Tag: big tech

FBI and DHS Heads Are Slammed for Pressuring Big Tech to Censor Americans

During a recent Senate Homeland Security Committee on “Threats to the Homeland,” the heads of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were blasted for their agencies’ roles in pressuring Big Tech companies to censor Americans.

In his opening statement, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) pointed to the 1976 Church Committee final report that documented decades of “widespread abuse by federal intelligence agencies against U.S. citizens” and expressed his fear that now, almost half a century after this report was published, “our federal government is still undertaking many of the same tactics that the Church Committee found to be unworthy of democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.”

He continued by highlighting the ways the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies operated “in a manner that is outside the scope of their authorities, wasting taxpayer dollars and infringing on the rights of Americans.” The senator from Kentucky pointed to the Fifth Circuit’s finding that the FBI and other federal agencies likely violated the First Amendment when coercing Big Tech companies to censor speech and noted that much of the speech the FBI flagged for censorship was truthful.

Paul also took aim at the FBI’s “misuse [of] its authority” under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a warrantless surveillance law that the FBI has used to spy on millions of Americans, including a senator, a state senator, and a judge.

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US Republican senators ask tech firms about content moderation in Israel-Hamas war

A U.S. Senate panel’s Republican lawmakers sent a letter on Friday to tech companies Meta Platforms, Google, TikTok and X, formerly called Twitter, seeking information on their content moderation policies in the Israel-Hamas war, the senators said.

The Republican lawmakers of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said they asked the companies “to commit to fully preserving a documentary history of Hamas’s atrocities.”

Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people, mainly civilians. Since then Israel has bombed Gaza with air strikes. At least 4,137 Palestinians have been killed, including hundreds of children, in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Gaza, a 45 km-long (25-mile) enclave home to 2.3 million people, has been ruled since 2006 by Hamas. Gaza has been cut off from much of the outside world for 16 years since Israel imposed a blockade.

“We believe it is imperative that we preserve a full documentary history of Hamas’s atrocities,” the Republican lawmakers led by Senator Ted Cruz said.

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US Senator Michael Bennet Invokes EU’s Censorship Demands, Calls For Big Tech to Censor “Misinformation”

Senator Michael Bennet has criticized tech behemoths such as Meta, X, Google, and TikTok, accusing them of having lax policies that seemingly sanction the spread of untruths.

The turbulent situation between Israel and Hamas was recently seized upon by Democratic Senator Michael Bennet as another pretext to launch an offensive against the digital landscape.

Bennet targeted X, Meta, TikTok, and Alphabet in a letter dated October 17, imploring them to “extinguish the proliferation of inaccurate and misleading content” related to the Middle East conflict.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

On the surface, the Senator’s request appears aligned with social responsibility while mitigating harm. However, the true objective surfaced, revealing Bennet’s obsession with enhancing the influence of censorship-prone entities that preside over content veracity.

Bennet’s stance is in alignment with European Union officials who are exerting pressure on these tech giants to aggressively deal with misinformation, via a letter addressed to the executives.

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Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another

THE TECHLASH HAS finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.

From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”

And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”

What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.

Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.

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The White House’s ‘Misinformation’ Pressure Campaign Was Unconstitutional

I am one of five private plaintiffs in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court found that the government “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship [on social media] aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints” and that “the platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.” This resulted in the censoring of constitutionally protected speech of hundreds of thousands of Americans, tens of millions of times. Based on this finding, the Fifth Circuit in part upheld an injunction on certain public officials put in place by a district court.

Even when the government appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit, its lawyers hardly disputed a single factual finding from the court’s ruling. A unanimous three-judge panel upheld the core findings that “several officials—namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI—likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions. In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.” The government again appealed the injunction to the Supreme Court, where we expect a ruling this week.

The government’s claim that the injunction limits public officials’ own speech is absurd misdirection. The government can say whatever it wants publicly; it just cannot stop other Americans from saying something else. Free speech matters not to ensure that every pariah can say whatever odious thing he or she chooses. Rather, free speech prevents the government from identifying every critic as a pariah whose speech must be shut down.

We are all harmed when our rulers silence criticism. Our government’s self-inflicted deafness prevented officials and their constituents from hearing viewpoints that should have had a meaningful impact on our policy decisions. Instead, government censorship resulted time and again in the silencing of scientifically informed criticisms of, for example, harmful COVID policies. This allowed misguided and divisive policies to persist far too long.

The scope of the current government censorship regime is historically unprecedented. “The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the district court judge explained in his ruling. He went on, “The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario… The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.” The Fifth Circuit panel concurred: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.”

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Biden’s 2024 Campaign Will Continue Flagging “Misinformation” To Big Tech

The Biden regime’s practice of flagging content for censorship and pressuring platforms to remove content that it deems to be “misinformation” is so pervasive that it’s the subject of a major censorship lawsuit where an appeals court recently ruled that the Biden admin violated the First Amendment when pushing for social media censorship.

Despite this ruling, Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign plans to continue flagging so-called misinformation to social media platforms, “reaching out” to social media companies, and working with media outlets to “fact-check untruths.”

Additionally, it may target “deepfakes” in states with laws against the technology and use “applicable copyright laws.”

According to POLITICO, Biden’s campaign will hire hundreds of staffers and volunteers to monitor online platforms as part of this effort.

Not only is Biden’s campaign planning to continue engaging in actions similar to those that were flagged by an appeals court for violating the First Amendment, but one of the leaders of the Biden campaign’s effort will be Rob Flaherty, a former White House Digital Director who is a defendant in the First Amendment lawsuit that the appeals court ruled on.

Flaherty is currently a deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Documents that were uncovered as part of the censorship lawsuit against the Biden admin revealed that Flaherty was one of the Biden White House’s most aggressive censorship proponents.

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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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