But it's not really even hyperbole

A post shared on social media purports that singer Justin Timberlake announced he is leaving the country and will not sell his albums in the U.S. due to former President Donald Trump’s victory. And another one bites the dust. Is it Christmas in November? Yo, Justin, you leaving the US have nothing to do with Diddy, […]

Wow...

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Australia’s government is working on a set of new rules to eventually be added to a law dealing with “online harms.” But these could turn into yet more – well, harm to freedom of expression. Addressing the Sydney Institute, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced that the effort is now known as a “Digital Duty of Care” and promises the result will be “safer and healthier” platforms. Once, that is, the tech companies behind the platforms are whipped into shape to “moderate” and remove content to the government’s satisfaction. And as EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and UK’s own Online Safety Act continue to create controversies and draw accusations of enabling wide-scale censorship, Rowland essentially promises that the result of her country’s effort along the same lines will be “even better.” While praising Australia’s Online Safety Act as efficient in “incentivizing” platforms to remove content (according to Rowland, only illegal content gets removed thanks to the law) – she urged “a shift away from reacting to harms by relying on content regulation alone, and moving towards systems-based prevention.” One of the consistent points of criticism leveled at similar legislation is the broad scope and vague wording, that inevitably opens the door wide to censorial abuse. But Rowland appears to want more, not less of this trend in regulating digital platforms – she spoke about the need for “a broadening of our perspective of what online harms are.” This is where the choice of inserting the term “duty of care” into the name of the planned new rules, comes in. It’s typically a legal requirement for an organization to comply with “reasonable standards” and take equally “reasonable steps” to prevent “foreseeable harms.” And it is not a concept that was introduced almost a hundred years ago in the US to regulate speech. Nevertheless, it’s clear that when used in the context of the speech, it can be interpreted in a worryingly broad way. Rowland only just presented the plan on Wednesday, but it has already received support from the Reset.Tech Australia pressure group, which is known for demanding “misinformation” censorship by major social media companies. This organization “proudly” announced that it contributed to this year’s review of Australia’s Online Safety Act with just the idea Rowland has presented. “A single, overarching duty of care was a key recommendation in our submission,” said Reset.Tech Australia. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia Unveils “Digital Duty of Care” Modeled on UK and EU Online Censorship Laws appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

