Tag: big tech

Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship

Kremlin-backed media outlets have been banned throughout the European Union, both on television and on apps and online platforms. RT has lost its Sky TV slot in the UK, where the outlet is also blocked on YouTube. Australian TV providers SBS and Foxtel have dropped RT, and the federal government is putting pressure on social media platforms to block Russian media in Australia.

In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia, speaking in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will get you years in prison.

Twitter, historically the last of the major online platforms to jump on any new internet censorship escalation, is now actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. This censorship-by-algorithm tactic is exactly what I speculated might emerge after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned back in November, due to previous comments supportive of that practice by his successor Parag Agrawal.

Twitter is also placing warnings labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform. It has also placed the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. Some are complaining that this new label has led to online harassment amid the post-9/11-like anti-Russia hysteria that’s currently turning western brains into clam chowder.

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Google suppresses America’s Frontline Doctors in search results

More evidence is emerging of Google manipulating algorithms powering its mammoth and highly influential search service to give certain results (much) more visibility than others.

And now, reports say, Google is not even trying to hide that this is the case, as America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) has been informed its reach on the internet is being artificially limited.

This organization says it is dedicated to improving doctor-patient relationships that are jeopardized by what it calls politicized science and biased information. The AFLDS would also like to provide patients with access to “independent, evidence-based information” that will inform people’s decisions regarding their healthcare choices.

Well, meeting that goal might prove to be quite difficult since Google Search, on which a huge majority of US-based users rely for their internet queries, says it is deliberately deranking information coming from the AFLDS.

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Facebook, Twitter, Google, Netflix ALL BLOCK Russian News Broadcasts, Content At Direct Behest Of The European Union

Big tech has moved in lockstep to censor Russian news networks Sputnik and RT, further ensuring that westerners only receive one narrative when it comes to coverage of the conflict in Ukraine.

Facebook is restricting access to content from RT and Sputnik on both its main social media platform and Instagram following “requests from a number of governments,” according to he company’s vice president Nick Clegg.

The move comes just hours after the EU announced it will ban RT and Sputnik broadcasts across the bloc, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declaring that the networks are spreading “harmful disinformation,” and that the EU is further “developing tools to ban toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe.”

Following pressure from EU officials on Google and its subsidiary YouTube to crackdown on content from the Russian news networks, the tech giant also announced that it will block YouTube channels “connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately”.

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Twitter Announces New Policies Promising Censorship of ‘Misleading’ Posts Relating to Russia and Ukraine

Twitter has announced policies promising the censorship of “misleading” posts relating to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

As all conservatives already know, “misleading” tends to mean anything that the establishment disagrees with when it comes to Big Tech policies.

“We’re actively monitoring for risks associated with the conflict in Ukraine, including identifying and disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information,” Twitter announced in a lengthy tweet thread about steps they are taking. “We’re proactively reviewing Tweets to detect platform manipulation (or other inauthentic behavior) and taking enforcement action against synthetic and manipulated media that presents a false or misleading depiction of what’s happening.”

Once again, the big tech giant admitted that they are a publisher with an editorial slant instead of a platform.

“We’re continuing to provide as much context around content relating to the crisis as possible, including through Moments and Events on Twitter,” Twitter Safety tweeted.

Twitter also said they are monitoring high-profile accounts to “mitigate any attempts at a targeted takeover or manipulation.”

“We’re actively monitoring vulnerable high-profile accounts, including journalists, activists, and government officials and agencies to mitigate any attempts at a targeted takeover or manipulation,” the thread continued.

The company continued to announce that for “people using Twitter in Ukraine and Russia, we also paused some Tweet recommendations from people you don’t follow on Home Timeline to reduce the spread of abusive content.”

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FACEBOOK ALLOWS PRAISE OF NEO-NAZI UKRAINIAN BATTALION IF IT FIGHTS RUSSIAN INVASION

FACEBOOK WILL TEMPORARILY allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.

The policy shift, made this week, is pegged to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and preceding military escalations. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing ultranationalism and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members. Though it has in recent years downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group’s affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion’s first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].” With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook’s blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you’ve deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault?

