In a heart-wrenching turn of events, a North Carolina family is seeking justice for the tragic death of Philip Paxson, a father who met his untimely demise on a dark and rainy night in 2022 while following GPS directions from Google Maps. The family has filed a lawsuit against the tech giant, alleging negligence and accusing the company of contributing to the accident by failing to update its maps.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Wake County Superior Court, also implicates two local businesses and an individual who owned, controlled, or were responsible for the bridge, which the plaintiffs claim did not have critical safety features like barricades and warning signs.
The family of a North Carolina man who died after driving his car off a collapsed bridge while following Google Maps directions is suing the technology giant for negligence, claiming it had been informed of the collapse but failed to update its navigation system.
Philip Paxson, a medical device salesman and father of two, drowned Sept. 30, 2022, after his Jeep Gladiator plunged into Snow Creek in Hickory, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court. Paxson was driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party through an unfamiliar neighborhood when Google Maps allegedly directed him to cross a bridge that had collapsed nine years prior and was never repaired.
“Our girls ask how and why their daddy died, and I’m at a loss for words they can understand because, as an adult, I still can’t understand how those responsible for the GPS directions and the bridge could have acted with so little regard for human life,” his wife, Alicia Paxson, said.
“This is horrific, what our family is going through,” she told reporters.
The suit claims that Google had been notified multiple times by residents in the area about the dangerous route it recommended to drivers. Several individuals had used the “suggest an edit” feature on Maps. A Hickory resident reported the perilous route as early as September 2020. Yet, Google took no substantive actions to update the directions or warn drivers about the bridge.
“This was a crater literally in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” Robert Zimmerman, a lawyer for Mrs. Paxson, said. “It’d be one thing if it was there for a day or a week, but it was there for nine years.”
Nearly a year after Mr. Paxson’s death, Mr. Zimmerman said, the bridge has not been repaired and that Google Maps is still directing drivers to cross it.
José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, expressed sympathy for the Paxson family and explained that the company is reviewing the lawsuit.
This legal action highlights serious questions about the liability of GPS developers when erroneous directions result in fatalities or other types of harm. It underscores the necessity of updating these maps in a timely manner to avoid potential tragedies.
This unfortunate incident provides a somber reminder of the potential consequences that could arise as a result of negligence on the part of tech companies who are trusted to provide accurate information—especially as it relates to driving directions. The outcome of this legal action could set a precedent for holding these companies accountable when their services lead to serious accidents.
Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after nearly four decades on the job.
Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, hailed Fauci as “the most important, consequential public servant in the United States in the last half century.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described him as a near-constant “source of information and facts” for all Americans throughout the pandemic.
Indeed, the U.S. public’s understanding of COVID-19—its virality, how to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from—was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like him, to a greater degree than most people realize. The federal government shaped the rules of online discussion in unprecedented and unnerving ways.
This has become much more obvious over the past few months, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Musk granted several independent journalists access to internal messages between the government and the platform’s moderators, which demonstrate concerted efforts by various federal agencies—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even the White House—to convince Twitter to restrict speech. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, are eye-opening.
But Twitter was hardly the only object of federal pressure. According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. “Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all,” reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: “BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo.”
These Facebook Files show that the platform responded with incredible deference. Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was “man-made” rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was “technically possible” but “extremely unlikely.”) In other emails, Facebook asked: “For each of the following claims, which we’ve recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?”
The platforms may have thought they had little choice but to please the CDC, given the tremendous pressure to stamp out misinformation. This pressure came from no less an authority than President Joe Biden himself, who famously accused social media companies of “killing people” in a July 2021 speech.
Combating misinformation has remained a top goal for Fauci. The day after his final White House press conference, he sat for a seven-hour deposition conducted by Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in November). While the proceedings were closed to the public, courtroom participants say Fauci insisted that misinformation and disinformation were grave threats to public health, and that he had done his best to counteract them. (He also demanded that the court reporter wear a mask in his presence. Her allergies had given her the sniffles, she claimed.)
