Tag: big tech

Black Lives Matter shows how liberal groups weaponize social media censorship

The talking points have apparently gone out, and it is now OK for the mainstream press to gently criticize the Black Lives Matter movement. Accordingly, New York magazine has issued a critique of BLM’s financial management — particularly, the organization’s purchase in 2020 of a $6 million, 6,500 square foot house in Southern California.

Almost exactly a year ago, the New York Post reported on the purchase of four other multi-million dollar high-end homes by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. The story described the homes no differently than it would any other celebrity home purchase. All the information contained in the article was gleaned from public records, including the photos. No addresses were listed.

But within days, users on Facebook were banned from sharing the story — on the platform itself, on Facebook messenger, and on Instagram, which Facebook owns. Despite the fact that all the information discussed was a matter of public record, Facebook flagged the article for violating their community standards, specifically the “privacy and personal information policy.”

A year later, Facebook (now Meta) still classifies the story as “abusive” and prevents it from being shared on its platforms.

Now we know why.

Buried in New York magazine’s reporting is this little nugget: “Other conversations on the BLM Security Hub chat show efforts to monitor social media for negative mentions of [the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation], with members using their influence with the platforms to have such remarks removed.”

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Twitter’s “autoblock” feature blocks citizens from responding to, or even seeing, elected politicians’ tweets

Twitter is a “social” network that is paradoxically becoming ever more insular and anti-social – apparently, all in a bid to “protect” users from one another. This seems to be the idea behind testing new features such as the one called “Safety Mode,” that includes something called, “autoblock.”

At some point, the question might start arising in the minds of some, or even many, people: why even use a platform that you consider to be so potentially dangerous that it has to implement such a granular and complex system of separation and prevention of access to content and accounts?

But at this time, Twitter is still widely used and marching on its chosen path. And, right now, the “autoblock” is producing effects like a user getting blocked from viewing the profile of a public servant – in this case, that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While the problem has affected many, it was Laura Marston, an advocate for lowering the cost of insulin for diabetes sufferers, that most recently found her account blocked from highlighting problems with a recent bill that Marston feels falls short.

Those affected by the issue not only can’t comment on the politician’s tweets but they are also not even allowed to see them.

The Twitter notice that popped up instead of the Pelosi profile said that the user is temporarily blocked from interacting with the account’s tweets because “they were in Safety Mode” – while Twitter flagged previous interactions as “potentially” abusive or spammy.

The notice goes on to state that the social media company is aware “autoblocks” don’t work as intended all the time – another way of saying that flimsy automated algorithms and/or unreliable third party fact checkers are once again used to carry out the “Safety Mode” goals, and will highly likely be getting things wrong.

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Hunter Laptop Story Confirms: Rein in Big Tech or Cease to Be a Free People

In an October move that would presage the collapse of the “public”-”private” distinction during the Biden presidency—as seen in press secretary Jen Psaki’s open bragging last summer of collusion with Mark Zuckerberg to censor COVID “misinformation,” and Eric Schmidt’s recently revealed role helping shape administration science policy—Big Tech oligarchs dropped the hammer on the New York Post, a high-circulation newspaper, for its reporting on Hunter Biden’s now-infamous “laptop from hell.” The laptop’s files demonstrated the notoriously troubled Hunter’s venality, abuses of power, and general sketchiness of his foreign dealings. He and some of his cronies remain under federal investigation for possible tax and money laundering violations.

In response to the Post’s reportage, Twitter locked the paper out of its own account for over two weeks. Both Facebook and Twitter, moreover, heavily limited or outright-blocked disseminating the Post’s URL for the laptop story. Crucially, the entirety of this sordid affair transpired less than a month away from a momentous Election Day. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) correctly demanded that the Federal Election Commission investigate whether Facebook and Twitter illegally issued in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign; he was rebuffed.

There are myriad problems with this picture. Most notable, perhaps, was the undoubted nature of the laptop’s authenticity; no one, not even anyone in the Biden clan, denied at the time that Hunter’s computer was genuine. One might normally deem such a detail important. But the Big Tech powers, uninterested in something as mundane as “truth,” immediately grasped the greater imperative—to discredit the story in, and even to memory-hole it from, the collective public conscience.

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YouTube deletes entire back catalog of Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges

YouTube is at it again, this time setting its sights on Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges, whose entire video archive for the On Contact program published on Google’s platform has been deleted.

Hedges announced this in a blog post, saying that the show, which was broadcast for six years on RT America and RT International and even received Emmy nominations, is now gone from YouTube.

Hedges goes on to list some of the high profile people he spoke with over the years and explains that those interviews are now gone: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf, Slavoj Zizek, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, among dozens of others.

Hedges has been treated by YouTube like so many other creators over the years of stepped-up censorship that has little time, and sees little reason to explain itself: namely, there has been no explanation.

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Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp., among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

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Silicon Valley’s Transhuman Obsession Is Fundamentally Flawed

If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance ourselves—such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was unlimited, we experienced no disquiet, and we did not age—would we? Should we? For advocates of radical enhancement, or “transhumanism,” answering “yes” is a no-brainer. Accordingly, they press for the development of technologies that, by manipulating genes and the brain, would create beings fundamentally superior to us.

Transhumanism is far from a household term, but, whether or not they use the word publicly, its adherents are in places of power, especially in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is devoted to boosting “cognition” and co-founded the company Neuralink toward that end. Having raised more than $200 million in new funding in 2021, in January, Neuralink proclaimed its readiness to start human trials of brain-implantable computer chips for therapeutic purposes, to help those with spinal-cord injuries walk again. But Musk’s ultimate target in exploring brain-computer connections is “superhuman,” or “radically enhanced,” cognition—a top transhumanist priority. Those with radically heightened cognitive ability would be so advanced that they wouldn’t even really be human anymore but, instead, “posthuman.”

In transhumanist fantasy, posthumans could, philosopher Nick Bostrom assures us, “read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress.” Similarly, according to futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil—who has worked at Google since 2012—they would rapidly absorb the entire contents of the World Wide Web. Pleasure would be pervasive and boundless: Posthumans will “sprinkle it in [their] tea.” On the flip side, suffering wouldn’t exist, as posthumans would have “Godlike” control of their moods and emotions. Of course, posthuman bliss would not be supreme absent immortality. This last facet, the quest to conquer aging, already garners substantial backing from Silicon Valley. In 2013, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder—and CEO of its parent company, Alphabet, until December 2019—announced the launch of Calico Labs, whose mission is to understand aging and subvert it. A growing list of startups and investors, dedicated to the “reprogramming” of human biology with the defeat of aging in view, has entered the mix. This list now includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who, in January, contributed to the $3 billion that launched Altos Labs.

Today, transhumanism’s name recognition has spread beyond Silicon Valley and academia. In 2019, an opinion piece in the Washington Post stated that “the transhumanism movement is making progress.” And a 2020 essay in the Wall Street Journal suggested that, by making “our biological fragility more obvious than ever,” COVID-19 may be “just the kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts” to achieve transhumanists’ goal of immortality.

You’re probably already familiar with certain enhancements—like athletes using steroids to gain a competitive advantage, or individuals using ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall off label in search of a cognitive boost. But a chasm separates such enhancements from transhumanism, whose devotees would have us engineer a species-level upgrade of humanity into posthumanity. And key to all of transhumanism’s planned advancements, mental and physical, is a specific understanding of “information” and its causal dominance in relation to features that advocates prize. This focus on information is also transhumanism’s fatal flaw.

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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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