Will Scorched Earth Hasbara round 2 even work, I wonder? The cat's out of the bag for the American populace like it never has before. Shouldn't Israel's reputation be beyond repairing?
I'm sure this post will be gone in another few minutes.
I do think, in general, people are increasingly feeling a mismatch between what they're being told people feel on social media and what people in irl feel. However, there is still a lot of control being exerted online and it still seems to have some effect at maintaining the illusion of what views are and are not actually mainstream.
> I'm sure this post will be gone in another few minutes.
Aaand it's flagged, of course. Seriously, flagging should force you to leave a reason, or at least choose from a list of guidelines for others to see which the flagger thought was unmet.
It comes down to whether everyone who lives in Palestine can be killed or removed before the direct financial support reverses into sanctions or something beyond the heavily suppressed critical online comments they're facing right now. Once they are all gone, the pressure to save them will be as well. I think they are at peace with "reputation" (among who, western intellectuals? progressives in Europe?) in exchange for achieving a goal that has defined rightwing Israeli politics for generations.
Besides, what do they have to be afraid of? They know the accusations of antisemitism are false, and will not become true any time soon. The idea of a widespread vendetta against both the violent and peaceful elements of Israel has always been a fiction, used to justify the extraordinary measures employed to "defend" against it. All they have to do is kill or expel two million people, and then the crime will become history (probably not in US textbooks).
Yeah, depressingly, I think you're right. They've gotten away with it for so long now, without any real repercussions, so perhaps they can just accelerate now that they're on the home stretch, reputation be damned. The EU states were extremely quick to cancel their sanctions discussions, but still haven't resumed them as the killings continue. They've been very quiet. Ultimately, they too, are too craven to do what's right.
Genuinely hate this. Thanks to the so-called "vibe shift" all of the ostracism mechanisms pioneered by the left are now being turned against them. I think the lesson here is that when building tools of social change, consider what happens when they're turned against you. I agree with Keira Knightley[1] - people need to learn to live with those that disagree with them (again).
Can you identify for us which merger approvals or broadcast licenses were threatened by the incumbent left-wing government for private parties engaging in protected speech?
I'll bite, despite your goal-post shift. Both sides do this, by the way, but you asked specifically for Democratic abuse of state institutions to suppress speech:
The Biden administration engaged in communications with social media companies urging moderation of content labelled "misinformation," especially around COVID-19 and the 2020 election. A district court found that the government had likely violated the First Amendment by "urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing" platforms to suppress protected speech.
In 2022 the DHS announced creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, whose stated role was to advise on "mis-, dis- and malinformation." The board was paused and then disbanded that same year following backlash, but the initiative itself is an example of Democratic-led state power being proposed for controlling speech.
There are many more, but those are 2 recent examples.
Do continue! And please be more specific which cases you're citing. The case I think you're referring to (Murthy v. Missouri) was decided this last June by the US Supreme Court. Even that resulted in a wash where plaintiffs didn't show standing.
Also, you're citing instances that were walked back or otherwise not implemented. That's very different to what happened with Kimmel. Or is that moving goal posts again?
Standing was denied, not the underlying finding. The Court never ruled that coordination between the White House and social-media platforms was constitutionally fine. The district court had found likely coercion, which remains uncontested on the merits.
And whether an initiative was walked back (like the Disinformation Board) doesn’t erase the intent to institutionalize speech regulation through DHS. Retraction after exposure doesn’t mean it wasn’t attempted.
But sure, as you requested:
The FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story is another example. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI held regular briefings with major tech platforms warning of possible “hack-and-leak” operations by foreign actors, specifically referencing topics that would later match the Hunter Biden reports. When The New York Post published its story, Twitter and Facebook immediately throttled or blocked it. Later, both companies acknowledged that the FBI’s warnings influenced those decisions. The Bureau didn’t issue a formal takedown order, but the effect was identical: a law-enforcement agency used its authority to shape the information environment around an election.