The deposition was part of Schmitt v. Biden, a lawsuit that accuses the federal government of improperly pushing private social media companies to restrict so-called misinformation relating to COVID-19. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, professors of medicine at Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively, have claimed that social media platforms repeatedly muzzled their opposition to lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest law firm that has joined the lawsuit, thinks the federal government’s campaign to squelch contrarian coronavirus content was so vast as to effectively violate the First Amendment.
“What’s at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age,” says Jenin Younes, the group’s litigation counsel. “We’ve never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding in terms of censoring people.”
These concerns are well-founded, as the emails obtained by Reason make clear. Over the course of the pandemic, CDC officials exchanged dozens of messages with content moderators. Most of these came from Carol Crawford, the CDC’s digital media chief. She did not respond to a request for comment.
“If you look at it in isolation, it looks like [the CDC and the tech companies] are working together,” says Younes. “But you have to view it in light of the threats.”
Facebook is a private entity, and thus is within its rights to moderate content in any fashion it sees fit. But the federal government’s efforts to pressure social media companies cannot be waved away. A private company may choose to exclude certain perspectives, but if the company only takes such action after politicians and bureaucrats threaten it, reasonable people might conclude the choice was an illusion. Such an arrangement—whereby private entities, at the behest of the government, become ideological enforcers—is unacceptable. And it may be illegal.
Jawboned
There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. It’s jawboning.
The term arose from the biblical story of Samson, who is said to have slain a thousand enemies with the jawbone of a donkey. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the word’s public-policy use began with the World War II–era Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, which primarily relied on “verbal condemnation” to punish violators. President John F. Kennedy jawboned steel manufacturers in the 1960s when he threatened to have the Department of Justice investigate them if they raised prices; President Jimmy Carter did the same to try to fight inflation in the 1970s. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Republican candidate George W. Bush explicitly stated that he would “jawbone” Saudi Arabia to secure lower energy prices.
While jawboning has generally referred to economic activity—to attempts to intimidate other entities into changing prices or policies—there is a history of speech-related jawboning too. One of the first legal theorists to apply the term this way was Derek Bambauer, a professor of law at the University of Arizona. In a 2015 article for the Minnesota Law Review, he argued that libertarian trends in internet regulation provide unique protection from government actors, who would be likely to resort to threats and demands.
“State regulators wielding seemingly ineffectual weapons—informal enforcement based on murky authority—appear outgunned,” he wrote. “Yet like Samson, they achieve surprisingly-effective results once the contest begins.”
This has been the case throughout the pandemic. With encouragement from government health advisers, congressional leaders, and White House officials—including Biden—multiple social media companies have suppressed content that clashes with the administration’s preferred narratives.
Bambauer says that while Biden clearly has the right to complain about material on social media, the administration’s actions are probably blurring the line between counterspeech and jawboning.
“I think all of this is of real concern,” he says. “It’s also a useful reminder that the government innovates in how it applies information pressures, so researchers need to stay up to date on new tactics.”
One illustrative case concerns Alex Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times who became a leading opponent of the coronavirus vaccines. Berenson contends that the mRNA technology undergirding some of the vaccines is “dangerous and ineffective,” and he has called for them to be pulled from the market. His claims about vaccine safety are widely rejected; most experts say the vaccines significantly reduce severe disease and death among vulnerable populations, including the elderly and immunocompromised. His prediction that the vaccines would fail to meaningfully eliminate coronavirus case counts has held up better. Most health officials now concede that the disease is quite capable of evading vaccine-acquired protection against infection.
Berenson obviously has a First Amendment right to express his views, even if they’re wrong. Nevertheless, federal officials became concerned that anti-vax content on social media would dissuade Americans from getting the jab. They were particularly worried about Berenson. In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
Andy Slavitt, a White House senior adviser, was especially alarmed, and raised red flags about Berenson’s content throughout summer 2021. (He left the administration around that same time, in June 2021, but remained in contact with other officials.)
“Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz [visualization] that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo [disinformation] that radiated outwards to the persuadable public,” wrote a Twitter employee in another Slack conversation.
By that time, White House officials had begun slamming social media companies for failing to deplatform vaccine skepticism. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report titled “Confronting Health Misinformation” that included advice for social media companies; Murthy wanted the platforms to prioritize the elimination of misinformation “super-spreaders.” Then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki referenced research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that called out 12 Facebook accounts for spreading disinformation on that platform.
