Don't Get The Idea That Internet Censorship Is Diminishing

July 03, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

I owe an apology to all readers for the temporarily reduced frequency of posting. I’m currently in Italy on a family vacation. On multiple occasions over the past several years, I have taken family vacations— including to semi-developed places like Russia and Vietnam — without significant effect on my ability to post on the blog. However, the internet service where I currently find myself in Italy is remarkably poor, and not sufficient to support the kind of research it takes to do one of my usual posts. So please have patience. I’ll be back to my usual routine next week.

Meanwhile, let me relay some information that people have sent me. Greg Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, sends along some truly shocking information about ongoing big tech censorship of the climate debate. Things may have improved at Twitter over the past few months, but Twitter is only one of several of the big tech behemoths. At the others, little has changed. Indeed, things may be continuing to get worse.

If you are unfamiliar with it, the CO2 Coalition is the premier organization of scientists and science-oriented people who are skeptical of the claims of the weird pagan cult that currently dominate public debate on the subject of climate. The large majority of top-rank climate scientists who actually know what they are talking about are members of the Coalition. (The exceptions are generally people who have declined to join because of well-founded fears of adverse career consequences should they associate themselves with the group.). Dr. William Happer, the senior atmospheric physicist at Princeton, is the Chair of the Coalition. The Coalition also includes as members various science-oriented people who regularly contribute to the public climate debate. In that category, I joined by invitation a couple of years ago.

One of the more notable recent additions to the Coalition is a guy named John Clauser. Clauser happens to be one of the winners of the latest (2022) Nobel Prize in physics. The work for which Clauser won the Nobel Prize is on a specific issue called “quantum entanglement.” But he is clearly a brilliant physicist, and physics generally is highly relevant to the subject of the world’s climate. Also, like many other actual top scientists, Clauser is a “climate skeptic.” Finally, Clauser has not only joined the CO2 Coalition, but in May he became a board member.

On June 26 in Seoul, Clauser gave a keynote speech at a conference called Quantum Korea. Wrightstone was provided with an English version of the remarks, and excerpted several key lines to create a page on the CO2 Coalition website and also a Facebook post. Here (from the CO2 Coalition site) are some quotes and paraphrases from Clauser’s presentation, with quotation marks indicating which are direct quotes:

• “The world we live in today is filled with misinformation. It is up to each of you to serve as judges, distinguishing truth from falsehood based on accurate observations of phenomena.”
• “Misinformation is being spread by those with political and opportunistic motives.”
• Dr. Clauser, known for his stance [with respect to] climate change, diagnosed the current situation as not being a climate crisis and criticized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for spreading misinformation.
• He stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” and expressed his belief that “key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by approximately 200 times.”

According to Wrightstone, here is what happened next at Facebook:

Our post and ad promoting it [were] removed by Facebook on July 1.

Wrightstone provides the following screenshot from Facebook:

The picture shows Clauser delivering his address at the conference in Korea.

And then:

Next, one day later, an ad promoting the image that adorns our Facebook page and carries our unofficial motto “We Love CO2 and So Should You” was removed and censored. The only text we posted was “What’s not to love?”

Here’s a screenshot of that rejected ad, and Facebook’s response:

Wrightstone concludes: “These are troubling times we live in.”

I should also mention that Wrightstone and the CO2 Coalition have been permanently banned from LinkedIn. Wrightstone calls it “Linked Out.”

The stupids are truly in control of much of the world right now. We’ll see how long it continues.