Censorship China style is a fabulous idea! That’s the entire gist of this awful article in The Atlantic.
“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”
I beg your pardon? China’s control over their networks and information dissemination should be applauded?? Are those two professors on crack? They must be.
Fact: China locked down Wuhan Province over this virus.
Fact: China told the WORLD nothing to see here, move along when information started trickling out about the virus.
Fact: China let people from Wuhan jaunt all over the world for MONTHS while keeping this virus a secret.
Fact: China told WHO that everything is fine and WHO is still peddling that lie!
Yet Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, professors of “journalism” are here to tell us that CHINA should be the example to follow when deciding how to police the internet??!! That’s a solid NO from me.
Further down the rather lengthy article, I found this dreck:
“What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.”
Oh isn’t that just ducky? Let’s boot our Constitution to the curb in favor of regulating free speech in public or on the internet because someone deems it offensive. Let’s drop kick our First Amendment rights into oblivion because someone somewhere is peddling information that doesn’t not fit the chosen Covid-19 narrative. A prime example? The two doctors out of Southern California who’ve had their video taken down by YouTube and several other platforms. Another example? China vs Australia.
Australia has been warned by the Chinese ambassador that it could face an economic hit if it does not back down from a push into the nation’s handling of the coronavirus. https://t.co/A6NVi0axjz
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) April 27, 2020
I’m with Australia on this. Meanwhile, quite a few “journalism” folks signed a petition advocating for the following:
“We write to demand that the live, unedited airing of the Daily White House Task Force Briefings stop. Because Donald Trump uses them as a platform for misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, they have become a serious public health hazard—a matter of life and death for viewers who cannot easily identify his falsehoods, lies and exaggerations. We ask that all cable channels, broadcast stations, and networks (with the exception of C-SPAN) stop airing these briefings live. Instead, they should first review the briefings and, after editing, present only that information that provides updates from health officials about the progress and ongoing mitigation of the disease.”
In other words, make President Trump and the task force give a briefing to an empty room with no cameras rolling. Why? So our media betters can vet the information, censor what THEY deem as inappropriate or wrong, such as the UV light and disinfectant kerfuffle, and then feed their cherry picked data to the public.
Again, that is a hard NOPE from me. Because Constitution dammit!
Besides, if the briefings aren’t carried live, then none of us would find out that shitty questions like this are asked.
.@Olivianuzzi : If a POTUS loses more Americans over six weeks than died in the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 27, 2020
TRUMP: "If you look at what the original projections were, 2.2 million — we're probably headed to 60,000, 70,000 …we've made a lot of good decisions." pic.twitter.com/J6YzS7jWoz
Amazingly, she’s proud of the reaction and of her question! Wanna bet Olivia Nuzzi is on the China censorship grand idea! bandwagon?
https://twitter.com/GAKechnie/status/1254571180767481856
It amazes me to no end as well. Furthermore, it’s equally astounding that, in the midst of everything going on regarding this damned Wuhan virus, two presumably intelligent professors would write an article that literally applauds China’s censorship tactics!
China has detained doctors, or made them disappear altogether, and has cracked down on social media so people around the world couldn’t be warned about the virus. Microsoft-owned GitHub is another recent example of China’s free speech crackdown. Never mind that folks! Censorship China style is awesome!
No, and hell no. They are advocating on behalf of China’s censorship while ignoring the fact that medical supplies and equipment used to battle this virus were sent all over the world, and have been found to be absolutely useless because they are defective.
China unleashed this virus upon the world and yet we are supposed to applaud them for their brilliance in censorship and move to do the same here?
Sunlight kills the virus. A crap ton of sunlight will be needed to kill unConstitutional ideas like this.
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Joe in PNG says: The Leftist Intelligentsia has always had a love of tyranny and tyrants, because they wish they too could become tyrants.
That their inevitable end post-revolution is to be the first against the wall never seems to register.
GWB says: I say we aim to excel, and make it their end pre-revolution!
Jim says: Maatje Benassi went to Wuhan to participate in the Military World Games as a cyclist. The games took place in November, 2019. Maatje was injured but she finished the race. Now she is being targeted by the CCP, though she is not in politics and just an athlete. Similarly the Australian swimmer Mack Horton and his family were targeted by Chinese ‘agents’ after he complained about a Chinese swimmer being a drug-cheat:
“Mack Horton‘s family said they received death threats, had their home broken into and believe other forms of abuse were retaliation after the Australian swimmer labeled now-banned Chinese star Sun Yang a “drug cheat” at the Rio Olympics and made a podium protest at the 2019 World Championships, according to a report.
“My primary concern has been my family,” Horton said, according to the Australian. “To be honest, initially I wasn’t aware of a lot of what was going on as my parents tried to protect me. To see and hear the impact it has had on those I love most has been the most upsetting part.”
Horton’s family said people hurled dog faeces over their fence, banged pots and pans in an alley behind the house and verbally abused them from the driveway. Plants were poisoned. Horton’s mom, Cheryl, found “a bucket load” of broken glass at the bottom of their pool, according to the report.”
In short the forces of the CCP will take every step, legal and, apparently extra-legal, to force its will on others and will target private individuals as well as politicians in other, sovereign nations. They don’t care about people only Power and these two academic ‘journalists’ would appear to be part of the Chinese propaganda system that operates world-wide spreading disinformation and lies.
