“Good Faith”

Posted on 28 May, 2020 by wjjhoge

Ron Coleman has a white paper posted over at Likelihood of Confusion which suggests using a state-based consumer protection process to reign in censorship abuse by social media companies.

Political or ideologically-based corporate censorship of social media content and users is a discernable social, economic and political problem. As private conduct, it is not a violation of the First Amendment’s speech clause. The problem appears intractable because of a combination of broad statutory protections for online service providers, one-sided terms of service and a lack of federal regulatory acknowledgment fo the problem. This paper suggests, however, that a state-base consumer protection initiative requiring “good faith” application of social media platforms’ terms of service to user bans could overcome these obstacles and would be consistent with a wide range of consumer-oriented remedial regimes that have survived constitutional and other attacks.

That’s the paper’s abstract. Read the whole thing.

I’ve been on the receiving in of Twitter’s bad faith. My business and personal accounts were permanently suspended as the result of a false claim of harassment. When the legal case against me collapsed for lack of evidence and it became obvious that the complaint had been based on false testimony, Twitter told me I could have one of my accounts back. One. Not both. I elected to have my business account reinstated.

None of the accounts related to my false accuser were sanctioned in any way.

The sort of regulation Ron Coleman proposes is overdue.

UPDATE—I received an email this morning from a friend who tells me that Facebook won’t allow her to share content from Hogewash! because it violates their “community standards.” I’ll take that as a badge of honor.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

Posted on 11 May, 2020 by wjjhoge

Chuck Todd has been caught editing remarks by Attorney General William Barr to misrepresent what Mr. Barr really said.

Yawn.

There’s nothing novel about the Left’s crude attempts to edit Reality to their liking.Neither Nikolai Yazhov nor Winston Smith were available for comment.

Newspeak or Newsspeak?

Posted on 19 March, 2020 by wjjhoge

So far, the MSM and Big Tech haven’t been able to exercise sufficient control over the Internet to install an effective memory hole function. For now, they’ve been limited to trying to change the debate by trying to change the usage and meaning of words. There’s an odd kind of precision in their sloppy language that tries to strip words of their nuanced meanings.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well–better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

…

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

One of the problems with the Internet is that it can gum up the works when Our Betters want to erase their previous statement which are no longer politically correct. The Main Stream Media’s previous use of the now-raaaaaacist terms Wuhan virus or Chinese virus are too well backed up to allow them to credibly challenge Donald Trump’s using them. Their words won’t disappear, and too many people remember what they meant when they were spoken.

We need to remember that in the Real World 2 + 2 = 4.

The Week So Far

Posted on 5 February, 2020 by wjjhoge

Monday. Check.

Tuesday. Check.

Wednesday. Check.

Yep. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Sometimes I Feel Like a Bowl of Petunias

Posted on 29 January, 2020 by wjjhoge

There’s a scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the use of a spaceship’s infinite improbability drive causes two guided missiles to be changed into less threatening objects several miles above the surface of the planet Magrathea. One becomes a whale which asks all sorts of questions about its new situation as it plummets to its death. The other is a bowl of petunias which simply says, “Oh, no, not again.” That’s pretty much my reaction these days when I hear someone claiming to be a victim because he was truthfully quoted. I’ve had to endure multiple LOLsuits alleging defamation because this blog wrote truthfully about certain people.

The latest bit of such whining comes from Don Lemon, Wajahat Ali, and Rick Wilson. They are upset because of a Republican ad which uses a video clip from CNN which shows them expressing their distaste for Trump supporters. Wajahat Ali would have us believe that he is being bullied by being truthfully quoted.

Yeah. Right.

My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has a post up appropriately mocking Lemon, Ali, and Wilson. Go read it.

High Crimes, Misdemeanors, and Felonies

Posted on 28 January, 2020 by wjjhoge

Eugene Volokh has a post over at The Volokh Conspiracy that looks at the possibility that the journalists who leaked the Bolton book story might have committed a felony by publishing the government’s “predecisional information.” About a month ago, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided a case (U.S. v. Blaszczak) finding that a federal agency “has a ‘property right in keeping confidential and making exclusive use’ of its nonpublic predecisional information.” By a 2-to-1 vote the court held that a federal employee’s leak of such information—and its receipt by someone cooperating with the employee—could be felony wire fraud and conversion of government property.

Nor would journalists have an obvious First Amendment defense that others don’t possess. … [T]he First Amendment generally doesn’t give institutional media more protection than other speakers.

Even if a court could distinguish use of government property for public speech purposes (whether by the media or other speakers) from such use for private purposes, the statutes on which the panel relies draw no such distinction. And the panel’s reasoning as to property draws no such distinction, either: If the predecisional information is federal government property, and using that information for one purpose (selling stocks) is conversion of that property, then using that information for another purpose (selling newspapers) would be as well. Certainly journalists (or independent bloggers or other commentators) have no assurance that they would escape criminal liability under the panel’s theory.

Conversion is a form of theft. While the First Amendment protects our right to speak freely about public issues, it doesn’t protect theft. For example, I generally can’t publish someone else’s copyrighted material as my own.

IANAL, but it seems to me that while the government can’t generally engage in prior restraint of speech, it might reasonably be able to punish someone who steals government property.

Hmmmmmm.

When Even Rolling Stone Calls It Fake News …

Posted on 11 December, 2019 by wjjhoge

… it’s time to admit you’ve been pushing fake news.

Matt Tabbi has a review of the recently released DoJ IG report over at Rolling Stone.

Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.

The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.

As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”

No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.

They should be embarrassed because their behavior was unprofessional and immoral, but I suspect for most of our betters among the “journalists” the source of any embarrassment is frustration caused by being caught.

The Democrats Can’t Meme …

Posted on 18 October, 2019 by wjjhoge

… and they can’t handle being the targets of a good meme.

Video Credit: Right Angle

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