Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson said on Tuesday that may lose his license unless he submits to mandatory “social-media communication retraining” by the College of Psychologists of Ontario, his home province’s licensing authority.
“I face public disgrace, mandatory political re-education, disciplinary hearing and potential loss of my clinical licensing for agreeing with [Conservative MP] Pierre Poilievre and criticizing our standing [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau,” Peterson said on Twitter.
According to Peterson, “about a dozen people from all over the world” submitted complaints to the CPO, alleging his views and comments “harmed people.” None of them were actual clients of his, but lied about it so their complaints would be accepted, he added.
“If I comply, the terms of my re-education and my punishment will be announced publicly,” he said.
“Canadians: your physicians, lawyers, psychologists and other professionals are now so intimidated by their commissar overlords that they fear to tell you the truth. This means that your care and legal counsel has been rendered dangerously unreliable,” Peterson tweeted.
Peterson was reinstated on Twitter in November, after Elon Musk bought the company and reversed many prior bans that he thought unjust. He had been locked out of his account in July 2022, for refusing to use a transgender actor’s new name and pronouns.
On December 27, Peterson tweeted that Trudeau “appears to me to be perpetually 14 yrs old,” referring to the concept of “psychological age” in his field of expertise.
The psychologist first gained national and international attention in 2016, when he was subjected to similar “re-education” pressure over his criticism of a bill that declared “gender identity and expression” to be protected categories. More recently, he has denounced the “totalitarian” lockdowns and vaccine mandates embraced by many countries – including Canada – in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. (Russia Today, January 3, 2023)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at a gaming convention in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 13, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters) Canada
Musk Says Federal Internet Regulation Bill ‘An Attempt to Muzzle’ Canadians
By Peter Wilson December 14, 2022 Updated: December 14, 2022 biggersmallerPrint 0:003:08
Elon Musk recently commented once again on the Liberal government’s pending internet regulation legislation, this time saying it sounds like “an attempt to muzzle” Canadians.
Musk was responding to a Twitter post by Canadian journalist Andrew Lawton, who wrote on Dec. 13 that the federal government “wants to regulate internet content and deputize social media companies to enforce ‘hate speech’ bans.”
“I hope [Elon Musk] takes a stand against this,” Lawton wrote.
“Sounds like an attempt to muzzle the voice of the people of Canada,” Musk responded on Dec. 14.
Musk earlier responded to a comment regarding Bill C-11 in late October when a Twitter post asked if he would help Canadians “fight back” against the legislation.
“Now that you own Twitter, will you help fight back against Trudeau’s online censorship bill C-11?” said a post by Canada Proud on Oct. 28.
Musk replied, “First I’ve heard.”
Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, is currently pending in the Senate and, if passed and given royal assent, will grant the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulating power over streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube.
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who sponsored the bill, has reiterated in the past that the legislation will not give the CRTC power to regulate the content of individual social media content creators.
However, CRTC chair Ian Scott told a parliamentary committee in May that, within the legislation, “there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.”
Amendments
Senators on the transport and communications committee amended Bill C-11 earlier this week by adding a clause that will prohibit the CBC from publishing or broadcasting sponsored content in the future.
Sen. Percy Downe, who introduced the amendment on Dec. 8, said sponsored content leads to the “cheapening of journalism.”
The government’s Senate representative, Sen. Marc Gold, opposed the amendment.
“The government is of the view that this amendment is not appropriate in the context of this bill,” he said.
A week prior, the same Senate committee voted down an amendment that would’ve limited the CRTC’s scope of regulation under the legislation.
The amendment proposed that only digital content creators with a yearly revenue of $150 million or more be subject to the CRTC’s regulating authority, but was voted down 10-4.
“Many [online content creators] have testified that a financial threshold would be important to help give guidelines to the CRTC on who they can regulate,” said Sen. Pamela Wallin during a Senate transport committee meeting on Nov. 29.
“The government opposes this amendment and thinks it’s not necessary for reasons that it set out,” said Gold.
Two days later, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told Canada’s International Trade Minister Mary Ng that the U.S. is concerned that Bill C-11 could lead to discrimination against American businesses.
“Legislation in the Canadian Parliament … could impact digital streaming services and online news sharing and discriminate against U.S. businesses,” said a U.S. government news release on Nov. 30.
