Tag: big tech

Senate Probes Meta Over Alleged Censorship Tools and Data Sharing Ties with Chinese Communist Party, Whistleblower Testifies

US Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, on Wednesday organized a hearing about Meta’s alleged work to develop custom censorship tools for China’s Communist Party (CCP) and share user data with China – which Meta denies.

Whistleblower and former Facebook Director Global Policy Sara Wynn-Williams, who left the company at some point around 2018, presented her testimony during the hearing dubbed, “A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress.”

Senator Josh Hawley, who chaired the meeting, showed internal Facebook documents that Wynn-Williams previously shared with Congress, that appeared to corroborate the whistleblower’s claims.

Wynn-Williams accused Meta executives of “repeatedly” undermining US national security and betraying American values as they allegedly set out to build “an $18 billion business in China” and work directly with the CCP, including censoring a Chinese dissident.

According to her testimony, Meta executives are guilty of lying to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public about the giant’s dealings with China, which she dubbed “illegal and dangerous,” dating back to 2015.

One of Wynn-Williams’ allegations is that Facebook’s “moderation” tools for the CCP allowed those using them to censor access to content in entire regions, or on particular dates, such as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Wynn-Williams also claimed that Meta was willing to allow access to user data, including that of Americans, as it built a physical pipeline between the US and China, which the latter country could have used to intercept information.

“The only reason China does not currently have access to US user data through this pipeline is because Congress stepped in,” she told the committee.

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Meta Keeps Big MAGA Accounts on Ban List as Mark Zuckerberg Lobbies Trump

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly lobbying the Trump administration to drop a pivotal FTC case against the company, in what would amount to a major political favor for Meta. Despite Zuckerberg’s multiple olive branches to the Turmp administration, a number of high-profile, pro-MAGA voices are still banned on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Mark Zuckerberg has made regular visits to the White House urging the president to lean on the FTC to drop its case against Meta. If the FTC were to prevail in the case, Meta could be forced to divest from WhatsApp and Instagram, breaking up the company.

In January, Zuckerberg made several public overtures to the Trump administration, praising parts of its policy platform in an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, and criticizing the outgoing Biden administration for its censorship demands during COVID. Zuckerberg also announced a policy pivot at Meta, promising to “get back to our roots” of supporting free speech.

Despite these pledges, several prominent anti-establishment figures remain banned on Meta platforms:

  • Laura Loomer, investigative journalist and former Republican congressional candidate who was recently credited with influencing a shakeup at the NSC.
  • Tommy Robinson, the prominent British political activist and critic of Islam.
  • Alex Jones
  • Paul Joseph Watson
  • Gavin McInnes
  • Milo Yiannopoulos, self-styled “civil rights icon” and former Breitbart News editor.

It is also unclear if Meta still maintains its “hate agents”  list of prominent anti-establishment voices uncovered by Breitbart News in 2019 that included political candidates. Or if the company has taken any steps to remedy the mass-censorship of WhatsApp accounts in Brazil, which extended to Flavio Bolsonaro, son of persecuted former president Jair Bolsonaro. In a comment to Breitbart News, the company denied it has continued to maintain its documented list of hate agents.

As the FTC trial date draws closer, Meta has drawn flak from the conservative commentariat.

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Whistleblower Drops Bombshell During Senate Hearing: Accuses Facebook (Meta) of Secretly Aiding China in Undermining U.S. National Security 

A former Meta executive turned whistleblower just dropped a political nuke that has rocked Capitol Hill and should terrify every American who values freedom, privacy, and national sovereignty.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, once Facebook’s director of global public policy (now Meta), appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Wednesday and leveled jaw-dropping allegations against her former employer.

That Meta knowingly briefed the Chinese Communist Party on advanced U.S. technologies, including artificial intelligence, beginning in 2015—just to get a seat at Beijing’s lucrative tech table.

“These briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence – explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies,” said Wynn-Williams, who worked at the social media giant from 2011 to 2017, according to the New York Post.

“There’s a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta’s Llama model,” she added.

Project Aldrin, as it was known internally, was Meta’s covert initiative to worm its way into the Chinese market. But according to Wynn-Williams, it wasn’t just about business—it was about compromise.

Her testimony details how Meta’s briefings helped the CCP leapfrog U.S. competitors by giving them insights into emerging technologies meant to secure America’s future.

Her disclosures didn’t stop at AI. Wynn-Williams also revealed that Meta built a censorship engine for the CCP in 2015, and in 2017, willingly took down accounts belonging to Chinese dissident Guo Wengui after pressure from Beijing.

