Tag: big tech

Meta Launches Real-Time Content Censorship Unit for 2024 Elections

When Facebook (Meta) wants to safeguard its “right to censor,” the company presents itself as basically just another private company out there minding its own business.

But when election campaigns get in full swing, especially in the US, but also the EU, the way Meta reacts, announcing all sorts of yet new policies and new units to deal with information related to elections, shows that it could have a massive influence on their outcome.

And while it’s repeatedly said that (mostly arbitrarily “defined”) misinformation is the scourge of democracy, there is another, this time, no doubt about it: censorship, sometimes based on such flimsy excuses as basically somebody’s subjective opinion – for example, “potential threats.”

None of this seems to be important to Meta, who have just announced how they are “preparing” for the elections in the EU this summer.

There’s a slew of news on this front: Meta will have what it calls an Elections Operations Center whose job will be identifying “potential threats.” And then real-time “mitigation” (i.e., censorship) will follow.

Oh happy news: despite all the controversies around “fact-checker,” Meta has announced it is continuing to rely on them, and even boasts about having “the largest fact-checking network of any platform.”

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New York Governor Pushes Big Tech To ‘Step Up’ By Removing Illicit Marijuana Shop Listings

New York’s governor is calling on big tech companies such as Google and Meta to “do the right thing” by taking steps to stop promoting illicit marijuana shops that have proliferated across the state.

During a press briefing on Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said that social media and search engine companies are passively undermining the legal market that’s being implemented by allowing unlicensed retailers to be featured on their services, giving consumers the false impression that they are legitimate businesses.

‘They’re hurting our legal shops, and we’ve been in touch with these companies, these platforms, and we’ve told them flat out, ‘You need to change this,’” she said.

Hochul added that she doesn’t expect the tech companies to proactively identify and remove illicit shop listings on their own because “they would tell us that they’re not required to.” To that end, she said her message to the businesses is, “let us help you.”

“Let us give you the list of legal vendors. I know who’s legal. We all know who’s legal. And then you have a responsibility to make sure that you’re not posting the locations of illegal shops,” the governor said. “Now I’m calling on all these platforms to step up, do the right thing and be part of the solution. Don’t be complicit in helping jeopardize the public health and the livelihoods of these legitimate business owners.”

At Wednesday’s briefing, Hochul was joined by cannabis stakeholders and advocates, including representatives of organizations that published an open letter to the governor on Tuesday that raised the alarm about social media companies promoting unlicensed retailers.

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‘Absurdly woke’: Google’s AI chatbot spits out ‘diverse’ images of Founding Fathers, popes, Vikings

Google’s highly-touted AI chatbot Gemini was blasted as “woke” after its image generator spit out factually or historically inaccurate pictures — including a woman as pope, black Vikings, female NHL players and “diverse” versions of America’s Founding Fathers.

Gemini’s bizarre results came after simple prompts, including one by The Post on Wednesday that asked the software to “create an image of a pope.” 

Instead of yielding a photo of one of the 266 pontiffs throughout history — all of them white men — Gemini provided pictures of a Southeast Asian woman and a black man wearing holy vestments.

Another Post query for representative images of “the Founding Fathers in 1789″ was also far from reality.

Gemini responded with images of black and Native American individuals signing what appeared to be a version of the US Constitution — “featuring diverse individuals embodying the spirit” of the Founding Fathers.

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Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”

Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”

A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.

A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.

And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.

The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.

No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.

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EU Officials Start Crafting Censorship Guidelines for Big Tech Companies Ahead of 2024 Elections

The European Union has announced that it has started putting together what it calls “guidelines for election integrity” – but what critics will describe in plain language as censorship guidelines that Big Tech is supposed to follow.

The process of drafting these instructions, a part of the Digital Services Act (DSA), was initiated with a public consultation that will last until March 7, and the EU said these will be the first guidelines under the DSA.

Social media and services covered by it are referred to as Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines, and they are the ones who will be expected to implement what the EU thinks are “best practices and possible measures to mitigate systemic risks” related to elections.

