Quote:

---

MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship

Predictably, this entirely American disruption has blue-checkmarked commentariat shrieking about Vladimir Putin on social media.

Just as predictably, it’s also got them calling for the censorship of social media.

The New York Times has published two new articles titled “The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media” and “Violence on Capitol Hill Is a Day of Reckoning for Social Media”, both arguing for more heavy-handed restrictions on speech from Silicon Valley tech giants.

This narrative which seeds the idea that unregulated communication on the internet will lead to violent uprisings is funny coming from Frankel, who, as a Twitter follower recently observed, wrote a piece in 2018 condemning the Iranian government for restricting protesters’ social media access during the demonstrations at that time.

(And) “We know the social media companies have been lackadaisical at best” at stopping extremism from growing on their platforms, Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, told NYT. “Freedom of expression is not the freedom to incite violence. That is not protected speech.”

We will likely see many more such articles in the coming days, arguing for increased regulation of internet communication to prevent future incidents ...

But how do you predict what protests are going to be “violent”? How do you decide which protests and what political dissent need to be censored and which ones should be permitted to communicate freely? Do you just leave it up to Silicon Valley oligarchs to make the call? Or do you have them consult with the government like they’ve been doing? Are either of these institutions you’d trust to regulate what protests are worthy of being permitted to organize online?

Because the actual power structures in the United States seem to be interested in simply censoring the internet to eliminate political dissent altogether.

In 2017 top officials from Facebook, Twitter and Google were brought before the Senate Judiciary Committee and admonished to come up with policies that will “prevent the fomenting of discord” in the United States.

Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii demanded, for her part, that the companies adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord.”

Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer, former FBI agent, and member of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, made the following apocalyptic proclamation: “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions ... Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced."

That sounds an awful like government officials and operatives telling social media corporations that it’s their job to censor communication which could facilitate any kind of unrest, no matter how justified.


https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/msm-already-using-capitol-hill-riot-
to-call-for-more-internet-censorship-a3a47494b4bc

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Goodbye Boston Tea Party. So long Declaration of Independence.

---

Quote:

---

(after 9/11) Just as we were supposed to hate the crazy suicidal Muslims yearning for harems of afterlife virgins, we are now supposed to feel disgust for Chinese slurpers of bat soup. And just as we were supposed to loathe the brutal and incompetent governments of Muslim-majority nations, now we are told to revile the oppressive censorship-addicted regime in Beijing.

---

Quote:

---

But the worst ... is the NYT’s tech reporters, due to influence and reach if no other reason. When Silicon Valley monopolies, publicly pressured by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other lawmakers, united to remove Parler from the internet, the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.”

That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a virtual consensus in mainstream corporate journalism: it’s an animating cause for them.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censo
rship

---

Quote:

---

In Landmark Free Speech Case, SCOTUS Rules Schools Can't Police Social Media Posts Made Off-Campus

In a landmark decision on campus free speech, the Supreme Court today ruled in an 8 to 1 vote in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. that students' social media speech conducted off campus is protected by the First Amendment.

The case involved a disgruntled cheerleader, B.L. was a student at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, who tried out for the school’s varsity cheerleading squad.

When she did not make the varsity cheer, she was offered a spot on the cheerleading squad’s junior varsity team.

Justice Stephen Breyer states with considerable restraint:

“B.L. did not accept the coach’s decision with good grace, particularly because the squad coaches had placed an entering freshman on the varsity team.”

B.L. met a friend at the Cocoa Hut, a local convenience store, and used her phone to post two photos on Snapchat.

In the first image, both B. L. and her friend are shown with middle fingers raised with the caption:

“F**k school f**k softball f**k cheer f**k everything.”

In the second image, there is just a caption, which read:

“Love how me and [another student] get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but tha[t] doesn’t matter to anyone else?”

Critically, she was off campus when posting the Snapchat on a weekend day.

A lower court decided that the school overstepped by kicking B.L. off of the junior varsity squad, but the school district appealed.

Justice Breyer, writing for the majority, noted:

"It might be tempting to dismiss B.L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary. "

Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

As a result of this decision, schools will no longer be able to retaliate when students voice their opinions off campus, so long as the speech in question is not disruptive to the function of the school.

The "substantial disruption" test was established in Tinker v. Des Moines, which found that students were within their rights to wear arm bands protesting the Vietnam War to school because it did not substantially disrupt the school's operations.

During oral arguments in April, B.L.'s lawyer told the Court that she "was punished for merely expressing frustration with a four-letter word to her friends outside of school on a weekend. Her message may seem trivial, but for young people, the ability to voice their emotions to friends without fear of school censorship may be the most important freedom of all."

---