Rising fascism in the US

Covert influence campaigns run out of Russia and Iran repeatedly have been targeted by social media platforms over the years. This crackdown is the rare instance in which a U.S.-sponsored campaign targeting foreign audiences was found to violate the companies’ rules.

The accounts are being taken down at a time when social media giants have been trying to crack down on disinformation campaigns about the war in Ukraine. But much of that work has been focused on fighting efforts by Russian authorities to promote propaganda about the war, including false claims about Ukrainian military aggression in the region or blaming Western nations’ complicity in the war.

U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
By Raphael Satter

constantly bad mouth the BBC and its reporters.

A lot of people on social media were censured, censored, and banned temporarily and permanently for arguing with the government narrative on vaccines, and for disputing numbers and data methodology used by the CDC, and accusing the CDC of being manipulated by the Trump and Biden administrations, for a few examples.
People who I am associated with across several platforms and I experienced these unwarranted intrusions into our interactions.
Plenty of law enforcement, teachers, school support staff, and medical personnel who didn’t feel comfortable getting vaxxed were fired.

It was refreshing to see someone provide the single piece of evidence I always ask for rather than whining about how I should be the one to support their argument.

For the record, oralloy accepts vaccine science as well.

Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago.

In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules that sought to prohibit “harmful misinformation” about the virus and its vaccines.

Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter. The policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation.

Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change. Instead, some Twitter users Monday night spotted a note added to the page on Twitter’s website that outlines its Covid policy.

“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note read.

Musk has promised to restore many previously banned Twitter accounts as soon as this week. It is possible that among the restored accounts will be some of the 11,000 banned under Twitter’s former Covid misinformation rules.

The Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO tested the limits of Twitter’s previous policy in the early days of the pandemic. In March and April 2020, Musk used the social network to downplay the magnitude of the crisis and express frustration with how the pandemic had been handled. He repeatedly urged the end of the stay-at-home policies, despite public health officials’ insistence at the time that social distancing remained necessary to avoid a wave of infections that could overwhelm hospitals.

On a Tesla earnings call with Wall Street analysts in April 2020, Musk went off script to rail against Covid policies.

“I would call it, ‘forcibly imprisoning people in their homes’ against all their Constitutional rights, in my opinion, and breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America or built this country,” Musk said on the call. “It’s an outrage.”

Musk says he has twice had Covid. Despite his skepticism of public health policy, he has said he supports vaccination, even if he doesn’t believe the shots should be mandated. Still, he said in a New York Times podcast interview with technology journalist Kara Swisher in September 2020 that he would not get vaccinated because, “I’m not at risk for Covid, nor are my kids.”

When Swisher confronted Musk with the possibility that many people could die if they didn’t follow public health recommendations, he replied bluntly: “Everybody dies.”

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A lot of people on social media were censured, censored, and banned temporarily and permanently for arguing with the government narrative on vaccines, and for disputing numbers and data methodology used by the CDC, and accusing the CDC of being manipulated by the Trump and Biden administrations, for a few examples.

These were people on media sites owned by private companies, right? These companies can set their own terms of use.

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People who I am associated with across several platforms and I experienced these unwarranted intrusions into our interactions.

What "unwarranted intrusions" are you talking about? It's difficult to understand where you're coming from here. Most platforms have some sort of content policy. Enforcement of those policies isn't government censorship, it's part of the user agreement with the site.

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Plenty of law enforcement, teachers, school support staff, and medical personnel who didn’t feel comfortable getting vaxxed were fired.

They didn't get fired because they felt uncomfortable – they got canned because they refused to get vaccinated when it was a condition of their continued employment. Were you fired for refusing to get vaccinated or something? I'm trying to understand why you feel this situation is so intolerable and why you connect it to "fascism"..

Voices with a different opinion or different experiences around vaccines and illness can speak in response to opinions they disagree with—instead of banishing people from social media.

Well done.

Well done.

Voices with a different opinion or different experiences around vaccines and illness can speak in response to opinions they disagree with—instead of banishing people from social media.

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Voices with a different opinion or different experiences around vaccines and illness can speak in response to opinions they disagree with—instead of banishing people from social media.

People are thrown off of particular platforms if they violate the terms of use. That doesn't mean they are silenced on social media as they can simply avail themselves of other choices. Which is what many have done. And it's not "opinions" that are being flagged but false statements which concern public health, national security, or the democratic processes or ones which condone violence.

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Plenty of people think our government is lying or incorrect about public health, national security, and democratic processes and myriad other issues—and that we have the right to express our disagreement with this enforced submission to the government narrative. The government’s anti democratic and unconstitutional collusion with the social media monopolies was impacting free speech in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I realize it may not last, but I have a spark of hope today where there has been none for a while.

If Musk wants a wide open free-for-all, yes that's his choice. But if advertisers start(or continue) exiting in droves he may change his mind.

Que sera sera.