Tag: big tech

Biden’s Sneaky Censors

“Tech platforms are notoriously opaque,” the White House complained last week, saying Americans deserve to know more about how online forums decide “when and how to remove content from their sites.” Yet the Biden administration, which routinely pressures social media companies to suppress speech it does not like, is hardly a model of transparency in this area.

In a lawsuit filed last May, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt argue that the administration’s “Orwellian” crusade against “misinformation” violates the First Amendment. They are trying to find out more about this “vast ‘Censorship Enterprise’ across a multitude of federal agencies,” and the administration is fighting them every step of the way.

So far, Landry and Schmitt have identified 45 federal officials who “communicate with social media platforms” about curtailing “misinformation.” Emails obtained during discovery show those platforms are desperate to comply with the government’s demands for speech restrictions, including the removal of specific messages and accounts.

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Yet another “whistleblower” means yet more censorship

Anew Twitter “whistleblower” has come forward. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, allegedly a former hacker and Twitter’s ex-head of security, testified in front of congress today, with dire warnings about the business practices of the social media giant.

Did he talk about the company’s egregious attacks on their users’ free speech under the guise of “protecting” the public?

Did he mention the suppression of alternative and independent journalism through practices such as “shadow-banning” and discretely removing followers?

Perhaps he told them about how, like all major social media platforms, it is so cross-pollinated with intelligence assets it may as well be considered just another branch of the Deep State.

No, none of that. His main concern is that Twitter’s security is too lax, and that the platform’s “cyber-security failures” leave it potentially open to “exploitation” that can “cause real harm to real people”.

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Facebook Fact-Checkers Are Now Dropping by the Comments Sections of Your Posts to Re-Educate You

Facebook just keeps finding new ways to be awful. The latest stunt is to jump into the comments section of your posts to insert some approved agitprop that stays near the top of your feed.

This particular “fact” check concerns an estimate from a car dealership showing that a customer would be charged nearly $30,000 for an EV battery for his Chevy Volt. A Facebook page called Car Coach Reports, which focuses on auto news, posted a picture of the invoice on August 29. Two days later, PolitiFact waded into the comments section to add their take on the story—namely that the battery in question was for a 10-year-old vehicle with 70,000 miles that is no longer under warranty. PolitiFact wrote, “The battery had to be purchased from a third-party supplier because General Motors discontinued the Volt in 2018 and no longer makes the battery.” They quickly added that newer batteries “cost much less.”

On the “fact” checker’s website we learn that “The average cost of a replacement battery in an electric vehicle is about $6,300… though that price can be higher depending on the vehicle in question.” Prices can range anywhere from $6000 to $20,000.

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Over 50 Biden Administration Employees, 12 US Agencies Involved in Social Media Censorship Push: Documents

Over 50 officials in President Joe Biden’s administration across a dozen agencies have been involved with efforts to pressure Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation, according to documents released on Aug. 31.

Senior officials in the U.S. government, including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, and onetime White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt, have been in touch with one or more major social media companies to try to get the companies to tighten rules on allegedly false and misleading information on COVID-19, and take action against users who violate the rules, the documents show.

In July 2021, for instance, after Biden said that Facebook was “killing people” by not combating misinformation effectively, an executive at Meta reached out to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee, to say that government and Meta teams met after the remarks “to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”

The same executive later wrote to Murthy saying, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen,’” including removing pages linked to the group.

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Google to bans apps containing “misleading health claims that contradict existing medical consensus”

The Android app store, Google Play, has introduced sweeping new rules that ban apps containing what the tech giant deems to be “misleading health claims that contradict existing medical consensus, or can cause harm to users.”

The new rules are part of a Google Play “health misinformation” policy that came into force on August 31. Some of the examples of in-app content that’s banned under this new policy include “misleading claims about vaccines, such as that vaccines can alter one’s DNA,” “advocacy of harmful, unapproved treatments,” and “advocacy of other harmful health practices, such as conversion therapy.”

Google’s new policy comes at a time when the medical consensus has changed multiple times over the last few years. In 2020 Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said that Pfizer’s reported 90% COVID-19 vaccine efficacy rate was “extraordinary.” In 2021, Fauci said the vaccine will “protect you against the surging of the delta variant.” But this year, former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx admitted that she “knew” COVID vaccines would not prevent infection.

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FACEBOOK TELLS MODERATORS TO ALLOW GRAPHIC IMAGES OF RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES BUT CENSORS ISRAELI ATTACKS

AFTER A SERIES of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

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Facebook to let “fact checkers” comment on posts that “may not be verifiably false”

Just in case anything slips through the existing “fact-checking,” narrative-enforcing cracks of Facebook’s censorship, a new “feature” is now being introduced as a pilot.

Through it, Facebook is letting a small group of US “fact-checkers” leave comments on public posts, which “may not be verifiably false, but that people may find misleading.”

This has been revealed in the tech and social media behemoth’s Community Standards Enforcement Report for the second quarter of this year. One of Facebook’s (Meta’s) activities covered in the report concerns its third-party fact-checker – aka, the “hired censorship guns” program.

At the very end of the report, Facebook briefly mentions the exceedingly interesting new pilot program. While critics will no doubt see it as yet another avenue for the giant to steer users in a particular direction, it is presented as quite the opposite: allegedly to “empower” users as they come across content and are deciding “what to read, share, and trust.”

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Google triggers criminal probe after dad takes photos of his toddler, naked, for doctor

Google triggered a criminal investigation and locked a man out of his accounts after flagging photos he sent to his son’s pediatrician as potential child pornography, according to the New York Times.

The tech company initially flagged the images when they were automatically uploaded to Google servers from the father’s phone, according to the NYT. After a nearly year-long investigation of everything in his Google account, including search history, location history, messages and photos, police determined he hadn’t committed a crime.

The father, referred to only as Mark by the NYT, had taken photos of his young son, naked, at the request of a doctor over concerns about his infected penis, according to the NYT. Google quickly locked him out of his account after scanning the photos, and he lost emails, contacts and personal photos and had to get a new phone number after losing access to his Google Fi account.

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Google continues editorializing searches by adding “content advisories” to search results

It has hardly ever been enough for Google just to be able to censor content on YouTube and apps in its store – “curating” and, critics say, essentially editorializing what users can see when they use Google Search has been high on the list of priorities for a while.

(Article by Didi Rankovic republished from ReclaimTheNet.org)

Coincidentally or not, in the year of US midterm elections, the giant is ramping up this effort to make sure the search engine isn’t simply returning results – like people might still expect it to do – but what Google decides are “trustworthy results” as opposed to “falsehoods and misinformation.”

Google’s self-styled standard of what passes the trustworthiness test is described in the vaguest of terms, ostensibly so that a lot of things can fit that definition: it’s when the behemoth’s systems “don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results.”

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Facebook censors claims IRS posted job requiring “deadly force”

Facebook and Instagram have censored the Heritage Foundation and others for suggesting that a job posting by the Internal Revenue Services required a willingness to use deadly force.

The Heritage Foundation’s posts were slapped with a “missing context” label reading.

The original job posting, which has since been edited, read that “special agents” in the agency’s Criminal Investigation branch are required to “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force if necessary.”

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