The Obama administration’s record under the Espionage Act also fits the pattern. Obama’s Department of Justice prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers under that law than all previous administrations combined, often targeting disclosures that embarrassed the government but posed no clear security risk. Journalists who published the material, such as James Risen and others, were subpoenaed and threatened with jail time for refusing to reveal sources. That’s a textbook use of state power to chill investigative reporting.
There’s also the IRS targeting scandal, in which conservative nonprofit groups applying for tax-exempt status were singled out for extra scrutiny based on their political keywords (“Tea Party,” “Patriots,” etc.). The eventual Inspector General report confirmed viewpoint discrimination within a federal agency that directly affected the ability of those groups to operate and speak.
These episodes differ in scale and directness, but they share a common feature: government institutions, under Democratic leadership, exerting pressure,formal or informal, on the flow of information and the people disseminating it. Whether by pre-emptive warnings, selective enforcement, or bureaucratic choke points, each represents a form of speech control that doesn’t need a censorship law to be effective.
None of this is to suggest the problem is uniquely Democratic. Republicans have done the same and sometimes more overtly: pressuring the NFL over protests, threatening tech companies with regulation for perceived bias, using state legislatures to police campus or library speech, or floating defamation crackdowns against critics. Both parties reach for state power when it suits their narrative.
The conclusion isn’t that Democrats are worse, but that once any faction normalizes using the machinery of government to manage expression, the precedent will be used by everyone. The real lesson is that censorship, whether bureaucratic or partisan, always expands beyond its architects’ original intent.
Just to clarify for anyone inundated by the wall of... ahem... suspiciously verbose? text here:
The reason standing was denied in Murthy v Missouri is that the plaintiffs could not show any evidence whatsoever that their speech was curtailed due to any pressure whatsoever from the government.
In fact, their allegedly cancelled speech had been cancelled prior to any interaction at all between the administration and the platforms. It was cancelled because it violated the terms of service which the platforms developed and enforced well before the Biden administration even took office.
Twitter's own lawyers testified under oath that the government's requests played no role in their content moderation decisions and that requests were frequently denied with no repercussions.
Just to clarify for the zero other people who have gotten down to here: that’s only a partial description of Murthy v. Missouri. Standing was denied because the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate direct, individualized harm, not because the Court found the government’s conduct blameless. The Supreme Court explicitly avoided ruling on whether the administration’s communications with platforms were coercive. This was not a vindication, as GP implies.
As for the timeline, while some moderation policies pre-dated Biden, the record (from the district court, congressional reports, and the platforms’ own disclosures) shows substantial post-inauguration contact between federal officials and social-media companies, including specific requests to remove or de-amplify posts. Twitter’s legal testimony that it "often declined" requests does not negate that the government was actively attempting to influence what could be said online. Coercion doesn’t require success.
Not sure what's the angle, here. When Democrats do it, it's OK? It's OK if it doesn't work? Strange. When anyone does it, it's not OK. When people stop seeing the parties of the Duopoly as tribal identities they need to support no matter what, maybe we can get some effective, less corruptible US government.
For most of the past 10 years we've seen the liberal left celebrating this kind of McCarthyism. They normalised it, raised the stakes, and now it's being leveraged by the traditional actors who've always wanted to. Liberal elites should have been a bulwark against this, but they were not.
You're mistaken in your strawmanning of my position.
I'm against the dull left V right shallow simplemindedness dominant in US forums.
I reject the notion that "ostracism mechanisms", especially in a Hollywood context, were recently "pioneered by the left".
I read comments that blather on about "liberal left", "deplorables", et al. and despair for political sanity in the US.
It's an interesting emergance of iterative dynamics that the ancient rules of elections in middle north America resulted in a Hotelling's law two party system, neither broadly representative of US citizens, when those rules were founded by people opposed to party politics who sought robust debate of a multitude of views.
“ penned by Americana poet-laureate Taylor Sheridan. ”
Ok, but they’re going to need more than one writer for a MAGA friendly station. Honestly curious if they can actually overcome the move away from legacy media / movies.
