Tag: big tech

Meta deletes Al Jazeera presenter’s profile after show criticising Israel

Al Jazeera Arabic presenter Tamer Almisshal has had his Facebook profile deleted by Meta 24 hours after the programme Tip of the Iceberg aired an investigation into Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content titled The Locked Space.

The programme’s investigation, which aired on Friday, included admissions by Eric Barbing, former head of Israel’s cybersecurity apparatus, about his organisation’s effort to track Palestinian content according to criteria that included “liking” a photo of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces.

Then the agency would approach Facebook and argue that the content should be taken down.

According to Barbing, Facebook usually complies with the requests and Israel’s security apparatus follows up cases, including bringing court cases if need be.

The investigation followed up on Barbing’s admissions by interviewing a number of human and digital rights experts who agreed that there was a distinct imbalance in how Palestinian content is restricted.

The programme also interviewed Julie Owono, a member of Facebook’s oversight board, who admitted there is a discrepancy in how rules are interpreted and applied to Palestinian content and added that recommendations had been sent to Facebook to correct this.

Al Jazeera has asked Facebook about why Almisshal’s profile was shut down with no prior warning or explanation. It had not received a response by the time of publication.

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Biden Officials Likely Violated First Amendment On Social Media: 5th Circuit Court

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that several Biden administration officials had likely breached the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to moderate or take down content they deemed problematic.

And here is Exhibit A of that First Amendment-crushing coercion and collusion… which obviously began in the Trump-era under Anthony Fauci. ZeroHedge was banned from Twitter one day after this email.

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Look How Google Shoos You Away From The Biden Family Biz And Other Big News

While fact-checking a Federalist article early Monday morning, I did a quick Google search for “hunter biden joe biden ‘an absolute wall.’”

It’s the language now-President Joe Biden used during the 2020 campaign to allege a separation between his vice-presidential duties and his son’s overseas work for the family business. It’s back in the news after the House Oversight Committee on Thursday asked the National Archives and Records Administration for unredacted communications containing three of Joe Biden’s vice presidential pseudonyms: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.

Google, however, apparently didn’t want me to find too much information — at least not from certain sources.

“It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information,” Google alerted me, prompting me to make sure the source is “trusted on this topic” and maybe just to “come back later.”

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Disinformation And Censorship, 1984–2023

Orwell, again. 1984 seems written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.

George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (in our own time and place, think of “unhoused,” “misspoke,” LGBTQIAXYZ+, “nationalist,” “terrorist”).

Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and to accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (think mandating masks that do not prevent disease transmission). The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (think war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)

Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.

Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 

1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.

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New Files Show Biden Admin Forced Facebook To Censor “True Information” On Vaccine Side Effects

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan released a second batch of files Friday showing that the Biden administration was forcing Facebook to censor content relating to COVID vaccines, including what employees there described as “true information”.

Jordan noted that Facebook knew it was removing “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe,” as well as “true information about the side effects.” 

Jordan also noted that Facebook employees were annoyed at being made to take down content they knew was accurate, describing the administration’s definition of misinformation as “completely unclear” and noting that the White House was using “untested assumptions” to demand censorship.

“It also just seems like when the vaccination campaign isn’t going as hoped, it’s convenient for them to blame us,” one employee noted.

Another agreed, responding “This seems like a political battle that’s not fully grounded in facts, and it’s frustrating.”

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Facebook Felt “Pressure” From “Outraged” Biden White House To Remove Posts

Calling somebody a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” – there’s a nasty piece of propaganda work, trying to discredit political opponents in a time of crisis.

Worse still, it wasn’t happening out in the open, on actual social networks, but behind the curtains of government/Big Tech collusion.

And now – with the new US election looming large already – it’s probably prudent, if your party/political affiliation was on “the wrong” end of the stick the last time, to try to fight against this repeating “early, and often.”

The term “Disinformation Dozen” refers to a (conspiracy, to all effects) theory that there were only 12 people in the world (… right?) who were behind Covid vaccine criticism back in 2021.

And what a difference, strictly scientifically speaking, two years make…

But now, it’s time to face the “political piper,” as it were. Documents have emerged to show that Facebook at the time played along with the “Disinformation Dozen” game related not only to original posts – but also memes – and went to the significant no doubt trouble of changing its entire policy to suit the narrative rendered under pressure from Biden’s Surgeon General.

But as always, eventually, what does a Big Tech giant do? Appease the “permanent power center” supported or not by some current White House.

And so, we are now learning that Meta wasn’t thrilled about it – but “felt” it had to play along and acquiesce to government pressure.