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100+ Meta employees, including Head of AI Policy, confirmed as ex-IDF

Meta’s recruitment of vast numbers of former Israeli soldiers raises serious questions about the tech giant’s commitment to free speech – and provides a peek into a biased content moderation process that’s been heavily censoring pro-Palestinian accounts amid the Israeli siege of Gaza.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.

Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under a program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.

Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda for the IDF. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and in its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialization in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.

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Woke Employees’ Worst Nightmare: Google Plays Pivotal Role in CBP’s AI-Powered Border Surveillance Upgrade

Google Cloud is at the center of a Customs and Border Protection plan to modernize video surveillance towers that involves deploying machine learning along the southern border, despite previous assurances from the woke Silicon Valley giant to its leftist employees that it was not involved in such projects.

Federal contract documents reviewed by the Intercept reveal that Google Cloud is playing a critical role in upgrading the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) so-called “virtual wall” along the Mexican border. This comes five years after Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured employees that the company was not working on any projects related to immigration enforcement at the southern border.

The CBP’s plan involves modernizing older video surveillance towers in Arizona, which provide the agency with continuous monitoring of the border. A key aspect of this effort is the integration of machine learning capabilities into CBP cameras, enabling automatic detection of humans and vehicles approaching the border without the need for constant human monitoring.

According to the documents, CBP is purchasing computer vision technology from two vendors: IBM and Equitus. Google’s role is to stitch these services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data through its ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment (MAGE).

The project focuses on upgrading 50 towers with up to 100 cameras across six sites in the Tucson Sector. IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, typically marketed for industrial quality control inspections, while Equitus will offer its Video Sentinel, a video surveillance analytics program designed for border surveillance.

A technical diagram within the document shows that every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will feed data into Google’s servers. The resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud, with the document stating, “This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing.”

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EU Targets Elon Musk’s X with Potential $1 Billion Fine Under Censorship Law

When the European Commission goes to war, it doesn’t send tanks. It dispatches compliance officers with angry emails and billion-dollar fines.

The European Union’s eurocrats’s next target is Elon Musk’s social media fixer-upper, X.

According to the New York Times, four anonymous whisperers from inside the EU machine say the bloc is loading up a billion-dollar bazooka aimed squarely at X, citing violations of their shiny new Digital Services Act, the latest attempt to regulate speech by committee. And what better way to showcase the importance of online civility than by dragging the world’s loudest billionaire into court?

The DSA, which was sold to the public as a digital hygiene law to make the internet a kinder, gentler place, has become a blunt instrument in the hands of bureaucrats who never met a control lever they didn’t want to pull. They’ve apparently decided that Musk’s flavor of digital chaos — too many unregulated opinions, not enough “fact-checking,” and a stubborn refusal to grovel — is a clear and present danger to the European project.

Among X’s alleged crimes against the algorithmic gods: refusing to hand over data to “independent researchers” (friendly academics who publish pro-censorship PDFs no one reads), hiding the secrets behind those little blue check marks, and failing to spill the tea on who’s advertising to whom.

Naturally, this has prompted Brussels to threaten a fine that could “top $1 billion,” a figure clearly pulled from the same place all government fines originate — an angry dartboard. One idea floating through the regulatory fog? That if X itself can’t pay up, maybe SpaceX can. Because when you’re short on jurisdiction, why not go fishing in another company’s wallet?

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Facebook To Shut Down Fact-Checking Program On Monday: ‘Officially Over’

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced Friday that its fact-checking program in the United States would be “officially over” on Monday, when it will roll out the community notes feature across all platforms.

The news comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that the company would end fact-checking and move to restore free speech on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Starting Monday, fact-checkers will no longer be able to rate new content, and old fact-checks placed on content will no longer appear.

Instead of fact-checks, Meta will adopt an X-style community notes system where users can add context to posts, which are then rated by other users. Anyone will be able to sign up to be a contributor to community notes if they are over 18 and have had a verified account for over six months.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, announced the changes on Friday.

“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & we haven’t applied penalties to fact-checked posts in the US since then. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan posted on social media.

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New Info on How the Feds Helped Censor a Bombshell

The US House Judiciary Committee has released internal chat logs, that show the FBI moved into cover-up mode the very day the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, on October 14, 2020.

The logs, first reported about by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, reveal that the FBI employees were immediately instructed “not to discuss the Biden matter,” while an intelligence analyst who, during a call with Twitter, accidentally confirmed that the story, i.e., the laptop, was real, was placed under a “gag order.”

