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Pinterest bans all climate change misinformation on its platform
Pinterest announced today it’s becoming the first major digital platform to introduce a comprehensive misinformation policy designed to combat false and misleading claims around climate change on its platform. According to the company’s newly updated misinformation guidelines, Pinterest will now be able to remove content that denies the existence of impacts of climate change, denies human influence on climate change and denies climate change is backed by scientific consensus, among other things.
It will also remove false and misleading content about climate change solutions that contradict scientific consensus, content that misrepresents scientific data either by omission or cherry-picking in order to erode trust in climate science and experts and harmful and misleading content about public safety emergencies including natural disasters and extreme weather events.
The company noted the new Community guidelines don’t only apply to posts on the social network, but also to ads. Pinterest advertisers will have to follow the same rules and the Pinterest Advertising guidelines were updated to also prohibit ads containing conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation related to climate change.
Epstein Shared Hotel Suite With Bill Clinton and Worried About Being Poisoned
Juliette Bryant was at a Cape Town cocktail lounge with a friend when an associate of Jeffrey Epstein approached her. “This guy is bothering me,” the woman, an American actress named Naja Hill, told them that night in September 2002. “Can I hang out with you guys?”
Bryant, who had just turned 20, understood that women must look out for one another and welcomed the beautiful stranger to join them. When Hill learned Bryant was an aspiring model, she suggested they find her “billionaire” friend Jeffrey, who she falsely claimed was the owner of Victoria’s Secret and could jump-start Bryant’s career.
Hill, who had emphasized Epstein’s celebrity contacts, shared that the financier was currently at a chic restaurant nearby with none other than former President Bill Clinton, and actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker. She asked Bryant if she’d like to meet them. Bryant and Hill then hopped in a car, giddy at the opportunity to make their acquaintance.
“I was a silly young 20-year-old and thought it sounded like such an amazing opportunity considering the people he was here with,” Bryant told The Daily Beast, in her first in-depth media interview about surviving Epstein’s sex ring. She also spoke to BBC Two for its new series about Epstein’s former girlfriend and now-convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The show, House of Maxwell, premiered on Monday.
“That’s what gave Epstein credibility,” Bryant added. “The fact that he was with Clinton.”
YouTube is emailing users to say “members of the community” are “concerned” about their comments
YouTube’s “Community Outreach Team” has been emailing users to tell them that “members of the community were concerned about some of the comments you’ve posted on YouTube.”
The emails, forwarded to Reclaim The Net by YouTube users, don’t tell users which of their comments allegedly caused concern to members of the community and instead urges them to take a survey.
“After you take the survey, someone from our team may follow up to better understand your feedback,” YouTube’s email adds.
Media Ran a Disinformation Campaign to Protect Fauci From Criticism Over Dog Torture
Based on Reinhard and Milbank’s work in the Post, Politifact, USA Today, Snopes, FactCheck.org, Media Matters, Mic and others parroted the claim that NIAID didn’t fund the study.
Now, thanks to a FOIA request from White Coat Waste, we have obtained the NIAID-approved grant application which confirms that, contrary to its public statement and denial, the agency did indeed fund an experiment in which sedated dogs were placed in cages full of sand flies.
“Dogs will be anaesthetized by subcutaneous injection of 200 μI of ketamine (10 mg/ml) (Merial, Lyon, France) and for 2 hours will be placed in a cage containing between 15 to 30 females P. perniciosus.”
That Time the U.S. Army Sprayed Millions of Americans With Zinc Cadmium Sulfide
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps prepared a series of biological weapons tests in multiple cities across the United States and Canada. These experiments were executed in the mid-1950s through the late 1960s—not before a law was passed to shield private military contractors from all liability for public injury.
As Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor writes, this, in effect: “created a sanction-free military human test zone across North America and blocked legal recourse for victims.”
In short, the Army was ostensibly concerned that the Russians would expose American and Canadian civilians to dangerous agents, so the Army did it themselves in the name of mitigation.
As a part of the tests, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps released zinc cadmium sulfide “from airplanes, rooftops, and moving vehicles in 33 locations, mostly cities and towns, in the United States and Canada.” These cities included St. Louis, MO, Minneapolis, MN, Corpus Christi, TX, Fort Wayne, IN, Biltmore Beach, FL, and Winnepig, MB. The cities were chosen because of their similarity to cities in the USSR.
In St. Louis, the Army’s dispersion methods were insidious. “The Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons” to disperse the chemical agent. Local officials were told that the “government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.”
Zinc cadmium sulfide itself is a fine powder “that is formed by heating zinc sulfide and cadmium sulfide together under very high temperature so that they fuse…Zinc cadmium sulfide is not a biologic weapon; it was a tracer used by the Army to imitate or simulate the dispersion of biologic weapons.” At the time, the compound was not believed to be dangerous to humans.
Fun fact!
NEW AMAZON WORKER CHAT APP WOULD BAN WORDS LIKE “UNION,” “RESTROOMS,” “PAY RAISE,” AND “PLANTATION”
AMAZON WILL BLOCK and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” — presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.
“Our teams are always thinking about new ways to help employees engage with each other,” said Amazon spokesperson Barbara M. Agrait. “This particular program has not been approved yet and may change significantly or even never launch at all.”
In November 2021, Amazon convened a high-level meeting in which top executives discussed plans to create an internal social media program that would let employees recognize co-workers’ performance with posts called “Shout-Outs,” according to a source with direct knowledge.
The FBI is spending millions on social media tracking software
Social media users seemed to foreshadow the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — and the FBI apparently missed it.
Now, the FBI is doubling down on tracking social media posts, spending millions of dollars on thousands of licenses to powerful social media monitoring technology that privacy and civil liberties advocates say raise serious concerns.
The FBI has contracted for 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software made by Babel Street that lets users search social media sites within a geographic area and use other parameters.
The contract began March 30 and is worth as much as $27 million. The FBI has already agreed to pay an IT vendor around $5 million for the first year of the contract, procurement records indicate. The contract has not previously been reported.
The Justice Department has previously had Babel X in its arsenal, contracting records show. But the new contract appears to be by far the most the agency has ever shelled out for the software, and is one of the largest contracts for the software by a civilian agency, experts said.
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