
Part 2
Censorship segment