October 1, 2021

       "If Texas wants to sue Google in Texas to protect Texans, it should be able to do so. The same goes for Utah, or California, or any other state."

Senate Judiciary Committee advances bipartisan antitrust bill aimed at Google, Facebook

The bill would make it more difficult for antitrust suits to be moved to courts that are more sympathetic to the defendants

A bill that would allow state attorneys general to select which courts hear their antitrust cases advanced Thursday out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with broad bipartisan support.

The State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act is sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, the committee's top antitrust legislators, both of whom are themselves attorneys.

The politicians believe the bill will prevent state antitrust cases from being moved to courts that are favored by defendants and combined with private lawsuits.

The bill is one of a several being taken up by Congress this year pertaining to antitrust regulations surrounding Big Tech.

"This bill would simply strengthen enforcement of our antitrust laws," Klobuchar said.

State attorneys general widely support the bill, as well as some of the other congressional efforts to update antitrust legislation.

In addition to pending suits again Google, state AGs are pursuing an antitrust case against Facebook, which was initially dismissed by a federal judge, but is being appealed. 

But, some committee members have concerns about the retroactive application of the law to already pending cases.

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Lee and Klobuchar stood by the retroactive application of the law, saying that from a legalistic standpoint, it changes only procedural rules not substantive legal standards. 

Removing the retroactive portion of the law would "only help Google, which wants to do everything it possibly ca to slow down the prosecution and keep the case as far away from Texas as possible," said Lee.

He also said: "If Texas wants to sue Google in Texas to protect Texans, it should be able to do so. The same goes for Utah, or California, or any other state." 

Google and Facebook have been aggressive in their contestation of allegations of anti-competitive behavior and practices. 

October 5, 2021

       “She was the head censor on FB during the election of 2020. Yet she is going to come out and act like she’s a whistleblower? No. Haugen is controlled opposition..."

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/facebook-crashes-globally-mainstream-media-heralds-alleged-whistleblower

Facebook Crashes Globally After Mainstream Media Heralds Alleged ‘Whistleblower’

Without warning, Facebook crashed on Monday morning. It’s unclear what caused today’s global outage which saw Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all crash.

The shutdown comes after a former Facebook product manager turned “whistleblower” leaked tens of thousands of internal documents published in a blockbuster series of reports published by The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook executives admit in the internal memos that Zuckerberg “hobbled” America to get vaccinated, facilitates human trafficking and that the company’s subsidiary, Instagram, is harmful to teenagers among the trove of damning information leaked.

However, the whistleblower, 37-year old data scientist Frances Haugen who led Facebook’s Civic Integrity and Misinformation Group starting in 2019, was the chief censor on the social media platform ahead of the rigged 2020 election.

Unlike whistleblowers who have previously exposed big tech, Haugen is conspicuously being championed by the mainstream media.

While the latest leaked documents confirm complaints repeatedly leveled against Facebook, the latest expose is suspected to be psy-op contrived by Facebook to conglomerate with the federal government to amass unrestrained power.

Facebook executives “see people are leaving Facebook. They’re going to GETTR, they’re going to Telegram. They’re going to all these other places. They’re sharing Rumble,” Human Event’s Jack Posobeic told Steve Bannon on Monday. “She was the head censor on FB during the election of 2020. Yet she is going to come out and act like she’s a whistleblower? No.

Haugen is controlled opposition, Posobeic warns.

“She’s realizing the only way to do this is with legislative action. They want the government to step in and they are going to use brute force,” he said. “They are going to say the only way to fix this, of course, is going to be government action for the ‘greater good.

“Think of any of the whistleblowers who have come forward from Facebook, Google, Pinterest, from Project Veritas – those are the real whistleblowers – the people who lose their jobs, get lawsuits, get ruined. There are guys behind bars. Real whistleblowers don’t get thrown on 60-Minutes. This is an operation.”

Zuckerberg has yet to comment publicly on the slew of allegations published since Sept. 13. Instead, in recent weeks the CEO has posted videos of himself sailing and fencing on his own profile.

October 7, 2021

        "A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls."

         Careful what you wish for. You may lose your power very soon.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/greenwald-democrats-media-do-not-want-weaken-facebook-just-commandeer-its-power-censor

Greenwald: Democrats, Media Do Not Want To Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer Its Power To Censor

"Whistleblower" Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse...

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.

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Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.

As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.

A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of "restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies "to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

October 13, 2021

        “We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well. Our case will prove this censorship is unlawful, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s completely un-American,”

BOOM: Trump Launches Lawsuit Against Facebook, Instagram

On Thursday, former President Donald Trump issued a lawsuit against Facebook, suing them to reinstate his social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

This preliminary injunction against Facebook seems appropriate to file this week since they’ve been big in the news lately for all the issues they’re facing,” President Trump’s attorney John Coale said to the Examiner.

“Zuckerberg and Facebook say it’s the 21st-century public town square; if so, they should uphold the First Amendment,” Coale added, referring to statements made by the Facebook CEO about his platform in 2019. “You can’t have it both ways. They’re like a public utility when it comes to speech.”

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In the preliminary injunction, Trump’s legal team argued that by “cutting him off from the most effective and direct forms of communication with potential voters,” Facebook is “threatening irreparable damage to the Republican Party’s prospects in the 2022 and 2024 elections.”

It also says that Trump faces irreparable harm and significant losses due to being cut off from his donors and merchandising platforms as well as his ability to communicate his views and endorse local candidates.

Back in July, Trump issued a class action lawsuit against all of the Big Tech giants including their CEOs after they all banned him after the January 6th riot.

“We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well. Our case will prove this censorship is unlawful, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s completely un-American,” Trump said at the time during the press conference. “It will be a pivotal battle in the defense of the First Amendment. And in the end, I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom, and at the same time freedom of speech.”