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Facebook Will Restrict Certain Users If US Election Gets “Extremely Chaotic Or Violent”

Earlier this week, Facebook gave us a welcome break from the virtue-signaling by threatened to pull its business from Europe should courts uphold an EU-wide ban on transfering European user data to US-based servers (something Washington is desperately trying to stop TikTok from doing, in a sense).

But that didn’t last long. On Tuesday, the social media giant’s head of global communications, former deputy PM Nick Clegg, told the Financial Times that the company is developing contingency plans should the US election lead to an outbreak of chaos and uncertainty. Though he didn’t go into too much detail, the implication is clear: Facebook is planning to significantly curtail speech on its platform, echoing the Internet blackouts utilized by authoritarian regimes including Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere.

Clegg preferred to call them the “break-the-glass” options, and assured readers that they probably wouldn’t happen anyway.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs, said it had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or “the political dilemmas” of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, which will play a larger role in this election due to the coronavirus pandemic. “There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances,” Mr Clegg said, though he stopped short of elaborating further on what measures were on the table. The proposed actions, which would probably go further than any previously taken by a US platform, come as the social media group is under increasing pressure to lay out how it plans to combat election-related misinformation, voter suppression and the incitement of violence on the November 3 election day and during the post-election period.

Of course, post-election day indecision is nothing new in American politics, though it will be the first time we’ve seen one since Facebook was founded in 2004. It also comes – as the FT none-too-subtly points out – as “conerns mount that even US president Donald Trump himself could take to social media to contest the result or call for violent protest, potentially triggering a constitutional crisis.”

But don’t worry: Because as Clegg explains, Facebook has done this before in “other parts of the world.”

“We have acted aggressively in other parts of the world where we think that there is real civic instability and we obviously have the tools to do that [again],” Mr Clegg added, citing the previous use of “pretty exceptional measures to significantly restrict the circulation of content on our platform”.

Facebook has also taken several steps to immediately step up and address any harmful activity that might emerge on its platform during the election. Citing unnamed sources, the FT says Facebook has planned for more than 70 scenarios, and that any high-stakes decisions will fall to a team of executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company is employing a range of experts, including military planners, to help the company’s leadership make the best decisions possible.

“We’ve slightly reorganised things such that we have a fairly tight arrangement by which decisions are taken at different levels [depending on] the gravity of the controversy attached,” Mr Clegg said. The executive also said that “the amount of resources we are throwing at this is very considerable”. Facebook will have a virtual war room – dubbed its “Election Operations Centre” – for monitoring for suspicious activity and updating its “voter information hub”, which will showcase verified results to users, he said.

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Joe Biden is the enemy of BLM

Dennis and Deana Molla, who had draped “Trump 2020” flags on their home in Minneapolis, awoke Wednesday morning to find their garage and trucks ablaze and graffiti scrawled on the two doors of the garage. On one door was painted “BLM” over the circle-A anarchism symbol, and on the other “Biden 2020.” 

We have witnessed an unprecedented degree of political stupidity in recent months but the comedic contradictions make this case special.

Leaving aside the idea that anarchists would endorse a career politician to be head of state, it is impossible to logically reconcile support for the Black Lives Matter movement with an endorsement or even a vote for Joe Biden. For those who are passionately angry about the number of black people caged and killed by police in recent decades, Biden should in fact be the object of more scorn than any other politician, including Donald Trump. And yet many people holding a Black Lives Matter sign in one hand are holding a “Biden 2020” sign in the other.

It is now fairly well known that as Democratic Senator from Delaware, Biden was the author and principal proponent of what became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included an unprecedented expansion of mandatory minimum sentences, applied the death penalty to 60 crimes, and funded state prison construction and the hiring of 100,000 new police officers. Biden used the law to respond to the common — and erroneous — criticism that liberals were soft on crime:

Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties…. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.

Four years after Biden’s crime bill became law, the number of people under correctional control was seven times greater than in  1970, and the black-to-white ratio for incarceration rates had risen from 3-to-1 to 6-to-1. The legions of police that were deployed into the streets by the federal law and the new responsibilities they were given to enforce drug laws and ever more “quality of life” laws — largely in Democrat-controlled cities — radically increased the number of encounters between police and the less-wealthy residents of those cities, with predictable results: there are now 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons and 1,000 civilians killed by police per year.

No one has done more to create the very conditions that the Black Lives Matter has organized itself against than Joe Biden.

And it doesn’t end in the US: if black lives matter, we should also consider Biden’s record overseas. Yet I have not seen any pictures of signs at Black Lives Matter protests denouncing the killing of black and brown lives in the ongoing U.S. wars in East Africa, Yemen, Syria, and—seemingly always—Iraq and Afghanistan, but if BLM protesters believed those non-white lives mattered as much as George Floyd’s or Jacob Blake’s they would consider Joe Biden to be a monster worse than Trump.

As chairman of the Foreign Relations committee in 2002 and 2003, Biden championed the invasion and occupation of Iraq and was deemed by the New Republic the Democrats’ “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.” He served as the Bush administration’s close ally in prosecuting the war, declaring in one hearing that the “weapons of mass destruction” alleged to be stockpiled in Iraq “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.”

As vice president, Biden was tasked with coming up with a strategy to maintain the intensity and breadth of the war on terror but with fewer U.S. boots on the ground. He proposed what he called “counterterrorism plus,” which ultimately became the Obama administration’s general approach to the wars in Africa and the Middle East. Biden helped invent what came to be known as the “Obama Doctrine” of increased “surgical” tactics, which involved sending in Special Forces on assassination missions and bombing suspected terrorists via drones. By the end of Obama and Biden’s two terms, the US military was bombing seven different Muslim-majority countries, killing hundreds of civilians — farmers, funerals, a wedding party, and even the sixteen-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, whose father had been assassinated by a drone two weeks earlier.

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New Documents Further Unveil Obama’s Anti-Trump Campaign

A number of recent document releases shine new lights on ‘Russiagate’. That conspiracy theory, peddled by the Obama administration, the Democratic Party aligned media and ‘deep state’ actors opposed to President Trump, alleged that Trump was in cahoots with Russia. The disinformation campaign had the purpose of sabotaging his presidency.

To some extend it has worked as intended. But due to the legal investigation of the whole affair much more is now known about those who conspired against Trump. Some of them are likely to end up in legal jeopardy.

Some of those are the agents under FBI director Comey who used the easily debunked Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic party, to gain a FISA court warrants that allowed them to spy on the Trump campaign. It now turns out that the main source for the dossier they used was a shady actor who the FBI had earlier investigated for an alleged connection to Russian intelligence:

The primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was the subject of an earlier counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, and those facts were known to the Crossfire Hurricane team as early as December 2016, according to newly released records from the Justice Department that were first reported by CBS News.

The timing matters because the dossier was first used two months earlier, in October 2016, to help secure a surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and then used in three subsequent surveillance renewals.

“Between May 2009 and March 2011, the FBI maintained an investigation into the individual who later would be identified as Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-source,” the two page FBI memo states. “The FBI commenced this investigation based on information by the FBI indicating that the Primary Sub-source may be a threat to national security.”

That the Steele dossier was potentially based on the words of a Russian spy should have been a red flag against its use. It seems that the FBI had not informed the FISA court about the dubious sourcing of the dossier allegations.

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