Ah, those were the good old days. Now we’re REALLY desperate.
Observation One: If you don’t see what’s nauseating about it, you are part of the problem. Here:
Top Obama administration officials, including Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, and White House Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith met in San Jose, California, with representatives of Twitter Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., and other Silicon Valley companies to seek ideas on how extremist content online can be identified and removed, as well as help creating alternative messages to counter terrorist recruitment methods using social media. You can be thoroughly nauseated by reading about the whole embarrassing fiasco here.
Other observations:
2. The incompetence this displays is staggering, and the apparent unawareness of the optics of incompetence is staggering:
“The gathering took place as Obama announced a new counterterrorism task force to thwart extremists and their use of social media after recent deadly attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. The task force will organize federal efforts into several areas, including research and analysis, technical assistance, communications, and programs to help prevent radicalization, according to the Homeland Security Department.”
Translation: “We haven’t been taking this seriously at all and were caught with our pants down, big-time. Now we have to look like we’re doing something.”
2. “Do something!” is the apparent theme of the Obama Administration. No matter how silly, over-hyped, desperate or of dubious legality, the sole objective, it seems, is to lull the complacent into the false belief that the country is capable hands, while all substantive evidence says otherwise. Pundit Ed Driscoll compares this episode to Michelle Obama’s tweet about the Nigerian girls kidnapped by terrorists (above). This is worse than that. Both are equally useless, but the grand show-meeting wastes the time of allegedly skilled officials who must have something valid to do, wastes taxpayer funds, is designed to represent a public relations stunt as a substantive measure, and crosses Constitutional lines as well.
3. What could possibly have a significant negative impact on terrorists enticing young, impressionable, stupid minds on social media? Censorship and chilled speech, and that’s all would be my guess. What business does the government have telling private companies what to censor? None. If the government is driving efforts to make it difficult for someone to communicate, then that a First Amendment incursion.
4. There is nothing that would fall short of already constitutionally dubious laws on the books criminalizing certain types of speech (like inciting violence and “true threats”) that social media should stifle or censor. There is precious little speech, if any, that anyone should trust the likes of Facebook to police, based on its wretched record so far that has proven biased in partisan and ideological directions. There is no way to impede terrorist from persuading American citizens on social media without breaking current laws that would not be similarly employable to squelch other political speech content that this Democratic, progressive, Constitution-defying bunch finds inconvenient.
5. Forget nauseating: how scary is this story and its context? As the danger of terror attacks grows after the President and his heiress-apparent assured the nation that all was well and under control, the most apparent moves of “counter-terrorism” appear to be 1) to blame the availability of guns for recent attacks and to seek ways around the Second Amendment while falsely hyping miniscule “reforms” that would have had no effect on the problem at hand, and 2) to try to censor social media by finding ways around the First Amendment. Neither effort is more than smoke and mirrors, or, in the alternative, pathetically desperate.
6. Yet the Obama Administration publicizes this sad spectacle, assuming it will make concerned Americans feel that it’s government is “doing something.”
7. This is signature significance, I fear. Leadership that is capable of taking substantive and forceful measures to counter a terror threat from abroad doesn’t resort to this garbage, especially as a first resort.
Incompetent…
insulting…
inept…
dishonest..
desperate…
cynical…
dangerous.
Nauseating.
Yes, and terrifying too.
Ethics Alarms 
From the linked article: “…there is a shortage of compelling credible alternative content.”
There wouldn’t be a shortage if much of America’s elite didn’t treat America as if it were the font of all the world’s evils.
I had missed this. Thank you for the link and your poignant comments.
Well, it IS a change from how previous administrations have handled threats against the US. We were promised change.
This is certainly change we can believe in. Yes we can. Si, se puede.
What evidence is there that Facebook is biased?
Facebook’s choices of what posts and accounts deserve to be taken down are arbitrary, politically correct and untrustworthy. The most recent example is its removal of the “white student only” pages in response to the anti-white black student protests on campuses.
There’s also long been complaining that a great deal of anti-abortion information is quickly dropped down the memory hole.
What I don’t think anyone is talking about is how this shows how Obama’s administration is either too lazy to participate in the marketplace of ideas, or that he doesn’t think we’d win that competition.
This is the latest brick in a well laid road of non-platforming. This is a problem that exists on both sides of the aisle, but the left has really gone to town with it. I think the idea was, originally, that if you could make it so that someone didn’t have a place to speak, you weren’t necessarily censoring them, but their message still couldn’t get out. This is typical of liberal academic thinking: “Well, it doesn’t matter if the outcome is near identical to if we were censoring them, if we do this, we have deniability and can sleep better at night.”. We saw that with far right extremist groups, then middling republicans, and then anyone who disagreed with Obama, at the same time as people and groups who spoke out candidly against ideologies like feminism or the gay lobby, and recently it has devolved to the point where we have echo chambers with well defined boundaries full of people who will crumple into convulsions if you poke at their favorite unicorn. What they never really cared to realize was that in doing this They Lost. They Lost because they drove those voices onto platforms that would have them, and because there were so precious few of those platforms left, those platforms grew formidable… Fox being the best example. But they also Lost because they demonstrate surrender in non-platforming.
What they’re saying is that their ideas are so precious and fragile that they can’t stand up to the scrutiny of dissenting voices. Who cares if that person is pro-life, or for traditional marriage, or against pot? Who cares if they’re racist or sexist or homophobic? Who cares if they think Obama is incompetent, or a Muslim, or smells bad? If you are so sure of your ideas, then you should be able to defend them against the tide of ideas that you think are wrong.
Never mind showcasing that Obama’s administration isn’t really interested in fighting terrorism. This shows that Obama’s administration might not think they can.
Don’t ideologies that tend to have to force the opposition to shut up tend also not to be able to stand against the opposition in a fair fight.
I’m reminded of a quote by an ISIS militant, who, speaking quite proudly of his accomplishments for the advancement of Islam stated, quite matter of factly (and as though it were a point of honor): “Sharia can ONLY be established with the Sword!”
Now, I know he said it thinking that there was a religious duty or a moral superiority in establishing Islam through violence, but on it’s face it really does indicate the flaw: The vast majority of people DO NOT WILLINGLY choose strict Sharia when other (typically liberating options) are available.
The same goes for this phenomenon… Giving a chance to really think about the options, most people would run screaming away from what the Left desires for America. So what must the Left do? shut up disagreers and shut out other options and sugarcoat the hell out of the platform.