There is an epidemic of anti-white racism and anti-free speech censorship at many high schools across Canada. If you don’t believe that, then it’s worth looking into what happened at Strathcona high school, Edmonton, when students voiced that exact sentiment: emails to parents, a witch hunt orchestrated by the administration and school board, official condemnations from school authorities, a police report filed by the principal, libelous accusations by the media, and much more.
The freedom of speech is on the ropes, and it just received another body blow. Over at Amazon, you can still get Friedrich Nietzsche’s God Is Dead. God Remains Dead. And We Have Killed Him. You can still get Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. You can get Christianity Disproved: The conclusive proof that Christianity is false. You can get God Needs To Go: Why Christian Beliefs Fail. You can get All That’s Wrong with the Bible: Contradictions, Absurdities, and More. You can get Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer: Breaking the Spell of Christian Belief. And on and on and on. But you can’t get Allah is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion by the New English Review’s Rebecca Bynum.
The post that generated the most controversy was a screenshot of another person’s post that she then posted onto her own Instagram account. The post compared the current politically divisive culture in the U.S. to Nazi Germany. The screenshot stated:
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children.
“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Morena, the political party of Mexican president López Obrador, submitted a bill on February 8th calling for fines of up to $4.4 million USD against social media companies for violating users’ right to free speech. The law would apply only to platforms with over one million users in Mexico, which covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
As a US citizen, this makes me ashamed.
A study by the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, titled “False Allegation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Censors Conservatives,” is downright chilling—and it tells you everything you need to know about the dishonesty of those who purport to be arbiters of truth in modern American society.
Gab.com is an online community where freedom of speech is paramount, and it explains it is not the website’s job to fact check “political opinions, news, history, math problems, memes, or anything else.”
With those goals, it’s not surprising that it’s been banned from app stores and deplatformed by a long list of Silicon Valley interests.
As expected, the government will claim they are ‘protecting Canadians,’ while actually seeking to protect government from the criticism that is necessary in a free society.
There is a free speech debate at Drake University over hateful and vulgar tweets from Associate English Professor Beth Younger, who called for Republicans “to suffer.” We have seen increasing vulgar attacks from academics, including such high-profile figures as Laurence Tribe in the last few years. Notably, Twitter did not suspend Younger’s account for calling for harm to all Republicans. I do not believe that she should be barred from social media or fired from Drake as a matter of free speech. Even with professors who have justified the murder of conservatives or killing police are protected in such hateful expressions. The solution to such hate speech is more (and better) speech. I would rather we denounce such speech than censor it.
h/t Marvin
A new generation of media crusaders clamor for government control over what you see, hear, and read—and for banning their competition
American journalism once thought of itself as being inherently and institutionally pro free speech. Visitors to the Newseum, the media industry’s temple of self-glorification on Constitution Avenue in Washington, were once greeted with the First Amendment inscribed across 74 vertical feet of lofty marble. The Newseum has been closed since late 2019, its operators having discovered the hard way that the public doesn’t share the media’s heroic level of regard for itself.
Report calls for powerful new federal body to regulate social media
A federally funded panel is recommending the creation of a powerful new government regulator to oversee social media companies such as Facebook and Google and to require them to have strong content-moderation practices and to comply with a new legal duty to act responsibly.
The report by the Public Policy Forum (PPF)’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, to be released on Wednesday, also calls for the creation of a federal “e-tribunal” to hear complaints about specific social media posts.
The federal Liberal government plans to introduce legislation early this year to regulate social media companies, with a focus on online hate and harassment. The report’s recommendations are aimed at influencing that legislation.
Fuck you Nazi.
Repairing free speech is the No. 1 priority in this nation right now.
Here’s a sad truth we now have to live with.
The America we know, the America we grew up with, the America we had until a year or less ago, is gone. The Constitution of the United States of America, the “greatest document ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man at any one time,” as Gladstone called it, lies in ruins.
Among many other catastrophes, we have lost freedom of speech. This just happened within the last few weeks.
Oh boy.
This is Twitter’s attempt to outsource defamation liability for its left-wing, partisan content warnings to a hand-picked pool of users. It’s the ideological offspring of the heckler’s veto and Mao’s communist social credit system. https://t.co/Ma8eWFZOgT
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 25, 2021
Most Canadians want the government and social media companies to do more to curtail hateful and racist behaviour online even if it diminishes freedom of speech and privacy, according to a national opinion survey.
The findings add to fraught debates over free speech and censorship, the power of Big Tech, the boundary between opinions and abuse, and how best to maintain free speech in an omnipresent online world.
One poll commissioned by a biased organization that sucks on the government teat. I refuse to believe Canadians are this stupid.
This reeks of government propaganda.
Hundreds of publishing officials, professors, and academics have signed a petition to blacklist Trump administration alumni from receiving book deals. It is the latest step in a rapidly expanding anti-free speech movement in the United States. In the wake of the Capitol riot, Democratic members and others are calling for a crackdown on free speech and punitive actions for those viewed as complicit with Trump. What is striking is how censorship, blacklists, and speech controls are being repackaged as righteous and virtuous. Indeed, the failure to sign such anti-free speech screeds is a precarious choice for many. It is as easy as calling for tolerance through intolerance. After all, why burn books if you can just effectively ban them?
Federal Heritage Minister, Steven Guilbeault, has been vocal on social media recently regarding his opinion on Big Tech’s censorship of prominent figures and free speech platforms.
