Category: Freespeechers

He Admires Their Basic Dictatorship

Blacklocks (paywalled) – Gov’t Will Regulate YouTube

The Commons heritage committee has voted to regulate YouTube under federal law. The Department of Heritage said YouTube management, not individual users, will be liable for complying with the Broadcasting Act: “The only reason the government is doing this is to stretch the justification of regulating public airwaves into a justification for regulating private viewing.”

via Robert of Ottawa:

They’ve done this because the head of the CRTC, Ian Scott, CEO, demanded the right to regulate all forms of transmission. Thing is, they can do it when radio spectrum must be controlled as there is a limited supply and to use it requires a large, fixed, transmitter. Not so for Netflix, Youtube, etc. We’ll see how the battle goes. There will be three sides, Netflix/Youtube etc., the governmnet and Canadians.

This coming along with a movement by the government to take their money; but that will probably end up in symbolic payments as long as they do the government’s censoring.

Sounds about right.

Let Them Eat Taser

Ezra Levant;

50 heavily armed police just raided the hotel where our Rebel News reporters were staying in Montreal.
 
I told them they couldn’t come in without a search warrant. So instead they manhandled me. They handcuffed Keean Bexte. And They just put David Menzies in the back of a police car.
 
Police have sealed off the AirBnb we were staying in with police tape — they say it’s a “crime scene”.
 
Of course it’s not. In fact, when we asked them what the “crime” was, all they could come up with was that our staying in the hotel was an illegal “gathering,” contrary to Quebec’s lockdown laws.
 
That’s obviously not true. It is a registered, legal hotel rental on Airbnb. In fact, we had fewer guests than the facility is built for.
 
This is the same Montreal police who have harassed and assaulted our reporters for weeks. This is their revenge. Because we report on their misconduct.
 
I’m very upset by this. And I remember that, several times, Montreal police have pulled our reporters over and called us “Jew Media” or asked if we’re “Jews”. I can’t help but think that’s a bizarre anti-semitic motivation. That sure isn’t professional policing.
 
David is still in the back of the police car. Our lawyer is on the scene. I’m mad as hell.

Update @ezralevantMontreal’s corrupt police tried to raid our reporters’ hotel rooms. We told them to get a search warrant. They retaliated by seizing the Airbnb and calling it a “crime scene”. But no judge would sign their crooked warrant. The cops left. We won.

Diversity and Exclusion

Excerpt from Lindsay Shepard’s new book in today’s National Post.

Christie Blatchford and I exchanged some initial emails and had a couple of brief phone calls so she could confirm the details of the incident, and ensure she got the facts straight. After I sent her the secretly-recorded audio, she wrote back to me, “I just listened. Jesus H. Christ, what a pompous pair of gits,” and “You do realize these people are INSANE?”

More

The book

“Congress … has given digital platforms ‘immunity from certain types of suits’ … but it has not imposed corresponding responsibilities”

Justice Clarence Thomas is a national treasure.

@JackPosobiec: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas finds social media companies do not have First Amendment right to ban protected speech and that Section 230 is unconstitutional

Much like with a communications utility, this concentration gives some digital platforms enormous control over speech. When a user does not already know exactly where to find something on the Internet—and users rarely do— Google is the gatekeeper between that user and the speech of others 90% of the time. It can suppress content by deindexing or downlisting a search result or by steering users away from certain content by manually altering autocomplete results. Grind, Schechner, McMillan, & West, How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 2019. Facebook and Twitter can greatly narrow a person’s information flow through similar means. And, as the distributor of the clear majority of e-books and about half of all physical books, 4 Amazon can impose cataclysmic consequences on authors by, among other things, blocking a listing.
 
It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.

File is here, starting on Page 8..

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