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Google censored Catholic Online's Daily Readings.

Censorship is a growing problem in cyberspace. Media outlets and content producers across the web are learning the hard way that if Goolge and Facebook disagree with your opinion, you will be silenced and run out of business. It is time to regulate social media to protect free speech.

Censorship by Google and Facebook is stifling free speech in America.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- In some countries, posting a meme that is critical of the government will get you arrested and put in jail. What happens after that depends on where you live. You could walk free after a short time, or you could be put to death.

As Americans, we have always cherished our right to freedom of expression. It is such an important right, we enshrined it in our Constitution as the First Amendment.

For over two hundred years, the public forum created by the First Amendment has been jealously guarded against all infringement.

But in the past few decades, the public forum has changed. It has moved into cyberspace where private corporations rule. Today, Google dominates the realm of internet searches as well as the advertising market, and YouTube, which it owns. Facebook dominates social media.

Whereas a few decades ago, most people got their news and information via the newspaper and television, today most people consume media on their mobile devices. They use the internet to access Google, YouTube, and Facebook, and this is where they get their news and information.

The problem is that Google and Facebook have started to aggressively censor content across the web. And they're turning to questionable organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center to tell them how to do it. The result is overbearing censorship, particularly of conservative media.

In 2014, as the Islamic State conquered a swathe of territory across Syria and Iraq, the terrorists released a series of gruesome propaganda videos to terrorize the rest of the world. These videos were swiftly censored. Google, YouTube and a host of smaller media providers often removed these videos within minutes to hours of their posting. The justification was that the blood and gore violated their terms of service. They often added they did not want to provide the terrorists with a channel of communication that could be used to promote terrorism.

For some time, censorship was restricted to that kind of content, but within the past two years, it has steadily grown.

Soon, any content critical of Islam or that dealt with terrorism was subject to censorship. The restrictions have since spread further. Today, any kind of content that is considered offensive, hateful, or that could inspire hatred or violence is subject to censorship.

Most of the content facing censorship comes from the right wing of the political spectrum. Neo-Nazi organizations like Stormfront have been booted entirely off the web. But the censorship does not end with Nazis.

Last week, a conservative group, The Liberty Conservative, was ordered to remove a piece that explained the difference between the Alt-Right movement and actual Nazis. Google deemed the piece offensive, and demanded they take it down.

The Liberty Conservative relented and removed the piece. Had they refused, Google would have kept all of their advertising revenue from their Ad Sense account. Ad Sense is Google's advertising platform that pays content providers, such as The Liberty Conservative for displaying ads on their webpages. Many media outlets rely on this money to stay in business.

This is how Google gets away with claiming they are not censoring content. The Liberty Conservative could have kept their piece published, but Google would not have paid them, and in turn, they would not have the money to pay their staff. This would have put The Liberty Conservative out of business. But technically, they could have kept the piece published.

This kind of censorship is known as "soft censorship."

Google also has the power to bury websites it doesn't like in search results.

A similar occurrence took place in the last month on Catholic Online. Google demanded the removal of several daily reading videos from YouTube because they were somehow deemed offensive. These videos were mere Bible readings from the Catholic lectionary. They contained no commentary or editorial. There was no homily or sermon. They were simply passages from the Bible.

Catholic Online was able to compromise and remove advertising from those videos, but the alternative was to either have their entire channel shut down, or be paid nothing from ad revenue as long as the videos were up. This has driven Catholic Online to develop an alternative media strategy for itself, which will be announced shortly.

The problem with these cases is that Google, a private corporation, is deciding what speech is acceptable in the public forum. That's because the public forum has moved from the newspaper and television and into cyberspace, but we have few laws which regulate cyberspace.

It is time for the U.S. federal government to enter cyberspace and set boundaries for Google and Facebook. This is common in other parts of the world where Google and Facebook already censor their content to order. People in countries like China use Google too, but Google censors their results to satisfy the demands of Chinese law.

Google could do the same in the U.S., but in reverse. They could be compelled to censor less content hosted in the United States as long as that content would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. They could be banned from soft censorship.

Google and Facebook are monopolies, much like cable and electric companies. As such, they should be regulated to ensure the service they provide meets the expectations of a free and just society.