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Onetime guest on Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘pedophile island’ donates nearly $700K to Biden campaign fund

A joint fundraising committee raising dollars for President Biden’s re-election effort received a large donation from a tech billionaire revealed to have once traveled to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman dumped $699,600 into the Biden Victory Fund war chest, a joint fundraising committee authorized by the Biden campaign, in April, federal election records show.

The donation came one week before The Wall Street Journal reported Hoffman had visited the late serial sexual predator’s US Virgin Islands compound in 2014.

The close timing of the donation and the article was first reported by Fox News on Sunday.

Hoffman, 55, had reportedly planned on returning to the island with Epstein later in 2014 before traveling to Boston to raise funds for MIT on behalf of fellow island trip attendee Joi Ito, a then-media lab director at the institute.

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US ‘Disinformation Industry’ Lands in Court

What kind of a week was last week in the theater of war wherein battles rage over illegal censorship, illegal attacks on freedom of speech, illegal government infringements on our constitutional rights, and, amid it all, the complicity of our most powerful media in these illegalities?

For a brief while it looked as though it was a very fine week. On July 4, an excellent day for this, a district court in Louisiana ruled that the White House and a long list of other federal agencies are barred from all contacts with social media companies if the intent is to intimidate or otherwise coerce Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other such platforms into deleting, suppressing, or in any way obscuring content protected as free speech, to paraphrase a key passage in the ruling.

Wow. A federal judge brings to the surface, there on your morning page one, all the illegal interventions, years of them, in which the Biden regime and its Capitol Hill allies have indulged to quash dissent. What liberal authoritarians impudently dismissed as a kooky “conspiracy theory” on July 3 is in a judicial stroke written into the record as an ugly reality to be eliminated. What’s not to like?

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FBI Colludes with Ukrainian Intel to Censor Americans under Biden Misinformation Campaign

In the most recently exposed Biden administration scheme to combat misinformation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) colluded with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor the speech of Americans. The federal agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorists, violent street gangs and serial killers joined forces with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is widely known to be infiltrated by Russian-aligned forces, to take down the authentic social media accounts of Americans. This includes a verified U.S. State Department profile and those belonging to American journalists. Interestingly, accounts targeted for removal by the SBU and FBI criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed pro-Ukrainian views.

Details of the illicit operation are outlined in a new congressional report made public this week by the House Judiciary Committee. The document also exposes how the FBI offered Facebook and Instagram legal cover to delete social media accounts singled out by the SBU. The two agencies routinely sent the popular social media platforms spreadsheets and other documents identifying thousands of profiles to eliminate. “Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU’s requests, the FBI had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media,” the report states. “In contrast to the Biden Administration’s stated support for Ukraine, the FBI, on behalf of the SBU, flagged Americans’ accounts and posts that were critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The report says that the FBI also delivered censorship orders from the SBU to Google and YouTube and reveals that a senior cybersecurity employee at Google said the company was “deluged with various requests” for content removal after Russia invaded Ukraine. The primary liaison between the FBI and Silicon Valley is Elvis Chan, a San Francisco-based assistant special agent in charge of the division’s cyber branch. The congressional probe highlights the FBI’s unconstitutional role in enabling the SBU’s censorship regime and raises grave concerns about the agency’s credibility and competence as the nation’s premier law enforcement organization. “Put simply, the FBI worked with and on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency—widely known to be compromised by Moscow at the time—and directly abetted efforts to censor Americans engaging in protected speech,” the report says. “As a result, the FBI agents’ actions had the potential to render substantial aid to the Kremlin’s war effort.”

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Appeals Court PAUSES Ban on Biden Big Tech Censorship Collusion

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has granted a reprieve to the Biden administration in a case concerning its interactions with social media firms over contentious online speech and “misinformation.”

The decision temporarily suspends a preliminary injunction that sought to ban censorship collusion with social media platforms in an order previously issued by US District Judge Terry Doughty.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

On July 4th, Judge Doughty passed an injunction that effectively barred various government departments and administration officials from advocating or inciting the suppression or removal of online content considered to be constitutionally protected free speech.

The lawsuit that led to the injunction had been lodged the previous year, alleging that the Biden administration had effectively suppressed free speech through potential regulatory threats and pressure on companies to purge what it classified as “misinformation.”

The dispute particularly centered around topics like COVID-19 vaccines and claims of election fraud.

The legal team representing the Biden administration swiftly sought a stay on the injunction, contending that it was both overly broad and vague.

They raised concerns over the potential implications of the order on the scope of discussions officials could have with social media firms and the content of public statements and that the injunction was preventing them from combating “misinformation.”

Despite these arguments, Judge Doughty declined to suspend his order. In his written denial, he stated that the administration was essentially seeking a stay so it could continue infringing on the First Amendment, a viewpoint the government vehemently disputes.

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