Censorship - Is Censorship Sweeping the Nation?

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George Orwell's 1984 Labelled Offensive By UK University

Wokery beyond parody because university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell's 1984 as it contains 'explicit material' which some students may find 'offensive and upsetting'

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.

Its plot centres on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.

‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’

Orwell biographer David Taylor said: ‘I think 13-year-olds might find some scenes in the novel disturbing, but I don’t think anyone of undergraduate age is really shocked by a book any more.’

The seminal novel has regularly been adapted for stage and screen, including an acclaimed film starring John Hurt.

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The further they drift from The Truth...

Woke People Love their Big Brother and Super Nanny (state).

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Is book banning sweeping the nation? Seattle school drops ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ over racism concerns

A Seattle-area school board voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” from student reading lists this week, just days before news surfaced that a Tennessee district had, earlier this month, banned the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the holocaust, “Maus,” from its curriculum.

The actions are part of a rising wave of efforts across the country to remove books from libraries and student reading lists in response to complaints and criticisms from parent groups and other organizations.

That includes the recent decision by Utah’s Canyons School District to remove at least nine book titles from libraries at four high schools in the district — all in response to an email from a parent who expressed concerns about the titles she said she learned about through social media videos.

When that mockingbird don’t sing

According to the Seattle Times, the Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously Monday night to remove Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” from the required reading list for ninth graders while still allowing for teachers to choose to teach the classic novel to students.

The board acted after months of discussion among teachers, parents and students, and in reaction to concerns over racism in the classic novel, first published in 1960.

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Q/ How do non-binary ninjas kill people?
A/ They slash Them.

Sent to bring cheer to the JEDi knights.

Love and Father's blessings to you all.

Amen

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JEDI .. meant did i

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Google “alternative” DuckDuckGo has become “Google Lite” with decision to censor sites over “disinformation”

For the past few years, as search and tech behemoth Google began leaning heavily to the left and became a full-fledged propagandist for the deep state, more and more Internet users switched to DuckDuckGo as an alternative.

The latter posited itself as a much more ‘free’ platform and far more committed to protecting users’ privacy, while Google literally vacuums every crumb of user activity so it can target Internet surfers with ads and other ‘select’ content.

But it appears as though the deep state has now infiltrated DuckDuckGo as well, as noted by an announcement from the search engine company this past week which said the platform will become “downgrading” — i.e., censoring — sites deemed to be pushing “disinformation.” As you know, “disinformation” is just code for shutting down sites publishing facts and views that have not been ‘approved’ by the powers that be.

In a recent Twitter post, the CEO of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announced that the company would be downranking “sites associated with disinformation,” which has been a popular tactic by Google for years to reduce user access to content it considers objectionable.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg tweeted about the decision, stating that it was an effort to reduce Russian disinformation online.

“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine?,” Weinberg stated, adding: “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

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Biden’s Ministry of Truth head wants the power to EDIT your tweets, making them conform to whatever LIE the government claims to be TRUTH

The Biden regime’s pick to head up the new Disinformation Board says that she wants the power to manually edit people’s tweets in order to make them more politically correct.

In a Zoom meeting with numerous others, Nina Jankowicz stated that she wants “trustworthy verified people” like herself to be granted full authority over what people post online to make social media more like Wikipedia.

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Gina Marie Colvin Hill speaks about censorship and her personal (negative) experience with YT.

Team YouTube

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Paul Joseph Watson chimes in: Disinfo queen gets dethroned.

Big Sis is Big Sad :disappointed_relieved:

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“Minster of Truth” Nina Jankowicz Participated in Secret NATO-Funded Cabal to Subvert Western Democracies

Founded in mid-2015 under the auspices of the U.K. government-funded NGO “Institute for Statecraft,” the Deep State project had the following motto: “Defending Democracy Against Disinformation.”

The Integrity Initiative “defended democracy” by recruiting secretive “clusters” of academics, national security bureaucrats, journalists, think tankers, and lobbyists in multiple European countries. These clusters would then be engaged in various ways to address nation-specific threats of so-called “Russian disinformation.”

