US President Donald Trump has spoken out about censorship against conservatives on social media, saying it is a “very dangerous thing” and calling for everyone to be allowed to participate in the online conversation.
“Social media is totally discriminating against Republican/conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others,” Trump wrote.
Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….
He went on to call censorship a “very dangerous thing,” while taking the opportunity to slam “fake news.”
“There is nothing so fake as CNN & MSNBC, and yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed…”
…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..
Trump also questioned “who is making the choices” regarding who gets removed from social media, adding that “mistakes are being made.”
“Let everybody participate, good and bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!” he wrote.
….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!
It comes just days after several journalists raised alarm at what they say are baseless complaints sent to Twitter over stories with sensitive topics – including the activities of British spy Christopher Steele and links between Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and China.
Meanwhile, many conservatives recently became outraged when Twitter and Facebook suspended controversial right-wing host Alex Jones of Infowars over so-called “hate speech.”
That decision was defended by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told The Hill earlier this week that Jones had been posting content that broke Twitter’s terms of service.
Twitter has also acknowledged that a new policy to suppress hate speech has resulted in the search results of some Republican lawmakers being reduced. The company did, however, add that some Democrats have also been affected. On Friday, liberal Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone was removed from Twitter after tweeting that “the world will be improved” when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who is battling brain cancer, “finally dies.”
As for Facebook, which recently came under fire for suspending the pages of TeleSur and independent sites Venezuelanalysis.com and Haitianalysis.blogspot.com, the social network stated in May that it will be launching a review of anti-conservative bias on the platform.
Trump’s most recent tweets aren’t the first time he’s spoken out against the alleged censoring of conservatives on social media. In July, he said the so-called “shadow banning” of prominent Republicans on Twitter is “discriminatory and illegal.” The term ‘shadow banning’ refers to a situation when a social media user believes they have full access to a platform but other users are prevented from seeing their accounts or messages.
WordPress.com’s Lip Service to “Democratized Publishing” Belied By Censorship & New Executive Hires
Sandy Hook Research Tossed Down Memory Hole
By James F. Tracy (Updated 8/19/18)
The individual who oversaw an across-the-board, content-specific evisceration of WordPress.com-hosted websites is none other than Matt Mullenweg, the 34-year old chief executive of Automattic Inc. and creator of WordPress.com. A supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and purported advocate of “Free Speech” and “Open Source” technology, Mr. Mullenweg caved to a New York Times story highlighting the alleged plight of individuals related to the dubious Sandy Hook mass shooting event.
WordPress.com and former Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, who on August 14 abruptly pulled the plug on numerous WordPress.com client websites. Image Credit: Wikipedia
Mullenweg promotes himself and his companies as alternatives to the “tech giants” and “big platforms” such as Google and Amazon. Yet if the world’s super-wealthy blog czar ever did have the personal integrity and zeal to defend the right of expression and open source philosophy via his enterprises, his recent management appointments and the flagrant censorship of his WordPress clients below indicate that these have clearly been forgotten.
What do we know if Mr. Mullenweg’s political inclinations? He is a left-progressive and supporter of the Democratic Party and former President Barack Obama, whose administration oversaw and appears to have coordinated the Sandy Hook massacre event in order to further its own radical gun control agenda.
Mullenweg and New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker at the 2013 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. Image Credit: https://ma.tt/
In 2016 Mullenweg endorsed the campaign of far-left presidential hopeful and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. In 2017 Lessig, a leftwing academic ideologue and outspoken opponent of Donald Trump’s presidency, proposed a scenario by which Hillary Clinton might seize the White House in a bloodless coup.
Censored Bloggers Did Not Violate WordPress.com’s Terms of Service, or Did They?
A careful reading of WordPress.com’s Terms of Service reveals that the websites known to us to have been “suspended” or “archived” at this time have been censored for no apparent reason, other than Mullenweg caving to pressure from the Times and Sandy Hook gun control activists.
With the above in mind, it would appear that Mullenweg and Automattic have eliminated the following blogs without cause, which is their right under the company’s Terms of Service, and that their shared themes make Automattic’s action content-specific. These blogs include, FellowshipoftheMinds, FundamentalOption, CinderellaBroom, AmericanEveryman, JaysAnalysis,ChemTrailsPlanetand Government Rag. All of these blogs have contributed to furthering the public’s understanding of governmental and corporate corruption through their detailed analyses of mass casualty events and pedophilia.
According to TechCrunch, WordPress.com actually edited its own Terms of Service to accommodate the complaints of an individual who asserts he is “Sandy Hook parent Leonard Pozner,“and who routinely files copyright infringement complaints to stifle independent research on the Sandy Hook event.
[Wordpress.com] told The NYT that language was a part of a predefined statement it used, and was sorry that it did so in this particular situation.
However, it also admitted that the posts in question weren’t in violation of any current WordPress user guidelines or copyright law.