CEO of social media platform nixes Trust and Safety Council amid spike in extremist content
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk disbanded an advisory panel set up in 2016 to address hate speech and other harmful content on the social media platform.
However, since the tech billionaire bought Twitter in a $44 billion purchase he has reinstated the account of former U.S. president Donald Trump among some 62,000 accounts brought back online. Musk also suspended the account of antisemitic rapper Kanye West.
Three Council members resigned last week, stating in an open letter that “the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline” despite claims to the contrary by Musk. The three members who left are Eirliani Abdul Rahman, Anne Collier and Lesley Podesta.
The Council consisted of volunteers who served as advisers with no governing or decision-making authority.
“ADL (Anti-Defamation League) was an active member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council because we strongly believed that social media companies should learn from the best practices of civil society and those communities most affected by hate, harassment, and extremism online on how to best address these issues,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
“It is disappointing that the Council was dissolved because it’s members had valuable insights about how to make their platform a safer place for all users,” Greenblatt added.
Arik Segal, an expert on online conflicts such as hate speech and fake news, told i24NEWS that the Council was ineffective and that this was done on purpose.
“The big tech companies have this method to counter public outcry about all the troubles that they create online like fake news,” said the professor, who teaches at Israel’s Reichman and Bar Ilan universities. “They create this kind of council that doesn’t really do anything but at least they can say that there is a council. I don’t think it was meaningful [and its disbanding] won’t mean anything.”
Antisemitic posts spiked more than 61 percent in the first two weeks that Musk took control of the company, according to online hate monitors. The Network Contagion Research Institute said in early November that terms associated with Jewish people were being tweeted more than 5,000 times per hour and that antisemitic tweets were receiving the most engagement from users.
“The things that are much more troublesome with [Musk’s] behavior are the fact that he allowed those who were blocked on Twitter to be pardoned,” Segal said, expressing concern that Musk’s call on Sunday to prosecute U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci could give rise to more conspiracy theories on the extreme end of free speech.
Segal said that more structured or organizational antisemitism could be more of a problem, citing the BDS movement as an example.
“If it’s more structured antisemitism or influencer antisemitism and hate content on Twitter, that could disseminate to other platforms,” Segal warned. “The problem with the other platforms is the echo chambers — especially WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups — and those people actually go and do something about that.”
A former official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who joined social media company Twitter has been terminated following the discovery of his attempt to block files set for release by Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
James Baker, deputy general counsel for Twitter and former FBI general counsel, was shown the door on Dec. 6. Musk himself confirmed the counsel’s firing in a tweet, writing: “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter.”
Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported the initial “Twitter Files” release on Dec. 2, revealed that Baker was “vetting” the internal documents. He also divulged that the former FBI counsel was delaying the release of a second batch of files to him and fellow investigative journalist Bari Weiss.
“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter Files’ surprised everyone involved, to say the least,” Taibbi wrote on Dec. 6. “Reporters resumed searchers through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today,” he added. Taibbi reassured that the “next installment” of Musk’s revelations will appear in the near future.
The files released by Musk document Twitter’s censorship of evidence exposing the corruption of the Biden crime family, specifically President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Central to this evidence is a story of the New York Post, which revealed the multi-million-dollar deals Hunter inked with Eastern European oligarchs and Chinese entrepreneurs with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) earlier recounted a sequence of events that led to Twitter hiring Baker.
Prior to joining Twitter in June 2020, Baker had been the alleged source of the story that revealed the existence of the now-debunked Steele dossier that maligned former President Donald Trump.
According to a December 2017 story by POLITICO, Baker “communicated with Mother Jones reporter David Corn in the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election.” The report added that Corn was the first to report the existence of the dossier on Oct. 31, and that the report was compiled by a former high-level Western spy.
The reporter for the leftist publication referenced “a senior U.S. government official not involved with the case, but familiar with the former spy.” That official vouched for Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous dossier, describing the former MI6 agent as “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government.”
Corn quickly denied that the FBI general counsel was his source for the story.
“I’m not going to discuss my sources,” he told POLITICO in a statement at the time. “But in order to prevent the dissemination of inaccurate information, I will say that James Baker was not my source for this story.”
According to Taibbi’s report on the Twitter Files, Baker may have directly coordinated with executives of the social media site to suppress the Post‘s compromising story on Hunter Biden. He mentioned that then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was left out of the loop in the decision to censor the Post.
