News Round-Up: US Justified Censorship With Misinformation, Biased Global Warming and Elon Musk's Lawsuit Against Defamers
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
The US government justified its calls for social media censorship with misinformation.
In-depth research: inaccurate measurements mean it is impossible to say who or what is warming the climate.
A British court said a trans activist inciting violence against women had not committed a crime.
Musk plans legal action against the Anti-Defamation League because of defamation.
A well known US journalist admitted suffering vaccine damage.
The US government justified its calls for social media censorship with misinformation
In March 2021, the UK's Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published an influential report on the posts of 'misinformation' about vaccines on social media. They claimed that a study they conducted between February and March of that year showed that 65% of the so-called anti-vaccine content on social media originated from just 12 people, who the study called the 'Disinformation Dozen'. These 12 people included, for example, vaccine skeptic and current Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alternative medicine promoters Joseph Mercola, and Ty and Charlene Bollinger, among others.
The study was widely reported in the press around the world. It was also referenced by the US government in July 2021 when it called for social media companies to censor information about Covid that they saw unfit – here, then Biden press secretary Jen Psaki speaks of censorship requests, referring to the 'Disinformation Dozen':
But now, the US House Judiciary Committee, investigating social media censorship, has subpoenaed Facebook internal documents and correspondence showing that the entire CCDH report itself was outright misinformation. Jim Jordan, the Republican leader of the Judiciary Committee published a note on his social media platform X account that the claim that 65% of the so-called anti-vaccine posts originated from people they called 'Disinformation Dozen' was untrue.
Facebook was well aware that out of all the posts the government considered "anti-vaccine" a mere 0.05% originated in fact from the 'Disinformation Dozen'. Further more, there was nothing happening on the accounts of these dozen people that would have led the platform to act to curb free speech without pressure from the White House – there were simply no 'violations'. As early as April 2021, Facebook employees complained to the company's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that they were under pressure from the White House to remove the 'Disinformation Dozen' from the platform, but they had no basis for doing so. They also expressed surprise that the Biden administration appeared to genuinely believe the blatant misinformation provided by foreign activists – the CCDH. In referring to this data, the White House wanted to censor not only the posts of specific individuals but all the posts they had declared to be false, on whichever social media platform.
By July, when the White House started to push Facebook particularly hard and openly, the platform had long since taken action against the 'Disinformation Dozen', including deleting Kennedy's account from its sister platform Instagram. It also reduced the visibility of the accounts of organisations linked to these 12 individuals. The accounts were constantly monitored in an attempt to find some reason to remove them in order to please the White House, but no such content was there.
With the Biden administration still putting pressure on the company, Facebook announced in August of the same year that it was taking further steps to curb the postings of the 'Disinformation Dozen'. The company removed more than three dozen pages, groups, and users associated with the 12 individuals from both Facebook and Instagram. Penalties were imposed on several other pages and groups allegedly linked to the same "dozen".
Study: inaccurate measurements make it impossible to say who or what is warming the climate
A study by 37 scientists from 18 countries published at the end of August concluded that the measurements of global warming made since 1850 are not accurate. The authors of the study explain that the data are skewed by urban temperature measurements since urban areas are always somewhat warmer than rural areas due to the effects of constant human activity. However, urban areas represent only a very small fraction of the planet's total surface. This means that calculating global warming by combining the temperature measurements in both urban and rural areas provides a higher result than it would by viewing each separately. The researchers found that when using a mix of rural and urban temperatures, the long-term warming trend is 0.89 C per century. For rural areas only, the increase is 0.55 C. "This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases," the paper notes.
The UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that urban heat accounts for less than 10% of recorded global warming. However, the scientists who carried out this study estimate the impact at nearly 40%.
If the urban effect in the measurements is greater than previously thought and renders the existing measurements inaccurate, a question arises: How much of global warming can actually be attributed to human activity? The IPCC argues that global warming is either entirely or mostly anthropogenic and that the contribution of natural processes is essentially zero. However, the authors of this study note that "the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination".
The Daily Sceptic, which reported on the study, commented that the IPCC's claim is a political construct designed to promote a policy of moving towards Net Zero. "Given our current state of scientific knowledge, it is impossible to calculate how much of the recent warming is due to the small amount of carbon dioxide humans produce by burning fossil fuel compared to natural climatic variations," the outlet writes.
UK court finds no crime in trans activist's incitement against women
A 54-year-old man posing as a woman – going by the name Sarah Jane Baker – made a public call for violence against women at a trans-rally in central London in July, reports The Daily Mail. Speaking to a large crowd, he shouted into a microphone that though he had wanted to be nice and fluffy when he came to the parade, he wasn't going to be. "If you see a TERF, punch them in the f****** face," was instead his crude appeal. The acronym TERF is used by trans activists as a slur against women who do not agree to call or treat men who call themselves women as women. Spelled out, it means 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist'.