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YouTube to censor “new misinformation” preemptively

YouTube, the world’s dominant video sharing platform, has already removed over one million videos for violating its strict and controversial “misinformation” rules. But in a new announcement, the tech giant has revealed that it’s going to be getting even stricter and suppressing “new misinformation” preemptively before it has the chance to gain traction.

YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan described how the video-sharing platform will start “catching new misinformation before it goes viral” in a blog post. The process will involve continuously training YouTube’s machine learning systems with “an even more targeted mix of classifiers, keywords in additional languages, and information from regional analysts” to identify “narratives” that YouTube’s main classifier doesn’t catch.

Mohan added: “Over time, this will make us faster and more accurate at catching these viral misinfo narratives.”

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Meta-Facebook Manager of Community Development Staffer Caught In Hotel Child Sex Sting Operation

A Manager of Community Development at Meta/Facebook was busted in a Chris Hansen-style pedophile sting operation by independent journalists.

Andy Ngo reported,

Exclusive: High-level Facebook staffer allegedly caught in amateur child sex sting operation

A live stream video posted on YouTube on Feb. 16 by “Predator Catchers Indianapolis” purports to show Meta/Facebook Manager of Community Development Jeren Andrew Miles, of Palm Springs, Calif., being caught in a child sex sting in Columbus, Ohio.

Miles, 35, allegedly communicated sexually explicit texts with a person who said they were a 13-year-old boy. He allegedly made plans for the boy to meet him at Le Meridien Columbus hotel, which is how and where the “Predator Catchers” group interviewed him.

Miles serves on the board of directors for LGBTQ+ group, Equality California. He has since completely deleted his social media accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Miles previously worked as the Director of Community Affairs for Lyft, according to an archive on LinkedIn.

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DeepMind Has Trained an AI to Control Nuclear Fusion

THE INSIDE OF a tokamak—the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction—presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that’s hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades. At this point, the science underlying fusion seems sound, so what remains is an engineering challenge. “We need to be able to heat this matter up and hold it together for long enough for us to take energy out of it,” says Ambrogio Fasoli, director of the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

That’s where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction.

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YouTube CEO wants governments pass laws to “have more control over online speech”

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, has acknowledged that the platform’s policy of censoring legal content that it deems to be “harmful” is controversial and urged governments to step in and pass stronger speech laws.

Wojcicki made the comments in an interview with the Hamburg-based independent broadcaster TIDETVhamburg where she was asked about how the platform navigates the “minefield” or complying with national laws while also keeping advertisers happy and users interested.

“We work around the globe, and you’re right, certainly there are many different laws and many different jurisdictions, and we…enforce the laws of the various jurisdictions around speech or what’s considered safe or not safe,” Wojcicki said.

She added that there’s been little controversy when YouTube enforces these laws. Instead, the controversy arises when YouTube decides to censor speech that it deems to be “harmful” but “not illegal,” particularly in relation to COVID.

“What has been the controversial part is when there is content that would be deemed as harmful but yet is not illegal,” Wojcicki said. “An example of that, for example, would be COVID. I’m not aware of there being laws by governments saying around COVID in terms of not being able to debate the efficacy of masks or where the virus came from or the right treatment or proposal but yet there was a lot of pressure and concern about us distributing misinformation that went against what was the standard and accepted medical knowledge. And so this category of harmful but…legal has been, I think, where most of the discussion has been.”

Despite admitting that the way YouTube censors legal content is controversial, Wojcicki pushed for stronger speech laws that would accommodate this censorship.

“Our recommendation, if governments want to have more control over online speech is to pass laws to have that be very cleanly and clearly defined so that we can implement it,” Wojcicki said.

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Google pulls ads on meteorologist tracking climate for ‘unreliable and harmful claims’

A meteorologist who worked on climate studies at NASA says satellite observations show the Earth is warming at the “bottom end” of climate models – but Google has demonetised his website.

Dr Roy Spencer said Google was “not specific about what claims” led to the decision.

“What their website tells me is that all of my whole website basically is unreliable and harmful claims,” he said.

“If people like myself don’t buy into the narrative that global warming is not only occurring but it’s going on at a catastrophic rate and we have to do something about it, if you don’t go along with that narrative, you get thrown under the bus.”

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