Murthy’s missives were phrased as requests. Psaki’s, not so much.
“Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts,” she said at a July 15 press conference. “Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”
On July 20, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC. Host Mika Brzezinski asked Bedingfield about Biden’s efforts to counter vaccine misinformation; apparently dissatisfied with Bedingfield’s response that Biden would continue to “call it out,” Brzezinski raised the specter of amending Section 230—the federal statute that shields tech platforms from liability—in order to punish social media companies explicitly.
“When Facebook and Twitter and other social media outlets spread false information that cause Americans harm, shouldn’t they be held accountable in a real way?” asked Brzezinski. “Shouldn’t they be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?”
Bedingfield responded by stating that Biden, who had previously expressed support for scrapping Section 230, would be reviewing just that.
“Certainly, they should be held accountable,” she said. “You’ve heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem.”
Indeed, Biden had accused social media companies of literally “killing people.” And on July 16, as the president prepared to board Marine One, a reporter asked him what he would say to social media companies that take insufficient action against vaccine misinformation. His response indicated that he held Facebook and Twitter responsible.
“That was the public face of the pressure Twitter and other companies came under,” says Berenson.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, Berenson had remained in contact with Twitter executives and received assurances from them that the platform respected public debate. These conversations gave Berenson no reason to think his account was at risk. But four hours after Biden accused social media companies of killing people, Twitter suspended Berenson’s account.
It is important to keep in mind that while Biden and his team railed against social media companies in public, federal bureaucrats held constant, private conversations with the platforms, giving advice on which statements were false, which ones needed fact-checking, and which ones could theoretically promote vaccine hesitancy. Small wonder the platforms adopted an overly deferential posture.
Demonstrating that this phenomenon isn’t confined to the executive branch, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) praised Twitter’s decision to jettison Berenson. In a letter to Amazon, she implied that the online retailer should do something similar to his books.
“Given the seriousness of this issue, I ask that you perform an immediate review of Amazon’s algorithms and, within 14 days, provide both a public report on the extent to which Amazon’s algorithms are directing consumers to books and other products containing COVID-19 misinformation and a plan to modify these algorithms so that they no longer do so,” she wrote.
Right To Remain Silent?
Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks the federal government’s jawboning on COVID-19 misinformation might violate the First Amendment.
“Multiple arms of the administration delivered the jawboning effort together,” Duffield says. “Each one component wouldn’t rise to something legally actionable, but when taken as a whole administration push, it might.”
In a recent paper on social-media jawboning, Duffield pointed to two very different Supreme Court precedents that could provide insight: Bantam Books v. Sullivan and Blum v. Yaretsky. In the 1963 Bantam decision, the Court held 8–1 that a Rhode Island commission had unconstitutionally violated the rights of book distributors when it advised them against publishing obscene content. In the Court’s view, the implicit threat of prosecution under obscenity law was an act of intimidation.
Richard Posner, a widely cited former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, referenced the Bantam decision in a 2015 case, Backpage v. Dart. Tom Dart, an Illinois sheriff, had attempted to throttle the advertising of adult services on internet platforms by threatening credit card companies that do business with them. Ruling against Dart and in favor of the platforms, Posner wrote that “a public official who tries to shut down an avenue of expression of ideas and opinions through ‘actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction’ is violating the First Amendment.” If that standard were the law of the land, it would be difficult to view the Biden administration’s jawboning as constitutional.
In the 1982 Blum case, unfortunately, the Supreme Court took a much more dismissive view of informal government pressure. That decision held that government jawboning is only illegal when the state “has exercised coercive power” or has provided “significant encouragement, either overt or covert.”
There’s also the problem of granting lasting relief. Even if a court rules that a government actor impermissibly jawboned a private entity, that doesn’t mean the court can compel the private entity to reverse course. Duffield points to a 1987 decision, Carlin Communications Inc. v. Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that an Arizona deputy attorney had wrongly jawboned a telephone company for running a phone sex hotline. Obviously, the company was still free to drop the hotline of its own accord; to rule otherwise would be to restrict the company’s First Amendment rights.
“Courts can prohibit and even punish jawboning but they may not be able to dispel the lasting effects of official threats,” wrote Duffield in his paper.
