Gang of Biden Staffers Who Stifled Speech On Social Media

The censorship of social media posts at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites by the Biden Administration is no surprise to those of us who had been censored and shadow-banned.

But a recent lawsuit against the Biden Administration led a federal judge to "out" the Biden staffers who conducted violations of the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

The Washington Times reported (some snippets):

A federal judge who excoriated the Biden administration for pressuring social media platforms to censor Americans’ speech shined a light on a group of obscure but powerful White House staffers who leaned on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites to remove posts and ban users whose content they opposed.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, acting on a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by two states and a group of plaintiffs, said the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Court documents show that while top Biden administration officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci sought publicly and privately to censor social media posts over COVID-19 content, the task was more extensively carried out behind the scenes by a select band of staffers. 

The effort began almost as soon as Mr. Biden entered the White House with a Jan. 23, 2021, email from Clarke Humphrey, then the digital director for the administration‘s COVID-19 response team.

Mr. Humphrey emailed Twitter officials at 1 a.m. on Mr. Biden’s third day in office and asked them to remove a tweet posted a day earlier by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that suggested, without evidence, that the death of Hank Aaron, 86, could be tied to the coronavirus vaccine. 

The job of policing social media appeared to fall mostly to Mr. Humphrey’s White House colleague, Rob Flaherty, who recently left the administration, reportedly to take a job in President Biden’s reelection campaign.

While Mr. Flaherty strong-armed Twitter and Facebook to cooperate with the White House, another staffer, Andy Slavitt, ramped up the effort by threatening the social media platforms with federal action. 

Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media director, also helped carry out the White House‘s censorship scheme. 

To read the full article, go here. 

‘Twitter Files II’ Exposes Blacklists, Shadow Banning, Targeted Censorship

A few years ago, I noticed a drop-off of views of this blog on Twitter and Facebook. I also noticed that when trying to Google this blog, the number of results also were low. It was obviously being shadow-banned. 

Gary Julian, who runs The Federalist blog, also noticed his blog was being shadow-banned. His blog was also blocked by Facebook.

The Twitter Files II has exposed blacklisting and other means of blocking conservative posts.

From Headline USA:

(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) A second explosive release of Twitter files that dropped Thursday exposed a concentrated campaign by avowed leftists at the social media titan to censor conservatives and suppress opinions contrary to the regime-approved narrative.

“A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” reported independent journalist Bari Weiss, who released a Twitter thread with the new information.

The egregious censorship was carried out by Twitter executives at the highest levels, who have all been fired from the company since Elon Musk became its Chief Twit. So-called “Trends Blacklist” that were created for suppression and censorship included a wide range of notables, including respected medical experts, politicians and conservative media personalities and outlets.

If there is a class-action lawsuit filed by James Woods or whomever, I will likely sign on to it.

To read more, go here. 

Spreely

A little while ago, I joined Spreely.

It is similar to Facebook, but without censorship. Spreely = Speak Freely!

I am at: https://www.spreely.com/ArmandVaquer.

If I know you, I'll approve your connection.

Trump Issues Executive Order Against Social Media Abuses

It was a long time in coming. It has support by both parties.

President Trump issued an executive order on social media, especially the giants like Facebook and Twitter, who practice censorship, shadow banning, "fact checking" and other acts on a selective basis.

According to Fox News:

Flanked by Attorney General Bill Barr, President Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office on Thursday that calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) to remove statutory liability protections and cut federal funding for tech companies that engage in censorship and political conduct.

The president's order came just two days after Twitter took the unprecedented step of slapping a "misleading" warning label on two of Trump's tweets concerning the fraud risks of nationwide mail-in balloting. The move immediately backfired: Experts disputed that Trump's tweet was actually misleading, given that mail-in balloting has been linked to ongoing fraud, and Twitter failed to apply the fact-check standard to others. 

At Thursday's signing ceremony, Trump called the fact-check "egregious," and held up a photo of Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who heads up the site's fact-checking operation. Fox News reported on Wednesday that Roth has mocked Trump supporters, called Trump's team "ACTUAL NAZIS," slammed "scary trannies," and called GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a "bag of farts." 

"My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it so that social media companies that engage in censoring any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield," the president said.

He added: "My executive order further instructs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce. This commerce resides in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. ... Additionally, I'm directing the attorney general to work cooperatively with the states ... to enforce their own laws against such deceptive business practices. The states have broad and powerful authority to regulate in this arena." 

Under the CDA, platforms are ordinarily not liable for users' defamatory or otherwise problematic posts under the CDA, while publishers that actively shape content do face liability. Trump's order would empower the federal government to interpret and apply that legislation.

To read more, go here. 

Google Makes An About-Face?

Above, today's Google search results.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! (As Gomer Pyle used to say.)

For the heck of it, I just did a Google search of my blog post of two days ago, "Cuba Tourism Tanks 24%" that was non-existent in my Google search of yesterday.

Lo & behold, it showed up in my search in the second spot (behind The Japan Times)!

Could it be that someone at Google saw my post on shadow-banning of yesterday and made some "corrections"?

Google Shadow-Banning Far & Wide

Continuing with shadow-banning by Google...

The Federalist has picked up my blog post of yesterday on shadow-banning. It is interesting that even my innocuous article on Cuba tourism got the shadow-ban treatment from Google, but Bing and Yahoo! picked it up it was at the top of their search results.

So, without further ado, here's The Federalist posting of today.

We're Shadow-Banned By Google

Shadow banning (also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting) is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned. - Wikipedia.

This morning, I was reading The Federalist blog on Google's ongoing censorship of this and other conservative websites.

Gary Julian, a longtime friend and owner of The Federalist blog, did some checking and found that Google is shadow-banning his blog.

He wrote:

With shadow banning it was all down hill from there. This last month we were down to 25,784 page views. 

What the Fascists at Google do is bury Conservative websites so deep that no one will ever find them. 

So I ran a Google search on one of my articles: "Blame the GOP for Immigration - not Trump." 

I gave up looking after going five pages in. Using the exact title the article could not be found on Google.

(To read more, go here.)

After reading his post, I decided (this is the first time I checked, I might add) to do my own checking on my blog's status on whether it is being shadow-banned. Keep in mind, while I do post some political posts (and I am a conservative), my blog mainly focuses on travel, history and entertainment.

My searches on search engines Google and Bing found a similar scenario.

Yesterday, I posted an article, "Cuba Tourism Tanks 24%". I first checked Bing, and my article was listed in the second spot. And, what's more, I didn't type the post's title verbatim!

Next, I tried Google. And, I typed in the post's title verbatim. It was nowhere to be found, even four pages in!

So, like The Federalist blog, Google is shadow-banning Armand's Rancho Del Cielo.

UPDATE:

I just checked the Yahoo! search engine and we're in the sixth spot on the same search with them.

So, if one wants to do a search and have accurate results, use either Yahoo! or Bing, not Google.