Hate speech is still speech. And more importantly, protected speech, despite the disinformation being propagated by the authoritarian left who believe in censorship/criminal charges for saying the wrong thing. But that's not what's at issue with this article at all. But, I digress.... because this shit comes up every time where someone now falsely tries to claim hate speech isn't protected speech and thus that speech shouldn't be free.

Whomever is in power seeks to silence ideas and words they don't like. Up until about 2016 this was primarily done by conservatives, but now even more championed by the progressive authoritarian left. I never thought in 2024 I'd be seeing a sizeable amount of Republicans more diametrically opposed to censorship and war than Democrats. But the truth is, they aren't any better or redeemed, it's all about power and who wields it at the present time, and who is being victimized, who opposes this kind of oppression.

Even deeper than that, the US State Dept has quietly exerted pressure to implement hate speech exceptions and other codes where there is no bill of rights and first amendment, of 5 eyes and other NATO allies wherever they can, knowing that this external EU policy and pressure especially in a global internet, and using regulatory powers, would lead to an internal movement to strip away free speech here, especially when exercised through privately held social media channels.

That's just it, they not just trust the government, they love it. They have no problems giving up their privacy for "national security".

These are the people who hate cryptocurrency, anonymity and free speech. They're also the same people who are obsessed with doing everything possible by starting WWIII with Russia, which is exactly what makes one automatically presumed to be a Russian or Chinese friendly agent and a threat that justifies FISA warrant-less spying. That pesky encryption getting in the way of that now? SCARY! We can't have that kind of freedom and autonomy!

Batteries used to be removable and phones didn't have "features" like this.

This feels like the final nail in the coffin to having any semblance of being able to unplug. If you buy an Android phone, someone always will know where that device is.

Manning absolutely had access to the information she leaked, where Assange got into trouble was he allegedly helped assist her to try to crack a hash to an alternative account that would have helped cover her access tracks and not tie it to her own. Journalists helping whistleblower sources stay anonymous is a duty and tje First Amendment provides broad protection for freedom of speech and the press, which has been interpreted to include the right of journalists to report information of public interest obtained from confidential sources

That was Glenn Greenwald's doing, he leaked them on behalf of Snowden.

Greenwald is also an attorney.

I don't think Biden would be doing this if there wasn't pressure from Robert F Kennedy Jr's campaign. If he cared about sparing journalists and whistleblowers, he would pardon Snowden, too.

60 minutes and der spiegel are partisan propaganda rags, and not credible sources. They did a good job of riling you up into beliving Men Who Stare At Goats level of pseudoscience and speculation, goes perfectly with the congressional hearings about extraterrestrials and flying saucers. All bad actors intentionally feeding fake news to keep idiots like you chirping.

The report is so shockingly deranged. It's intended to resuscitate a long-debunked conspiracy theory which was a claim that arose from the Trump administration and NBC News that the Russians had somehow developed in secret this like 25th-century technology from the future that allowed them to direct energy waves into the brains of American citizens, specifically diplomats and intelligence officials stationed in Cuba to direct energy waves into their brains through their ears causing catastrophic brain injuries. LOL. And the more the media talked about this, the more people deployed overseas began convinced that they had the symptoms because that's how mass psychosis works. That's how social contagion works. The more people claim that they're experiencing something, the more other people will convince themselves that they're also experiencing that. It happens in many, many instances. The more these people heard it in the State Department, in the CIA and overseas, the more people started claiming that they had similar symptoms and even the U.S. government investigated it for years. The obvious idea was, “Oh, Trump is allowing Russia to attack American service members and intelligence officials and State Department officials attacking their brains, and he refused to do anything about it because he's in bed with Russia.” But then even the U.S. government investigated it and found that the whole thing was fiction. There were no brain injuries, that any of these people had experienced, they gave them MRIs and every other exam known to modern science. They concluded that they were creating these symptoms psychosomatically. It began when a couple of State Department officials heard what they said were very strange, high-pitched noises, and they ended up matching it perfectly to the sounds emitted by crickets that were coming to the Caribbean, in Cuba, and from there it just snowballed.

Even the U.S. government has given up on this. The CIA, the FBI, and the State Department all investigated and all concluded that it was a hoax, and yet, 60 Minutes went back last night as the $60 billion needed to get to Ukraine to fight Russia, but also as the U.S. intelligence agency is gearing up to demanding greater and greater controls over the Internet in the name of Russian disinformation against the 2024 election, both of those goals require high levels of fear on the part of American citizens when it comes to Russia. This 60 Minutes segment, which was in this tone like it had broken some huge story, that they were blowing the lid off of some big cover-up in the United States government that, in reality, this crazy weapon existed and must be Russia because they did some quack research implies it we know everything we're doing and created some super scary secret weapon to fry peoples brains. Utter lunacy how you fall for such pseudoscientific dumb propaganda. Go take your horse dewormer and maybe adjust your tinfoil hat to cover your precious ears before vladimir gets to you!

This is a deranged conspiracy theory and already completely refuted and dismissed. Mind control weapons? What's next, Russia has Extraterrestrial powers?

For one, it's called age discrimination. Like any other categorical discrimination based on traits, age is actually still one of them even though some people think that only the stage of cognitive decline, not cognitive development, deserves any sort of discrimination protection or rights.

What's detrimental to your value system might not be to someone else. In other words, focus on your own damn family.

Instagram should define "politics" is. Politics, in its broadest sense, encompasses the distribution of power and resources within a society, the relationships among individuals and groups, and the processes by which decisions are made in public and private spheres. From this perspective, many aspects of life can be seen as political because they involve power dynamics, social negotiations, and collective decision-making. How does that translate into an algorithm? Certain areas, such as science, education, art, and religion, are often subjects of debate regarding their political nature. Is that verboten, too?

There should be complete transparency in the algorithm that defines what politics is, among other algorithms that influence millions of users.

The antidote to disinformation is counter-information. The messy debates of determining truth are NOT through censoring one side because the information is deemed wrong, or a view ALSO shared by a foreign adversary, or inconvenient for the state, etc...

Bad ideas are countered by good ideas. The white house has a very large megaphone where they can bypass social media entirely.

Nothing justifies what they are doing. It's the most grave assault on the first amendment we've seen in the digital era, and even more frightening is the complete 180 liberals took on free speech in just 1 decade. To me, that propaganda which has turned people into such authoritarians and abandon civil liberties is beyond frightening and the control social media has over the populace. It's only amplified by censoring information the powers don't like.