Following a complaint, police arrested Baker in July. Baker admitted saying the words, but only because he wanted the press attention, he explained. He claims to lead an organisation set up to defend the interests of transgender prisoners. Significantly, Baker himself is a former long-term prisoner who was released in 2019 after serving 30 years in prison which he did for brutal violent crimes. In 1989, he and his brother kidnapped his stepmother's brother, who was then beaten and tortured. While in prison, Baker attempted to kill a fellow inmate, for which he received a life sentence but was released early. He also started calling himself a woman while in prison, deliberately injuring his own testicles by cutting them off.
In his statement to the court, Baker said he regretted what he had said and wished he could take it back, but he also said that transgender people are victims. "I don't want someone to be beaten up because of some rubbish that comes out of my mouth, I just want attention for some of the causes that I believe in," he said.
Baker escaped conviction. According to the judge, it is entirely possible that Baker did not want to provoke violence, but wanted to get attention for himself. One may wonder though whether, for example, some conservative-minded man or woman would have fared the same in court under the same circumstances.
Baker himself, however, is currently being held in a men's prison, pending a hearing on whether he has breached the terms of his early release.
Musk plans to take legal action against Anti-Defamation League
Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X (formerly Twitter), has announced that the company is planning a lawsuit against an association of hate speech activists that accuses the platform of antisemitism and is campaigning aggressively among businesses to stop them from buying advertising there. The group, known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), describes itself as the world's leading anti-hate organisation, with one of its main aims being to combat all forms of antisemitism.
When Musk became the owner of Twitter last autumn, the ADL launched a campaign less than a week after the deal was closed, calling advertisers to refrain from buying ads on the platform. The boycott was prompted by concerns that antisemitism and hatred were spreading on the platform. However, in one week the platform had not changed at all compared to the so-called pre-Musk Twitter.
Musk posted on the platform now called X instead of Twitter, explaining that the campaign they had launched had done the company a great disservice, as advertising revenue in the US had fallen by 60% and had not yet recovered. In another post, Musk said he was in favour of free speech but against any form of antisemitism. In order to clear himself and the platform's name, he said he would sue ADL for the damage it had caused. "We have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League… Oh the irony!" he declared.
However, ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt, in a response published on CNN, portrayed himself as a victim of Musk's hate campaign, which allegedly resulted in direct threats against him and others in his organisation. Greenblatt acknowledged that they were indeed one of the organisations that launched the anti-Twitter campaign in the autumn of 2022, but defended himself by claiming that in reality it was never really activated. He declined to say explicitly whether he thought companies should or shouldn't be advertising on the X platform at the moment.
Adding some important background to the controversy were journalists Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger of PUBLIC, who said that activist organisations such as ADL were quite wrong to call themselves non-governmental organisations. In reality, governments fund these organisations and their fight against 'hate speech' either directly from the public purse or indirectly, as they pointed out with several examples (e.g. the CCHD mentioned in today's news round-up above receives indirect funding from the British government, they wrote). However, in the case of the ADL, founded in 1913, the authors pointed to the fact that for at least 40 years it spied on its enemies and shared intelligence with the US, Israeli and other governments. "The reason all of this matters is that ADL’s advertiser boycott against X may be an effort by governments to regain the ability to censor users on X that they had under Twitter before Musk’s takeover last November," Gutentag and Shellenberger reasoned in their story.
In this case, the ADL is waging a campaign against X quite similar to the one successfully waged against Facebook in 2020. The accusations back then led to 800 companies pulling out of Facebook advertising in just three days, with examples like Coca-Cola, Ford, Unilever and others pulling their money from the platform. Facebook agreed to the ADL's demands. Musk mentioned the same in his posts on the issue. "The Facebook caved to far left pressure groups and now allows them to silently dictate policy in exchange for ad money," he wrote.
A well known US journalist admitted suffering vaccine damage
Megyn Kelly, a prominent US journalist and former longtime Fox and NBC presenter, has said she deeply regrets having been injected with the Covid-19 vaccine and is now suffering from vaccine-induced health damage, according to The Epoch Times. She said she regrets getting vaccinated and then boosted, saying she doesn't think it was necessary. She has now also been told by her doctor that the autoimmune condition she developed after the injection may have been vaccine-related.
"I regret getting the vaccine even though I’m a 52-year-old woman because I don’t think I needed it," Kelly said on her podcast. “I think I would have been fine. I had got COVID many times, and it was well past when the vaccine was doing what it was supposed to be doing,” she added.
Kelly found out about the autoimmune issue during her annual health check-up. "And I went to the best rheumatologist in New York, and I asked her, do you think this could have to do with the fact that I got the damn booster and then got COVID within three weeks? And she said yes. Yes. I wasn’t the only one she’d seen that with," she said.
Kelly's attitude towards vaccines is a bit of a turnaround. When she announced her vaccination in April 2021, she noted in a post on X (then Twitter) that she had zero qualms about vaccinating and advised everyone to do what the doctor recommended.
