Tag: big tech

Google’s AI-First Ambitions Sideline Publishers, Boost Its Ability To Filter and Control Information

The internet’s most frequented page is on the verge of a transformation unlike any in its 25-year history.

Last week, at Google I/O 2024, as Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, gushed on stage about their AI-powered future, one couldn’t help but feel a pang of irony. “Google will do the Googling for you,” she proclaimed, envisioning a future where Google’s AI sifts through the web’s content and spits out neatly packaged summaries, removing the need to visit any websites.

How convenient – for Google, that is.

An ideologically driven monopoly further inserting itself between people and content, filtering out what it thinks you should be allowed to see (and what you shouldn’t) at a level never seen before. What could possibly go wrong?

At the event, the tech behemoth unveiled its latest shiny toys – an AI agent named Astra, a potentially reincarnated Google Glass, and something called Gems. Amidst the fanfare, though, there was a glaring omission: any mention of the voices who populate the web with the very work that makes Google’s empire possible.

But the origins of Google’s powerful monopoly and control over much of the internet’s content came a couple of decades ago when publishers and website creators made a deal with a devil whose motto was, at the time, “Don’t be evil.”

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EU Investigates Meta in Crackdown on Alleged “Rabbit Hole” Effects, Wants It To Push Digital ID

There was a lot of talk about the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) while it was drafted and during the typical-of-the-bloc tortuous process of adoption, but now that it’s been here for a while, we’ve been getting a sense of how it is being put to use.

Utilizing the European digital ID wallet to carry out age verification is just one of the fever pitch ideas here. And EU bureaucrats are trying to make sure that these controversial policies are presented as perfectly in line with how DSA was originally pitched.

The regulation was slammed by opponents as in reality a sweeping online censorship law hiding behind focused, and noble, declarations that its goal was to protect children’s well-being, fight disinformation, etc.

The cold hard reality is that trying to (further) turn the screw – any which way they can – on platforms with the most reach and most influence ahead of an election is simply something that those in power, whether it’s the US or the EU, don’t seem to be able to resist.

Here’s the European Commission (who’s current president is actively campaigning to get reappointed in the wake of next month’s European Parliament elections) opening an investigation into Meta on suspicion its flagship platforms, Facebook and Instagram, create “addictive behavior among children and damage mental health.”

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YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

YouTube has (“voluntarily” or otherwise) assumed the role of a private business entity that “supports elections.”

Google’s video platform detailed in a blog post how this is supposed to play out, in this instance, in the EU.

With the European Parliament (EP) election just around the corner, YouTube set out to present “an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information.”

The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the “war on disinformation.”

And what better way to “support” an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s

But YouTube was happy to share that in 2023 alone, it removed 35,000 videos uploaded in the EU, having decided that this content violated the platform’s policies, including around what the blog post calls “certain types of elections misinformation” (raising the logical question if some types of “election misinformation” might be allowed).

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Meta Relies On ‘Human Rights Norms’ To Censor Protected Speech, Board Member Admits

Amember of the Meta Oversight Board said in a recent livestream that Meta places “international human rights norms” above the First Amendment when it considers free speech issues. This admission is especially concerning considering a recent revelation that the FBI and CISA have renewed collaboration with social media companies to censor posts they label “disinformation.”

“As Meta became more global, it realized what an outlier the United States was, and could not simply default back to U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence,” said Kenji Yoshino, a member of the Meta Oversight Board, an independent entity that advises the platform. “Our baseline here is not the U.S. Constitution and free speech, but rather international human rights norms.”

Meta’s Censorship in Theory

Yoshino, a board member for the left-wing William J. Brennan Center for Justice, made this comment in a livestream with fellow Meta Oversight Board member and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Michael McConnell. The National Constitution Center hosted the online panel on April 29, and its CEO Jeffrey Rosen moderated the discussion about ways Meta shapes content during elections.

Meta originally sought to follow the First Amendment, Yoshino said. But as Meta expanded across the world, he noted, it shifted its content policies beyond the First Amendment.

McConnell disagreed with Yoshino’s reasoning and said the more important distinction is the First Amendment’s application to private entities. But he admitted he agrees with Meta’s ability to censor content. “Even within the United States, private companies are free to not convey speech that they disagree with over their platforms,” he said.

Meta has always prohibited some content like obscenity from the very beginning, according to McConnell. The Wall Street Journal, however, reported last year that Meta-owned Instagram connected vast networks of pedophiles, and its algorithms promoted child sexual content.

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Facebook Has Interfered in U.S. Elections 39 Times Since 2008

A recent study conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC) has uncovered 39 instances of Facebook interfering with U.S. elections since 2008, raising concerns about the platform’s influence on the democratic process.

According to a recent study by MRC Free Speech America, Facebook has been caught interfering in U.S. elections 39 times since 2008. The platform’s election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached its peak in 2020, and has started to fade somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle.

Mark Zuckerberg has made several pro-free speech statements, including his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University, where he said, “We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great.” He has also called politically-motivated censorship “dangerous” and stated that Facebook and other social media platforms should not act as the “arbiter of truth.”

However, Facebook’s actions have often contradicted these statements. In 2012, the platform suspended a Veteran PAC for a meme drawing attention to the attack on Benghazi. In 2016, Facebook censored then-Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders and “conservative topics” and news. The censorship escalated in 2018, with Facebook removing ads for several candidates for Congress and state legislatures.

The 2020 election saw an explosion of censorship on Facebook, with the platform censoring posts and ads from then-sitting President Donald Trump at least four times and taking down seven political ads paid for by the political right. The most notable incident was the censorship of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden report and the subsequent indefinite suspension of President Trump’s accounts in early 2021.