Few people like Nazis. Few people care to click into webpages emblazoned with swastikas. However, the same First Amendment that protects hateful content also protects content like daily Bible readings.

We the people ought to decide what is permissible in the public forum of ideas, not some private corporation. It's time to end soft censorship and intimidation by private firms, lest we find ourselves in some kind of Orwellian future where the only acceptable content are cat videos and Google-Southern Poverty Law Center approved propaganda.

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Pope Francis Prayer Intentions for AUGUST 2017Artists. That artists of our time, through their ingenuity, may help everyone discover the beauty of creation.

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Google censoring the BIBLE? Censorship by Google and Facebook growing in the US - Catholic Online

Anti-corporate voices across the ideological spectrum are claiming that Google is attempting to silence them for their political positions.

Barry Lynn, a senior fellowat the New America Foundation a think tank funded by Google says he lost his job this week as a result of his research critical of Google, which Lynn says should be considered a monopoly.

Every day I see people waking up to the power of Google, Facebook and Amazon. We have to do something as a people, we have to do something through our government and address the power of these companies, Lynn told The Guardian. The number of congressmen and others making statements on Capitol Hill about this is growing very rapidly. The number of businesses who are saying that something must be done about the power of these companies and the way they use their power.

On the far-left, the World Socialist Web Site is claiming a 70 percent drop in referrals from Google searches and that the sites news articles and essays on politics, history and culture are being systematically blocked. The group claims a Google algorithm change in April led to its content being blacklisted.

In an article published Wednesday, the WSWS claimed that the top 45 search terms that formerly led readers to the WSWS are now blocked by Google. The socialist website says Google is wrongfully censoring them under the guise of fighting fake news.

Also this week, a right-wing website called The Liberty Conservative claims to have received a letter from Google threatening to suspend advertising revenue from the site unless it pulled down an article written by an organizer of last months white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum, Shane Trejo wrote inan articleposted to The Liberty Conservative on Wednesday. Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.

Trejo claimed the article contained no offensive content and was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis.

The site often runs alarmist articles about the influence of corporations in American politics. (RELATED:Google And Facebook Co-Sponsoring Protest Of Pro-Life Womens Health Care Clinic)

Trejo said the site had to comply with Googles strong-arming tactics for the time being as a result of financial constraints.

An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive, he explained.

Conservative website PJMedia first highlighted Trejos claims in an article later featured on the Drudge Report.

Google has yet to return TheDCs request for comment for this article.

The latest accusations of censorship follow Googles controversial firing of an engineer, James Damore, for writing a memo criticizing Google as an ideological echo chamber.

My firing neatly confirms that point, Damore wrote in a Wall Street Journal column following his firing.

How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

Read more here:
Anti-Corporate Voices Claim Google Censorship | The Daily Caller - The Daily Caller

By Jane Bambauer By Jane Bambauer August 30

My last two posts summarized the extent to which the First Amendment should constrain the government when it seeks to censor weak scientific claims. To the extent that the government uses advertising restrictions in order to promote good science, free speech doctrine has already begun to get in the way.

This could nudge federal agencies and other lawmakers to use other means to promote research and consumer knowledge. Thats a good thing. The government could do much more than it currently does using its own powerful voice and by using other non-censorship regulations. Here are a few examples:

1. Funding and supporting more independent research.

One of the greatest drawbacks to our current system of food and drug testing is that we rely on self-interested companies to produce the bulk of research that regulators and consumers must use to make important decisions. This is so in part because randomized controlled trials the gold standard for research are very costly. The companies that are likely to profit from positive research findings are the most eager to fund it.

But for the company, the research is only worth its costs if it comes out the right way. Randomized controlled trials can be gamed, and often are. Although controlled trials are supposed to avoid the selection effects that can mar studies of observational data, they can be distorted if researchers put conditions on study participants that ensure all the research subjects are unusually healthy, and therefore unusually likely to respond well to medicines and to avoid side effects. Independent researchers would have more interest in selecting the pool of research subjects in a way that better represents the future users of the product.

