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Censorship Industrial Complex

California judge: first grader too young for free speech rights, family appeals

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From The Center Square

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As you read this keep in mind, she’s 6.

The mother of a first grader punished for handing an “innocent” drawing with the phrases “black lives matter” and “any life” to a classmate of color is appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after a lower court ruling  declared first-grade students are too young to be protected by the First Amendment. 

After a first grade lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Lives Matter, a student who felt bad for her classmate of color drew a picture for that classmate to allegedly help the classmate feel more included. The picture had the phrase “Black Lives Mater” (sic) above “any life,” with a picture below of four circles of different colors — which the author says represented her and three classmates holding hands. The student thanked the author for the drawing and took it home, after which the recipient’s mother reported the drawing to the school’s principal “to express concern that her daughter was being singled out for her race.” 

The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, allegedly concluded that writing “any life” was “inconsistent with values taught in the school but acknowledged that [author’s] motives were ‘innocent.’” The recipient’s parents agreed the author innocently drew the picture and that they did not want the author punished, but Beccara allegedly declared the drawing “racist” and “inappropriate,” and submitted the first-grade author to punishment. 

Becerra forced the author to apologize to the recipient for the drawing — to which the recipient allegedly expressed confusion upon receiving, leading to more confusion from the author. He also banned the author, a student “who loved to draw,” from drawing and giving pictures to classmates, and teachers banned the author from recess for two weeks without telling her why. 

According to Transparent California, Becerra received total pay and benefits of $207,678.20 in 2022 as elementary school principal at Capistrano Unified School District. 

After the author’s mother found out about the punishment a year later, she requested an explanation and an apology from the school, escalating until filing a suit in federal court. The school district claimed Beccara was operating under qualified immunity against the author’s First Amendment and retaliation claims. A federal district court ruled on behalf of Beccara, finding that first grade students are not protected by the First Amendment.

“Giving great weight to the fact that the students involved were in first grade, the Court concludes that the Drawing is not protected by the First Amendment,” wrote the court, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding “schools may restrict speech that ‘might reasonably lead school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities’ or that collides ‘with the rights of other students to be secure and let alone.” 

The court also said the phrase “any life” was close to the phrase “All Lives Matter,” which it said is “an inclusive denotation but one that is widely perceived as racially insensitive and belittling when directed at people of color” in its justification for Beccerra’s actions. 

The case’s appeal claims Beccarra’s punishment of the author counts as retaliation for actions protected under the First Amendment, and that says first grader’s speech is protected under Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist, a United States Supreme Court ruling that says “First Amendment rights … are available to teachers and students,” who do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” 

The appeal from the Pacific Legal Foundation says the lower court incorrectly found the author’s speech fell under Tinker’s First Amendment exemptions for speech at school that infringes on another student’s right to be left alone with regards tobullying, or causes “substantial disruption.” 

The case now awaits a hearing and ruling from the Ninth Circuit, which should occur within a year.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UK Government And Media Spread Disinformation About Southport Killer, Evidence Suggests

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Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer answers questions during a press conference following clashes after the Southport stabbing on August 1, 2024. (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images)

This is a preview of a breaking story.  Click below for the full report

UK police now say that the alleged killer possessed an al-Qaeda training manual and a deadly biological toxin

The riots in England this summer were motivated by far-right Islamophobia and driven by disinformation online, argued the UK media and government at the time. In July and August, social media posts claimed that a Muslim migrant was responsible for a mass stabbing in the seaside town of Southport. Those claims were false, according to officials and fact-checkers.

The riots began after a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana allegedly stabbed to death three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop. Rudakubana was born in the UK and raised Christian, the media reported. The rioters, said Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were “far-right thugs” seeking to exploit the tragedy and “target people because of the color of their skin.”

But it now appears that the UK government may have deliberately spread disinformation and used it to justify censorship and repression. Police yesterday issued new charges under the Terrorism Act against Rudakubana, now 18, for allegedly producing ricin, a biological toxin, and possessing an al-Qaeda training manual titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.” Since police arrested Rudakubana at the scene of the stabbings, it’s likely they searched his home shortly after, and thus may have discovered the ricin and manual within hours of the attack.

Ricin is a protein toxin derived from the castor bean plant and has no known antidotes. The terrorism charges identify the al-Qaeda training manual as “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” Although the police stated that the case is not yet classified as a “terrorist incident,” these new charges suggest that radical Islamism motivated the attack, contradicting authorities’ previous narrative.

“It is not plausible for the police, Home Secretary, Prime Minister not to have known about the suspect’s background until this week,” said conservative Member of Parliament and former Home Secretary, Dame Priti Patel, in a statement to The Telegraph. “This detail would have materialized within 2-3 days of such a devastating and serious incident with the entire security apparatus focusing on finding answers to key questions.

Mourners gather for the funeral of a nine-year-old victim of a knife attack in Southport on August 11, 2024 (left); Axel Rudakubana, Southport stabbing suspect (center); Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street on August 1, 2024 (right). [Getty Images and Liverpool Crown Court drawing]…

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerDebbie Lerman  

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.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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