Tag: big tech

Meta’s Re-Education Era Begins

Like law enforcement in some repressive virtual regimes, Meta is introducing the concept of re-education of “citizens” (users), as an alternative to eventually sending them to “jail” (imposing account restrictions).

But this only applies to “first-time offenders,” that is, those who have violated Meta’s community standards for the first time, and if that violation is not considered to be “most severe.”

The community standards now apply across Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads – while the new rule means that instead of collecting a strike for a first policy violation, users who go through “an educational program” can have it deleted.

There’s also “probation” – those who receive no strike for a year after that will again be eligible to participate in the “remove your warning” course. This applies to Facebook profiles, pages, and Instagram profiles.

Meta first introduced the option for creators last summer and is now expanding it to everyone. In announcing the change of the policy, the tech giant refers to “research” that showed most of those violating its rules for the first time “may not be aware they are doing so.”

This is where the “short educational program” comes in, as a way to reduce the risk of receiving that first strike, and Meta says the program is designed to help “better explain” its policies.

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Facebook Fails to Silence Smith & Wesson

One can always count on social media to carry out the regime’s anti-American agenda.

Social media giant Facebook has long been a thorn in the side of gun owners ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. Since that period, Big Tech has taken it upon itself to become the private enforcement arm of the managerial state. In effect, Big Tech companies have functioned as Pinkerton-style law enforcement agencies who do the regime’s dirty work of censoring any individuals or organizations who voice explicitly right-wing views on issues ranging from immigration to gun rights.

Facebook’s privatized tyranny was on full display when the social media giant indefinitely suspended the account of legendary firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson on Nov. 22, 2024. Smith & Wesson was founded by gunmakers Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson by 1852 and has remained one of the U.S.’ flagship gun manufacturers. Smith & Wesson has a large social media following with over 1.6 million users. Facebook’s act of censorship against Smith & Wesson was not by accident and was certainly done to send a message.

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Meta’s Nick Clegg Admits Excessive Censorship and High Error Rates in Content Moderation

Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg has admitted that the tech giant “still has too high” content moderation error rates.

This is another way of conceding that censorship is alive and well on Meta’s massive platforms, Facebook and Instagram, but also, Threads.

That’s despite there being something of a shift in the way this issue is treated by Meta, including by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Now Clegg, in a blog post dedicated to 2024 “global elections,” touches on free expression allowed on these social platforms, to state that Meta’s choice is to find a “balance” between free speech and “keeping people safe.”

It’s unclear how Meta “keeps people safe,” but free speech is a straightforward concept, and here Clegg offers a “mea culpa” by not only publicly accepting that there are high rates of error, something that he says “gets in the way” of free expression.

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Meta Pushes for a Digital ID Revolution

Meta is coming out as a supporter of age verification, and the proposal the giant is putting forward exposes and sums up many of the points critics have been consistently making.

A blog post by Meta VP and Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis proposes to implement age verification at the operating system/app stores level.

Although the narrative around child safety and difficulties of parenting “in the digital age” dominates the article, “the meat of it” are the implications that this approach brings with it: namely, it creates a situation where, down the line, people would be forced to link real-world identity to their phone’s operating system (OS).

And everything they do using the phone is exposed to that OS.

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US Lawmakers Investigate Biden White House-Affiliated UK Censorship Group’s Plot To “Kill” Elon Musk’s X

Among the investigations currently carried out by the US House Committee on the Judiciary and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is the one into a case involving UK-based “censorship group” – the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

In a letter dated November 7, Committee chairman Jim Jordan is asking CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed to, by November 21, comply with a subpoena issued on August 30, 2023.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

According to Jordan, it covers the group’s activities as well, including documents showing the Biden-Harris administration’s alleged collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans’ lawful online speech.

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Google claims it fixed discrepancy showing poll locations for Harris searches, but not Trump

Google claimed Tuesday that it had fixed an issue in which user search queries for “Where can I vote for Harris” generated an interactive map tool to find polling places, while queries of “Where can I vote for Trump” received no such benefit.The search giant said that the issue stemmed from its algorithm conflating Vice President Kamala Harris’ last name with Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located.

