‘The Online Safety Bill, the most far-reaching online censorship law to ever be proposed in the UK, has been presented to Parliament.
UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to “make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online.”
However, as with many bills that are positioned as a way to keep children safe, this Online Safety Bill contains sweeping speech restrictions that will affect all UK internet users.
The bill requires Big Tech companies to take action against “priority legal but harmful” content which will be decided by the government. The DCMS Secretary of State has the power to add more categories of priority legal but harmful content via secondary legislation in the future.
According to the Financial Times, this secondary legislation “requires less scrutiny from MPs [Members of Parliament] than the original bill.”
Companies are also required to report “emerging harms” to the UK’s communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom).
Additionally, the Online Safety Bill outlaws sending “knowingly false” communications that are sent “with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm,” requires large social media companies to introduce identity verification tools, gives Ofcom the power to force companies to use “better and more effective” proactive content moderation technology, tasks Big Tech with determining which of its advertisers are pushing scams, mandates that any website hosting pornography put “robust checks in place to ensure that users are 18 years old or over,” and more.
UK citizens who are found guilty of offenses under the Online Safety Bill can be imprisoned or fined.
Not only does the Online Safety Bill contain numerous provisions that can be used to silence UK citizens and punish them for their online speech but powerful “recognised media outlets” are exempt from any regulation in the bill. Some of the outlets that will be getting special carveouts under this bill have even been praised by politicians for pushing for stronger “online safety” laws.
The punishments for companies that fail to censor enough under the Online Safety Bill include having their sites blocked and being hit with multi-billion dollar fines worth up to 10% of their annual turnover. Tech company executives can also be jailed if they fail to cooperate with Ofcom’s information requests.
Despite introducing strong punishments for tech companies that don’t remove enough harmful content, the Online Safety Bill has yet to reveal the categories of legal the harmful content that tech companies will have to target under this bill.
Earlier this week, Dorries said large platforms will be required to remove legal but harmful content “if it is already banned in their own terms and conditions.”
Yet today’s UK government press release for the Online Safety Bill says that the categories of legal but harmful content will be “set by the government and approved by Parliament.” The press release also lists “exposure to self-harm, harassment and eating disorders” as examples of harmful content that online platforms will be required to remove.
The introduction of the Online Safety Bill to Parliament is the first stage of its legislative journey.
Numerous UK rights groups have blasted the Online Safety Bill and warned that it will restrict free speech.
“The Online Safety Bill is set to rip up the rule book as far as traditional British free speech standards are concerned,” Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said. “This is a censor’s charter that will give state backing to big tech censorship on a scale that we have never seen before.”
Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, warned that the bill will have a “chilling effect on free speech.”
“We are particularly concerned that the government has said it will force social media platforms to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content, including ‘harassment,’” Young added. “That will enable political activists and interest groups claiming to speak on behalf of disadvantaged groups to silence their opponents by branding any views they disagree with as ‘harassment.’”
Matthew Lesh, Head of Public Policy at the think tank Institute of Economic Affairs said: “The UK threatening tech executives with jail time is eerily similar to how Russia and other authoritarian countries are currently behaving. It is an attack on free speech and entrepreneurialism.”
Before the bill was presented to Parliament, the UK’s main opposition party, the Labour Party, suggested that it would offer little obstruction to the Online Safety Bill and complained that it hadn’t been introduced fast enough.
Last October, Labour Leader Keir Starmer lamented that it has been “three years since the government promised an Online Safety Bill. Starmer also claimed that “the damage caused by harmful content online is worse than ever” and promised to support the bill if its second reading was brought forward to the end of 2021.
More recently, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell said that Labour supports “the principles of the bill that is finally being published” and claimed that “delay up to this point has come with significant cost.”’https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-online-safety-bill-censorship-parliament/
It really comes as no surprise that ‘Disney+ has censored an episode of The Simpsons in Hong Kong, where the streaming service recently launched. The episode was censored over references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Until June last year, Hong Kong operated separately from China. Hong Kongers enjoyed more freedoms than the mainland.
However, since Beijing enforced the national security law in Hong Kong, the censorship laws enforced in China started applying on the island.
On social media, Disney+ subscribers began reporting that an episode in Season 16 had been removed in Hong Kong.
We’ve managed to confirm that the Season 16 episode “Goo Goo Gai Pan” has been removed in Hong Kong.
The episode had two references to the Tiananmen Square massacre. It featured the famous Tank Man Photo and a plaque with the statement “Tien An Men Square: On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.” People often use the statement to mock the government’s attempts to erase the event from history.
In China references to the Tiananmen Square massacre are heavily censored and is called the “Tiananmen Square Incident.”