We understand the company has since phoned Mr. Ponzer to apologize directly. It then created a new policy to address the problem.
Its new policy reads:
WordPress.com Impervious to Censoring Its Own Clients?
What makes censorship of the above sites even more glaring is the fact that heretofore WordPress has more or less been impervious to content-related challenges to his clients’ blogging, as Mullenweg reveals in a 2015 interview:
Question: Do you get a lot of subpoenas?
Mullenweg: Oh, yeah. It’s like everyone who publishes - it’s like if Bill Gates got takedown notices for people using Microsoft Word. We just get people contacting us for everything.
Question: Every type of disagreeable content that’s published on WordPress results in some type of letter.
Mullenweg: Yep.
Question: That sounds like fun.
Mullenweg: The more clueless the attorney, the more likely they are to contact us.
WordPress.com’s reach, ambition, and aspirational language are impressive. For example, Mullenweg and company are devoted to “making the web a better place” and “democratiz[ing] publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it …” And as noted, they “believe in Open Source.” The reality of this past week’s purge of bloggers for merely asserting argument that have been found controversial by corporate media strongly suggest otherwise.
We might also interrogate WordPress.com’s newfound penchant for censorship by considering the personnel Mullenweg has recently recruited to steer the enterprise. Announcements of these managerial changes are available on the WordPress.com founder’s blog.
For example, the new managers include former National Public Radio and New York Times executive Kinsey Wilson, who was hired by Mullenweg to oversee WordPress.com in early 2018. WordPress.com remains our flagship product,” Wilson noted upon his appointment. “And the goal is to position it as a platform that provides both simplicity and ease of use as well as tremendous power.” (Emphasis added.)
Image Credit: Poynter.org
One might pass Matt Mullenweg off as yet another youthful, easygoing, mop-topped coder and multi-millionaire. Even if this is caricature is partly accurate it hasn’t stopped the tech entrepreneur from tapping top brass from the military industrial complex to steer the WordPress.com ship. In fact, earlier this summer Mullenweg brought on US Army General Ann Dunwoody to Automattic’s Board of Directors.
Gen. Ann Dunwoody (PRNewsfoto/Automattic)
Four-star General Dunwoody has “managed and operationalized the Army’s global supply chain for numerous engagements, including support of Iraq and Afghanistan operations, contingency operations in Haiti, Pakistan, and Japan, and the Base Realignment and Closing move of Command Headquarters from Fort Belvoir, Va., to Huntsville, Ala,” notes one 2013 press release. (Emphasis added.) General Dunwoody also serves on the board of directors of LMI, a major government consulting firm.
WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg and US General Dunwoody. Image Credit: https://ma.tt/
“We’re very lucky to have Gen. Dunwoody’s expertise and experience around the table as we navigate our second decade as a company and realize the huge opportunities ahead of us,” Mullenweg effuses. “With WordPress now powering more than 30% of all sites on the web, we’re excited to work together to shape the future of the open web. Gen. Dunwoody will help us continue to blaze a trail for open source and distributed companies all over the world.”
To make the circle complete Mullenweg has also tapped one James Grierson, former chief executive of BlueHost, to manage WordPress.com’s JetPack product. Under Grierson BlueHost’s legal department enforced a strict, “censor first, ask questions later” policy on any potential copyright infringement claim, however frivolous, as MHB experienced firsthand before BlueHost booted us entirely for alleged “Terms of Service” violations stemming from a complaint by the Sandy Hook-linked scammers.
WordPress.com Clients Routinely Violate TOS
A cursory search of “WordPress.com’s Reader” area for the blogs WordPress/Automattic continues to host after silencing those it has identified as violating its “Terms of Service” include several that are in demonstrable violation of the company’s TOS. (“Publish material or engage in activity that is illegal under applicable law.”)
Let us take, for example, the Antifa movement, a far left vigilante organization advocating intimidation and physical violence against virtually anyone its leadership perceives as averse to its political dogma.
Since these organizations are almost without question involved in illegal activity and in TOS violation one might conclude that they should be similarly banished, just as those posting conspiracy-oriented material. Yet perhaps Mullenweg’s political lens renders these sites and their calls to violence invisible, and hence they remain as accessible as before the purge.
To be sure, there are also many WordPress.com clients who’ve survived the purge that espouse unabashed conservative and far-right political views that would be deemed “hateful” and even “violence inciting” in many quarters.
WhiteLocust, a WordPress.com blog. https://whitelocust.wordpress.comNumerous WordPress.com clients found on the company’s “Blog Reader” are ideologically opposed to radical left-wing organizations such as Antifa.
With the above in mind the abrupt deletion of the blogs exposing deep government malfeasance simply make all of Mullenweg’s extravagant lip service to “democratizatation” and “open source” environments ring hollow. WordPress.com is as anti-free speech as the “big platforms” its leader decries. In today’s political environment where misleading and even demonstrably false news and opinion masquerades as “the newspaper or record” should we really be surprised.
