Tag: big tech

Google to introduce behavioral “interventions”

Google has presented its project dubbed “Info Interventions” based on what it says is a behavioral science that, if these “interventions” are used as directed, could “teach” users to the degree they will become resilient to online harms.

Another promise is that by “pre-bunking misinformation” users can be “immunized.”

How is this supposed to work? Google has put up a site that states the goal is to provide accuracy prompts that would refocus users’ attention toward whatever Google decides qualifies as accurate information.

And to reach it, the “hypothesis” currently seems to be that “reminding individuals to think about accuracy when they might be about to engage with false information can boost users’ pre-existing accuracy goals.”

This method of effectively training users to behave in a desired way is unsurprisingly attempting to draw from behavioral science research and Google says it has been validated by digital experiments.

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Apple turned off a private communication tool in China just before major protests broke out

Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China. The file-sharing tool for iOS was used by protesters to communicate freely without the risk of censorship, because the tool uses direct connections between devices, creating a local network that cannot be monitored by government internet regulators.

Initially, people could choose to receive AirDrops from everyone nearby. However, a recent iOS update has made that impossible. The update made a change to AirDrop’s usage that only applies in mainland China, while the rest of the world can still use it to communicate as before.

Users in China can only receive from everyone nearby for only ten minutes, putting restrictions on how it’s used.

AirDrop has been used by protesters in Hong Kong to communicate with other protesters and bystanders, as well as send messages to tourists from mainland China. On the mainland, protesters have used AirDrop to spread protest literature.

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Twitter Suffers From “Ridiculous” Number Of “Psy Ops”, Elon Musk Says

Twitter owner Elon Musk said Monday that the platform suffers from a “ridiculous” number of professional psychological operations (or, “psy ops”), a concept that typically refers to the dissemination of propaganda or, when used by state actors like the military, psychological warfare tactics meant to manipulate one’s enemies.

“The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous!” Musk wrote in a post on Twitter.

He added jokingly that “at least with new Verified, they will pay $8 for the privilege—haha.”

Musk later qualified his statement, responding to a Twitter user’s comment that the psychological operations are “mid”-level rather than professional. Musk conceded that “it’s mostly basic.”

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Binance’s ‘CZ’ Says Half Billion WhatsApp User Records For Sale On Dark Web

Nearly half a billion WhatsApp users’ mobile phone numbers are allegedly for sale on a dark web community forum, according to multiple sources, including Binance’s billionaire Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. 

“A new set of 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers for sales in the Dark Web,” CZ tweeted Sunday. He said a sample of hacked data “indicates the phone numbers are legit.”

CZ warned users on the Meta-owned platform that “threat actors downstream will use this data to conduct smishing (phishing messages) campaigns.” 

Cybernews initially confirmed the hack. They said: 

On November 16, an actor posted an ad on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming they were selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.

The dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. Threat actor claims there are over 32 million US user records included.

Another huge chunk of phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million).

The dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.

The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK – $2,500, and Germany – $2,000.

Cybernews also posted a screenshot of the seller’s post on the forum featuring the total number of phone numbers per country. 

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Meta Confirms US Military Running Fake Social Media Accounts to Push Propaganda

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.

Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.

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Far-Left Antifa Thugs Still Active on Twitter While Many Conservatives Remain Banned

Elon Musk has mostly championed free speech since taking over Twitter. There are a still a number of conservatives who remain banned, including The Gateway Pundit, while he has ignored leftists supporting violence on the platform.

The case of Antifa ‘journalist” Vishal Singh is a particularly acute example. Independent journalist Andy Ngo documented multiple cases of Singh celebrating and calling for violent actions on Twitter.  His latest post called for deadly violence against Republicans and Libs of Tiktok.

Singh previously celebrated assaults on actual journalists and demanded assaults against law enforcement. 

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Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

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YouTube Punishes Journalist for Factual Video Showing Democrats AND Republicans Make Election Fraud Claims

In September, video journalist Matt Orfalea made two videos for TK News that highlighted election denial in the past two presidential elections.

The first video, Memory Holed: “The Election Was Hacked,” was a montage of Democrat politicians and commentators saying that the 2016 election was illegitimate, hacked, or rigged.

The second video, Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election, compares the statements made by Republicans after Donald Trump lost and those made by Democrats after he won in 2016.

For instance, when Trump was asked if he’d concede, he said “I have to see.” Orfalea showed Hillary Clinton saying, “No, I would not,” when asked the same question after she lost.

Matt Taibi at TK News highlighted the statements that were made the video:

“This video after all is packed with clips of people like Karine Jean-Pierre saying the 2016 election was ‘stolen,’ Joe Biden saying ‘I absolutely agree’ Trump is an ‘illegitimate president,’ Kamala Harris saying ‘you’re absolutely right’ Trump didn’t really win in 2016, and even Jimmy Carter saying ‘Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.’ Old pal Keith Olbermann proclaimed the public wouldn’t stand for this ‘bloodless coup’ called voting, Chris Hayes said Trump ‘cheated,’ and a conga line of officials from Adam Schiff to Elizabeth Warren insisted foreigners had ‘hacked our elections.’”

Initially, YouTube demonetized both videos, then reversed the decision. However, on Friday, Orfalea announced that the second video had been removed. YouTube also gave his channel a strike which is a more serious YouTube punishment as getting strikes eventually results in a channel being permanently removed.

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Musk’s Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive

When Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was first announced this past April I said that the purchase likely wouldn’t go through if the empire thought it posed a threat to its information interests. I said that any reduction of censorship protocols which Musk implements on the platform would probably not be of the sort that make any difference to the powerful, but would instead just amplify vapid partisan culture war nonsense.

So far since Musk’s takeover, this does appear to be the case.

In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a “digital town square” to debate and discuss ideas.

And it’s not enough. Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you’re really doing something, but in the end all you’ve done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven’t done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

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Massive ‘CitizenFreePress’ News Site Suspended from Musk’s Twitter for Sharing Video of Obama Admitting Election Machine Exploits.

The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.

CitizenFressPress.com (CFP) was not the only account to have shared the clip, though appears to be the only one that has received a suspension for doing so. Though the video can still be viewed on Elon Musk’s platform, it now carries a warning label which claims the video is “misleading,” as well as noting that the clip can no longer be replied to, shared, or liked.

The video is still shareable from other accounts, and still available on CSPAN. But someone at Twitter appears to be trying to nuke it, at least from CFP’s account.

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