68 Comments
Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

"The frustrating absence in the exchange between Hawley and Cox is about the presumption in the category of “disinformation.” "

I was thinking the same thing. Did no one think to mention the countless occasions they got it wrong or the fact that many of the voices they silenced were in fact experts with relevant points of view?

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Sep 16, 2022·edited Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

the whole mis/dis/mal debate is pointless. it doesn’t matter! unless it’s not protected speech, leave users alone. who exactly anointed these idiots arbiters of truth? they cant even define what a woman is without help from a biologist (yes, the same ‘experts’ who need to see the effects of pregnancy hormones on male mice hearts). disinformation does not exist. we have a collection of empirical observations about the world around us. we interpret that data. we get more data and incorporate that into our interpretation. people have varying degrees of ability synthesizing and applying said data. some are better than others. how does the left get away with honoring everyone’s lived experience and truth (at the expense of objectivity) but then turn around and decide the official interpretation of current facts. straight up dumb.

i shouldn’t have to submit empirical proofs to rant incoherently on facebook.

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Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

"Was every piece of “disinformation” removed from Facebook actually disinformation, or did some of it turn out to be information? Is it correct to say that every claim removed from social media as disinformation was provably incorrect?"

My 2 cents: this is irrelevant to the other First Amendment considerations. People are supposed to be allowed to say stuff free of government interference. Period. Whether it's hate speech, misinformation, disinformation or malinformation -- for the First Amendment that doesn't matter.

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By labeling some Americans extremists or domestic terrorists, the government has legal reasoning to censor, harass, arrest, threaten, jail, any and all political opposition, all with the easy assistance of big tech, media, and the courts. If they can mistreat the former president, message loud and clear to everyone, they ca do it to anyone We are now living in tyranny.

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Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Since it's impossible to decide what's actually true and what's not, what's disinformation or misinformation or unacknowledged truth, then you have to just allow *everything* and let the chips fall where they may.

But wait, that might put too much responsibility on the plebeian class.

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Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Who is this Hawley? I like his demeanor and his line of questioning. EXCEPT, he didn't ask how disinformation is defined. Real disinformation is, "Safe and effective," which has been proven wrong time and again. Dr. Kory saying IVM works if taken in the correct timeframe and dosage, is not.

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Facebook's removal of threads and accounts with bona fide statements about successful treatment plans and experiences with the vaccine, in my view, makes it complicit in causing injury and death to many. It was intentional. The fact that the information fed by the CDC and government was actually disinformation is no excuse for Facebook's cupability as Cox himself admitted that this was an unprecedented situation. This would be all the more reason to have free flow of information to discover the truth.

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Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Someone owes Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition an apology. I grew up being taught that the Catholic Church had committed a great crime against science by forcing Galileo to recant. It appears they were only way ahead of their time.

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So the problem really is how they feel like they are RIGHT in doing this. Sam Harris thought it was MORALLY right to do something legally wrong. This dude felt it was MORALLY right to do something blatantly wrong. It doesn’t matter that what we stifled was truth. And that is what literally keeps me up at night. The truth is irrelevant. IRRELEVANT.

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Facebook is already dead but doesn't realize it. Same with Twitter.

Pretty soon Tom will be greeting new accounts.

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Its not Speech

Its information

See ?

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Sep 18, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

The frustrating absence in the exchange between Hawley and Cox is about the presumption in the category of “disinformation.”

I actually think this is good strategy on Hawley's part. Too often the right goes down the rabbit hole of arguing something like "you were wrong about this being disinformation," and ends up ceding the bigger issue, which is they have no business deciding what is true and what is disinformation, period. In so doing, we win a small battle and lose the bigger war.

Even if someone posts something false or exaggerated, it is protected First Amendment speech. That is the point. It may feel good to point out how wrong their judgments are, but the fact that they are making the judgments at all is the problem.

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Sep 18, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

Censorship goes hand in hand with totalitarianism, corruption, manipulation of public opinion, and usually is a sign of a frightened regime. Are there exceptions to these characteristics? Well yes, for example you shouldn’t be able to destroy somebody’s reputation with lies, but there are laws against that sort of thing. Of course, you need an ethical judiciary to uphold the law.

I was banned from:

Twitter, crime: saying allowing ANTIFA/BLM to riot, loot, commit arson, and kill people was a bad idea for America and could lead to wider violent conflict.

LinkedIn (lol), for saying that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggested the COVID 19 virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute, not from a Burger King with armadillos in the rest rooms. Of course, just before my banishment from the world’s most annoying corporatespeak networking site, a virologist with multiple DoD contracts got into my timeline to argue with me. (That was disturbing.) He didn’t refute my evidence, but just afterward magically I was banished.

WSJ- didn’t actually ban me, just eventually would not let anything I posted appear. Meanwhile paid Leftist trolls, who admitted as much, posted their strident woke dumb crap with impunity.

There are others as well. All of them tell you that you are violating a policy, but you never really know what you did wrong, which means the banishment is arbitrary,partisan, and not motivated by anything most decent people would wish to be associated with.

How much of it is internal censorship versus the administrative state coercion of private enterprises is unknown at this time, but government seems pretty comfy censoring Americans with the “wrong” POV these days.

Actually I’m happier off of most social media. It’s a time suck, rarely is enlightening except for breaking news, which is otherwise available, and tends to bring out the worst in people on all sides of the sociopolitical spectrum.

But we need to defend the Bill of Rights. The Founders were not perfect, nor were they omniscient. But they did better than any other group up to their time in translating a revolution into something positive and enduring, by creating foundational documents around the rights and natural inclinations of a free people. The people we have running the works now are pathetic.

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You can forget about Florida , The Liberals avenge themselves on DeSantis by shipping him Karens.

https://babylonbee.com/news/marthas-vineyard-takes-revenge-on-desantis-by-shipping-him-50-karens

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Sep 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray

There's this gigantic, ~800-page file on the main lawsuit against Biden over this: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf

One of the remarkable things from the file is that Facebook apparently started this effort on its own, in February 2020.

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