Thursday, October 6, 2022

Mainstream and Social Media 2

 This is a blow to the big-tech social media giants. And a really good one. Quote: "US Appeals Court Rejects Big Tech's Right to Regulate Online Speech. A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on "viewpoint," a setback for technology industry groups that say the measure would turn platforms into bastions of dangerous content. The largely 2-1 ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, sets up the potential for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the law, which conservatives and right-wing commentators have said is necessary to prevent "Big Tech" from suppressing their views. "Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say," Judge Andrew Oldham, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the ruling.

       The Texas law was passed by the state's Republican-led legislature and signed by its Republican governor. The tech groups that challenged the law and were on the losing end of Friday's ruling include NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which count Meta Platforms' Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet Inc's YouTube as members. They have sought to preserve rights to regulate user content when they believe it may lead to violence, citing concerns that unregulated platforms will enable extremists such as Nazi supporters, terrorists, and hostile foreign governments. The association on Friday said it disagreed with forcing private companies to give equal treatment to all viewpoints. "'God Bless America' and 'Death to America' are both viewpoints, and it is unwise and unconstitutional for the state of Texas to compel a private business to treat those the same," it said in a statement.

       Some conservatives have labeled the social media companies' practices abusive, pointing to Twitter's permanent suspension of Trump from the platform shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Twitter had cited "the risk of further incitement of violence" as a reason.

The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to "censor" users based on "viewpoint," and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Twitter hailed the ruling as "massive victory for the constitution and free speech."

       Because the 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with part of a ruling by the 11th Circuit, the aggrieved parties have a stronger case for petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the matter. In May, the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that most of a similar Florida law violates the companies' free speech rights and cannot be enforced."     US Appeals Court Rejects Big Tech's Right to Regulate Online Speech | Newsmax.com   We will have to wait and see if it stands.


This item illustrates in spades the gross dishonesty, unprofessionalism, crudeness and abject corruption of the majority of the left-wing political activists who call themselves professional journalists.  Both the mainstream and social media partners are filled with far too many such reprehensible individuals masking as journalists. 

         Quote: "Andrew Kaczynski is a CNN personality who published a misleading hit piece on Joe Kent, a Republican candidate in Washington State running for Congress. Kaczynski’s effort perfectly illustrates the debauched, diseased state of modern “journalism.” Then, when a Republican strategist commented on what Kaczynski had done, Mediaite used exactly the same tactic against the Republican strategist. Joe Kent is an Army veteran who is running on a platform that would have been centrist back in the 1980s and before. He advocates for American jobs, less government regulation, lower taxes, controlled immigration, the end of foreign wars (once a Democrat position), support for the military and law enforcement, an end to Chinese aggression, and putting America’s interests ahead of those of foreign countries. Only when it comes to the Second Amendment (for) and abortion (against) would he have been recognized as a Republican back in the day.

        However, this is 2022, so pro-American values are “far right,” at least as far as Andrew Kaczynski of CNN is concerned. He published a hit piece identifying Kent as a far-right candidate who consorted with a Nazi sympathizer. The “proof” that Kent is far right is that he supports Majorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar, who also hold once-centrist values.

Kent’s big sin, though, is that he was caught “speaking with Greyson Arnold, a Nazi sympathizer.” It’s only in the fifth paragraph of Kaczynski’s attack piece that we hear that the contact between Kent and Greyson was an accidental, “on the street” moment:

In a statement to CNN, campaign spokesperson Matt Braynard said, “Joe Kent had no idea who that individual was when he encountered him on the street and Joe Kent has repeatedly condemned the statements that the individual is accused of making.”

Braynard added that the campaign screens all interview requests and that Arnold approached Kent on the street by what he assumed was a local journalist. “None of the questions gave Joe any indications that the individual had any racist or antisemitic views and, if he had, Joe would have cancelled the interview immediately,” said Braynard.

        During the McCarthy era, the left taught America that “guilt by association” was evil. Leftists continued to hold this view when Obama sat for twenty years in the pew of a minister who blamed 9/11 on America, saying its “chickens are coming home to roost.” That same minister also castigated America as a racist country, intoning, “God man America.” We were assured, though, that Obama was free of the taint of America-hatred. The same was true when Obama consorted with a known violently anti-White and anti-Semitic race hustler. Again, we were told that didn’t share any of these views.

         For the left, though, it’s different when a Republican does it. In that case, simply talking to a stranger on the street is enough to be tarred as a neo-Nazi. This is how the modern media operates. It starts with a kernel of truth (Kent spoke with Greyson) and turns it into a slimy piece of fact-free innuendo.

         The hustle continued when Mediate reported that a “GOP Strategist Invokes Death of CNN Reporter’s Daughter To Hit Story He Didn’t Like: ‘I Thought He Would Have Changed.’” That’s the headline. The body of the story is a bit different.

Alex Breusewitz, a Republican strategist, stated on Steve Bannon’s war room that Kaczynski is a “total fake news hack,” who “went through a rough patch.” Breusewitz hoped that this experience meant Kaczynski “would have changed hard and become a decent person,” but was disappointed to realize that Kaczynski remained “a lying piece of crap.”

         The modern leftist media is unconstrained by traditional rules of reporting. Rather than reporting the facts and letting readers draw their conclusions, modern reporters offer conclusions and then throw in random, often unrelated or meaningless facts.

When I was a litigator, if you could prove to the judge that the opposing counsel was doing this, that counsel could face everything from monetary sanctions to having the case dismissed. In the world of modern journalism, the best we can do is encourage people to turn off the TV and remove these outlets from their browser’s bookmarks."    

        One would think that calling Kaczynski a “total fake news hack” and “a lying piece of crap” would have incurred Mediate’s ire but that’s not what happened. Instead, it was the polite and oblique reference to “a rough patch” in Kaczynski’s life. At no point did Breusewitz detail what that rough patch was and it’s probable that no one listening to Bannon’s show had any idea what Breusewitz was talking about.

        But the left heard that whistle. That polite allusion was, as noted, a crude call-out grinding Kaczynski’s face into the “inside politics” fact that his infant daughter had died. The fact that Breusewitz said absolutely nothing about Kaczynski’s child or her death was irrelevant. The point was to transmute the neutral phrase “a rough patch” into a crude emotional attack and then run with it."     The American media and the art of grotesque misrepresentations - American Thinker


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