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26 Mar, 10 tweets, 4 min read
Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively [for subscribers]

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-…
The repressive objective of Congress is to transfer the power to police political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.

The hearing yesterday was a stunning display of authoritarianism: one member after the next issuing threats if their censorship demands are not met.
Having endured all five hours of it, I could not help but take a brief detour to express how bizarre it is to watch the way Mark Zuckerberg "communicates." There's nothing like it, and he united all members across the political spectrum in visceral contempt.
Here's one excerpt of a Democratic member of Congress, @RepAngieCraig, badgering Zuckerberg in demanding to know why Facebook's censorship decisions did not comport with her own politics, and how he responded:
Here was another Democratic Committee member, @RepFletcher, suggesting that the government create lists of who they regard as "domestic terror organization" and give to tech companies so they can treat them like ISIS: "track and remove" discussions of them:
There are viable ways to deal with tech monopolies. But that's not what these hearings are: they want to commandeer that power.

The SupCt has repeatedly ruled that state coercion to censor violates the 1st Amendment. That's what they are clearly doing:

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-…
Also:
Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively [available to all]

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-…
The New York Times has found yet another place on the internet allowing "unfiltered" conversations (😲) and is so unhappy about it that they put it on their front page.

nytimes.com/2021/03/25/art…
Does anyone know: in the esoteric jargon of the NYT tech team, what is worse: "unfiltered" conversations on the internet or "unfettered" ones? They're both obviously intolerable, but which is more upsetting?

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Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
27 Mar
Karmic justice can sometimes be so sweet that it verges into the super-natural ImageImageImage
Days after Brazil's Supreme Court overturned former President Lula's convictions based on our year-long exposé showing his judge & former Bolsonaro Justice Minister was corrupt, I'm just hanging out being pronounced "irrelevant" by some liberal banality who writes about the TV. ImageImageImageImage
As this sector of the digital liberal media rapidly erodes and crashes down on their heads, these people get more warped and desperate, and their sense of priorities even more trivial and deranged than before. Going to the grave with zero self-reflection.

Read 4 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
27 Mar
This is repulsive. The US Govt -- after decades of engineering and cheering coups throughout South American -- did the same with the 2019 coup in Bolivia. The coup regime massacred indigenous protesters. Now Biden's Secretary of State is demanding immunity for the coup leaders.
If you're a democratically elected government in Latin America -- which, no thanks to the US, is how Bolivia is governed -- the absolute last thing you should do is take orders from the imperialist ghouls in Biden's State Department, who have huge amounts of blood on their hands.
"We are deeply concerned by growing signs of anti-democratic behavior .... in Bolivia," says the State Department, which has done more to spread "anti-democratic behavior" around the world than anyone.

Blinken tweeted this sermon after sending arms to the Saudis and Sisi.
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Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
25 Mar
CNN's Defense of Chris Cuomo's Special COVID Privileges is Grotesque

greenwald.substack.com/p/cnns-defense…
How can a media outlet credibly claim to denounce abuse of power by political officials when they defend and glorify their own anchor's participation in it?

CNN's attempt to glorify the participation of their news host in family corruption is insultingly deceitful.
What's most amazing is Chris Cuomo "interviewed" his brother on CNN just *weeks after* their abuse of state resources to obtain testing. The interview began with them both acknowledging that the state had serious resources constraints to provide testing.

Read 4 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
25 Mar
Just as the current epidemic of online censorship began with the age-old tactic of targeting someone widely disliked (Milo, then Alex Jones), these censors are trying to create a censorship precedent for Substack by forcing them to boot one bad writer, then expand from there:
That's the tactic of state and non-state censors always:

Let's find the first target that everyone hates so nobody cares when they're silenced. Then we'll have instituted this power and then we can use it far more widely.

You have to fight it in all instances, from the start.
These people are so fucking broken. It's not enough for them to refuse to read a site or refuse to write there, which is totally within their rights.

They can't stand that there's any venue they can't control, where people are free to speak. They're little petty wannabe despots.
Read 6 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
25 Mar
For the third time in six months, Congress is summoning tech CEOs to testify in order to badger and coerce them to censor the internet more. Google's Pichai, Facebook's Zuckerberg & Twitter's Dorsey will all testify. I wrote about it here last month:

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-esc…
Congress has a legitimate role to play in overseeing tech giants, especially given its (valid) assessment that they wield classic monopoly power.

But they're not doing anything about that: they're instead trying to co-opt that power to censor the internet for their own interests
It's extra creepy somehow watching members of Congress sitting in their homes as they warn tech CEOs that they need to stop censoring the internet more or else they will enact laws to regulate and force them to do it:

Read 14 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
25 Mar
1/ Estou vendo muita confusão sobre o que significa "ser judeu". Sem comentar sobre nenhum indivíduo (cuja história eu não conheço), é importante entender que - ao contrário da cristianismo - "judeu" tem um significado racial / étnico e também religioso. Estes são separados.
2/ Segundo a lei judaica, qualquer pessoa nascida de mãe judia é judia - não importa o que acredite sobre Deus. É por isso que pode ter um ateu judeu, ou um judeu budista, ou mesmo um judeu que orar pro Jesus. Este é o sentido em que "judeu" significa uma identidade étnica/racial
3/ Mas tb tem um componente religioso: qualquer ser humano, de qualquer pais, pode se tornar judeu se passar pelo processo de conversão (o que é bem difícil). Essa é a definição religiosa de judeu: alguém que acredita nos princípios do Talmud e que observa o judaísmo religioso.
Read 4 tweets

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