Facebook Censors it's Own Critics, Yale Prof Persecutes Journalist, France & Germany Denounce American Censorship, The 70's Reporter Who Broke Journalism (The Five for 1/12/21)
Hi,
One thing before we begin.
DON’T MISS THE FACT THAT I LAUNCHED A PRIVATE SOCIAL NETWORK AND YOU CAN JOIN IT HERE.
(Details in the first story).
That being said, here’s The Five.
[one]
I don’t want to bury the lead here. Due to the fracturing of the country, I’ve decided to create a space for people who read The Five to gather around the idea of first fixing yourself to fix the country.
I launched a private social network on Discord, focused on the following:
workouts/wellness
reading (non-fiction only…the world of ideas)
self defense and survival skills
gear (headphones, running shoes, whatever)
community development (inviting your neigbhors over for dinner, coaching little league, stuff like that).
I’ve been testing the idea with six users. So far, here’s what’s happened:
Three of us are following the 75 Hard mental toughness challenge (details here).
We’re reading important books and sharing our thoughts.
People are connecting in a space online that’s designed to be a place where you get better rathter than get angry.
Odds are that you may not have heard of Discord which started out as a place for people who played online video games to connect and communicate, and has since spiraled out to be one of the hot new properties in tech/virtual communities.
Since this is a private server, it can’t be canceled by Facebook, Twitter or Big Tech.
The downside is that it requires one more app on your phone. And that I have to pay for the server space.
I would love to host this community, on a major tech platform, for free.
But I no longer think that’s a wise move (see story #2)
If you have any questions on using the app, email/text me: sethtowerhurd@gmail.com, 314-580-3719. Better yet, downlod the Signal app and hit me up there. (I’m running out of time/space, but I’ll cover this issue in the next newsletter).\
[two]
It’s tough to get your head around all the changes swirling in the world of news, tech, censorship…and how that censorship is spilling over to do real damage to people who had nothing to do with the capital riots.
I’m going to break format here and present you with a list of breaking events, rather than focusing on ones story:
Libertarian and former Presidential Candidate Ron Paul was locked out of his public Facebook page…for criticizing Facebook. (Update: I wrote this on Monday night. On Tuesaday morning, Paul was allowed to use his page again. But the precedent has been set—you’re not safe on big tech if you raise concerns about big tech).
Facebook deleted the Walk Away Campaign, a page with 500,000 members, because the group was at Trump’s speech on 1/6, the same day the violence broke out at the Capital. The group’s admins also had their personal Facebook accounts deleted, and are assumedly banned from using the platform ever again. Walk Away was founded by Brandon Stracka, a gay NYC hair stylist and former liberal who has never called for violence, nor have any Walk Away members, former Democrats who have turned Republican, been accused of extremism.
By this time, there’s no point in covering Parler’s deletion from Amazon’s servers, taking the network offline. But perhaps it’s informative to compare the network to Twitter, which allowed China to celebrate the forced sterilization of Muslims last week and allowed “Hang Pence” to trend. It’s also worth noting that Twitter’s own blog post claims it banned Trump in part…because he refused to attend Biden’s Inaguration.
It’s assumed that most on the political right think there’s a Tsunami of censorship coming, targeted at anyone right of center (what happened to Ron Paul certainly points in that direction).
However, there are some on the left who are also standing up for free speech.
Parler’s suspension should concern us all. I despise white supremacist content and its proliferation online, and the tweeted examples of comments posted on Parler are alarming and deeply unsettling to read. But as Kate Ruane, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, it “should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions—especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”* There should be ways to bring accountability to platforms that host inciteful hate speech. Justice, however, is not achieved by endorsing other companies’ self-interests.
Earlier this year, the openly Socialist Jacobin Magazine also stood up for the First Amendment:
Yet because the Left is the cradle of civil liberties, we have a special responsibility to guard against illiberalism. After the experiences of the twentieth century, we will forever have a solemn task to constantly be on our guard against any recurrence of the morbid group dynamics that helped give rise to them, and within our own movements before anywhere else.
There is a need to let progressives who support free speech know that they are not alone and to give them confidence to speak out against censorship and illiberalism on their campuses, in their organizations, in their communities, or wherever someone imposes it, whether this comes from the right, center, or left, from the state or civil society.
I’m a First Amendment person.
The solution to lies, hate speech and evil speech…is more speech.
The idea that the truth can win out in the marketplace of ideas is something I’ve built my career, and my life, upon. Every day, it seems like there are less people in Silicon Valley who share that ideal.
One final note here, my friend Chris Spangle was warned on Instagram about “violent” content. These are the memes deemed “violent.”
Once
Once we have given our right of free speech to the tech overlords, we shouldn’t be suprised when they abuse their powers.
[three]
Over the weekend, Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder published an essay in the New York Times which accused a photojournalist for The Daily Caller of being a rioter. The paper did issue a correction, but the New York Times refused to correct or apologize for the falst claim that credentialed journalist Richie McGinnis was involved the violence.
The correction does not make mention of the removed allegation that McGinniss "punched the door" or was "forced out of the building."
In a Twitter thread, Ingersoll angrily accused the Times of inventing "a story about a credentialed reporter out of whole cloth."
Meanwhile, McGinnis continues to be harrassed by conspiracy theorists who claim he was a rioter. The New York Times poor reporting may have contributed to this behavior.
[four]
Matt Taiabbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, has an excellent writeup on how our media got to be so divisive. Tiabbi’s take is that everything changed with Rolling Stone sent rebel journalist Hunter S. Thompson out on the campaign trail to cover it in detail.
Entertainment came to political journalism, which slowly transformed into tailoring stories for specific groups rather than purely focusing on the facts. And nobody has figured out how to put the genie back in the bottle.
From taiabbi.substack.com:
Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.
Trump began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom, and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed from Fox, which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors. Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer, making the hate more real.
I came into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the work of Hunter Thompson:
Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces.
What Rolling Stone did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull “objective” format.
The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.
I certainly share some analysis here, but I’m also trying to create a fact-based media outlet that both the left and right can agree on. We may not always see eye to eye on the issues, but we should be able to come to a place of common ground on the facts…which is why I work so hard at this thing.
Because very few outlets are even trying to do that.
[five]
And finally, even the Europeans think American tech is becoming too Authoritarian.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday, according to Reuters.
“Given that, the chancellor considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended.”
Later, France echoed this sentinment, according to Bloomberg:
The German leader’s stance is echoed by the French government. Junior Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune said he was “shocked” to see a private company make such an important decision. “This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO,” he told Bloomberg TV on Monday. “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms.” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire earlier said that the state should be responsible for regulations, rather than “the digital oligarchy,” and called big tech “one of the threats” to democracy.
I wish I had a brighter note to end on…but I will say that the readership of The Five does give me hope for decent, everyday people making a difference.
To meet some of them in my new private social network on Discord, click here.
Until the next one,
-sth