Online Censorship

No, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and pretend he’s a free speech champion as if there were nothing he could have done to stop the censorship at Facebook that rigged the 2020 election and probably cost lives during the pandemic.

The wanksta-lite makeover can’t hide Zuck’s sins, from throttling The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election to deplatforming a sitting president, Donald Trump, to suppressing COVID-19 dissent.

Within days, TikTok could be banned from being distributed in the United States and, eventually, stop working as an app altogether if the U.S. Supreme Court does not intervene to block a bipartisan law that is set to take effect on Jan. 19.

On Friday, Jan. 10, the justices heard arguments on whether or not to step in and temporarily pause the measure given what TikTok claims is a violation of free speech for its tens of millions of American users.

When Congress passed the law that required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it or see it banned in the U.S., it was partially motivated by the fear that the Chinese government might use TikTok to contort Americans’ discourse, pitting people against one another and eroding their trust in the democratic systems that define American politics.

The Supreme Court on Friday heard oral arguments in a fast-tracked case over the future of TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media app that will be barred from operating in the U.S. in just nine days barring divestiture or eleventh-hour intervention from the high court.

Brussels, meanwhile, retains the progressive faith in managing democratic outcomes by regulating what can and can’t be said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s dismissal of Facebook’s fact-checkers and his replacement of them with a “community notes” approach pioneered by Elon Musk at X (formerly Twitter) signals the end of an aberrant era in American politics that began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. The era of trying to manage American political outcomes by having social media superintend, rather than facilitate, political debate is over.

A new paper, "Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions," published today in Nature suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users—and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.

X is blocking links to an independent journalist’s newsletter that published an alleged dossier used to vet JD Vance that is believed to be part of the Iranian government’s hack of the Trump campaign.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter — now owned by billionaire Elon Musk — also suspended Ken Klippenstein, the journalist behind the newsletter.

Now, when users enter the link to the newsletter in X’s search bar, an error flag tells them to “try searching for something else.”

The X, formerly known as Twitter, account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended on Thursday following the release of a dossier about Sen. JD Vance that was allegedly from an Iranian government hack. "Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post earlier. Klippenstein, who is a former reporter at Intercept, published the dossier to his substack website about three hours prior to the account suspension on Thursday. It is still available to be viewed at the time this article was published. "The dossier has been...

The X (formerly Twitter) account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended Thursday after he shared details of a dossier about Sen. (R-OH) that allegedly hacked. "Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post on X soon before his account was suspended. The former Intercept reporter also linked to an article on his website explaining why he published the so-called dossier. "It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other...

In a move that's undoubtedly going to be used to justify more censorship, 42 state and U.S. territory attorneys general are urging Congress to mandate Surgeon General warnings on algorithm-driven social media platforms, aiming to combat the growing mental health crisis among America's youth. The group, representing 39 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, and the U.S.