Category: Censorship

Dear Representative Eshoo,

I am writing to ask Representative Eshoo to cosponsor H.R. 4027 (116th), the Stop the Censorship Act, and support it in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce where the bill is waiting for a vote.

H.R. 4027 amends the existing Telecommunications Act of 1996, Section 230.

In 1996, less than 1% of the world’s population used the Internet, There were no social media companies. Today, about 65% of the world’s population uses the Internet. This 25-year-old law is due for an update.

We must address the growing censorship that blocks the free flow of information. This censorship is facilitated by the “Good Samaritan” clause, a vague clause in the law that allows the social media corporations to censor content that is, among other things “otherwise objectionable”. The clause was never intended to facilitate censorship, but was added to protect children from pornography, something it has failed to accomplish.

Given that “otherwise objectionable” cannot be defined by law, the social media giants have taken it upon themselves to regulate themselves. The Good Samaritan clause puts social media companies in control over public discourse. Indeed, “otherwise objectionable” and other such subjective descriptors fail the vagueness doctrine, outlined by our constitution. It encourages arbitrary censorship, and this is antithetical the spirit of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

HR 4027 amends the Good Samaritan clause by replacing all such subjective descriptors as “otherwise objeectionable” with “illegal”. This helps clarify what service providers may remove. If HR 4027 passes, providers may remove illegal content.

As the law stands today, individuals such as myself are blocked from information exchange, including political redress, education, and commerce. I may not contact Amazon over facebook regarding missing packages or contact you over Twitter to communicate with you in any way. I may not participate in educational discussion about biotechnology over Reddit.

I am posting this letter on my personal website, MyBanned.com because I cannot post it on any social media sites. This should not be.

Please support HR 4027.

Thank you for your time.

Instagram tries to instill fear of thought crime where they interpret the user’s keyword search terms as criminal thought. Are you going to let yourself be intimidated by a bot?

April 12, 2021, Facebook retroactively restricted my account from February 01, 2021, for allegations of Community Standards from the previous year (2020).

Facebook restricted my account for 90 days with the start date of Feb 1.

April 12, 2021, I posted a video to Facebook. The video was viewed by others. Shortly thereafter, Facebook prevented a second video of mine from appearing in that comment thread on the desktop site and also prevented others from viewing that video. The video does exist on Facebook’s website and is viewable to me at it’s url. The video, hosted on Facebook, can also be seen on Facebook on a mobile browser by me only.

Upon checking my Facebook account today (April 12, 2021), I saw a notification that my account had been retroactively suspended from February 1, 2021. The reason given was “A post from the last year didn’t follow our standards.” There is no link to any post nor any mention of what violated community standards from the last year.

If this seems confusing, that’s because it is totally illogical.

Update

The video that I’d uploaded as a comment had been switched to private. Responses to group messages are always visible and this does not seem to be changeable by the user.

Later, after revisiting the link that Facebook had supplied to me upon completion of processing the video, I saw that Facebook had set the video’s permission to private. After removing the “private” attribute, the video was displayed in the response.

Google Search Results are biased to modify public opinion. Google deters users from accessing a broader range of perspectives, even when the user has intentionally searched for such perspectives.

Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design: “As knowledge, commerce, and politics continue move online and to the Web in particular, search engines have quickly become the “gatekeepers” of cyberspace. What’s more, a single search engine – Google – now handles the majority of Web queries. Google directs hundreds of millions of users towards some content and not others, towards some sources and not others. As with all media gatekeepers, if we believe in the principles of deliberative democracy – and especially if we believe that the Web is an open, “democratic” medium – then we should expect our search engines to disseminate a broad spectrum of information on any given topic.”

…

“The dissemination of the widest possible information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” Free download: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_2

This is a legal notice to you, Artistworks, to provide all of my data, including all media, posts, messages, and contacts in a human accessible and machine readable format, free of charge to me, as specified by and provisioned for in California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) SECTION 1. Section 1798.100 of the Civil Code, for Right of Access.

Additionally, I am requesting all non-public data from Artistworks, including any police correspondence or records thereof. (Any police reports you may have filed or discussed filing).

April 07, 2021.

The following is a report to the Office of the Attorney GeneraConsumer Complaint Against A Business_Company _ State of California – Department of Justice – Office of the Attorney General (OAG) regarding a violation of the law by Facebook.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a social justice organization. They believe in digital freedom for those who support their ideologies.

But don’t take it from me, take it from their legal intake coordinator, Social Justice Activist Haley Pederson.

Haley Pederson is and has been mostly ignoring me for the last two years regarding the censorship and digital rights violations against me by Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, and Reddit.

Haley cares about free speech and freedom of expression where it suits her, such as for Black Lives Matter “peaceful protesters” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/eff-offering-assistance-attorney-referrals-protesters.

Take it from Danny O’Brien, Director of Strategy at EFF. Danny, who I previously knew at Noisebridge, now ignores me completely. When I reached out to Danny regarding the censorship, cancellation, and digital rights violations against me, he ignored all of my emails and wouldn’t respond to voicemail.

That’s odd, because he’s emailed me previously and I’ve met and talked with him in person.

The wrong speech is not acceptable among the social justice types. They’ll oppose hate speech bans on their oppressed groups, like LGBTQ Anthony Oliveira, but when it comes to speech they don’t agree with, they look the other way.

Danny O’Brien promotes Social Justice in his recent article demanding cancellation of the problematic Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, from the very foundation he founded, the FSF itself.

Danny’s rationale is that the people have been “harmed” by Richard Stallman’s opinions and therefore, more censorship, in the form of cancellation, is needed to send a political message that the wrong opinions need to be banned.

Hey Danny, how about instead of being a crybully who cancels others like RSM who — unlike you — actually does useful things, grow a pair, suck it up, and deal with the fact that not everyone holds the same stupid opinion as you and your social justice loser friends at the EFF.