'X' Brings Back Censorship; Agenda to Remove Trump From Ballots Is Failing | CLIP | Crossroads

Good morning, everybody, and happy Friday. Some interesting stuff happening right now. If you've been watching what's happening on Twitter or X, of course, when Elon Musk first took it over, he was promising essentially a platform that respects free speech. They came out with a new line. That new line is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. In other words, you can speak, but people might not be able to hear you speak, is the new thing. You could argue that muzzles work similar to that. If someone puts a muzzle over your face and you're not able to be heard, of course, you can still speak. You can hear yourself speaking, but maybe nobody's going to hear you. It reminds me as well of what was done during the Soviet Union. During the time of the Soviet Union, of course, when it came to religious freedom, people said, hey, you're allowed to have your religion. You can have your belief, but keep it inside your own home. Don't let other people hear you express your faith. Of course, he's not restricting religion, as far as I've seen, but it's very similar to that. A lot of this comes in after he brought in this new CEO, Yaccarino. She just seems like she's a pro-censorship, kind of deep state-ish aligned individual, but here we are. The big thing, though, is that part of the censorship programs they're rolling out, they claim it's a temporary thing specifically around elections. That has people questioning, well, what is this censorship program for elections? Were you all forced to do it? Is this some kind of government program you're not telling us about? Why do you have a special censorship program just for the elections? Let me show you briefly. It says here, TwitterX, supporting people's rights to accurate and safe political discourse on Twitter. Now, you can have, of course, the right to free speech, but it says supporting people's right to accurate and safe political discourse. Since when do you have a right to accurate discourse? If you have two kids and they're arguing with each other, I guarantee each side believes that they're the accurate one. How do you determine which side is accurate? You got to hear them out. You got to let them hash it out. The basis of free speech was in the marketplace of ideas, not a right to accuracy. How do you say a person reading the news has a right to accuracy? Of course, the news as an industry, as a business, would have it in their interest to provide accurate information, because if people stop believing the information is accurate, people might stop reading. You at least need to take steps to ensure credibility and accuracy, but since when do people have a right to accuracy? Of course, the bigger question is accurate according to whom? Who decides what is accurate? Who decides what is inaccurate? I can tell you already, Twitter has censored us, again, since Elon Musk took over. They actually censored one of our documentaries just recently, and I would say that's 100% accurate. There's nothing in it that could be deemed, I think, false, and so obviously they're censoring for some other reason. Regardless, they say they also have safe political discourse. What is safe political discourse? Is it safe political discourse, for example, if you have Democrats throwing Molotov cocktails and so on? Is it safe political discourse if a Proud Boy shakes a metal fence, he gets 17 years in prison for it, which just happened, by the way? Is it safe when you have people protesting across the street from the White House, and one of them throws a Molotov cocktail in a historical church and sets herself on fire, notably when Trump was president, do you all remember that? And nothing happened to them? What about when you have these two individuals torch a police car? Or for example, when you have the CHAZ site, the CHOP site, whatever they want to call it, the Temporary Autonomous Zone, actual insurrection, take over parts of like, what was it, Seattle? And did anybody go to prison for that actual insurrection? Was that actual insurrection where they declared themselves a separate country, and then actually carried out acts of forcing businesses to pay them for protection money? Did anybody go to prison for that? Is that safe political discourse? Or is it only safe political discourse if someone says they're offended by what somebody else says? Because that's what it sounds like. Regardless, it says this, during elections, X works to get in front of a range of tactics that people use to target the process. To do this, we hire the right people, update our policies, and evolve our product. Now, what are these tactics that people use to target the process, and they have to kind of get ahead of this? They're not really being clear on what the heck they're talking about. They're suggesting that people use certain tactics to target the process, we assume, of basically spreading information. I don't know what this is. Is the process like reporting and going on the ground interviewing people? Yeah, one of the big journalists in Maui just got censored on Twitter, by the way. One of the journalists on the ground reporting in Maui got censored by Twitter. Is that the process, going on the ground to sites where information is happening and recording yourself and interviewing people? Is that the process they have to get ahead of? It's not clear. They say this, though, our policies, we have rules in place to help protect the safety and authenticity, yeah, authenticity and safety of conversations on X. Again, how do you determine what is safe or unsafe information? How do you determine what is authentic or inauthentic information? If they're talking, again, about censoring people on extreme things, like making terrorist threats, hey, fine, censor them. If they're talking about censoring people because you make somebody feel unsafe, which is everything these days, then no. How do you talk about the authenticity? If they're talking about AI or false information or bots, fine, censor all of them. But if you're talking about trying to fact-check people using one-sided bias fact-checkers, which happens a lot, then no. I will say the community notes on Twitter, though, does tend to be decent, at least, and so if they're going by that, good, but I can say already they have censored. I've seen censorship on things that absolutely should not have been censored. Censorship of accurate information, censorship of actual news reporting, censorship of investigative journalism, and they're on a bad track with that so far. Regardless, it says, during the elections, this is the big part, our civic integrity policy provides an extra layer of protection that is applied for a limited period of time before and during an election. So they have a special election censorship program. Maybe you can't talk about election fraud or something, you know, because that's what they're doing everywhere else. We're updating this policy to make sure we strike the right balance between tackling the most harmful types of content, those that could intimidate or deceive people into surrendering their right to participate in a civic process, and not censoring political debate. If they want to make sure that nobody is intimidating or deceiving people into surrendering their right to participate in a civic process, the people trying to get Trump removed from ballots, i.e. the secretaries of state, they should all be censored. Are they not trying to refuse people their civic rights? If people want to, for example, vote for Donald Trump and they want to remove him from the ballot so he can't vote, is that not interference with the person's basic civic rights? Should that be then censored if people advocate for the removal of him using the 14th Amendment? I think so. What about, you know, using the legal system to attack and undermine a political campaign? Is that depriving people of their civic right, making sure that an elected candidate, one of the main candidates, cannot properly tour around and hold events and campaign? I'd say that's interference with civic rights. You know, what do they consider to fall under this in this case, you know what I mean? And will this stay in place, I really wonder. If Donald Trump comes back into office, are the Democrats in that case all just going to throw their hands up and be like, we're not going to question the election. This was people's choice. This is democracy. We all respect democracy. Could you imagine that? Imagine, all right, suspend disbelief, 2024, votes are in, Donald Trump is the winner of the elections, I guess 2025, he's inaugurated January 6th, and the Democrats are just on the sidelines applauding, yay, congratulations on winning a totally legitimate election. No challenges, we're not going to question it whatsoever, rise, Mr. President. Also, we're not going to question your, you know, your presidency or your legitimacy or your character, because only a domestic terrorist would do such a thing. Do you think they're going to do that? No, I would be shocked to the core if I saw that. They're going to flip the narrative and they're going to do the same thing they've done every single time, which is carry out the same acts and same narratives that they've ironically tried to incriminate others of doing, you know, questioning the elections and probably carrying out mass protests and acts of violence under the name of defending democracy or something like that. They're going to do the exact same thing that they're throwing other people in prison for, because that's what they've done every single time, frankly. And when that happens, inevitably, I wonder really if these big tech platforms, if Twitter, if Facebook, if, you know, Google and so on, I wonder if they'll continue censoring people once that happens. I seriously do wonder.