“The ‘where to vote’ panel is triggering for some specific searches [because] Harris is also the name of a county in [Texas],” the tech behemoth said in an X post. 

“Update: This is now fixed,” Google later added — and a test carried out by The Post confirmed that to be the case. 

Numerous users on social media complained about the search giant. Tech guru Elon Musk, for instance, asked his 203 million followers “are others seeing this too” and later cut a screen recording that he posted on X highlighting the problem.

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‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’: British Intel Again Targets Donald Trump

On October 22nd, independent journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi published a bombshell investigation, exposing how the intelligence-adjacent Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) hatched a covert plot at the start of 2024 to “kill [Elon] Musk’s Twitter.” This highly politicised attack on ‘X’ is just one component of a wider British invasion of the US political sphere, designed to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, guarantee the election of Kamala Harris, and keep Washington embroiled in the Ukraine proxy war quagmire.

CCDH was founded by Morgan McSweeney, a British political svengali widely credited with masterminding Keir Starmer’s landslide July general election win, now closely advising Harris’ presidential campaign. The organisation, which targets both left and right dissident voices for censorship and deplatforming, was spun out of Labour Together, a “think tank” McSweeney led 2017 – 2020. In this position, he drew up Machiavellian plans for Starmer’s seizure of power, and neutralising then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his party support base, much of which subsequently came to fruition.

CCDH was a key element of McSweeney’s anti-Corbyn crusade. Officially founded in early 2019, its first act was to launch Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Initially operating without any clarity on who or what was funding and running the endeavour, it promoted boycotts of independent English-language news outlets. Resultantly, major businesses were pressured into withdrawing their adverts from target websites, to starve them of revenue. The approach was devastatingly effective, shutting down several websites and forcing others, like The Canary, to downsize.

Fast forward to today, and McSweeney is leading a pack of veteran British political strategists Stateside who, in the words of Politico, are teaching Harris and her campaign “how to win.” Multiple mainstream reports indicate this unprecedented support is concerned with maintaining the “Grand Atlantic Alliance” between London and Washington, and ensuring Starmer isn’t left “alone” in backing Kiev. Given the Machiavellian histories of McSweeney and CCDH, it is beyond doubt these efforts are but the visible tip of something far larger, and more destructive.

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They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day. 

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours. 

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media. 

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time. 

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now. 

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NYT and Washington Post Push YouTube To Censor Election “Misinformation,” Lament Podcast Censorship Challenges

The New York Times, Media Matters for America, and The Washington Post are stepping up their pressure on YouTube to demonetize and censor election “misinformation,” particularly statements that the 2020 election was rigged or insecure.

As these organizations push for stricter speech suppression, questions are raised about the implications for open discourse on the platform and the legacy media and activist attempts to get it shut down.

In the past months, Media Matters undertook an extensive review of content from 30 prominent conservative YouTube channels, identifying 286 videos containing what they classified as election misinformation, which collectively garnered over 47 million views. This report, backed by verification from The New York Times, pointed out that YouTube profited from ads placed on many of these videos.

Highlighted in the Times article were figures such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, all of whom have voiced skepticism regarding the legitimacy of various aspects of the 2020 election process.

According to The New York Times, “Giuliani, the former New York mayor, posted more false electoral claims to YouTube than any other major commentator in the research group.”

Surprisingly, YouTube’s stance, as relayed by a spokeswoman, stresses the importance of open political discourse: “The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value — especially in the midst of election season,” she stated, defending the platform’s approach to content management.

However, YouTube did still remove three of the videos that Media Matters flagged.

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When Did Google Search Become Totally Useless?

When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.

It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to dominate they needed to maximize the marketing angle of search, but over time that side of the business — the one that produces revenue — swallowed the informative results that drove the search engine’s success.

Now, Google’s true product, its users, are drowning in a sea of partisan slop and sponsored content rather than getting the results we’re looking for when we take to the World Wide Web. By doing so, Google is making it pointless for us to continue to allow ourselves to be the product.

Let’s say you have an artistic daughter who wants some oil paints for Christmas, but you’re unsure about which brand to buy or even what the definition of oil paint is. You head over to Google and type in “oil paint.” Is your first result a definition or even the Wikipedia page? Nope, it’s ads. You have to scroll to get to Wikipedia.

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