Taibbi further revealed that Vijaya Gadde – former Twitter head of legal, policy and trust – spearheaded the effort to censor the Post‘s stories. She had also been previously responsible for decisions to permanently ban conservatives from the platform and had opposed Musk’s takeover of the website.
Musk fired Gadde as soon as he assumed leadership of the Big Tech company. She was not the only executive to suffer that fate, as Musk also fired Dorsey’s successor Parag Agrawal.
THE TWITTER FILES, PART II – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists
by Tyler DurdenFriday, Dec 09, 2022 – 05:51 AM
After nearly a week’s delay on the second installment of “THE TWITTER FILES” – Twitter’s internal correspondence surrounding their decision to censor the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story – Journalist Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) has begun releasing more information via Twitter.
EU rules Google must remove wrong search results
S
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. 8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us. 9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. 10. All without users’ knowledge. 11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed. 12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day. 13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.” 14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others. 15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.” 16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok
—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” See here:
20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:
24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”
25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”
26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by @abigailshrier@shellenbergermd@nelliebowles@isaacgrafstein and the team The Free Press @thefp. Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: http://thefp.com. /Fin
ADL Demands that Elon Musk Remove “Denizens of Hell”
Jonathan Greenblatt heads ADL, a militantly anti-free speech lobby. On CNN, today he demanded that Elon Musk remove “the denizens of hell”; that is, nationalists and critics of Jews. Get this straight: Groups like ADL &, in Canada, the Canada Israel Affairs Committee are the worst enemies of free speech.
[This blows my mind. I am loving what Elon Musk is doing. This is fantastic. The heads of the Liberals/Jews/Leftists/Communists must be EXPLODING. This is fantastic. I wonder if they have records of really old Twitter accounts like mine which were banned 7 years ago? This is a HUGE step in the right direction. Musk is doing better work than Trump. Seriously. This is HUGE. This is HUGE. I’m very impressed. Jan Lamprecht]
Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk has announced he is rolling out a blanket amnesty for accounts that were permanently suspended on his recently acquired social media platform.
Earlier this week, Musk ran a poll to ask Twitter users if they’d support such an amnesty.
“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” he wrote.
More than three million users voted in the poll, with nearly three-quarters of voters, 72.4%, voting “yes,” while just 27.6% voted “no.”
After an overwhelming number of users voted in favor of the idea, Musk announced that he will begin rolling out the amnesty next week.
He revealed that Twitter will begin unbanning accounts en masse, except for those who broke the law or engaged in excessive spam.
“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote after the poll concluded.
“Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” Musk has already unbanned a number of popular accounts that were permanently suspended before he took over as “Chief Twit.”
Before the poll ended, Musk seemed to indicate that in effect, the platform would significantly curtail content moderation to target illegal content and increase transparency.
“Please limit content moderation to illegal content (or, at most, a narrow interpretation of moderation under Section 230) and give users the tools that enable the freedom to choose what content they see,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton replied to the poll.
“That’s the general idea,” Musk replied.
“[W]hatever it decides to do, twitter should be clear and consistent about it’s rules and penalties for breaking them, enforcement should be unbiased, and the mechanisms of enforcement shouldn’t be easily abused by people who have an agenda,” Billy Markus, the creator of DogeCoin, replied to the poll.
Musk agreed with Markus’s suggestion, replying with the “100” and “bullseye” emojis.
In a separate tweet, Musk indicated that Twitter’s old policies and enforcement methods were dishonest.
“The more I learn, the worse it gets,” Musk said.
“The world should know the truth of what has been happening at Twitter.
“Transparency will earn the trust of the people.”
Twitter’s blanket amnesty policy is Musk’s latest move in his effort to restore free speech on the social media giant.
Under his leadership, Twitter has already restored the accounts of several high-profile conservative and right-leaning influencers.
The list includes Christian satire site The Babylon Bee; renowned clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson; conservative undercover investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas; and President Donald Trump.
As Slay News reported, Musk announced earlier this week that he plans to publish all of Twitter’s internal discussions regarding the company’s decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“This is necessary to restore public trust,” he said of the move.
Perhaps, Kanye hit a sore point. What other minority group would have the clout or nerve to call for a ruinous advertising boycott, having already inflicted great harm on the rapper, designer, turned evangelist Kanye West for merely offering a personal opinion?
