Tag: big tech

Facebook Claims it Will Allow More Free Speech Now

Admitting it has gone too far, Meta’s platforms of Facebook and Instagram are ending their ‘fact checking’ programs and restrictions on speech to allegedly restore free expression, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a video posted Tuesday.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.” 

The shift to an X-style model with community notes replacing the heavy hand of internet censorship will be rolled out over the next few months, according to Zuckerberg.

“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression,” Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” Tuesday.

The fact checking program was put in place following the Democrats loss of the 2016 election. Its purpose was to manage user’s content and censor what it deemed as ‘misinformation’. The move was initiated by political pressure, explained Zuckerberg.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.”

Meta’s man went on to discuss specific topics that will no longer be taboo on his website.

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Cracking Down on Big Tech: New Bill’s Plan to Expose Government Collusion

A new legislative effort has been launched in the US Senate in order to prevent any future instances of government Tech collusion from flying under the legislators’ radar.

The Transparency in Bureaucratic Communications Act, introduced by Republican Senator Eric Schmitt, would have inspectors general (IGs) inform Congress in detail about any communication, and circumstances of that communication, between the agencies these watchdogs are in charge of, and companies benefiting from Section 230 protections.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Judging by a press statement by Schmitt, the concern is that, even with the government accused of such collusion now on its way out, what he refers to as “the deep state” might still continue to “work” with Big Tech.

“The incoming Republican Congress cannot allow deep-state bureaucrats to continue censoring the free speech of our constituents any longer (…) We will find the bureaucratic rot and we will rip it out,” Schmitt stated.

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Zuckerberg And Bezos To Donate $1 Million Each To Trump’s Inauguration Fund

Tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Meta and Amazon are both reportedly giving a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg’s donation comes following a private dinner he had with Trump at his Florida home

The Wall Street Journal reports that the donation is part of an effort by Zuckerberg to ease tensions between him and Trump.

Trump previously threatened to prosecute and jail Zuckerberg and anyone else who interfered in the election by using their tech platforms to censor information in the same vein as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020. 

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Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist

Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest, greatest quantum computing chip. The speed and reliability performance claims Google’s made about this chip were newsworthy in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry’s attention was an even wilder claim tucked into the blog post about the chip.

Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog post that this chip was so mind-boggling fast that it must have borrowed computational power from other universes.

Ergo the chip’s performance indicates that parallel universes exist and “we live in a multiverse.”

Here’s the passage:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

This drop-the-mic moment on the nature of reality was met with skepticism by some, but, surprisingly, others on the internet who profess to understand these things argued that Nevan’s conclusions were more than plausible. The multiverse, while stuff of science fiction, is also an area of serious study by the founders of quantum physics.

The skeptics, however, point out that the performance claims are based on the benchmark that Google itself created some years ago to measure quantum performance. That alone doesn’t prove that parallel versions of you aren’t running around in other universes — just where the underlying measuring stick came from.

Unlike classic digital computers that calculate based on whether a bit is a 0 or 1 (on or off), quantum computers rely on incredibly tiny qubits. These can be on/off or both (somewhere in between) and they can also tap into quantum entanglement — a mysterious connection at the tiniest levels of the universe between two or more particles where their states are linked, no matter the distance that separates them.

Quantum computers use such quantum mechanics to calculate highly complex problems that cannot currently be addressed with classic computers.

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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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