The concept of free and fair elections is long-standing, but the EU has managed to work the term “resilient elections” in there as well, as the ultimate goal of the new guidelines.

The draft also gives examples of what the bloc considers to be good ways to censor unwanted content – where censorship is referred to as “mitigating measures.” Particular attention is paid to generative AI, i.e, deepfakes.

The platforms are supposed to stick to the guidelines before, as well as after the voting, and for once, “billions of people all around the world going to the polls this year” are not mentioned as the justification for the “measures.”

At least the EU does not do it while announcing the drafting of the guidelines, although legacy media do, while reporting about it. Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager is quoted as saying that the concern here are elections at various levels in EU nation-states, as well as those for the European Parliament.

According to Vestager, voters must discuss issues online “in a safe way.”

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YouTube CEO Vows To Censor “Hate Speech” and Boost “Authoritative Sources” in Recommendations When People Look for Election News in 2024

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has a post up on the company blog just in time to, well in advance, reiterate the giant platform’s policies regarding the upcoming elections.

Even though Mohan’s “letter” is supposed to deal with the “four big bets for 2024,” the bit concerning the elections is of most interest, given the ramifications of YouTube’s previous and continued restrictive approach and unprecedented levels of censorship.

Just in case anyone worried things might improve, the post reassures them: YouTube will use its massive resources and the way the platform is structured, such as search and recommendations, to wipe out what it chooses to consider “hate speech” and at the same time “boost authoritative sources” even more.

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House Weaponization Committee Report Warns of AI-Enabled Censorship Echoing 2020 Social Media Suppression

A Republican report from the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday raised alarms over possible AI-enabled censorship on a massive scale, reminiscent of Twitter and Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop exposé in 2020.

The accusations focus on a series of AI tools currently under development. Financial backing for this venture has reportedly come from the Biden administration, leading to concerns about the permeation of political influence in freedom of speech.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

According to the report, the administration has invested millions of funds in AI research. The objective of this activity, as stated, is the creation of handy tools capable of targeting and suppressing “misinformation.” Once operational, these utilities could ostensibly be handed over to major social media platforms.

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Government-Funded Entities Build Network to Flag “Misinformation” In Private Messages

More reports are emerging about the various forms in which the Big Tech/government collusion is taking place in the US.

It’s not just directly pressuring, or “communicating with” – as current White House officials like to put it, social sites; reports are now emerging about companies getting hired to make massive databases of supposedly unlawful speech that are compiled thanks to users effectively spying and reporting on each other on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

Former State Department official, now executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online, Mike Benz, calls this “a snitch network of citizen informants.” Information thus obtained is then analyzed using some form of AI, resulting in identification of “misinformation trends.”

One of these companies is Algorithmic Transparency Institute. The money comes from firms that receive government funds and congressionally chartered organizations.

The need to resort to “old school” citizen-informant methods arises from the nature of the platforms the government would like to spy on, and get content flagged and eventually censored. It’s the likes of WhatsApp and Telegram, where, due to the nature of (particularly encrypted) private messaging, the now established forms of “monitoring” places like Facebook or YouTube cannot be used.

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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google “Search Liaison” Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don’t see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google’s support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google’s page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

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Senators Obliterate Zuckerberg For ‘Helping’ Pedos Find Child Sex Abuse Content

During a remarkable Senate hearing Wednesday, Republican Senators wiped the floor with Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, exposing how his company has acted woefully when it comes to child sexual abuse material and other harmful content on its platforms that has directly led to the deaths of children.

By the end of the hearing Zuckerberg was utterly humiliated, forced to stand and face the families of victims who have suffered because of his failures, and told that he should be sued into oblivion for gross dereliction of duty.

During the hearing titled ‘Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis’, Senator Ted Cruz essentially accused Zuckerberg of helping pedophiles gain access to child porn on his platforms.

“Every parent in America is terrified about the garbage that is directed at our kids,” Cruz told Zuckerberg, adding “the phones they have are portals to predators…and each of your companies could do a lot more to prevent it.”

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