It is unrealistic to expect that the National Institutes of Healthand other federal research organizations will receive large enough budgets to run all clinical trials themselves. But more can be done with post-market observational data. While observational studies will always raise questions about whether there are sufficient controls to ensure that an effect is truly causal, they do have the virtue of coming from the real world and reflecting what has happened in the field. Randomized controlled trials, by contrast, reflect the population of patients who happened to come down the pipeline and are willing to consent to an experiment. Controlled trials also tend to be quite small because of their costs, and they may lack the power to detect rare but important therapies or side effects.

Compared withcontrolled trials, analysis of observational data is cheap. The federal government should encourage researchers to access medical data and link them to other consumer databases in order to uncover latent health benefits and risks. Instead, federal privacy and research law tends to do the opposite, discouraging data collection and erecting barriers to access.

2. Publicizing or certifying the findings of independent or well-conducted research.

The government can also use its voice to promote the research that meets its favored scientific standards. Rather than using censorship rules, the government could certify health claims that meet its evidentiary standards, and allow manufacturers to proudly mark that certification in its advertising. The government can also contribute to consumer education more actively through its websites or through public service campaigns in the mainstream media.

3. Using ex-post liability and safe harbors.

Regulators could also rely more heavily on ex-post enforcement than the modern regulatory state typically does. Strict liability and ex-post fines for products that prove to cause harm can do a lot to motivate research and caution by manufacturers. The government could also create strong incentives to engage in pre-market research using safe harbors from the fines and liability that would otherwise apply if a product turns out to be dangerous for its anticipated use.

4. Mandating disclosures about the evidence base (or lack thereof.)

The government could also make better use of rules requiring companies to provide disclaimers or other information.The compelled speech doctrine seems to bemore forgiving than the free speech rules that apply to censorship, at least when compelled disclosures are used to provide relevant, purely informational content. Thus, the state could require companies that choose to makescientific or health claims in their advertising to provide the evidence supporting and contradicting each of their claims on a website or through a central clearinghouse.

Mandated disclosures have a tendency to proliferate quickly, though, and they dont always have salutary effects. In the next post, I will address some serious limits to the ability for mandated disclosure to effectively educate consumers.

Link:
Promoting good science without censorship - Washington Post

A bot called censorship notifierwas recently released on Reddit. It was built to scan for censored posts, but it has now been censored from discussion threads. A recent r/btc post by the bot creator explained its purpose, but also provided information that users from r/bitcoin wanted it silenced or removed. Apparently, they complained to r/bitcoin mods about the bot in the hopes of squelching it. This caused the bot to get disabled.

Also read:Bitcoin Is Becoming a Popular Investment for Middle-Class Americans

The bots creator post read, New bot in testing. Notifies people in/r/bitcoinif their comments or posts get silently removed, or greylisted into the moderator-review queue.

The post further mentioned that the goal of the bot is to collect data of censorship for the purpose of having useful statistics about moderation habits. However, almost anything a user posts on the bot will be monitored by moderators. The bots creator said they are open to feedback and suggestions. The bot elaborated:

I am open to feedback and suggestions (though it will take some time to implement things). Be aware that anything you post here will almost certainly be read by the moderators of/r/bitcoin. In the next few weeks the plan is to have the bot automatically collect and periodically publish useful statistics on/r/btcand/r/bitcoin.

As a result of complaints about the bot, the bots basic functionality was disabled. However, the creator of the bot decided to enable it with an opt-in service. Now users can simply private message the bot and type please message me about removed comments and posts, and the bot will work. Users can private message stop to cease receiving messages.

Overall, the bot has received controversial reception from Reddit users. Some are miffed at the idea that a bot will record what posts get deleted or greylisted. One user was so upset he believed the bot was built to brainwash him. He took a screenshot of the bot and said, I sent the mods a screenshot of this. You tried to brainwash the wrong guy. Fuck you.

What do you think about Reddit censorship problems? Will bots help mitigate some of the problem? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock

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Anti-Censorship Bot For Detecting Deleted Posts on Reddit Gets Censored - Bitcoin News (press release)

Poor, poor Philip Levine. The Miami Beach mayor has long been suspected of running a massive social-media-blocking campaign over the past few years,he's cut off critics, local activists, and even the main MiamiNew Times twitter account from reading his tweets. Multiple courts have ruled that politicians are not allowed to block people from viewing their social media accounts because those pages disseminate vital public information.