In its organization, funding, operation, structure, and rhetoric the Integrity Initiative is the single best template for understanding how the entire hornets’ nest of NGOs, journalists, and “national security” bureaucrats work secretly and in concert to wage psychological warfare against citizens of the West. One cannot understand how the Disinformation Industry functions without understanding the little-known (and now defunct) Integrity Initiative.

Thankfully, before its demise, hackers leaked a huge swath of internal documents from the Integrity Initiative... More at link

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WOW! Biden Regime Hires Michael Chertoff to Lead Disinformation Board – Previously Targeted Gateway Pundit and Breitbart – Another Hunter Biden Laptop Truther

The Biden regime announced on Wednesday they hired Michael Chertoff, another Hunter Biden laptop truther to lead the government’s Disinformation Board. Chertoff has worked as an attorney at Covington & Burling. Chertoff is the co-author of the Patriot Act that allowed the federal government to spy on its citizens.

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Humanity Against Censorship - Rally At Facebook Headquarters - Includes video about the vaccine injured. "Murder By Censorship"

Grassroots orgs from across the country at Facebook HQ.
Protesters believe Facebook is at the center of violations against the First Amendment right to free speech.

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Canadian Legislator Sounds Alarm on Censorship Bill Seeking to Regulate Online Free Speech

https://www.infowars.com/posts/watch-canadian-legislator-sounds-alarm-on-censorship-bill-seeking-to-regulate-online-free-speech/

The Canadian government is gearing up to clamp down on freedom of speech online via a bill that will give a regulatory agency carte blanche to censor Internet content, Conservative MP Andrew Scheer is warning.

In a message posted to social media Thursday, Scheer explained how the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which regulates radio and TV content, is poised to expand its reach onto the web via Bill C-11, AKA the Online Streaming Act.

“Under this bill they will be able to make new regulations,” Scheer warns. “Regulations don’t have to pass through Parliament. With the stroke of a pen, the CRTC can make new rules about what you can post and what you can see online.”

“It will undermine your ability to create content and have other people see it. It’s going to affect what videos come up in your YouTube stream. It’s going to affect what people are allowed to post on social media sites – all in the name of ‘protecting you.'”

When you break it down, the Online Streaming Act, is actually about censoring free speech, a principle Scheer says used to unite both sides of the political aisle.

“But as the radical left gets increasingly angry and intolerant they’re no longer interested in promoting their ideas or debating yours they just try to stifle anyone who disagrees with them.”

Censorship also has a historical precedent, and is often a sign a government is transforming into a tyrannical regime, Scheer says.

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WOW! Facebook Oversight Board Received Over 1 Million Appeals on Company’s ‘Content Moderation’

The oligarchs on Facebook’s oversight board released their first annual report, shedding light on the company’s bloated censorship operation.

The Meta Oversight Board’s annual report revealed it received “more than a million appeals” on the company's “content moderation decisions” between October 2020 and December 2021. More than 8 in 10 of user appeals to restore content to Facebook or Instagram involved Meta’s so-called “rules on bullying, hate speech or violence & incitement.” The number of appeals totaled a whopping 1,152,181. On average, the board received a reported 2,649 cases a day. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack database has logged 3,975 cases of censorship as of Thursday morning; 1,016 (26 percent) of those cases were from Facebook alone. The Oversight Board’s report shows that the 1,016 cases in the CensorTrack database don’t even scratch the surface of Facebook’s obsession with censorship.

The report showed users appealed the out of control Facebook censorship in mass numbers. “Of the cases submitted, 99% related to content on Facebook, while just 1% concerned content on Instagram,” according to the report. Even more revealing was that starting in the second quarter of 2021, “after users were empowered to appeal to the Board to remove other people’s content, 94% of user appeals were to restore content to Facebook or Instagram.” [Emphasis added.]

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Beware of the 3-letter agencies.

THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF TWEETS: TWITTER IS HIRING AN ALARMING NUMBER OF FBI AGENTS

With nearly 400 million global users, there is no doubt that Twitter has grown to become a platform large and influential enough to necessitate extensive security measures, as actors of all stripes attempt to use the service to influence public opinion and political actions. There is also no doubt that there is a limited pool of people qualified in these sorts of fields.

But recruiting largely from the U.S. national security state fundamentally undermines claims Twitter makes about its neutrality. The U.S. government is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world. As far back as 2011, The Guardian reported on the existence of a massive, worldwide U.S. military online influence campaign in which it had designed software that allowed its personnel to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” The program boasts that the background of these personas is so convincing that psychological operations soldiers can be sure to work “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Yet Twitter appears to be recruiting from the source of the problem.

These former national security state officials are not being employed in politically neutral departments such as sales or customer service, but in security, trust and content, meaning that some hold considerable sway over what messages and information are promoted, and what is suppressed, demoted or deleted.

It could be said that poachers-turned-gamekeepers often play a crucial role in safety and protection, as they know how bad actors think and operate. But there exists little evidence that any of these national security state operatives have changed their stances. Twitter is not hiring whistleblowers or dissidents. It appears, then, that some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector. And few are even acknowledging that there is anything wrong with moving from big government to big tech, as if the U.S. national security state and the fourth estate are allies, rather than adversaries.

That Twitter is already working so closely with the FBI and other agencies makes it easy for them to recruit from the federal pool. As Rowley said, “over a period of time these people will be totally in sync with the mindset of Twitter and other social media platforms. So from the company’s standpoint, they are not hiring somebody new. They already know this person. They know where they stand on things.”

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UK NHS continues to scrub the word “women” from its websites to avoid causing offense

The term continues to be censored.

Earlier this month, we reported that the NHS had removed gender-specific language on its pages about biological women-specific cancers like cervical and ovarian cancers, in order to avoid online backlash. Now, they have done the same on pages about menopause, a condition that can only affect biological women.

The NHS quietly removed the words “woman” and “women” from the pages about menopause. Experts have warned that de-gendering medical guidance is dangerous as it over-complicates important advice.

Previously, the overview page on menopause had six gender-specific terms. It defined menopause as “when a woman stops having periods and is no longer able to get pregnant naturally.” In the updated version, menopause is defined as “when your periods stop due to lower hormone levels.”

The old page highlighted the prevalence of premature menopause as “one in 100 women.” The updated page does not include the statistics for premature menopause.

Nursing and midwifery expert from Western Sydney University Dr. Karleen Gribble blasted the changes.

“The risk of de-sexing this information remains that women who have low English or health literacy may not know that the information applies to them,” she said to the Mail.

“That first sentence of the older version – ‘The menopause is when a woman stops having periods and is no longer able to get pregnant naturally’ is really important in signposting to women that they should read further.

“The fact that some women might have low literacy and not know basic terms is shown by the fact that they included a link to a definition of what periods are in the earlier version.

“In desexing the page they have removed the links to further information.”

The updated page excludes many links for further information, including that on premature menopause, and all links providing further information on the symptoms of menopause.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid condemned the changes that were made on the NHS pages on cancers specific to biological females.

“You won’t be surprised to know that, as the Health Secretary, I think that your sex matters, your biological sex is incredibly important to make sure you get the right treatment, the very best treatment,” he said at the time.

However, he did not say if the wording would be changed: “I am looking into this and you’ll know, look, the NHS, there (are) many different trusts and I want to listen to why someone might have taken a different approach – I don’t just want to assume – but I think I’ve made my views clear on this.”

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The Woke Inquisitors Have Come for the Freethinking Heretics

  • Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date.

  • Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of "good intentions." Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola's "bonfire of the vanities" destroyed anything that could be seen to invite or reflect sin. The notorious 1933 Nazi book burning... in Berlin torched some 20,000 books deemed subversive or "un-German". During Communist China's decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, the vast majority of China's traditional scrolls, literature and religious antiquities went up in smoke.

