Censorship Industrial Complex
JK Rowling dares Scottish police to arrest her over new ‘hate crime’ law threatening free speech
From LifeSiteNews
‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,’ the ‘Harry Potter’ creator said.
Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling is striking a defiant tone in the face of a new Scottish law that many fear will effectively criminalize free speech on subjects such as biological sex and “gender identity.”
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, passed in 2021 but only now taking effect, consolidates various preexisting “hate crime” statutes while also creating a new offense, “threatening or abusive behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred” on the basis of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or variations in sex characteristics.
As covered by The Guardian and The Scotsman, various individuals and groups have raised objections to the law, including MP Joanna Cherry, who predicts it “will be weaponized by trans rights activists to try to silence, and worse still criminalize, women who do not share their beliefs”; said the Scottish Family Party, who says it will mean the “death” of free speech; and the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents and Scottish Police Federation, who fear it will overtax police forces inadequately trained to handle the influx of new offenses.
Scotland First Minister Humza Yousaf, who championed the law, insists that abuse will be prevented by a “very high threshold” for prosecuting cases and protects freedom of expression in a variety of ways, including a “reasonableness” defense. Ex-Tory MSP Adam Tomkins claims that simply “asserting that sex is a biological fact or that it is not changed just by virtue of the gender by which someone chooses to identify is not and never can be a hate crime under this legislation.”
Such assurances hit a snag, however, when calls to prosecute Rowling under the law prompted Scotland’s Community Safety Minister Siobhian Brown to walk back her initial assurances that “misgendering” would “not at all” violate the law, The Telegraph reported. “It could be reported and it could be investigated,” she said, “whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that.”
On Monday, Rowling shared a lengthy Twitter/X thread of examples of “trans women” (i.e., men) and pro-LGBT activists she suggested were now a “protected category” despite their violent, abusive acts and/or hateful behavior, using the hashtag #ArrestMe to effectively dare the authorities to persecute her.
“The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex,” she wrote. “For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable.”
“I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Rowling added.
Scotland's Hate Crime Act comes into effect today. Women gain no additional protections, of course, but well-known trans activist Beth Douglas, darling of prominent Scottish politicians, falls within a protected category. Phew! 1/11 pic.twitter.com/gCKGwdjr5m
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
Fragile flower Katie Dolatowski, 6'5", was rightly sent to a women's prison in Scotland after conviction. This ensured she was protected from violent, predatory men (unlike the 10-year-old girl Katie sexually assaulted in a women's public bathroom.) 3/11 pic.twitter.com/13J5XfRo3a
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
Scottish woman and butcher Amy George abducted an 11-year-old girl while dressed in female clothing. No idea why this was mentioned in court – of course she was wearing women’s clothing, she's a woman! Amy took the girl home and sexually abused her over a 27-hour period. 5/11 pic.twitter.com/xy3DmnqZrc
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
Mridul Wadhwa, head of a Scottish rape crisis centre, says, ‘sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well.’ She has no gender recognition certificate, but was still appointed to a job advertised for women only. Time to be ‘challenged on your prejudices’, rape victims! 7/11 pic.twitter.com/YfxUhbh6cw
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
Katie Neeves has been appointed as the UN Women UK delegate. She switched from straight man to lesbian at the age of 48 and, in a leaked 2022 webinar, described how she used to enjoy stealing and wearing her sister’s underwear. A truly relatable representative! 9/11 pic.twitter.com/VKzF7IuJTU
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
🎉🌼🌸April Fools! 🌸🌼🎉
Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.
In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their…
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2024
Rowling, whose Potter novels are the best-selling book series in the world, has long been known as a doctrinaire liberal on most issues, in 2007 going so far as to retroactively add a same-sex relationship to the backstory of Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore, despite the character’s sexual attraction not being referenced in the books themselves or their film adaptations (until briefly being alluded to in the third film of the Fantastic Beasts spinoff series).
Even so, Rowling has been deemed a bigot by pro-LGBT activists for refusing to go along with the notions that gender is a social construct that may be changed at will, or that life-altering surgical or chemical “transition” procedures are appropriate for confused minors. In recent years, despite intense cultural pressure, she has only grown bolder in opposing the transgender lobby’s detrimental impacts on children as well as actual women.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Joe Rogan Responds To YouTube Censorship of Trump Interview
From Reclaim The Net
Joe Rogan has accused YouTube of making it difficult for users to find his recent interview with former President Donald Trump, saying that the platform initially only displayed short clips from mainstream media instead of the full episode. Rogan sarcastically remarked on YouTube’s actions, saying, “I’m sure it was a mistake at YouTube where you couldn’t search for it. Yeah. I’m sure it was a mistake. It’s just a mistake.”
In episode 2200, Rogan explained that even though his team contacted YouTube multiple times, the episode remained difficult to find. X CEO Elon Musk intervened, contacting Spotify CEO Daniel Ek about the issue. (Spotify exclusively licenses The Joe Rogan Experience but allows the show on third-party platforms like YouTube.) Watch the video clip here. Rogan noted the explosive viewership once the content was available, with the episode racking up “six and a half million views on mine and eight plus million on his.”
Emphasizing the episode’s broad reach, Rogan expressed frustration with the initial suppression, stating, “You can’t suppress shit. It doesn’t work. This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you’re doing.” He pointed to the significance of this episode’s reach, asking, “If one show has 36 million downloads in two days, like that’s not trending? Like what’s trending for you? Mr. Beast?” Describing the power of YouTube’s algorithmic influence, Rogan claimed the algorithm worked against the interview’s visibility, only showing clips instead of the full conversation. According to him, when YouTube initially fixed the issue, users had to enter highly specific keywords, like “Joe Rogan Trump interview,” to find the episode. Rogan argued that YouTube’s gatekeeping reflected an ideological stance, remarking, “They hate it because ideologically they’re opposed to the idea of him being more popular.” He suggested that major tech platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, which hold significant influence, often push agendas that favor specific narratives, stating, “They didn’t like that this one was slipping away. And so they did something.” In a telling moment, Rogan noted the impact of the initial suppression, explaining how “the interactions…dropped off a cliff because people couldn’t find it.” He claimed that this caused viewers either to give up or settle for short clips, leading to a dip in views before the episode gained traction on Spotify and X. |
Since there's an issue with searching for this episode on YouTube here is the full podcast with Trump pic.twitter.com/sl2GTUaWdE
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) October 29, 2024
Brownstone Institute
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
From the Brownstone Institute
By
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
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