On June 4, 1989, in an effort to stop a protest by students about corruption in the government and democratic reforms, the Chinese government sent the army to Tiananmen Square with tanks. The exact death toll from the clash between protesters and the army has never been released, although it is speculated to be in the thousands.
‘I have heard from multiple people now that Comcast is sending Unreported Truths emails to spam no matter how many times users mark them otherwise.
And this just came in.
I have also heard that some hospitals are blocking all access to Unreported Truths on their networks. Because science! Sciency-sciency-science! is all about making sure people can’t have access to data that might make them question dogma for themselves.
‘Facebook’s parent company Meta has launched a program to “support” journalism in New Zealand and has made a new commitment to managing “defamation.”
The aim of the program is presented as a way to help media organizations in New Zealand create sustainable business models.
The program includes a Grant Fund, Audience Development Accelerator, the creation of a News Innovation Advisory Group, and the provision of digital training focused on engagement for news organizations.
According to Facebook’s head of public policy for Australia and New Zealand Mia Garlick, the program will involve 12 media organizations with regionally, culturally, and digitally diverse publications. The idea is that these organizations will “come together and try to innovate and learn from experts and really collaborate on new strategies to drive business growth both on and off Facebook.”
Garlick said that the International Center for Journalists would help establish the advisory group.
“What we’re really trying to do now is trying to recognize that the goal in New Zealand is to support a sustainable and diverse and robust ecosystem, and so we want to make sure that we’re offering different solutions for publishers, no matter where they are in their digital transformation journey,” Garlick said.
Garlick denied that the New Zealand journalism program is not a way to keep media organizations from demanding deals such as those afforded to Australian media houses and she also made a commitment to helping news outlets censor “potentially litigious” comments.
There were several strategies to prevent “false comments” being posted, Garlick said, according to RNZ.
The other aspect mentioned by the announcement was that Facebook was committed to help all page administrators to “better moderate” their comments.
“So what we did in March this year is that we released a tool that allows page owners, including publishers to be able to [turn] off comments on a post on a per post basis,” Garlick said.
“Facebook removed harmful health information relating to Covid-19 and vaccine issues, plus page administrators had the ability to set their own custom filters,” the report states, adding that “Facebook had been working with health experts around the world and in New Zealand to find out what were the claims that were harmful and should be removed in relation to Covid-19”
“We invest significant resources in making sure that we’re removing those and then we invest in fact checkers and we have fact checkers working across New Zealand as well, and when they rank content as false, including Covid and vaccine misinformation, then that will reduce in its distribution and people are notified that they’ve shared misinformation,” Garlick said.’https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-partners-with-new-zealand-media-for-funding-censorship/
Since putting the following on this blog DuckDuckGo has up and gone the way of Google. Therefore, we need to be very discerning in what social media platforms we not only use but promote.
‘Is Google still your default search engine? If so, you are helping an anti-Bible, anti-morality, pro-sodomy, pro-perversion, anti-God company with every search you make. They also intend to censor you and to eliminate your voice if they can. For example, if you search for “Homosexuality is wicked,” the top result (as of when I wrote this article) is an article that laughably claims that sodomy is not condemned by Scripture, and other pro-sodomy articles are in the top page of results. If you search on the search engine DuckDuckGo, the top result is an article entitled “Five Biblical Reasons Homosexuality is Worse than Most Other Sins” and practically every other article on the first page is anti-sodomy, with the anti-sodomy articles being stronger against this perversion than the ones on Google. Do you really think that the top results on Google are unbiased, or is Google putting a heavy thumb on the scale? If you search for “scientific creationism” on DuckDuckGo, the first page includes links to the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis. Neither website is on the first page in a Google search. Do you think that is by chance? If you search for “Hunter Biden China collusion,” the top result on DuckDuckGo is an article from the leading conservative organization National Review entitled “A Collusion Trail: China and the Bidens.” On Google, National Review does not appear anywhere on page one and this article is at the very bottom of page 2. Chance? Oh, no!
DuckDuckGo is not specifically conservative–it just doesn’t have the leftist bias of Google. DuckDuckGo just puts up what most people actually are searching for when they do Internet searches. While some interaction with wicked companies is unavoidable, breaking your tie with Google here is easy. Open your “preferences” file in the browser(s) you use right now (it may be some dots in the top right corner of your browser, or it may be in a menu) and change the default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. Do it on your phone. Do it on your laptop. Do it on everything. Google wants your data to make money, but it doesn’t want your beliefs. It wants to destroy them. Stop giving Google money with your Internet searches, and resist Google’s censorship of God’s truth. It takes about five minutes. Do it now.’https://kentbrandenburg.com/2021/07/02/fight-googles-censorship/
YouTube and the other social platforms such as Facebook etc. are headed by Leftist/Marxist/Communist leaning people. If this continues there will be no alternative information put forth for people to read and make proper decisions in life. Freedom always comes at a cost and are we willing to pay that cost for that freedom?