“This past Tuesday (November 1, 2022), @Twitter’s new owner @elonmusk met with representatives from U.S civil society organizations, including @JGreenblattADL and @YaelEisenstat. Following that meeting, Musk pledged that “Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment,” including antisemitism.”
“Since that meeting, Musk permitted @kanyewestto start posting again. From Ye’s “Death Con 3” tweet to @KyrieIrvingpromoting an antisemitic film, we’ve seen celebrities use Twitter to disseminate antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate to tens of millions of followers.”
Rumble, a Toronto-based video hosting service similar to YouTube, which touts itself as pro-freedom of speech, has announced that users in France will no longer be able to access the site. The suspension came after a demand by Paris to remove some Russian news sources, the company added.
The video hosting service said it was committed to not moving the “goalposts” on its policy of platforming users with “unpopular views.” It has challenged the legality of the French order, but for now, access in France will be disabled, the statement on Tuesday said.
Rumble added that the decision will not impact the company materially, since less than 1% of its user base was viewing videos from France. It expressed hope that Paris will reconsider its demand and allow Rumble to operate in the country again.
CEO Chris Pavlovski shared the news on Twitter – in a reply to a tweet by Elon Musk in which he reported that he resisted pressure by some governments to ban Russian news sources on his Starlink satellite broadband service. In the post from March, Musk declared himself a “free speech absolutist” and promised not to yield “unless at gunpoint.” The billionaire purchased Twitter last month and pledged to overhaul its controversial content moderation policies.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-
A report in The Intercept, a news outlet which Greenwald co-founded and later resigned from, revealed last week that US federal agencies and major US-based Big Tech firms have been working hand-in-glove to suppress what Washington deems to be “misinformation,” including the factually true Hunter Biden laptop story.
Greenwald left The Intercept in October 2020 due to its refusal to print in full his analysis of Big Tech and media censorship of the laptop story. He has since partnered with Rumble and is in the process of launching a talk show on the platform, which he said “has no desire to be anything other than a content-neutral free speech platform.”
France, like other EU nations, banned Russian government-funded news outlets, including RT, after the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. Major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are enforcing the ban by blocking people in the EU from accessing content from these sources.
Musk declared last week after his acquisition of Twitter that “the bird is freed,” but the EU leadership seemed to pour cold water on the notion. “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market, said.
Great News: Elon Musk, Committed to Free Speech, is Buying Twitter
Elon Musk, CEO of electrical car giant Tesla, has bought social media giant Twitter and promises a new era of free speech. ” – Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc. for $44 billion cash on Monday in a transaction that will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person. It is a seminal moment for the 16-year-old company, which emerged as one of the world’s most influential public squares and now faces a string of challenges.
Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, has criticized Twitter’s moderation [censorship]. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement. Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc for $44 billion cash on Monday in a transaction that will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.
It is a seminal moment for the 16-year-old company, which emerged as one of the world’s most influential public squares and now faces a string of challenges. Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, has criticized Twitter’s moderation. … Political activists expect that a Musk regime will mean less moderation and reinstatement of banned individuals including former President Donald Trump. Conservatives cheered the prospect of fewer controls while some human rights activists voiced fears of a rise in hate speech. (Reuters, April 25, 2022)
Worried thought control types fretted at the prospect of real free speech. “Human rights groups on Monday raised concerns about hate speech on Twitter and the power that its takeover by Elon Musk would give the billionaire after the self-described “free speech absolutist” clinched a deal to take the social media platform private.
Musk, who is also chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” who has been critical of Twitter’s policies of moderating content on the platform. He has said Twitter needs to become a genuine forum for free speech. In a statement after securing the deal on Monday, Musk described free speech as “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”
“Amnesty International said it was concerned about any potential decision that Twitter may take after Musk’s takeover to erode enforcement of the policies and mechanisms designed to moderate hate speech online. The last thing we need is a Twitter that willfully turns a blind eye to violent and abusive speech against users, particularly those most disproportionately impacted, including women, non-binary persons, and others,’ Michael Kleinman, director of technology and human rights at Amnesty International USA, said on Monday.” (Reuters, April 25, 2022)
by Tyler DurdenFriday, Dec 09, 2022 – 05:51 AM