A better solution would be to explicitly prohibit government officials from engaging in jawboning. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R–Wash.) has introduced a bill, the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act, that would penalize federal employees who use their positions to push for speech restrictions. Enforcement would be akin to the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their positions to engage in campaign activities. If this bill were to become law, federal officials would have to be much more careful about advising social media platforms to censor speech, or risk loss of pay or even termination. This is the superior approach: Legislators should regulate government employees’ encouragement of censorship on social media platforms, rather than the platforms themselves.
Unfortunately, national lawmakers in both parties have expressed boundless enthusiasm for regulating the platforms. Reforming or eliminating Section 230, the federal statute that protects internet websites from speech-related liability, is an idea with tremendous bipartisan support: Biden, former President Donald Trump, Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) have all signed on.
The Democrats’ critique of Section 230 is in direct conflict with Republicans’ grievances; Democrats want to punish social media companies for censoring too little speech, while the GOP wants to punish social media companies for censoring too much speech. Abolishing Section 230 would likely force the platforms to moderate content much more aggressively. And it would essentially punish them for being the victims of jawboning.
“It’s a sort of victim-blaming approach,” says Duffield. “‘Oh, you didn’t stand up hard enough against the federal government, so now we’re going to harm you again?’”
Legislators have signaled persistent interest in exactly that approach. The very loudest jawboners are the nation’s senators and congressional representatives, who frequently inveigh against the tech industry and its leaders. Democratic lawmakers routinely accuse Facebook of subverting American democracy by allowing too many Russian bots on the site, and then they threaten to use antitrust action to break up the company. Republicans have said virtually the same thing, except they think American democracy was subverted by Big Tech’s mishandling of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Prohibiting lawmakers from demanding censorship is legally thornier than prohibiting federal employees’ demands. The Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution gives members of Congress fairly broad latitude to say whatever is on their minds. Ultimately, it is up to voters to punish congressional jawboning.
Beyond COVID
In October 2022, The Intercept published a report on the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to monitor misinformation on social media. These plans make it clear the CDC is far from the only government agency to take an active interest in jawboning. According to the department’s quadrennial review, Homeland Security aims to combat misinformation relating not only to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines,” but also “racial justice, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
While it’s undoubtedly true social media users have deployed inaccurate information when discussing these issues, they are policy questions. People have a right to scrutinize U.S. funding of the Ukraine war effort, and to reach conclusions about it that clash with the views of the Biden administration. National security officials frequently make mistakes. Dozens of so-called experts wrongly branded Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian plot. Nina Jankowicz, the civil servant who was briefly tapped to head a Homeland Security project dedicated to identifying misinformation, incorrectly described the laptop as such.
This speaks to a larger problem with the discourse: Government officials and journalists who claim to specialize in the spread of online misinformation are often just as gullible as everyone else. Even federal health experts get stuff wrong. Fauci initially downplayed the importance of masks for general use due to his private fears that hospitals would run out of them; he also deliberately lied about the herd immunity threshold because he didn’t think the public could handle the truth. (In that case, the mutating nature of COVID-19 meant that Fauci was wrong about herd immunity at any level.)
On November 30, 2022, Twitter announced that it would no longer enforce any policies against COVID-19 misinformation. This change was implemented under new management. Musk, who purchased the company in fall 2022, has given every indication that he thinks the platform was too deferential to government censorship demands. Whether he will stand firm—and whether other platforms will copy his lead—remains to be seen, though his decision to release the Twitter Files is an encouraging sign that he intends to stop capitulating.
Musk’s new policies have already attracted jawboning. Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) accused the billionaire of failing to satisfactorily address concerns about misinformation, declaring that “Congress must end the era of failed Big Tech self-regulation.” Free speech would be better served by an era of Big Government self-regulation, and liberation for tech platforms and their users.
Personally, I use FakeBook once a month to check on Alaska family. What has become evident, as time has passed, is the things declared “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories” have been shown to be accurate.
Big Tech Censored Biden Criticism 646 Times Over 2 Years: Report
Big Tech platforms have censored criticism of President Joe Biden more than 600 times over the past two years, according to a new report.