I'm an antipodean world away and have still noticed Sheridan's name as an actor or director or writer or producer on seemingly damn near every major US TV and movie production in the past five to ten years.
I'm thinking Taylor Sheridan is a virtual Nicolas Bourbaki of clones laser focused on saccharin Americana mythology.
> noticed Sheridan's name as an actor or director or writer or producer on seemingly damn near every major US TV and movie production in the past five to ten years.
He's credited on 9 movies total with a tenth to be released, and none of them particularly high profile. As far as TV, he is pretty prolific recently but the only way you could possibly think he's involved in "damn near every" TV production in recent years is if you exclusively watch westerns.
(Credit where credit's due: I just learned he wrote Sicario, which was an excellent movie imo.)
I was unaware that Veronica Mars, Sons of Anarchy, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lioness, and Landman were considered "Westerns" (in the USofA sense).
I myself would have reserved that label for his multitude of Yellowstone and Glam Ranching spinoff productions.
My own AV collection of media I enjoy watching or have been involved in the production of does include a collection labled Western .. but these are not the Westerns you are thinking of.
This article is about how Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Mark Ruffalo are blacklisted from Paramount. Which one of those actors are Jewish?
Even if all parties involved were Jewish, I still don’t understand why that would make it not of interest to others that a corporation is blacklisting people on the basis of a mainstream political viewpoint.
Will Scorched Earth Hasbara round 2 even work, I wonder? The cat's out of the bag for the American populace like it never has before. Shouldn't Israel's reputation be beyond repairing?
I'm sure this post will be gone in another few minutes.
I do think, in general, people are increasingly feeling a mismatch between what they're being told people feel on social media and what people in irl feel. However, there is still a lot of control being exerted online and it still seems to have some effect at maintaining the illusion of what views are and are not actually mainstream.
> I'm sure this post will be gone in another few minutes.
Aaand it's flagged, of course. Seriously, flagging should force you to leave a reason, or at least choose from a list of guidelines for others to see which the flagger thought was unmet.
It’s really egregious because another (very relevant) submission I made was also flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816708
Most posts that talk about Israel’s influence in tech get flagged despite having many upvotes.
[dead]
It comes down to whether everyone who lives in Palestine can be killed or removed before the direct financial support reverses into sanctions or something beyond the heavily suppressed critical online comments they're facing right now. Once they are all gone, the pressure to save them will be as well. I think they are at peace with "reputation" (among who, western intellectuals? progressives in Europe?) in exchange for achieving a goal that has defined rightwing Israeli politics for generations.
Besides, what do they have to be afraid of? They know the accusations of antisemitism are false, and will not become true any time soon. The idea of a widespread vendetta against both the violent and peaceful elements of Israel has always been a fiction, used to justify the extraordinary measures employed to "defend" against it. All they have to do is kill or expel two million people, and then the crime will become history (probably not in US textbooks).
Yeah, depressingly, I think you're right. They've gotten away with it for so long now, without any real repercussions, so perhaps they can just accelerate now that they're on the home stretch, reputation be damned. The EU states were extremely quick to cancel their sanctions discussions, but still haven't resumed them as the killings continue. They've been very quiet. Ultimately, they too, are too craven to do what's right.
Genuinely hate this. Thanks to the so-called "vibe shift" all of the ostracism mechanisms pioneered by the left are now being turned against them. I think the lesson here is that when building tools of social change, consider what happens when they're turned against you. I agree with Keira Knightley[1] - people need to learn to live with those that disagree with them (again).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v4zSxefgKQM
Can you identify for us which merger approvals or broadcast licenses were threatened by the incumbent left-wing government for private parties engaging in protected speech?
I'll bite, despite your goal-post shift. Both sides do this, by the way, but you asked specifically for Democratic abuse of state institutions to suppress speech:
The Biden administration engaged in communications with social media companies urging moderation of content labelled "misinformation," especially around COVID-19 and the 2020 election. A district court found that the government had likely violated the First Amendment by "urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing" platforms to suppress protected speech.