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Google has funded EcoHealth’s virus research for at least 14 years

The 2018 paper, titled ‘Serologic and behavioural risk survey of workers with wildlife contact in China’, reported on a study conducted in Guangdong Province, China, which aimed to identify risky populations, occupations and behaviours that contribute to the transmission of zoonotic pathogens with pandemic potential.

It was authored by researchers from Yale University, Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, the Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Washington Centre for One Health Research – one of them being Peter Daszak.

But, as Natural News wrote, check out the conflict of interest statement: “Metabiota Inc. is a commercial company that received funding from Google/Skoll.”

The Skoll Foundation was created in 1999 by Jeffrey Skoll, who made his fortune as eBay’s first full-time hire and president.

It turns out that Google.org, the charity arm of Google, has been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth Alliance researchers, including Peter Daszak, for at least 14 years.  A 2010 study on bat flaviviruses lists both Daszak and EcoHealth vice president Jonathan Epstein as authors – and like the 2018 study mentioned above, this 2010 study thanks Google for funding it.

Yet another paper on henipavirus spillover that was published in 2014 shows the same authors and funding from Google, demonstrating a lengthy relationship between these entities.

Natalie Winters – who first wrote about Google funding research conducted by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance in 2021 – posted a Twitter thread about it earlier this month to remind us.  Her thread also lists another paper published in 2015, tying Google to Daszak and EcoHealth.

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Report Sounds Alarm Over Growing Role of Big Tech in US Military-Industrial Complex

The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California – a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday.

The report – entitled How Big Tech and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex – was authored by Roberto J. González, a professor of cultural anthropology at San José State University, for the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs.

The new paper comes amid the contentious rise of AI-powered lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots; increasing reliance upon AI on battlefields from Gaza to Ukraine; and growing backlash from tech workers opposed to their companies’ products and services being used to commit or enable war crimes.

“Although much of the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms,” González wrote.

“As Defense Department officials have sought to adopt AI-enabled systems and secure cloud computing services, they have awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle,” he added. “At the same time, the Pentagon has increased funding for smaller defense tech startups seeking to ‘disrupt’ existing markets and ‘move fast and break things.’”

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Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’

The notoriously intelligence-friendly social media network appears to have imposed a ban on posting a recent report by Kit Klarenberg, and is automatically restricting users who re-publish his work.

Multiple Facebook users have reported being banned, or having their posts censored, after sharing an investigation by The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg into CIA and MI6 involvement in the creation of ISIS. Readers who post links to the piece on the social network find themselves frozen out of their accounts, on the apparent grounds that Facebook has classified Klarenberg as a “dangerous individual.”

“I just shared this article from @Kit Klarenberg on Facebook and the post was immediately deleted,” wrote Ricky Hale, the founder of popular independent left-wing outlet Council Estate Media.

In a Substack article published April 5, Hale wrote that “the page was hit with restrictions and I was told I had shared a post from a dangerous individual or organisation.”

Hale was only able to regain control of his Facebook page, which boasts over 44,000 fans, by removing administrative privileges from the user who shared it — which happens to be himself.

Other restrictions imposed due to sharing Klarenberg’s work have not been lifted, and may well never be. Hale says he has been blocked from changing the page’s name, inviting people to join the page, or creating new Facebook groups. “Given Facebook had already reduced my page’s visibility for another absurd violation, I’m assuming my posts are going to be invisible,” Hale lamented. “This means a Facebook page with 44,000 users has been rendered useless because of state censorship that’s been outsourced to big tech. This is not how a free society operates.”

It was not the first time that Facebook censored one of its users for posting Klarenberg’s article. Hours beforehand, another social media user revealed the piece had been removed from her Facebook timeline mere “seconds” after it was posted.

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Google Contract Shows Deal With Israel Defense Ministry

Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the tech giant has negotiated deepening its partnership during Israel’s war in Gaza, a company document viewed by TIME shows.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to the document, has its own “landing zone” into Google Cloud—a secure entry point to Google-provided computing infrastructure, which would allow the ministry to store and process data, and access AI services.

The ministry sought consulting assistance from Google to expand its Google Cloud access, seeking to allow “multiple units” to access automation technologies, according to a draft contract dated March 27, 2024. The contract shows Google billing the Israeli Ministry of Defense over $1 million for the consulting service. 

The version of the contract viewed by TIME was not signed by Google or the Ministry of Defense. But a March 27 comment on the document, by a Google employee requesting an executable copy of the contract, said the signatures would be “completed offline as it’s an Israel/Nimbus deal.” Google also gave the ministry a 15% discount on the original price of consulting fees as a result of the “Nimbus framework,” the document says.

Project Nimbus is a controversial $1.2 billion cloud computing and AI agreement between the Israeli government and two tech companies: Google and Amazon. Reports in the Israeli press have previously indicated that Google and Amazon are contractually barred from preventing specific arms of the Israeli state using their technology under Project Nimbus. But this is the first time the existence of a contract showing that the Israeli Ministry of Defense is a Google Cloud customer has been made public. 

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Brazilian Censorship Scandal: Twitter Files Shows How Government and Big Tech Silence Dissent

The latest development in the Twitter Files suggests that a concerted initiative backed by the Brazilian government is threatening freedom of speech across the globe in coordination with various high-profile tech companies. According to the allegations brought forth by investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters are specifically in the crosshairs of this extensive campaign.

At the helm of this scheme, as Shellenberger suggests, is Alexandre de Moraes, the superior electoral court’s chief and a participant in Supreme court proceedings and someone whose push for censorship has been documented heavily.

He is purportedly leading a combined legislative and judicial endeavor to stifle political dissent. Shellenberger unveils some quite disturbing actions allegedly enforced by de Moraes, including imprisoning individuals sans trial for content shared on the web, the requirement of user-removal from social media sites and specific content censorship without the ability to appeal or access evidence produced against them.

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