The Media Research Center (MRC), a Virginia-based American content analysis and media watchdog group, through its CensorTrack database, found that between March 2020 and March 2022, social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram deleted or censored 646 accounts or posts that criticized the president.
Of the more than 600 cases, 140 of the posts censored by Big Tech involved the New York Post’s reports about the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and his allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings.
After the New York Post reported on emails and other material from a laptop believed to be owned by Biden’s son, Twitter blocked the circulation of the story while other news outlets cast doubt on the veracity of the developments.
The watchdog’s report also found that 232 posts that mentioned Biden’s behavior with women and children were censored.
In one example, a Facebook post that claimed to show images of Biden kissing his adult granddaughter on the lips during a campaign stop in Iowa in February 2020 captioned, “Find someone who kisses you the way Joe Biden kisses his granddaughter,” was reportedly deleted for violating the platform’s community standards on “nudity or sexual activity.”
In another case, news outlet Breaking 911 on Instagram quoted the president talking about COVID-19 vaccines, saying, “Freedom! … I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. No, I mean, come on! Freedom?!”
That post was reportedly moved for promoting “violence and incitement.”
“MRC Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship. … The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day,” MRC said. “The worst cases of censorship involved platforms targeting anyone who dared to speak about any subject related to the New York Post bombshell Hunter Biden story.”
“The Post investigated Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings. Big Tech’s cancellation of that story helped shift the 2020 election in Biden’s favor,” it added.
The Epoch Times has contacted Facebook and Twitter for comment.
It comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion cash. Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, has criticized Twitter’s moderation.
Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said Tuesday that American Big Tech companies do not consider themselves to be “American companies” due to “woke politics” and because their employees — particularly Chinese nationals — are sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party on some issues.
Thiel said during a virtual discussion hosted by former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo:
If you look at the big five tech companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft — virtually very, very little presence in China. So they aren’t naturally a pro-China constituency. Apple is probably the one that’s structurally a real problem because the whole iPhone supply chain gets made from China, and Apple is one that has real synergies with China. But then, there’s something about the woke politics inside these companies, the way they think of themselves as not really American companies. And it’s somehow very, very difficult to, for them to have a sharp anti-China edge of any sort whatsoever. [Emphasis added.]
At Facebook, I’ll give you an example. You had with the Hong Kong protest a year ago, the employees from Hong Kong were all in favor of the protests and free speech. But there were more employees at Facebook who were born in China than who were born in Hong Kong. And the Chinese nationals actually said that, you know, it was just Western arrogance and shouldn’t be taking Hong Kong’s side and things like that. And then the rest of the employees at Facebook sort of stayed out of it. But the internal debate felt like people were actually more anti-Hong Kong than pro-Hong Kong.
Thiel was responding to a question about China’s advantages on tech vis-à-vis the United States. The discussion was the Richard Nixon Foundation’s inaugural Nixon Seminar hosted by co-chairmen Pompeo and former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.
O’Brien slammed Silicon Valley progressives supporting woke policies at home but then ignoring human rights abuses abroad:
So in Silicon Valley, we’ve got, it’s a very woke industry in general about what’s happening here. And yet it’s not very woke in what’s happening to the Uyghurs, what’s happening to the Tibetans, what’s happening to the democrats with a small “d” in Hong Kong, the threats against Taiwan where you’ve got the indigenous people of Taiwan.
So, there seems to be less concern about those folks in Silicon Valley and industry in general than the concern for woke progressive politics here. How are they surprised and how do they get their conscience back when it comes to folks around the world? Maybe even victims of environmental disaster?
Thiel said there are plenty of issues for which the woke left could criticize China, such as their environmental or human rights record.
“If you’re concerned about climate change, maybe the tariffs the Trump administration put on China were way too small. They should be much higher, even the carbon tax should be higher because they use coal power. Even the electric cars in China are dirty; they’re dirtier than oil-power cars than China. But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently,” he said.
He recalled speaking with some Google employees working in artificial intelligence technology and asking them, “Is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” He said they responded, “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.”
“You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth column collaborators,” he said.
“I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that,” he added.