So Levine is getting sued. And his lawyers tried to argue in court yesterday that the mayor shouldn't have to sit for a deposition because answering basic questions under oath would apparently humiliate him.

"The Notice of Taking Video Deposition for the Corporate Representative clearly illustrates that this litigation is being utilized for the purpose of annoying and embarrassing the City," Miami Beach City Attorney Raul Aguila argued in a court filing yesterday.

The activist suing Levine, Grant Stern, has argued for months that the mayor's alleged habit of blocking people who disagree with him online violates the First Amendment. Sterns says he wants Levine to sit for a deposition to answer basic facts about who runs his social media accounts, how they're used, and whether any taxpayer money goes toward maintaining the accounts.

In a move that seems to have deeply upset the city, Stern launched a web page to crowdsource deposition questions for the mayor from citizens and other people who have been blocked. Stern, who does have a flair for drama, maintains he needed to do this because he hasn't been able to view any of Levine's personal accounts for more than a year and isn't able to properly conduct legal research and take note of what Levine has been posting. (Stern provided the mayor and the city with a list of possible deposition topics August 9.)

The city, though, argues the lawsuit is a publicity stunt. Its attorneys are asking a county circuit judge to issue an order preventing Levine from having to speak under oath and asking the court to sanction Stern for his actions.

Aguila, the city attorney, wrote yesterday that Stern's blog post and list of deposition topics "clearly show the intent of the video depositions in this litigation is to annoy Mayor Levine and the City."

That kind of response might only feed the notion that Levine is an out-of-touch rich dude obsessed with his own image. This term is his last as mayor, and he's spent 2017 traveling the state to decide whether to run for governor. Levine is a Democrat and longtime friend of the Clinton family, but earlier this year, he said he appreciated aspects of the Republican platform, called himself a "radical centrist," and claimed he wouldrun as an independent candidate for governor. At a speech in Pinellas County last Friday, Levine walked that ill-advised statement back and assured local Democrats he's one of them.

Such is the Tao of Levine: He has spent his mayoral career yelling at critics and putting his foot in his mouth, including jokingly threatening to invade Cuba.(He has been uncharacteristically well behaved since the Cuba flap and, to his credit, seems to genuinely care about sea-level rise.)

In Levine world, getting sued for allegedly censoring your constituents apparently rates as an "annoyance."

Levine could end Stern's suit by handing over the list of people he blocks online. Stern filed a public-records request for that information months ago for the mayor's three Facebook accounts (one private, one for his campaigns, and one official mayoral page). He's also asking for info about any pages that handle official mayoral business.

Stern has filed similar records requests with other Miami-area officials: In June, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle handed over her own block list, which revealed that the county's top prosecutor was blocking people for criticizing her conduct in office. After Stern, and later New Times , published information about her social media censorship, her office unblocked everybody. (California First Amendment activist Angela Grebenalso obtained ex-state Sen. Frank Artiles' lengthy Facebook block list earlier this year.)

Politicians' social media use has rapidly turned into one of the most pressing issues in First Amendment law: Free-speech advocates say it's important to force courts to recognize political Facebook and Twitter accounts as public records because elected officials use said pages to disseminate vital public information. In 2014, a Hawaii federal court ruled that Honolulu Police couldn't delete comments from its Facebook page, and this year, a federal court in Virginia ruled that politicians are not allowed to block people from viewing their pages. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is also suing Donald Trump to force him to unblock what is likely a massive list of censored accounts on Twitter.

But Levine refuses to give his block list to Stern, a move made doubly absurd by the fact that the mayor voluntarily gave that same list to Greben in 2015. So Stern claims he's had no other recourse but to sue.

"Mayor Levine must have done something even worse than we know about with his social media accounts since hes so scared to show up to a deposition about information which he is posting publicly," Stern said via phone today.

Link:
Miami Beach Mayor's Lawyers Say Censorship Suit Is "Embarrassing" Him - Miami New Times