In 2022 the DHS announced creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, whose stated role was to advise on "mis-, dis- and malinformation." The board was paused and then disbanded that same year following backlash, but the initiative itself is an example of Democratic-led state power being proposed for controlling speech.
There are many more, but those are 2 recent examples.
Do continue! And please be more specific which cases you're citing. The case I think you're referring to (Murthy v. Missouri) was decided this last June by the US Supreme Court. Even that resulted in a wash where plaintiffs didn't show standing.
Also, you're citing instances that were walked back or otherwise not implemented. That's very different to what happened with Kimmel. Or is that moving goal posts again?
Standing was denied, not the underlying finding. The Court never ruled that coordination between the White House and social-media platforms was constitutionally fine. The district court had found likely coercion, which remains uncontested on the merits.
And whether an initiative was walked back (like the Disinformation Board) doesn’t erase the intent to institutionalize speech regulation through DHS. Retraction after exposure doesn’t mean it wasn’t attempted.
But sure, as you requested:
The FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story is another example. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI held regular briefings with major tech platforms warning of possible “hack-and-leak” operations by foreign actors, specifically referencing topics that would later match the Hunter Biden reports. When The New York Post published its story, Twitter and Facebook immediately throttled or blocked it. Later, both companies acknowledged that the FBI’s warnings influenced those decisions. The Bureau didn’t issue a formal takedown order, but the effect was identical: a law-enforcement agency used its authority to shape the information environment around an election.
The Obama administration’s record under the Espionage Act also fits the pattern. Obama’s Department of Justice prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers under that law than all previous administrations combined, often targeting disclosures that embarrassed the government but posed no clear security risk. Journalists who published the material, such as James Risen and others, were subpoenaed and threatened with jail time for refusing to reveal sources. That’s a textbook use of state power to chill investigative reporting.
There’s also the IRS targeting scandal, in which conservative nonprofit groups applying for tax-exempt status were singled out for extra scrutiny based on their political keywords (“Tea Party,” “Patriots,” etc.). The eventual Inspector General report confirmed viewpoint discrimination within a federal agency that directly affected the ability of those groups to operate and speak.
These episodes differ in scale and directness, but they share a common feature: government institutions, under Democratic leadership, exerting pressure,formal or informal, on the flow of information and the people disseminating it. Whether by pre-emptive warnings, selective enforcement, or bureaucratic choke points, each represents a form of speech control that doesn’t need a censorship law to be effective.
None of this is to suggest the problem is uniquely Democratic. Republicans have done the same and sometimes more overtly: pressuring the NFL over protests, threatening tech companies with regulation for perceived bias, using state legislatures to police campus or library speech, or floating defamation crackdowns against critics. Both parties reach for state power when it suits their narrative.
The conclusion isn’t that Democrats are worse, but that once any faction normalizes using the machinery of government to manage expression, the precedent will be used by everyone. The real lesson is that censorship, whether bureaucratic or partisan, always expands beyond its architects’ original intent.
Just to clarify for anyone inundated by the wall of... ahem... suspiciously verbose? text here:
The reason standing was denied in Murthy v Missouri is that the plaintiffs could not show any evidence whatsoever that their speech was curtailed due to any pressure whatsoever from the government.
In fact, their allegedly cancelled speech had been cancelled prior to any interaction at all between the administration and the platforms. It was cancelled because it violated the terms of service which the platforms developed and enforced well before the Biden administration even took office.
Twitter's own lawyers testified under oath that the government's requests played no role in their content moderation decisions and that requests were frequently denied with no repercussions.
Just to clarify for the zero other people who have gotten down to here: that’s only a partial description of Murthy v. Missouri. Standing was denied because the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate direct, individualized harm, not because the Court found the government’s conduct blameless. The Supreme Court explicitly avoided ruling on whether the administration’s communications with platforms were coercive. This was not a vindication, as GP implies.