Nixon’s grandson, Christopher Nixon Cox, who also participated in the seminar, noted that Thiel put policies in place at the company he founded, Palantir, to not make deals with countries that are not on good terms with the United States.
Comment: There are basically 5 types of symbiotic relationship: mutualism, commensalism, predation, parasitism, and competition
Symbiosis is a close relationship between two species in which at least one species benefits. Mutualism is a symbiotic relationship in which both species benefit. Commensalism is a symbiotic relationship in which one species benefits while the other species is not affected. While predation, parasitism and competition are considered either direct or indirect competition for resources.
MilVets and Patriots was founded as a place for Vets and Patriots to exchange and comment on the news of the day. From the start we’ve had a very liberal comment policy, more or less based on the basic Disqus policy with a few small additions. No threats, no doxxing of any kind, no racist comments, no name calling and a modicum of civility.
We recognize the need for unfettered speech, and value the same.
Spammers aside, our banned list is vanishingly small. And to be completely honest, all but a couple were nothing but trolls. We have never banned for political views.
However, given the big tech crackdown on Right of Center voices, there are going to be some changes to our moderation policy going forward.
As managing editor, I have directed the moderation team to delete any comment that we deem as inciting violence, threatening anyone, or calling for insurrection. We do not make this change lightly. It goes against all I stand for, but at this moment in time, I feel it is a necessary step to ensure the continued existence of MilVets and Patriots as it is today.
We ask that you, Dear Constant Reader, help us keep MilVets and Patriots around. If big tech can de-platform the President, what’s stopping them from doing it to a small site like this one?
Because there is the chance for misunderstanding, if you feel a comment was deleted for no reason, tag either Rogue Unicorn or me. We will discuss the deletion with the moderator who deleted it, find out why, and make a decision from there. Keep in mind, the team here are all very experienced moderators and the executive team has great trust in their judgement.
Another thing to keep in mind: we’re not banning anyone if there is an occasional comment that gets deleted. Severe and repeated violations may, at the discretion of the executive team, result in time-outs or permanent bans, but unless you are persistently violating our rules you shouldn’t have a problem.
If anyone has any questions about the new policy, the reasons behind it, or the implementation of the policy, drop a comment below. We’ll answer as best we can. With any luck, this change will be temporary, and we can get back to the way things were up till now.
COMMENT:Marty; I am amazed. Your information is light-years ahead of the curve as well as Socrates. You said BigTech was censoring us because, under the Great Reset, banks would become obsolete. Alphabet is moving to expand Google Pay into a checking account that can also grant users all credit cards and discounts.
No wonder they call you the legend!
Stay safe – please!
See you in Orlando.
GW
ANSWER: We have people delivering information inside many organizations that want the info out and disagree with what is taking place. I do not want to name organizations, but they are in Silicone Valley, banks, governments, and around the world.
Why do you think they have been censoring free speech on behalf of the Democrats who have promised that under this Great Reset, there will be no private property for they will nullify all debt public and private. That means the banks are no longer necessary for they will no longer lend money to even start businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ly-RtxGpI
This agenda is so outrageous that it is being strategically pulled off while claiming anyone who objects they just label “conspiracy theorist” so they never have to admit or deny anything. They are overthrowing the United States and handing the power to a one-world government organized by the United Nations.
World leaders are all preaching the same agenda. Those who voted for Biden will lose everything because they are so blind to the big picture and just hate Trump so they never looked at the agenda.
Bank of America closed many branches and never reopened them. They are downsizing the physical presence of banking branches. The same is taking place across the nation. There is no appetite to bail out the bankers anymore. Eliminate the debt and the blackmail card they held that if they were not bailed out, the government could not sell their debt.
If there is to be no debt, then you do not need banks!
The New York Post dropped a bomb on the Biden claims he never discussed Hunter’s business dealings.
A laptop and hard drive containing emails and other sensitive data was dumped at a computer repair facility in Delaware and never picked up.
Emails found on the computer equipment seem to indicate that Joe has been lying about what he knew of his son’s business dealings in Ukraine and efforts to peddle influence in his name.
Tech giants Facebook and Twitter are actively trying to prevent the spread of the information in the Post’s story. This editor attempted to retweet the link to the Post article, and was told I couldn’t.
