The following article, Twitter Reinstitutes Draconian Censorship Heading Into Midterm Elections, was first published on Big League Politics. The social media giant Twitter is reinstituting draconian censorship policies in order to control the flow of information heading into the 2022 midterm elections. “The mission of our civic integrity work is to protect the conversation on Twitter during elections or other civic processes,” Twitter stated. Twitter is introducing the Orwellian notion of “prebunks,” which will guide people on their home page to regime-approved information. They will also hit tweets they deem to be misleading with these “prebunks” as well. They admit that they are bringing these policies back as the means of “protecting the integrity of the election conversation.” They will be examining “external data and internal country-based metrics” to “assess the potential for online or offline harm” and “the potential for false or misleading information about civic processes and human rights concerns.” Critics of Twitter, including the alt social media platform GETTR, are seizing upon this news to expose the restrictive nature of their competition. “These disturbing new policies deliver a huge blow to democracy and free speech right, not just in America, but around the world. We must not become numb to this kind of ideologically-motivated censorship which is a naked attempt from Twitter’s liberal executives to control the outcome of elections and the democratic process,” GETTR CEO Jason Miller said. “Now more than ever, we need platforms like GETTR which have a firm commitment to protecting the public’s right to information online, no matter their political beliefs,” he added. Big League Politics has reported on Twitter censoring accurate information detrimental to the Democrats in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election: “A day after censoring the New York Post for exposing Hunter Biden’s emails, Twitter has doubled down by censoring

For many people Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most well-known free speech defender in the current generation. He certainly is one of the bravest people who originally spoke out against Islamic extremism with his 1988 book Satanic Verses. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death over what he claimed were […] The post Salman Rushdie on Ventilator After Horrific Attack in New York appeared first on The Last Refuge.

Alex Berenson: White House Demanded Twitter ‘Kick Him Off Platform’ Authored by Alex Berenson via Unreported Truths (emphasis ours), Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal. In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” a Twitter employee wrote. The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech. The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does. Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims. In my case, though, federal officials appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage “misinformation” (i.e. information that the government does not like). Instead, top officials targeted me personally. Andrew Slavitt, senior advisor to President Biden’s Covid response team, complained specifically about me, according to a Twitter employee in another Slack conversation discussing the White House meeting. “They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson,” the employee wrote. “Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz [visualization] that had showed he was