Tag: big tech

Bi-partisan bill would push Big Tech and Big Media to make content distribution deals

Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC], Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA], Sen. Booker, Cory A. [D-NJ], Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI], Sen. Lummis, Cynthia M. [R-WY], Sen. Feinstein, Dianne [D-CA], Sen. Collins, Susan M. [R-ME], and Sen. Paul, Rand [R-KY] are all backing a bill that empowers mainstream media at the expense of smaller outlets and independent content creators.

The senators are co-sponsoring the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act which has been accused of actually hindering competition.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Instead of promoting competition in the world of media, the bill would allow mainstream media companies, like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC to form an alliance and collectively bargain with Big Tech platforms.

These mainstream outlets would be able to form new deals with online platforms that would force tech platforms to uprank their own content at the expense of independent content creators and independent voices.

The bill has a provision allowing legacy media to exclude companies that are not “similarly situated,” meaning independent journalists and small media companies will not get the benefits of the bargains with Big Tech.

Tennessee’s Senator Marsha Blackburn has warned the bill would result in more censorship by Big Tech. Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio aired similar concerns, saying the bill would strengthen the “collusion between Big Media and Big Tech.”

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Meta paid GOP operatives to push negative stories about TikTok

Meta has hired a top GOP consulting firm to gin up rage against TikTok and deflect political scrutiny away from Facebook and Instagram, according to a report on Wednesday. 

The consulting firm, Targeted Victory, pushed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to an internal email from February reported by the Washington Post.  

Targeted Victory reportedly advanced Meta’s agenda by pushing news stories blaming dangerous online trends such as the “slap a teacher challenge” on TikTok — even though the trend actually originated on Facebook. 

The group also helped place op-eds and letters to the editor in local papers like the Denver Post and Des Moines Register, raising concerns about China “deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids,” according to the report. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blamed TikTok for Facebook’s slowing user growth, which has contributed to its stock tanking 32.5% so far this year. 

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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Tulsi Gabbard Explains Big Tech Censorship After Twitter Shadow Ban

Former Congresswoman and frequent target of far-left censors, Tulsi Gabbard, used her own Twitter account to illustrate big tech censorship to her followers firsthand. Gabbard demonstrated the effects of Twitter’s infamous “shadow ban” in a video she shared online.

Despite formerly being elected to Congress as a Democrat and even seeking the DNC’s 2020 nomination for President, Tulsi Gabbard has been a frequent target of the political establishment and of big tech censors. Gabbard’s pro-freedom and anti-war stances (she has been to war herself) have often put her at odds with the geopolitical elite, and she has even been accused of being a Russian asset by the likes of Hillary Clinton and other’s often associated with the deep state, a claim then echoed by corporate media and, by extension, big tech. 

Like many others at odds with the uni-party elite have reported, Tulsi Gabbard says she has been shadow banned by Twitter. By web definition, shadow banning entails “blocking or  partially blocking a user or their content from some areas of an online community,” a practice which the censors at Twitter appear to have perfected.

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Google Doesn’t Want You to Research Mass Formation

At the end of 2021, the term “mass formation” had a value of 0 on Google Trends, meaning there’s not enough data for the term to even make it on the charts. Then, on December 31, Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,(1) mentioned it on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience viewed by more than 50 million people.(2)

The term, which provides a coherent explanation of why so many people have fallen victim to the unbelievable lies and propaganda of the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, went viral. On January 2, 2022, mass formation reached a value of 100 on Google Trends,(3) which means it had reached peak popularity.

Google Manipulates Reality Around ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’

The technocrats quickly took action, adding a rarely seen warning that popped up for those searching the suddenly popular phrase in the early days of 2022. It read, “It looks like these results are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.”(4)

In reality, the topic is not new. Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who has 126 publications to his name,(5) has been studying it for many years, and the phenomenon actually dates back over a hundred years. One of the earliest works on the subject, according to Malone, is an 1841 book titled, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds,” which details “the irrational behaviors of crowds.”(6)

You won’t find any of this — at least not easily — if you search on Google for “mass formation” today, however, as it’s all been effectively buried by Big Tech. What you will find is the results of an orchestrated and carefully vetted links to sites that help control the mainstream narrative around the topic. This not only serves to twist the meaning of the term but also to discredit Malone, a classic Orwellian Doublespeak move.

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Cowards at Twitter HQ Cite Foreign ‘Hate Speech’ Law to Punish American Company

Twitter shut down the account of the U.S.-based Christian Post for accurately describing President Joe Biden’s transgender assistant health secretary, Rachel Levine, as a man — and the social media giant cited a foreign law to justify its actions.

The evangelical Christian outlet told its readers on Monday that its Twitter account had been “temporarily limited” because of a tweet about Levine, a man who identifies as female.

The Christian Post said it was told by Twitter it no longer would be able to post anything new and could not like or follow other users or retweet posts.

The outlet was further informed that it would be suspended from Twitter for 12 hours.

The “offensive” tweet was the Christian Post’s March 15 message that read, “USA Today names Rachel Levine, a man, among its ‘Women of the Year.’”

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How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

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People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put $200,000 toward Kyiv Independent’s funding. The outlet is being so loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms“) has gained a million followers since the start of the Russian invasion.

Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the US-centralized empire‘s propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent news outlet. It’s very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if you don’t know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.

This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, “The US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality through propaganda.”

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Twitter blocked links to Daily Mail article that questioned Covid death stats

Twitter has put a warning on an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, one of the biggest news outlets in the country, that describes the article as potentially being “unsafe.”

The article is written by the newspaper’s deputy health editor, Eve Simmons, and discusses how official government figures vastly overstated the COVID-19 death rate due to bad reporting.

“Warning: this link may be unsafe,” Twitter displays when users  go to click the link to the article.

“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy,” it says at the time of writing.

It’s unclear who these “partners” are that have called for the censorship of the article.

“Health chiefs admitted, embarrassingly, that the numbers they’d been feeding the Government were only an approximation – provoking fury from Ministers,” the article reads.

“More recently it was revealed that a quarter of Omicron deaths included in the daily figures did not, in fact, list Covid as a primary cause.

“More than two years since Covid-19 emerged, many feel they want a simple answer: how many were killed by this virus?

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