U.S. Internet giants Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Google and Microsoft Corp. pledged to tackle online hate speech in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.
Beyond national laws that criminalize hate speech, there is a need to ensure such activity by Internet users is “expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms, upon receipt of a valid notification, in an appropriate time-frame,” the companies and the European Commission said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
The code of conduct arrives as Europe comes to terms with the bloody attacks in Paris and Brussels by Islamic State, which has used the Web and social media to spread its message of hate against its enemies. The companies said it remains a “challenge” to strike the right balance between freedom of expression and hate speech in the self-generated content on online platforms.
In the article linked on the Drudge Report, Bloomberg revealed how Facebook and Twitter are working with the European Union to ban on-line commentators from spreading “hate speech,” but Bloomberg watered down the news so badly it made censorship sound like a great idea.
So let’s break down the Bloomberg article to reveal what’s really going on. From the article:
U.S. Internet giants Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Google and Microsoft Corp. pledged to tackle online hate speech in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.
First off, the European Union is an unelected oligopoly designed to operate as a superstate which overrides the national sovereignty of its member countries.
As economist Ryan McMaken with the Mises Institute points out:
“The EU, of course, is an anti-democratic organization, which one speaker in the film notes is designed to be nearly totally insulated from the will of the voters in the member countries. The EU is run not by political appointees and the unelected European Commission.
A conglomeration of dozens of faceless, secretive commissions, offices, and ministries, the EU is a bureaucrat’s paradise where powerful people remain largely anonymous and safe to carry out their endless array of schemes without any fear of retribution from the voters anywhere. Virtually no one can name any of the most powerful people in the EU, whether one of the EU’s five presidents, or other powerful members of the EU organizations.”
In other words, unelected, anonymous bureaucrats will decide what constitutes “hate speech,” which to them is anything that doesn’t fit into their agenda to gain more power over the population.
Beyond national laws that criminalize hate speech, there is a need to ensure such activity by Internet users is “expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms, upon receipt of a valid notification, in an appropriate time-frame,” the companies and the European Commission said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
But who are these “online intermediaries” that will help EU bureaucrats eradicate “hate speech?”
Well, in Feb. Twitter announced it was organizing a “Trust & Safety Council” with feminist and Islamic groups to “prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying,” which, of course, leads to mass censorship.
The organizations taking part on the council include Feminist Frequency, GLAAD and even an Islamic advocacy group.
“Most of the groups listed are merely collections of people with an axe to grind, and my, how the lefties do love their acronyms,” a commenter at the Free Republic stated. “They also love their oxymorons: ‘outreach’ and ‘shutting down expression’ are a contradiction in terms yet Twitter is determined to conflate them and to enforce that conflation.”
To sum it up, this war on “hate speech” is nothing more than a program to control not only what people say but also what they think.
“No matter how implausible an idea [open borders, gun control, global government, etc.] may seem, it can gain acceptance in the minds of the citizens as the forces of PC relentlessly hype the idea in the public square [such as Facebook or Twitter],” former intelligence officer Stella Morabito revealed, with my own comments added for context. “Simultaneously, the voices that might challenge and analyze the idea must be suppressed — accusations of bigotry and hatred often do the trick — so that the PC idea has a chance to incubate and then affect public opinion.”
And that’s it in a nutshell: Facebook and Twitter are working with globalist bureaucrats and their “social justice warrior” puppets to sway public opinion on their virtual, one-world “empire” that would ultimately erase the importance of real nation-states.
Appeals Court Delivers Devastating Blow to Cellphone-Privacy Advocates
COURTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY are grappling with a key question for the information age: When law enforcement asks a company for cellphone records to track location data in an investigation, is that a search under the Fourth Amendment?
By a 12-3 vote, appellate court judges in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday ruled that it is not — and therefore does not require a warrant.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld what is known as the third-party doctrine: a legal theory suggesting that consumers who knowingly and willingly surrender information to third parties therefore have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in that information — regardless of how much information there is, or how revealing it is.
Research clearly shows that cell-site location data collected over time can reveal a tremendous amount of personal information — like where you live, where you work, when you travel, who you meet with, and who you sleep with. And it’s impossible to make a call without giving up your location to the cellphone company.
“Supreme Court precedent mandates this conclusion,” Judge Diana Motz wrote in the majority opinion. “For the Court has long held that an individual enjoys no Fourth Amendment protection ‘in information he voluntarily turns over to [a] third part[y].’” The quote was from the 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland.
The 5th, 6th, and 11th circuits have reached the same conclusion.
However, there’s been a lot of disagreement within the lower courts and among privacy advocates that the third-party doctrine is consistent with the way people live their lives in the digital age — primarily on their cellphones.
A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit in fact first ruled last August that getting cell-site records in bulk did constitute a search, triggering a warrant requirement. In the case, United States v. Graham, the government obtained 221 days’ worth of records belonging to a robbery suspect in Baltimore.
The panel’s opinion relied heavily on a separate legal theory, called mosaic theory, to come to that conclusion: the argument that even if one instance of evidence gathering doesn’t count as a search, asking for a large number of data points can eventually amount to one.
For a while, it looked like there might be a split in the lower courts that would require the Supreme Court to reconsider the third-party doctrine.
But now that the 4th Circuit has ruled, that seems less likely.
Privacy advocates were disappointed:
