Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media.
He won’t have it easy.
On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.” [bold, links added]
What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear.
The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.”
Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring.
The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes?
“We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month.
“If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”
Huh. Who else has “partnered” with Silicon Valley? It is hardly fake news, to pick a phrase, to point out that the internet is full of bad information.
Amid the pandemic, Facebook worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fact-check claims that Covid-19 vaccines might cause “magnetism” or “alter blood color.”
Twitter asked the CDC if it could flag “examples of fraud—such as fraudulent covid cures, fraudulent vaccine cards.”
Yet it was also initially dismissed as tinfoil-hat lunacy to wonder if the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
Shortly thereafter, experts with scientific standing acknowledged that as a real possibility to be discussed in earnest.
It’s a bad sign when one side of a political debate demands to cut off the microphones of the people on the other—and the tech censors these days are almost uniformly progressives.
On climate change, the disinformation tag gets liberally applied even to people who agree that it’s real, caused by fossil fuels, and a problem … but who also think humanity can adapt, apocalyptic predictions are overwrought, or subsidies for green energy are a poor investment.
“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said this summer.
Dissent has shifted from climate-change “denial” to “the values of solar energy, the values of wind energy,” she continued, but “that is equally dangerous to denial.”
In other words, censorship must increase the more the public resists the climate lobby’s preferred solutions.
If Gina McCarthy’s ideas lose a debate, the cause must be “disinformation.” With statements like that from White House bigs, is it any wonder that skeptics of big tech’s power are gaining ground?
The Left increasingly wants Silicon Valley to deploy its mute buttons as a way to stifle opposition, especially on climate.
If the platforms give in, they’ll be begging the next Republican Congress to rewrite the liability shield under Section 230.
Sen. Josh Hawley proposed a bill in 2019 to make internet sites get a federal certificate proving a lack of bias. This is a bad idea, but one that the continuing censorship push is doing its best to popularize.
Which brings us back to Mr. Musk, assuming his Twitter purchase goes through. His plans for the social site are far from clear, but he has spoken or tweeted in the past that Twitter should be the modern town square and should be an “inclusive arena for free speech.”
A good place to send that message would be to shut down the climate censors.
Read rest at WSJ
Paypal is implementing a new policy as of November where if a member makes a statement that Paypal doesn’t like, they can levy a fine of $2,500. It is not known if the statement would be just one made in Paypal, or one social media. It also isn’t known if they would only take money from the Paypal balance, or from the attached bank account. They will publish their new policy early in November. Even if the scope is minimum, this is extremely significant and likely to be copied by others. This is the firsts move from just censoring what people say to levying fines for making “politically incorrect statements.” This is another instant of private industry doing what the federal governments wishes it could do. As time goes on, we continue get closer to George Orwell’s 1984 scenario.
Thousands of people have called in to cancel their Paypal accounts. Many have been unable to do so because they were put on hold for seven hours. Paypal is now backing off, at least in part, on their new policy calling it a mistake. That is the difference between free enterprise and the federal government. If the First Amendment protection on free speech didn’t forbid the government from penalizing people for “political incorrect statements,” and they decided to do so, they would not back off.
There is a lot of disinformation on climate change. Among them is we have only have until 2030 to take extreme action or it will be the end of the world. Extreme weather events are increasing. Sea level is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The earth is warming at a rate that will cause disaster. Of course under the censorship that the left wants to increase, these will never be labeled as disinformation.
Facts that would be labeled as disinformation is the climate models are running hot in comparison to real world data, extreme weather events are not increasing, and wind and solar energy can not power a modern industrial society.
If a free exchange of information is allowed, most people will be able to sort out what is disinformation and what isn’t. That is what terrifies the liberals. They know support for climate change action would collapse. It also would be very clear that other liberal agendas have no merit.
Valid questions all. Question the alarmists orthodoxy because it is flawed, full of holes.
But of course, only those who attend the Church of Gaia can be allowed to voice their opinions the rest of us must be silenced so St Greta alone can speak
Extraordinary, where is the debate! One gas in our atmosphere matters, that gas is at a 300 million year low, that gas is only 0.04% of the total Atmosphere; that gas is the source via photosynthesis of all our oxygen and of all plant life on Earth life on earth… That gas is CO2 and yet some fools wish to rid the atmosphere of that gas without debate even!!!
8 times in the past 1 million years it has fallen to 180ppm … AT 150ppm all life on earth stops!!! DEAD… that being the limit for photosynthesis to take place. That is 8 times we have been a hairsbreadth from extinction.
Yet for Billions of years our planet has flourished with CO2 levels 10-20 times higher than ur present record low levels.
What is going on!!!!!
Politics only. Forget the science. The Alarmists do not want to hear the truth.
They will not listen or debate. It is their religion.
That is why it is called CAGW [Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming]
Here’s another way to look at this. The Greenhouse nonsense where a quantity of atmospheric gases hold heat in the atmosphere. Some refer to it as a blanket. If such were the case then the insolation energy would not escape and this truly would become the barren 3rd Rock from the Sun.
The heat MUST escape so a fishnet would be a better analogy. Gases are measured in ppm and Co2, Ch4 and N20 ~compose 418.133ppn total. I cannot understand mechanically how ~418 blockages out of 1,000,000 can control the heat retention.
The theory does not hold water.
The theory does not hold heat either! Water vapor content of the troposphere, where warmists claim CO2 reigns, averages 4% dwarfing CO2, CH4 and NO2 at 0.042%. If these tiny GH gases were the problem (they’re not!) man contributes 5% nature 95%. Eliminating all 5% of our contribution (impossible) still leaves 95%. No solution! CO2 is life sustaining not life ending! Fossil fuels recycle the two basic ingredients of life on earth – CO2 and H2O – when we use them to provide the energy that has made us the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous people that have ever lived! Making fossil fuels the ONLY GREEN ENERGY