  • All three atrocities were celebrated as achievements for the "greater good" of society... Much like today's new censors who claim to "fight hate" because "that's not who we are," the arsonists of the past saw themselves as moral paragons, too. They purged anything "obscene" or "traditional" or "old," so that theocracy, Nazism, or communism could take root and grow.

  • There will one day be much disagreement as to how the same Western Civilization that produced the Enlightenment and its hallowed regard for free expression could once again surrender itself to the petty tyranny of censorship.... The answer is that the West has fallen into the same trap that always catches unsuspecting citizens by surprise: the steady encroachment on free speech has been sold as a "virtue" that all good people should applaud.

  • First, certain thoughts became "aggravating factors" that turned traditional crimes into new "hate crimes" deserving of additional punishment. Then the definition of what is "hateful" grew until politicians could comfortably decree anything at odds with their agendas to be examples of "hate." Who would be for "hate," after all? Surely no-one of good sense or good manners.

  • Now "hate" has transformed into an elusive description for any speech that can be alleged to cause the slightest of harms. From there, it was easy for the state to decree that "disinformation," or rather anything that can be seen to contradict the state's own official narratives, causes "harm," too. Those who despise free speech told society, "If you do not punish hate, then you're a bigot." And today, if you oppose the government's COVID-19, climate change, immigration or other contentious policies, your harmful "disinformation" must be punished, too.

  • On a plaque in the square [where the Nazis burned books] is a commemorative engraving... "That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people." That warning comes with no expiration date. [Continued ... ]

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UK “Online Safety Bill” wants a backdoor on end-to-end encrypted messaging apps

Automated content scanning.

A proposed new amendment to the UK’s controversial “Online Safety Bill” would force tech companies to scan people’s private messages on end-to-end-encrypted apps.

End-to-end encrypted messengers allow people to communicate securely without a 3rd party being able to see messages. Such technology is available in platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal.

We obtained a copy of the amendment for you here.

The UK government says that its proposals are purely down to tackling child abuse material. However, once tech platforms are forced to add a backdoor system to their messaging apps, state actors could compel the platforms to hand over other forms of content.

Previous versions of the bill would have required tech companies to use “accredited technology” to scan and detect terrorism and CSEA content. However, a new amendment proposed on July 6 states that companies should strive to use “best endeavors to develop or source technology” to flag and remove CSEA.

The requirements would apply to messages “communicated publicly and privately.” The amendment appears to propose that end-to-end encrypted messages should be scanned for CSEA.

The UK government has long argued that law enforcement should have access to private messages to help investigate crime. However, privacy advocates argue that one you put a backdoor, for whatever reason, then no message can be considered private.

In the past few years, the government has expressed strong opposition to encryption. Last year, when Facebook, now Meta, announced it would be introducing end-to-end encryption in Messenger and Instagram DMs, Home Secretary Priti Patel harshly expressed her disapproval: “The offending will continue, the images of children being abused will proliferate – but the company intends to blind itself to this problem through end-to-end encryption which prevents all access to messaging content.”

Since the online safety bill was first introduced in parliament in May 2021, it has been opposed, critics arguing it gives the government overreaching powers. On its website, digital rights group The Open Rights Group describes the bill as “an Orwellian censorship machine.”

“Dropping powers to ban encryption would be a major step forward if confirmed in the Bill. Ukrainians and Russian dissidents today are relying on encryption to protect themselves from real-world harm.

“We have repeatedly warned the Government that attacks on encryption would only help blackmailers, scammers and other criminals.”

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msm

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Twitter begins banning “groomer” insults

Twitter has started enforcing the policy.

Following pressure from journalists, Twitter has followed Reddit and has started censoring the word “groomer,” suggesting that it is an anti-LGBT slur.

Cultural and political commentator James Lindsay was locked out of Twitter after calling Ari Drennen, who works at left-wing pressure group Media Matters, a groomer.

Drennen criticized an article by the Daily Caller about the campaign to get Twitter to censor the term “groomer.” Responding to Drennen’s tweet, Lindsay wrote: “Ok, groomer.”