Thankfully there is Rumble which has given people the freedom to put forth alternative views. HERE IS THE VIDEO YOUTUBE REMOVED!!!
When will the madness of cancel culture cease? The answer is; Not anytime soon!
‘Facebook today wrongly flagged a cartoon from College Fix cartoonist Pat Cross that lampooned recent cancellations of the works of Theodor Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss.
“Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people,” says a pop-up message (right) on the Facebook post, first published yesterday morning.
Underneath the post, a message takes the reader to a statement from a Facebook fact-checker that fact checks claims about Dr. Seuss being cancelled by Dr. Seuss Enterprises. It correctly points out that “Cat in the Hat” is not one of the six books that the company will no longer publish.
Fair enough. But that’s not the whole story.
As noted by The College Fix,Loudon County Public Schools in Virginia said some of Seuss’ works have “strong racial undertones” and it will no longer link his name with its annual celebration of reading.
His books have not been removed from school libraries, but “Dr. Seuss and his books are no longer the emphasis of Read Across America Day in Loudoun County Public Schools,” district officials said.
Underscoring that, eBay will no longer allow sellers to list the six books deemed by Dr. Seuss Enterprises as containing racially insensitive imagery, the Washington Examinerreports.
Leading the pack is President Joe Biden, who did not mention Dr. Seuss in his “Read Across America Day” statement on Tuesday. In contrast, both Presidents Trump and Obama did mention the children’s author in previous proclamations while in office. The celebration of reading day coincides with the birthday of Geisel.
In effect, the general effort to memory hole or cancel Dr. Seuss is now underway, and it goes all the way to the White House. It comes just two years after academics began to call his works problematic and racist.
Dear Facebook, let’s not pretend Dr. Seuss is not the target of cancel culture. There is a deep irony that a cartoon on the cancellation of Seuss is now being censored by Big Tech.
That is what The College Fix’s editorial cartoon aimed to convey. The image (i.e. not news story) expressed a sentiment on the headlines of the day by using a clever play on words from one of Dr. Seuss’ most recognizable works, “The Cat in the Hat.”
And while that particular book has yet to find it’s way to the chopping block, the key word is “yet.”
One scholar has argued that the cat character has “minstrel stereotypes. … The Cat’s physical appearance, including the Cat’s oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers.”
Another, Kansas State University English professor Phillip Nel, wrote: “Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism in Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books.”
In other words, today it’s “Mulberry Street” and tomorrow it’s “The Cat in the Hat.”
You as a simple normal average person MUST be silenced and one way to do that is through lockdowns and censorship.
‘On Feb. 15, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published a Feb. 11 Associated Press article applauding the censorship of those who criticize the government’s pandemic response policies.
Gates used millions in grants to transform the once proudly unbridled The Guardian into his personal newsletter. With $250 million, he purchased immunity from criticism by news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Gates also made large contributions to charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the The New York Times, according to an August 2020 investigation by Columbia Journalism Review. He similarly disarmed NPR and Public Television by making them reliant on his support. In exchange, these outlets shield his sketchy projects from critical scrutiny.
Gates is arguably the world’s biggest vaccine maker. As its largest contributor, Gates controls the World Health Organization which, according to Foreign Affairs, makes no significant decision without consulting the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He similarly exercises dictatorial authority over an army of quasi-governmental agencies that he largely created or funds: Path, GAVI CEPI, Unicef etc. These agencies have demonstrated their power to turn the globe into a captive market for Gates’ vaccine enterprise.
The mainstream network news shows, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox have put COVID Terror, Vaccines Salvation and the obligatory shaming of dissidents on a 24-hour loop with each segment (and I use this term in every sense of the word) with pharmaceutical advertisements.
These outlets have turned their weekly talk shows into fawning hagiographies for Gates’ regular satellite tours in which credulous, obsequious Sunday morning talk show hosts lob softball medical questions to a billionaire with no public health training.
Nobody ever asks Gates or his mini-me, Tony Fauci, why they chose to spend tens of billions in taxpayer dollars on speculative vaccines and zero dollars investigating the many off-the-shelf, off-patent medications that have demonstrated extraordinary success in the hands of private doctors — medications that might have ended the pandemic a year ago.
The media, which has enabled this global hostage crisis, is arguably the most consequential criminal enterprise in human history. As Rahm Emmanuel observed, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
whatyareckon 