And so within the bowels of Matt Mullenweg’s Ministry of Truth that now includes New York Times and even US military confidantes there must have been a conclusion reached (if but tacitly) that FellowshipoftheMinds, Chemtrailsplanet, JaysAnalysis, and others are so for some unknown reason so dangerous and repugnant they cannot see the light of day.
This is an updated version of my post of August 14 on The Fundamental Option, which WordPress suppressed by taking down the Fundamental Option blog that had been active for only 1¼ days — after taking down Fellowship of the Minds the day before.
Last Friday, FBI deputy director finally fired FBI agent (and suspected CIA agent as well) Peter Strzok who revealed his blatant, anti-Trump political prejudices in text messages with his adulterous lover Lisa Page (also an FBI agent).
On August 13, Strzok set up a GoFundMe account, soliciting donations for his “legal costs” and to compensate for “his lost income”.In just one day, he’s received $365,515 of his goal of $500,000 from allegedly 9,483 people.
As of today, he has received a total of at least $422,295 from allegedly 11,003 people, and probably will reach his goal of $500K by tomorrow.
Meanwhile, yesterday, President Trump finally revoked the security clearance for Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, who is most likely a Muslim convert.
Peter Strzok is one of nine individuals whose security clearances are also under review. The others are James Clapper, former director of national intelligence; former FBI Director James B. Comey; Bush national security advisor Michael Hayden; former Deputy Atty. Gen. Sally Yates; President Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice; current Justice Department official Bruce Ohr; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; former FBI agent Peter Strzok; and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Comey, Yates, McCabe and Strzok all were fired by Trump. (Los Angeles Times)
James Tracy: In Solidarity with Alex Jones – Sandy Hook Mother feted by Obama was Personal Assistant to Democratic Fund Raiser Maureen White
Mr. President,
On 16 January 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, President Barack Obama signed no less than 23 executive orders to constrain our access to weapons under the 2nd Amendment. A few months thereafter, on 13 April 2013, at Obama’s invitation, one Francine Wheeler delivered an impassioned speech for gun control from the President’s Oval Office, a distinction Obama previously conferred only upon Vice President Joe Biden. The choice is telling on multiple grounds.
Francine is likely the only actress with credits for doing the voice of a character in an animated porn feature to speak from the White House. Francine is also a musician member of “The Dream Jam Band.”
In fact, she and her husband, David Cole Wheeler, are both professional actors with film credits. David has starred in an obscure film, “Faithful”, which centers around the theme of guns and suicide, and he’s most recently been on the speaking circuit in the role of a bereaved Sandy Hook parent.
David Wheeler in “Faithful,” Image Credit: YouTube
More to the point, the Wheelers’ involvement in Sandy Hook and Francine’s choice to speak from the Oval Office appear to derive from Francine having been previously employed as personal assistant to chief Democratic National Committee fundraiser Maureen White. In fact, White was the DNC’s star campaigner, raising $51 million in 2005 alone. White then served as senior advisor on humanitarian issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which is suggestive of the political alliances behind the Sandy Hook event.
Maureen’s husband, powerful Wall Street investment banker and Obama administration advisor Steve Rattner, is also a close personal friend and money manager of anti-gun crusader and founder of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg used the Sandy Hook shooting as a rallying cry for more stringent federal gun control measures. Rattner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The more we dig into Sandy Hook, the more we learn its probable motivation as a FEMA drill presented to the public as real to promote the DNC gun control agenda.
James F. Tracy is a media scholar, educator and political analyst located in South Florida. He received his doctoral degree from The University of Iowa in 2002 and was a tenured Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University from 2002 to 2016. Beginning in 2013 Tracy became victim of a media-led smear campaign as one of the few working academics to publicly question the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and Boston Marathon bombings. In 2015 Florida Atlantic succumbed to public pressure and terminated his professorship. Tracy has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against FAU and its officials that is now before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Just a week or so after Spotify, Google, Apple and Facebook made the curiously synchronized move to kick Alex Jones and InfoWars off their platforms, and just days after Facebook shut down Venezuelan news network TeleSur’s facebook page (for the second time), the war on the free internet has opened up another front.
Small independent blogs are being shut down, seemingly without reason and certainly without explanation.
AmericanEveryman.com has been closed without notice or warning, according to the blog’s owner Scott Creighton. Allegedly for violating WordPress’ “terms of service”, although they have apparently been entirely vague about how.
— Abdul Hussain (Abdul-Kareem Hu) • v.gd/cdawg (@abzhuofficial) August 15, 2018
Other such blogs – fellowshipofminds.com and jaysanalysis.com – have suffered the exact same fate, on the exact dame day. There is undeniably a push to silence dissent and purge it from the internet. There may well be dozens – even hundreds – of other examples.
No, there are real targeted take-downs happening now. Our friend @Jay_D007 website removed by host. Wake up people. Censorship is real…. pic.twitter.com/5AdL95B1q4