The reason the analyst, who was with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was able to so quickly confirm the reporting was based on credible information was the fact the FBI had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop several months earlier.

Big Tech platforms – notably Twitter and Facebook – then started censoring the article, branding it falsely “Russian disinformation.” By maintaining the “no comment” policy instead of confirming that the laptop was real and under investigation, the FBI was in effect tacitly promoting the false narrative about foreign interference.

These moves originated from the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was shut down earlier this year for its activities related to censorship through pressure on social platforms.

The laptop scandal was unfolding during a crucial time in the 2020 campaign and represents one of the most egregious publicly known examples of political censorship of free speech and media orchestrated by government agencies.

The chat logs that have now been published reveal that one of the FBI staff involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was Bradley Benavides.

Only weeks prior, Benavides featured in another controversy: that time in what appeared to be a smear campaign against Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who were allegedly “advancing Russian disinformation.”

At the time, the senators just so happened to be investigating Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments.

A letter the Judiciary Committee sent Benavides in June 2023, shows that he had by that time gone through the Big Tech-Big Government “revolving door” – and was senior risk manager at Amazon.

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Democrats, Former Disinfo Board Chief, Defend Government-Big Tech Ties, Dismiss Censorship-Industrial Complex at House Hearing on First Amendment Safeguards

Nina Jankowicz – former head of the disbanded Disinformation Governance Board and CEO of the American Sunlight Project – and Democrats who this week spoke during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, continued to deny and defend the Big Tech-government censorship collusion.

The hearing – “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department” – also saw Jankowicz, who appeared as a witness, and Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat, attempt to paint the actions taken by the new Trump White House as worse that what was happening during the previous US administration.

Both Jankowicz and Kamlager-Dove referred to the system known as the Censorship-Industrial Complex, and its elements, as “fiction,” “lies,” “tall tales,” and, “a conspiracy theory,” with Jankowicz trying to frame the new government’s moves as “an assault on the First Amendment” and “suppressing speech.”

Despite the fact these are some of the key accusations against the Biden administration – and at this point, fairly well backed up by batches of internal documents, but also testimonies from Big Tech execs – Jankowicz chose to call it “the imagined actions of the Biden administration.”

As for her own role in this “imagined” system – namely, the brief stint at the helm of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (that was part of the Department of Homeland Security) – Jankowicz maintained that it was not meant to be a censorship body.

Instead, Jankowicz would have the Committee and the public believe the Board was true to its mission statement, which was “to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment.”

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Final moments of big tech whistleblower Suchir Balaji hours before his mysterious ‘suicide’

Hours before his death, Suchir Balaji appeared relaxed as he strolled to the door to collect his last meal.

The big tech whistleblower emerged from the elevators of his apartment building in San Francisco hungry and with a spring in his step.

He turned toward the front door and disappeared around a corner, returning 15 seconds later clutching a brown paper bag.

Inside was a box of take-out rice, meat, and vegetables – the scraps of which were found sitting on his desk when his body was found days later.

Balaji dressed casually in jeans, sneakers, and a zip-up sweater, strolled back to the elevator, pumping tunes through the wireless earbuds planted firmly in his ears.

To passersby he has the appearance of any tired, young professional ready to relax on the couch with his dinner.

Yet this newly uncovered surveillance footage obtained by DailyMail.com from 7.30pm on November 22 is believed to be the last time he was seen alive.

Just hours later he died from a single gunshot wound to the head. His body was found four days later on November 26.

The medical examiner concluded his death was a suicide. Police agree. But the young man’s parents are convinced he was the victim of foul play. 

They believe he was punished for daring to speak out against the dangers of the world-changing technology he’d been working on. 

A month earlier, Balaji had revealed OpenAI’s dubious methods of training ChatGPT and warned of its dangers to the internet. 

His mother, Poornima Ramarao, claims the final footage of her son proves he did not kill himself.

‘[The medical examiner] saw this video and still concluded he was depressed and called it suicide,’ she said.

Balaji spoke to his father, Balaji Ramamurthy, from 7.12pm until a few minutes before he arrived home.

He told him him he was getting dinner and they discussed his recent holiday, and tentative plans to meet in January.

There were no signs of what was to come. 

Earlier CCTV footage showed Balaji arriving home from his birthday holiday with friends to Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, at 1.33pm.

His luggage, a large canvas bag, hung from a strap slung over his left shoulder and he was wearing a black jacket, blue jeans, and black shoes.

Like the final video just six hours later, he was walking towards the elevators in the lobby of his apartment building.

‘Does he look stressed?’ Ramarao asked, rhetorically.

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