The Resistance is Tired and in Retreat

For their Friday show, the ladies of ABC’s The View welcomed New York City Mayor and Turkish Airlines super fan Eric Adams to the table to discuss the recent election and Donald Trump. In the second segment with Adams, Ana Navarro asked, “On the other side of that coin, though, you've got Trump, who says a part of his plan is to send troops into the states and into the cities to conduct these mass deportations. Would you let him come into New York City? What's your scenario? What are your plans if he tries to do that in New York City?”     “Let?” There is no “let.” New York cannot just declare the city off limits to federal law enforcement. As for Adams’s response, he gave a long-winded non-answer: We have sat down and did scenario plannings on all of these issues, and there are a lot of laws and requirements. What we must do is to be prepared to address the issues as they come in front of us, our team has been there. We looked at all of these issues and all the conversations that are taking place. The operationalizing of the theories that people want to do is different from the actualization of it. Again, people conflate sanctuary cities with the migrant and asylum issue. That's not the same thing. People who are paroled into the country, the sanctuary cities is stating to those who are here for those, you have the right to access the services of the city because that's how we treat people in New York City. While Adams tried to have it both ways, the cast moved on to his legal issues and questioned if his plea for fellow Democrats to tone down the rhetoric about fascism was just an attempt to appeal to Trump for a pardon. Earlier, however, Joy Behar was confused by Adams’s claims that Democrats lost touch with normal voters with all their prophesying about Trump being Hitler. She claimed Democrats not only did care for their needs but voters decided to hurt themselves, “But the Democratic Party was addressing most of those issues with the infrastructure bill, for example, and keeping Medicare and Social Security safe. Why would they vote for the party that will hurt them? I didn't get that.” Adams took the opportunity to promote himself: Well, you know, part of the business of campaigning is getting your message out and being clear in your message. Even the experts in their party were saying, get back to the message. What are we doing for everyday people in the country? And this is the same thing that happened in 2022. When I got elected in 2022, I stated that, listen, we need to be talking about crime in this country. They've ignored it. We lost the election. During 2023, I said we had to deal with this migrant and asylum seeker issue. It was on the top one or two issues in the country. We ignored it. We have to go back and talk to those issues that people are worried about. Meanwhile, if Behar doesn’t understand, maybe that’s why The View should pop their liberal bubble. Here is a transcript for the November 15 show: ABC The View 11/15/2024 11:20 PM ET JOY BEHAR: But the Democratic Party was addressing most of those issues with the infrastructure bill, for example, and keeping Medicare and Social Security safe. SUNNY HOSTIN: And an opportunity economy BEHAR: Why would they vote for the party that will hurt them? I didn't get that. ERIC ADAMS: Well, you know, part of the business of campaigning is getting your message out and being clear in your message. Even the experts in their party were saying, get back to the message. What are we doing for everyday people in the country? And this is the same thing that happened in 2022. When I got elected in 2022, I stated that, listen, we need to be talking about crime in this country. They've ignored it. We lost the election. During 2023, I said we had to deal with this migrant and asylum seeker issue. It was on the top one or two issues in the country. We ignored it. We have to go back and talk to those issues that people are worried about. … ANA NAVARRO: On the other side of that coin, though, you've got Trump, who says a part of his plan is to send troops into the states and into the cities to conduct these mass deportations. Would you let him come into New York City? What's your scenario? What are your plans if he tries to do that in New York City? ADAMS: We have sat down and did with scenario plannings on all of these issues, and there are a lot of laws and requirements. What we must do is to be prepared to address the issues as they come in front of us, our team has been there. We looked at all of these issues and all the conversations that are taking place. The operationalizing of the theories that people want to do is different from the actualization of it. Again, people conflate sanctuary cities with the migrant and asylum issue. That's not the same thing. People who are paroled into the country, the sanctuary cities is stating to those who are here for those, you have the right to access the services of the city because that's how we treat people in New York City.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr utilized Media Research Center analysis to put Big Tech and so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard on notice. Carr sent a letter Wednesday to the respective CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple accusing them of “improper conduct” in silencing Americans’ exercising free speech on political, religious and scientific issues. Carr specifically ordered these tech giants to acquiesce to surrendering any documents related to their work with “the Orwellian named NewsGuard” given its history of targeting right-leaning websites by bullying their advertisers. Moreover, Carr excoriated the CEOs for participating in “a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself” to suppress viewpoints, harm websites’ profitability and delist them by smearing them as “high risk” to advertisers. Carr relied on MRC studies to make his case that Big Tech platforms working with NewsGuard raise questions about whether this relationship constitutes “good faith” actions within the meaning of the Section 230 liability protections in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that they enjoy. For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” Carr wrote citing MRC Free Speech America research. “For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory. For still another, the Small Business Committee and multiple Media Research Center studies detail numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own rating system in an even-handed manner. Carr called for the ties of leftist ratings firms like NewsGuard, the government and Silicon Valley to be dismantled: “This censorship cartel is an affront to Americans’ constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled. Americans must be able to reclaim their right to free speech. Indeed, our democracy depends on freedom of expression.” MRC Free Speech America released three studies of NewsGuard’s ridiculously skewed ratings system across three consecutive years consistently showing NewsGuard heavily favoring left-leaning publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, the now-defunct BuzzFeed News (which infamously published the notorious Steele Dossier) over right-leaning media.  MRC’s most recent study, which Carr cited, revealed that NewsGuard gave “left” and “lean left” outlets an average “credibility” rating of 91/100, whereas “right” and “lean right” outlets got slammed with an abysmal 65/100 score—a 26-point disparity.  NewsGuard also applies nutrition labels to media outlets and targets the flow of ad revenue to a media outlet. The ratings firm relies on its subjective opinion of these outlets’ reliability, objectivity and other factors to come up with their scores. The MRC study also resurfaced a previous 2022 analysis that NewsGuard had given higher credibility ratings to Chinese Communist Party-tied publications over American-based right-leaning media.   China Daily (44.5/100), the Global Times (39.5/100), and China Global Television Network (CGTN) (44.5/100) and People’s Daily (39.5/100) all had significantly higher scores at the time over right-leaning media like The Federalist (12.5/100), One America News (25/100), Newsmax (15/100), Life News (17.5/100) and LifeSite News (17.5/100). Carr ripped NewsGuard for trying to pass itself off as some kind of neutral arbiter of truth: NewsGuard is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for its impact on protected First Amendment Speech. And while NewsGuard claims that its mission is to provide apolitical guidance on ‘misinformation,’ NewsGuard undercuts this claim by retaining on its Advisory Board at least one person that signed the now infamous October 2020 letter from former intelligence community officials that flamed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation—a letter that itself fueled a wave of censorship. Read Carr's letter to Big Tech CEOs below: Carr_Letter_on_NewsGuard_-_11.13.24.pdf Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

The election that will bring Donald Trump back into power as the 47th president of the United States proved a lot of things: People care more about the economy than “reproductive rights,” people don’t trust Kamala Harris’ policy flip-flopping, and as Rick Burgess points out, people don’t buy into the left’s woke agenda. They “[overplayed] their hand,” he says. It turns out that people at large still have their wits about them because they rejected the wokeness that demands setting aside all logic and reasoning. The question now is: Will the entertainment industry, which has been poisoned by woke ideology, get the message and correct course? “Will movie makers, will entertainment people get that cue?” Burgess asks Bubba Bussey. “No, not to the level you think they would,” says Bubba, noting that in 1984 when Reagan won 49 states, he mistakenly believed that that was “the end of liberalism.” “But it’s never that way,” he adds. “There’s a lot of people in the middle out there ... that just kind of vote for who they like.” On top of that, “If you just look through history, it swings back and forth all the time.” If we want to see a change that isn’t fleeting, Bubba says the Trump administration needs to “get busy right away and make some real changes that are substantive and make a difference in everybody’s daily life,” otherwise “the pendulum will swing back.” To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above. Want more from Rick and Bubba?To enjoy more legendary comedy, political arguments, and lessons in common sense, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The Civilization games have long been a cornerstone of the turn-based strategy genre. If you've always wanted to try them out, or just want to plug some gaps in your collection, a new Humble Bundle encompasses most of the series. It includes Civilization 3, 4, 5, and 6 (plus DLCs) for only $18 / £13.86 - and some of the profits go towards helping the homeless and research against Parkinson’s disease. Continue reading Get Civilization 6 and the entire Sid Meier Collection for just $18

Despite its rocky start to life, there’s plenty of good news surrounding Battlefield 2042 right now. Even though seasonal support for the game has ended, DICE is still working hard to get players in the door with limited-time events and other less resource-heavy initiatives. Its latest is a big one, and it appears to be a first for the Battlefield series - five days of triple XP. Continue reading Battlefield 2042 attempts to lure in players with an unprecedented bonus MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Battlefield 2042 review, Best multiplayer games on PC, Best FPS games on PC