As for the timeline, while some moderation policies pre-dated Biden, the record (from the district court, congressional reports, and the platforms’ own disclosures) shows substantial post-inauguration contact between federal officials and social-media companies, including specific requests to remove or de-amplify posts. Twitter’s legal testimony that it "often declined" requests does not negate that the government was actively attempting to influence what could be said online. Coercion doesn’t require success.
Not sure what's the angle, here. When Democrats do it, it's OK? It's OK if it doesn't work? Strange. When anyone does it, it's not OK. When people stop seeing the parties of the Duopoly as tribal identities they need to support no matter what, maybe we can get some effective, less corruptible US government.
HN deserves comments with less of a short horizon on history.
The ghost of Joseph R. McCarthy is questioning your hot take on ostracism mechanisms.
You're arguing in favour of OP there.
For most of the past 10 years we've seen the liberal left celebrating this kind of McCarthyism. They normalised it, raised the stakes, and now it's being leveraged by the traditional actors who've always wanted to. Liberal elites should have been a bulwark against this, but they were not.
You're mistaken in your strawmanning of my position.
I'm against the dull left V right shallow simplemindedness dominant in US forums.
I reject the notion that "ostracism mechanisms", especially in a Hollywood context, were recently "pioneered by the left".
I read comments that blather on about "liberal left", "deplorables", et al. and despair for political sanity in the US.
It's an interesting emergance of iterative dynamics that the ancient rules of elections in middle north America resulted in a Hotelling's law two party system, neither broadly representative of US citizens, when those rules were founded by people opposed to party politics who sought robust debate of a multitude of views.
“ penned by Americana poet-laureate Taylor Sheridan. ”
Ok, but they’re going to need more than one writer for a MAGA friendly station. Honestly curious if they can actually overcome the move away from legacy media / movies.
I'm an antipodean world away and have still noticed Sheridan's name as an actor or director or writer or producer on seemingly damn near every major US TV and movie production in the past five to ten years.
I'm thinking Taylor Sheridan is a virtual Nicolas Bourbaki of clones laser focused on saccharin Americana mythology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Sheridan
> noticed Sheridan's name as an actor or director or writer or producer on seemingly damn near every major US TV and movie production in the past five to ten years.
He's credited on 9 movies total with a tenth to be released, and none of them particularly high profile. As far as TV, he is pretty prolific recently but the only way you could possibly think he's involved in "damn near every" TV production in recent years is if you exclusively watch westerns.
(Credit where credit's due: I just learned he wrote Sicario, which was an excellent movie imo.)
Edit - Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Sheridan#Filmography
I was unaware that Veronica Mars, Sons of Anarchy, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Lioness, and Landman were considered "Westerns" (in the USofA sense).
I myself would have reserved that label for his multitude of Yellowstone and Glam Ranching spinoff productions.
My own AV collection of media I enjoy watching or have been involved in the production of does include a collection labled Western .. but these are not the Westerns you are thinking of.
* https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/710/milli-milli.html
* https://www.screenwest.com.au/made-in-wa/production-highligh...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Bastards
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(1988_film)
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092220/
* etc. (many more)
( Yes, I've been in a film with Nicole Kidman, and another with Hugh Jackman's wife* )
( * Well not then, nor now - but wife for much of the time between ... )
Union strike incoming?
[flagged]
[flagged]
This article is about how Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Mark Ruffalo are blacklisted from Paramount. Which one of those actors are Jewish?
Joaquin Phoenix is jewish.
Even if all parties involved were Jewish, I still don’t understand why that would make it not of interest to others that a corporation is blacklisting people on the basis of a mainstream political viewpoint.
I’m surprised people are upvoting this comment when there is not one iota of fact contained within it.
Ya I say we come up with some type of “final solution” for global Jewery. Would be much less awkward for the rest of us.
/sacrcasm
I don’t