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SENATOR BLUMENTHAL DEMANDS FACEBOOK AND TWITTER CURB VACCINE-SKEPTIC CONVERSATIONS

Connecticut’s Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, is calling on Facebook and Twitter to act on vaccine skeptic conversations, particularly around pregnant women.

Sen. Blumenthal penned a letter to both Facebook and Twitter. 

“Time and again, Facebook and its peers have moved far too slow in responding to the targeted harassment and promotion of destructive conspiracy theories against women and people of color.

“These mothers, through raising awareness to the vaccine and setting an example for the community, are doing an immense public service and lovingly protecting their infants. They are also acting responsibly,” Blumenthal wrote in the letter to Facebook.

The letter was sent a few days after The Daily Beast published a story on how vaccine skeptics have been sending messages to pregnant women who have gotten the vaccine. In one incident, vaccine skeptics were accused of harassing a medical worker who miscarried a few days after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

From the letter:

“Such disinformation is clearly coordinated, often through private groups and public pages that scour social media for targets and anecdotes for feeding their campaign. One Instagram account, in operation since December with over 100,000 followers, continues to promote misinformation and misleading anecdotes about vaccine safety and the effectiveness of facemasks. These accounts and groups, on both Facebook and Twitter, have also become a launching point for swarms of believers to prey on mothers to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Despite a clear pattern of violating platform policies, these accounts are still active, with large numbers of followers and are easily findable.”

Blumenthal’s concerns seem to stem from the fact that vaccine-skeptic content is still available on social media platforms, despite the Big Tech platforms having new policies against it.

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On the 56th Anniversary of His Murder, Watch Malcolm X Prophesize Today’s Police State

“They think they are living in a police state, and they become hostile toward the policemen. They think that the policeman is there to be against them rather than to protect them. And these thoughts, these frustrations, these apparitions, automatically are sufficient to make these Negroes begin to form means and ways to protect themselves in case the police themselves get too far out of line.” -Malcolm X – assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, in New York City.

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New “See Something, Say Something Online Act” Turns Social Media Users Into Spies

Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors, “If You See, Something Say Something”  program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into Federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.

Just how bad is this bill?

This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.

“Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.”

Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)

What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?

The term “suspicious transmission” means any public or private post, message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime.

How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users, etc. know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?

The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red-flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.

This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.

Social media users would be forced to submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) on suspicious individuals within 30 days.

“In General.—If a provider of an interactive computer service detects a suspicious transmission, the interactive computer service, including any director, officer, employee, agent, or representative of such provider, shall submit to the Department a STAR describing the suspicious transmission in accordance with this section.”

As Reason warned, the See Something, Say Something Online Act would put reporting on your fellow American on steroids. It would create a glut of frivolous reports, including many that are politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous.

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Erik Prince Busted In Illegal Libya Gun-Running Scheme That Included “Assassination For Hire”

Erik Prince is the wealthy scandal-plagued mercenary who seems never go away from the headlines. The founder of the notorious Blackwater private security company has since been involved in shady schemes and arms dealing everywhere from China to UAE to Syria to Venezuela. He currently heads the Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group, providing ‘security services’ across the globe.

And now it’s been revealed that he’s deeply involved in the still-raging war in Libya. No less than the United Nations is alleging he’s overseeing a major arms dealing program in support of eastern Libya warlord Khalifa Haftar who has for years waged war to take over Tripoli. The findings are detailed in a confidential UN report.

“The confidential report to the Security Council, obtained by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and partly seen by Al Jazeera, said on Friday that Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries and weapons to renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar, who has fought to overthrow the UN-recognized Libyan government, in 2019,” according to the latest reporting.

While Prince has typically avoided legal consequences for the past scandals he’s been at center of, the UN findings could bring potential international travel restrictions or even sanctions by the world body. This scenario is likely given there is currently a strict UN arms embargo on the country (something however that’s repeatedly violated by governments like France and the UAE and others).

“The $80m operation included plans to form a hit squad to track and kill Libyan commanders opposed to Haftar – including some who were also European Union citizens,” The New York Times found in reviewing the UN report.

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White House working with Facebook and Twitter to tackle anti-vaxxers

The White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation and getting their help to stop it from going viral, a senior administration official said.

President Joe Biden, who has raced to curb the pandemic since taking office, has made inoculating Americans one of his top priorities and called the move “a wartime effort.” But tackling public fear about taking the vaccine has emerged as a major impediment for the administration.

Since the onset of the pandemic, calls from lawmakers asking the companies to tackle the spread of COVID misinformation on their platforms have grown.

The White House’s direct engagement with the companies to mitigate the challenge has not been previously reported. Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain has previously said the administration will try to work with Silicon Valley on the issue.

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Pieces Of Color: When YouTube’s oversensitive filters think CHESS VIDEOS are racist, will language have to adapt to Big Tech?

With all its talk of black-on-white war, YouTube’s “hate speech”-filtering AI can’t tell the difference between chess players and violent racists. Perhaps leaving robots in charge of the English language isn’t such a good idea.

Croatian chess player Antonio Radic, known to his million subscribers as ‘Agadmator,’ runs the world’s most popular chess channel on YouTube. Last summer he found his account suspended due to its “harmful and dangerous” content. Radic, who was in the middle of a show with Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura at the time, was puzzled. He received no explanation for the ban, which was reversed on appeal, but speculated that YouTube’s censorship algorithm may have heard him say something like “black goes to B6 instead of C6, white will always be better.”

“If that’s the case, I’m sure all [all of] my 1,800 videos will be taken down as it’s black against white to the death in every video,” he told the Sun at the time.

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Former Florida Mayor Charged With Possession Of Child Pornography

On Friday, 65-year-old former Brooksville, Florida Mayor Kevin Hohn was arrested after Homeland Security agents found him in possession of over 100 images of child pornography. Some of the images appear to have been taken inside his home.

The criminal complaint states that “in September and December 2020, investigators identified a certain internet protocol address as having distributed images and a video depicting child pornography. Further investigation traced the IP address used to distribute the files to Hohn’s residence in Brooksville.”

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MALCOLM X’S FAMILY Claim New Letter Reveals NYPD, FBI CONSPIRED IN HIS MURDER

Malcolm X‘s surviving family members are demanding his murder case be reopened after claiming they now have a letter that ropes the NYPD and FBI directly into his death.

The late civil rights leader’s three daughters spoke out at a news conference this weekend, asking the Manhattan D.A. to re-open the case and take a hard look at new evidence they claim to have … which alleges a conspiracy at the highest levels.

It’s a letter written by a former NYPD officer, Raymond Wood, who often worked undercover … and who purportedly confessed on his death bed he had been instructed by his bosses to get some of Malcolm’s security guards arrested in the days leading up to his assassination.

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