US law now stops NGOs and social media from carrying out the censorship labor out for federal actors. This takes effect immediately. State Governors, responsible for federal grant disbursements, are now being urged by public free speech advocates to stop funds to State Universities grant recipients for misinformation, disinformation and malinformation censorship at social media.
Private citizens, who have made it known they do not wish to be censored, are producing legal effects to inform social media compliance departments that they cannot legally be censored by the government. Social media corporations are fast complying with their wishes, booting off federally funded academic minders from following accounts online.
The recent age of entitlement to censor US speech is drawing down.
This has forced censor actors, as true believers in the mission to “quell dangerous speech”, to outsource their efforts. This is the multilayered, end-around, used and more often abused, by the neoliberal autocracy to enforce their will on things that are not crime, still erroneously believe that public speech is harm.
THE LEGAL CONTEXT OF HARM
The problem with so much of what has happened in the last 3 years is the curtailing of public debate over serious issues of public harm. What is a crime? What amounts to public harm? Who determines what is harmful or dangerous or unsafe? How are these qualified?
Unfortunately, since Emergency Rule was passed based on the COVID-19 pandemic, COG or Continuity of Government protocols flipped into place. These are subterranean protocols that openly subverts rule of legal democracy and democratic sovereign public law to a shadow base of un-elected emergency managers, bureaus and global leadership.
It explains so much of the inexperience, the casual unthinking autocratic ‘reinvention of the wheel’ and generalized incompetence. Rather than exploring emergency manuals based on road tested processes, amateurs threw the book out and made hay on the backs of the American tax fund. They filleted away billions of dollars on the most sociopathic industry known to American government, the pharmacological lobbies. However, at the very same time, the context of harm became less and less focused and more diffuse in meaning and application as the priority of medical mandate and a sudden surge in kleptocracy emerged.
In European socialist and labor circles, they call quasi-seditionist media and public expression they find reprehensible, “dangerous speech”. They found a non-legal means to classify it as harm in the scholastic environment. This nomenclature branding, along with other socialist ideas like CRT, antiracism, and the eugenics driven gender-meandering of a non-binary academic cult, were laundered in along with a permissiveness to allow excessive intrusion by governments, collectivist student groups, communitarian academics to imbalance civil powers at Universities. This academic political system impugned democratically passed US law and lawful actions by the US Constitution. They manufactured chronic conflict, as history had to be cleansed and reinvented to match the preferences of the new dominant socialist theoretics.
This was applied top down by screaming insults at normal people doing normal things, who had very normal questions. Then came the firing & silencing of detractors. It is they who came to power during this emergency. They decided that harm was whatever they said it was – that day. Check in with the mothership tomorrow for what you have permission to do and say next.
In weak democracies run by easily shamed liberals, who desperately want the approval of European leadership, for some reason, they move to conform to every suggested whim. They bend to adopt every extremity. They start from meanings formed in academic circles: language, linguistics, taxonomies, rules, regulatory applications and blueprints. Then pivot to diagrams of cultural context to demand US conformance to a “better morality”, new ethics emitted by the vehicles of their enlightenment, the Universities.
Except, when the vehicle is socialism. Socialism has always failed the general economic welfare as adopted in every nation state. The people never endure its totalitarian shearing off of dissident citizens, un-functional slave economies and civic monotony in political debate. The University systems fronted the adoption of non-working policy and ideas; which do not conform to both the law and the economic systems of the West. They certainly do not conform to the rule of law in the United States.
So to be clear, during this National Emergency run by inexperienced, ivory tower scientists and expert academics, “harm” became whatever they said it was. “Harm” was whatever the socialist collectives at University of Washington or Stanford decided it was that day. Whether it actually conforms to reality, is true, has a basis in studied scientific measures of harmful outcomes, or prior legal definition of harm did not matter. That is why 3 year olds, the least susceptible for contraction or to transmit the COVID flu, were wearing masks outside in the hot daylight of Summer in New York City, where the virus could not live if breathed out but for a few seconds.
UNSAFE SPEECH AND NGOs
Unfortunately, the government turned again to the almighty wisdom of follower-leaders at US Universities and nonprofit NGOs affiliated with government science to enforce “safe speech” based on whatever they defined as harm that day. A ludicrous as this sounds, it has been the reason why US legal counsel at social media companies forgot what they knew about the law and started taking the government’s money to “obey for pay”. The companies started treating the government criers like advertising and marketing brokers. Privacy and civil liberty? Out the window. The government isn’t obeying it’s own laws, so just follow the train of law-shunting idiots right to the bank. That’s the logic.
Unfortunately, they all got caught doing the activities they were trolling the public for. DHS, the FBI, CDC, the GEC and train of malevolent and stupid 3-letter intelligence agencies, perhaps bored at their jobs and drunk on the powers of speculation, know they broke the law. The whole system invalidated its own character. The social media companies don’t enforce the law, but were bullied with defamation into breaking the laws that the government wanted to break themselves. So I wonder about those dirty hands.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?
This leaves us to the working world of useful idiots. Many of them are outsourced abroad. These were workers fooled into believing they were doing the right thing or at least, doing nothing wrong. They believed what they were told. That their jobs as universal diversity soldiers and misinformation & disinformation cops were actually found under: “Trust & Safety”, “ethical technical development”, “humane tech” and performance as “socially responsible technologists”. Unfortunately, you can see companies are still hiring for these positions. So the government will still try to enforce the unenforceable by illegal color of law.
Can you imagine coming in the door to “do good” in what was described during the interview as a social media editing and an altruistic content job for the company, to then be handed a spreadsheet of people the government wanted silenced and told to cut the cord? This was knowing the hands of the government were not allowed in any US governed universe to do this *legally*.
Most of them obeyed for pay. They played good Germans doing their duty banal for Der Furer. They didn’t question. They didn’t think about it. They didn’t feel anything. They collected their check, wore their mask and did whatever they were asked to do. They didn’t quit. They in many cases defended what they were doing and some enjoyed being bullies. Any objectors, whoever they were, left the company or found other employment. No one is forced to fulfil the unlawful aims of the US government at a social media company.
These people did get fired from Twitter. They may have suddenly been laid off at Google, Microsoft and a myriad of other technical companies, because the proxy actions taken against Americans human rights are very illegal. The legal counsels woke up and realized if they continued taking illegal action on behalf of the government they could be sued into irrelevance. There is no legal immunity or shield for the surveil & censor PaaS they were or may be conducting presently.
SO WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
American citizens are in a posture of human and civil rights recovery from the reproaches of the US pandemic. UK surveillance and censorship, like Bellingcat, continue to exercise floating extra-national bids to censor Americans for manufactured claims of misinformation and disinformation. Americans aware of the continued reproach of their rights using labor from abroad should know the facts.
US law applies to any US federal contractor working on behalf of the US federal government. If you inform social media companies the federal government does not have your consent to monitor, move or work on information published on your social media accounts they have to abide by your wishes.
