What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals — only of his rights.
- Judith Crist
Hedge posts 4.9 illegal aliens crossed the border. Twitter insists this is hate speech. Now I have been banned many times by FB for true speech. Twitter I rarely use. Substack banned me once “by accident” but took about two weeks to decide it was a mistake.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/zero-hedge-suspended-again-twitter-reporting-facts
Pivoting to the Covid fraud, for almost three years censorship has prevailed. Millions chose to inject due to propaganda. Propaganda backed by punishment for disobedience. To this hour punishment is meted out based completely on propaganda. A child of 4 is forced out of class for refusing to mask, The father of a 4-year-old California boy in transitional kindergarten said school officials called the police Thursday to boot his son from class over his refusal to adhere to a district mask policy. Masks do not work. Dr. Paul Alexander writes-‘The case rate curves for Alameda and Contra Costa counties are near-identical. Because the neighboring counties are similar in so many respects, if masking policy had an impact on pandemic outcomes, one would expect to see some sort of discrepancy in the graph.’ ‘Comparing COVID-19 cases rates in Alameda County, which instituted an indoor mask mandate, and neighboring Contra Costa County, which did not mandate masks indoors.’ Case rates are identical. No difference. In fact, Contra Costa appears lower.
Matches the many papers I have written showing that COVID masks are ineffective and even harmful (More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms).”
Wired wrote in 2020: As Margaret Roberts describes in Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall, the Chinese government also uses techniques like flooding—overwhelming the information space with state-favorable views and propaganda—to reduce the likelihood that citizens view state-critical content; it’s not just about telling platforms to remove disliked truths. With Covid-19, authorities instructed media outlets to limit negative coverage (what the Indian government aimed to do), and Chinese journalists were left combating a flood of positive comments about the crisis. Though within very different information and online ecosystems, similar techniques have played out elsewhere, like in Russia, where state-controlled media organs are designed to praise and justify Kremlin policy and to undermine, sometimes quite aggressively, any people or evidence challenging those narratives.
The pandemic has illuminated how censorship in one country can potentially affect global public health, safety, and security. It has also provided authoritarian and even historically democratic governments with cannon fodder to crack down on coronavirus information within their borders—here and there, against real misinformation, but largely against truthful information the regime doesn’t want getting out. When a crisis arrives, those looking to maintain or expand power are bound to exploit it. And in the case of the coronavirus pandemic, as countries around the world have used the crisis to justify greater state censorship, it’s a reminder for democracies of the importance of promoting and protecting not just internet freedom, but fundamental speech and protest freedoms too.
Next up is Climate Censorship: The Wall Street Journal writes “Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition.
A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.
Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”
Of course but understanding that even they are compelled to speak out on censorship points to it's folly.