Leftists are all about control, everything all the time. They know how to live your life better than you. The ChiComs rigid control is the envy of the Dems/Progs.
FerdBurful says: These fools think that they and their fellow travellers will be doing the censoring. Wrong. I will be the censor because. Now my first step will be to follow the Chinese protocols, throw these idiots into a re-education camp. Second, when they are unable to be re-educated, harvest their organs and burn their carcasses. That’s the Chinese way. They didn’t think this through very well, now did they.
Leonard Herr says: Obviously what we need is some sort of change in our culture according to these guys. We could call it…I don’t know, maybe the “Cultural Revolution”. What could go wrong?
GWB says: And, since we’re starting over in many ways, we could maybe call this “Year Zero”! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Orson says: As these J-school fascists demonstrate, and The once glorious Atlantic remonstrates for platforming this retromingent dictatorial fertiliser, the US Ruling class must be completely expunged, or else American freedom is dead. Patriots for civil war to reclaim liberty? The mature Jefferson commended us to do so – twice. We are righteously pissed. We must now act.
little bird says: Progressives believe that COVID is an epochal event that can transform America – that this is their moment, and that the public is too frightened and vulnerable to stop them. So their mask is off.
Here’s the bigger picture – https://ethics.harvard.edu/covid-19-response – it’s a policy framework that has been guiding their response to the pandemic.
If you check the Roadmap Response doc and the papers on social distancing ( ‘when can we go outside’ ) and testing ( ‘why we must test 1 million a day’) , you’ll recognize their policy recommendations fin the sequence of events that have occurred since the lockdowns. The no-arrest policies that cities have implemented are in there as well (‘policing in a time of pandemic’). The other papers define an ongoing agenda.
That’s where Cuomo has been getting his ”new vision’ and ideas for an ‘army’ of virus wardens from. And this is why Ezekial Emanuel ( Rahm’s brother) has been making the news rounds, laying the ground work for extending lockdowns to 18 months. The contributors are a who’s who of Lefty policy orgs and insiders, which probably explains the high degree of coordination in their messaging in support of extending lockdowns, testing, vaccines etc.. – and MS reps are contributors as well, along with the Rockefeller foundation and the WHO.
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GWB says: Progressives believe that COVID is an epochal event that can transform America – that this is their moment, and that the public is too frightened and vulnerable to stop them. So their mask is off.
^^THIS^^ The flip side of this is why they pushed so hard on impeaching Trump – they thought they were winning and they could begin to take the masks off, and then the rug was pulled out from under them by that impostor and usurper, Trump.
GWB says: And thank you for the info.
Orson says: Fore give me little bird. I am prepared to believe you. And on looking at the Harvard Ethics docs you link to, as “bi-partisan.” I was expecting the worst because the only non-leftists I could see were Alex Tabarrack and GMUs Niskanen Center in affiliating support. But my examination of the 56/page document and a look at the Big Think summary and pull quotes online, I really only see TTSI or Testing, Tracing contacts, and Social Isolation methods which has worked in East Asia,Australia and New Zealand.
Am I missing something?
GWB says: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high.
That’s always the claim. It’s why they can’t let a crisis “go to waste.” Whether it’s a war or a plague or an economic depression, it’s always “You have to give me control so we can fix this!” And some portion of the populace is always willing to look to a superman to save them.
(Oh, and the stakes are not that high, though the problem is actually universal.)
And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content
That third word is where we’re having difficulty: ‘platform’. We’ve left a handful of folks to control the platform. They’re not just controlling their websites. They’re not just controlling their servers. Those websites and servers are the entire platform for these methods of communication. Re-democratize the platforms and this level of control reverts to what the World Wide Web was intended to be – granular, able to route around “damage” like control.
Donald Trump uses them as a platform for misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19
I challenge you: name one instance. until you can clearly lay out one instance of actual mis- or dis-information, I’ll just point my middle fingers at you and call you a liar. (BTW, based on your claims, a mistake is NOT mis- or dis-information. It must be willful to fulfill your assertion.)
if the briefings aren’t carried live
Trump could easily argue they are necessary to the national emergency, and require the stations to carry them. In primetime. Now, real constitutionalists (like me) would not like that. But it would be absolutely precious to see the media flip again and scream “dictator!”
those who espouse the greatness of the US Constitution are the very ones
Huh? The Atlantic doesn’t espouse the greatness of the Constitution! At least not for the last 3 or 4 decades. That statement makes no sense.
it’s equally astounding that… two presumably intelligent professors would … literally applauds China’s censorship tactics!
They’re communists. Why should it surprise you? The communists (particularly the Chinese lately) have thoroughly poisoned academia. And journalism. So, it really shouldn’t be astounding at all.
A crap ton of sunlight will be needed to kill unConstitutional ideas like this.
Not sunlight, but light. The kind you get from lamp posts. It’s honestly the only way to kill the infection.
Mikee says: I wonder if anyone remembers that three months ago, just before the virus panic, a Harvard Chemistry professor and what turned out to be two Chinese military disguised as students were arrested by the FBI……too much to type here but google it as it will provide those who “missed” the story with some very interesting reading…….
GWB says: Yes, I recall it. They are not and have not been our “friends”. Not even the kind you have on FarceBook.
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