By Eugene Gant
04/22/2022
If you never thought we’d arrive at the day when a former president called for censorship to stop what he disingenuously called “disinformation,” well, the train is at the station. Yet the most amusing thing about Barack Hussein Obama’s speech at Stanford yesterday is that he peddled “disinformation” to justify Big Tech censorship [My Remarks on Disinformation at Stanford, Medium.com, April 21, 2022]. Those to be censored, of course, just happen to be those whom Obama and comrades don’t like; namely, VDARE, websites like it, and just about anyone else slammed as alt-right. In other words, don’t count on Big Tech to shut down leftist liars such as Rob “Meathead” Reiner or Stephen King.
BREAKING: Barack Obama, the corrupt former president who used federal agencies to harass and spy on political opponents, calls for further censorship and government regulation suppressing free speech on Big Tech platforms.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) April 21, 2022
Obama’s no dummy. He never targeted the right or conservatives generally in his speech. But he was very clear about who is “spreading” disinformation. People like Steven Bannon. It’s certainly not people like Obama, who said, with a straight face, that Flu Manchu vaccines are “safe” and “effective.” Right. That’s why 25-year-old athletes are dropping like flies, and tens of thousands of the vaxxed are still contracting The Virus.
But forget Obama’s disinformation for now.
Bannon and his ilk “understand it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions,” but instead “just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage,” the half-blood prince continued:
You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.
Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won. …
Without some standards, [the] implications of this technology, for our elections, for our legal system, for our democracy, for rules of evidence, for our entire social order are frightening and profound.
And so, because the First Amendment “doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter, any more than it applies to editorial decisions made by The New York Times or Fox News,” social media must “make choices” about what they allow. After all, they already do. They’re just not censoring enough.
And because no one really knows how social media decides what to censor, it’s time for a public debate. It’s time for “rules” to “draw lines between opinions, facts, honest mistakes, intentional deceptions.”
Thus, we must “reform” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Big Tech from defamation lawsuits arising from content because they are not, technically, publishers but instead neutral bulletin boards:
While I’m not convinced that wholesale repeal of Section 230 is the answer, it is clear that tech companies have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. And we need to consider reforms to Section 230 to account for those changes, including whether platforms should be required to have a higher standard of care, when it comes to advertising on their site.
Scrapping 230 is a key tactical objective for the radical left. Leftists believe Section 230 protects “hate speech,” and well, “disinformation,” because Big Tech isn’t held accountable for them. But repealing 230 would only empower the left. It certainly wouldn’t stop their “hate speech” and “misinformation,” which social media rarely censor now. Instead, it would expose conservative websites to unremitting, bankrupting lawfare from well-heeled communist operations such as the $PLC and ACLU. They would use a repeal or revision to punish conservatives, immigration patriots, and, most notably, whites who oppose The Great Replacement.
That’s the end game. Now that two or three major tech platforms virtually control all communication in the United States, it’s a short step for the communist totalitarians who run them to shut down anyone they want. Just ask Twitter chieftain Parag Agrawal.
But again, look at where we are. A former two-term president who claimed to have taught constitutional law wants to censor those with whom he disagrees.
That means you.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.