Big Tech
April 9, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Roger Kimball wears hats including that of the publisher of Encounter Books. Roger writes us with this public service announcement: Amazon made headlines in February when they got into the censorship business. Without notice or warning, they summarily delisted Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a thoughtful, deeply researched, and humane study that I published at Encounter Books some three years ago. But
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April 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend John Eastman is the former law clerk to Clarence Thomas and former Chapman University law professor. John was in the news this past January in connection with election related advice he rendered in the Oval Office to President Trump and Vice President Pence. John recently sat for an interview on issues of election fraud with Spectator Washington editor Amber Athey. The Spectator’s pseudonymous Cockburn now reports that YouTube
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March 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In parts 18, 20, and 27 of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger took up
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March 21, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Judge Laurence Silberman has had a distinguished career in the law, culminating in his service on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals since his appointment to the bench by President Reagan in 1985. He took senior status on the court in 2000. Accordingly, he now sits as a senior judge on the court. Last week Judge Silberman partially dissented from the court’s decision in Tah v. Global Witness. In
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March 14, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In earlier installments of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger now takes up the story
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March 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Google is under fire for the way it recruits engineers from colleges. According to the Washington Post: For years, Google’s recruiting department used a college ranking system to set budgets and priorities for hiring new engineers. Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the “elite” category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to
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March 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Under the RealClear banner Christian Toto has an excellent account of conservative humorists laboring under the arbitrary application of “community standards” by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media giants: “So This Conservative Comic Goes on Social Media and….” Christian covers show business at Hollywood in Toto and does an excellent job in the RealClear column that belongs in this series.
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March 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
On Sunday, with CPAC’s permission, Minnesota’s scrappy Alpha News posted the video of President Trump’s CPAC speech on the Alpha News YouTube channel. (I am a member of the Alpha News board.) YouTube removed the video and called strike one on Alpha News for posting it. Below is a screenshot of the notice from YouTube. Alpha News filed this appeal with the powers that be at YouTube: President Trump’s speech
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February 26, 2021 — John Hinderaker
It is black history month, and Amazon is all over it. But, it turns out, highly selectively. Mark Paoletta explains: Amazon Prime created an entire Amplify Black Voices page on its site that “feature[s] a curated collection of titles to honor Black History Month across four weekly themes (Black Love, Black Joy, Black History Makers, and Black Girl Magic).” There are scores of films available to stream, including four films
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February 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
As in a Stalinist purge, Amazon has silently “disappeared” Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. Amazon tacitly alleges that it acted under revised guidelines prohibiting the sale of “content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” including content that “promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, [or] advocates terrorism.” Beyond citing the policy, Amazon
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February 25, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Amazon isn’t talking about its suppression of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, but it has referred an inquiring reporter to its new hate speech policy. So Daniel Payne reports at Just the News. I infer that Amazon isn’t talking, however, because there is nothing that can reasonably described as hate speech in Anderson’s book. Anderson himself comments in his First Things essay “When Amazon erased my book.” The Washington
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February 23, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday we noted in part 18 that Amazon had silently removed Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. Steve has related observations in the adjacent post. Anderson’s book fails to conform to the woke party line now enforced by Big Tech. What does Amazon have to say about what it has done? I thought readers might be interested to know that Amazon isn’t talking — isn’t talking so far, anyway
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February 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Roger Kimball is the learned publisher of Encounter Books. He writes to alert us to the statement Encounter has just posted on the suppression of one of its titles by Amazon: Yesterday, we learned that Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, which Encounter Books originally published in 2018, was removed without explanation from Amazon.com and from its subsidiary Audible. Encounter Books is
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February 15, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Thanks to the coordinated efforts of Big Tech, the social media platform Parler has been offline for the past few months. It seemed to have something to do with the election of the gentleman from Madame Tussauds. News of Parler’s return is all over per the announcement we received this morning (in its entirety below): Parler Relaunches on New Platform With Over 20 Million Users, World’s #1 Free Speech Social
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February 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Joe Biden is a corrupt politician of the old-fashioned variety. He has no fixed convictions about anything. That’s why he has been on both sides of so many important issues. Biden has never been in the business of accumulating power in service of a policy agenda. He has always been in the business of accumulating power to feed his ego and enrich the Biden family. There’s nothing awful about this.
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February 3, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is an important guy in more ways than one. As John notes in this nearby post, DeSantis seeks to impose statutory constraints on Big Tech/social media in support of neutral free speech principles. Below is the full video of DeSantis’s press conference announcing the initiative. Looking around online for the details, I see that the Miami Herald reports: The proposed bill, which is still being drafted,
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January 30, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Big Tech companies, including Google and Twitter, are pulling the plug on disfavored posts, websites, and even people. They rely on section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to justify censorship. One way around section 230 is to enact state laws that ban viewpoint discrimination by tech companies. I discussed that project here and here. John followed up with this post about his efforts to advance such legislation in
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