Tag: big tech

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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FBI Director Cannot ‘Be Sure’ Whether Facebook Is Sending User Information to Agents

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday he cannot “be sure” whether Facebook is sending the agency user information without being compelled to do so, an act that would violate the law.

Wray’s remark in response to a question from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) comes after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a report (pdf) in early November in which a whistleblower suggested that the FBI has a “special relationship” with Facebook “in which it accepts private user information without any consent or legal process.”

The move is part of a program “likely codenamed ‘Operation Bronze Griffin,’” said the report. It alleges that the types of user content that Facebook provides the FBI “have a partisan focus, tending only to concern users from one side of the political spectrum,” and that there is a pro-Democrat bias within the FBI.

On Thursday, Paul asked Wray at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the report’s allegations, “Is Facebook or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?”

“Not compelled, in other words, not in response to legal process?” Wray queried.

“No warrant, no subpoena, they’re just supplying you information on their users?” Paul said.

“I don’t believe so,” Wray responded. “But I can’t sit here and be sure about that as I as I sit here.”

Paul told Wray that if Facebook is supplying the FBI with user information, it would be against the law—the Stored Communications Act, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986—which “prohibits providers from sharing electronic communications with any person or entity, unless it’s compelled.”

“This was done to protect the privacy of people, so we could feel like we can send an email or direct message to people without having that information given over,” Paul said.

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Massachusetts Department of Public Health SECRETELY Colluded With Google To Auto-Install Contact-Tracing SPYWARE On Your Phone

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health is facing a class action lawsuit after colluding with Google to repeatedly auto-install contact-tracing spyware on the smartphones of over a million Massachusetts residents without their permission or consent.

According to a class action lawsuit filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan nonprofit civil rights organization, the Department of Public Health rolled out the contact tracing app it worked with Google to create in April 2021.

“The App causes an Android mobile device to constantly connect and exchange information with other nearby devices via Bluetooth and creates a record of such other connections. If a user opts in and reports being infected with COVID-19, an exposure notification is sent to other individuals on the infected user’s connection record,” the NCLA explains in the complaint, Wright v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Initially, the app which obtains users private locations and health information was voluntarily installed.

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Facebook Censors Posts on Vaccine Harms Because They “Make People Feel Unsafe”

This morning, a friend published a short post on Facebook, drawing attention to how it seemed to him the company was not even bothering any more to refer to the so-called ‘independent fact-checkers’ to justify their censorship. He had re-posted a clip where Fox reporter Tucker Carlson discussed the negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, referring to peer-reviewed studies. The clip is available here.

How on earth can peer-reviewed results constitute “misinformation”? The peer review process isn’t perfect, far from it, but after all it is the accepted standard. A first conclusion therefore is that the word ‘misinformation’ does not refer to misinformation any more, it simply refers to any information the censor wants suppressed. The word has become meaningless.

The action, then, is suppression of a certain kind of information, but what about the reason? The reason for suppressing uncomfortable information about COVID-19 vaccines is that seeing this information may “make some people feel unsafe”. What does this mean precisely?

There are at least two possibilities, and here I’m talking only about those who believe in the narrative. The first is that people may feel unsafe seeing evidence that contradicts what they’ve been told by the authorities, the mainstream media and the social media giants; the ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Watching Tucker Carlson’s review of the evidence might make people feel unsafe, uncertain, sceptical towards the propaganda, relentlessly pushed towards them; this is what happens when you discover you’ve been deceived by someone you trusted. You feel unsafe for you don’t know who to trust any more.

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Group for those affected by pandemic response appeal to Elon Musk after account was banned this week

Twitter has suspended Law or Fiction, a group dedicated to those who have been impacted by the UK government’s response to Covid-19. The group advocates for citizens, lawyers, and medical professionals.

The Law or Fiction account was maintained by British Lawyer Stephen Jackson who, in an open video, addressed new Twitter CEO Elon Musk and said that Twitter gave no reason for the ban that happened this week.

“I don’t know the reasons for it. There was no strike system warning me of the closure,” Jackson said in the video.

“All I can tell you is that I had linked to the authorization of the bivalent Covid-19 vaccine, so-called, for children aged 12 and upwards. I put the words ‘vaccine’ in inverted commas. I referred to ‘experimental’ – and that seems fair enough given that this has not been trialed on humans and if we give new technology to animals we call it experimental…We don’t know the long-term effects of the technology – that’s something with Pfizer itself admits,” Jackson explained.

“So quite what the misinformation was I don’t know,” Jackson added. “What this seems to be is an attack on comment, on debate.”

Jackson called out Elon Musk specifically, saying, he “understood” Musk to be keen on comment and debate and on “free speech,” saying he’s not going to get to Mars by suppressing “debate about the science.”

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