Tag: big tech

Climate scientist asks YouTube to censor climate “misinformation”

A climate change scientist has complained to YouTube for appearing to promote what he suggests is climate change denial content. The scientist told the platform that it should treat climate change “misinformation” the same way it has been treating COVID-19 “misinformation.”

Prof. Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, tweeted: “Hey @Youtube. It’s good you’re taking down COVID denial videos. Now it’s time for you to remove climate denial videos. They pose an even greater threat to humanity in the long term.”

His tweet was in response to another user who tweeted that he has been getting recommendation of a 2013 climate change denial video too often.

The video, titled “Why has Global Warming Paused? – William Happer,” featuresPrinceton University physics professor and Trump appointee to the National Security Council William Happer.

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Twitter Bans Account That Posted Updates About Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein Trial

In a post written to the PatriotOne substack, The Free Press Report wrote “I woke up this morning and the @TrackerTrial account on Twitter was suspended. All the other accounts that I have made in the past were also suspended.”

According to a screen shot provided in the Substack article, the @TrackerTrial account was suspended for allegedly breaking Twitter’s “rules against platform manipulation and spam.”

“The @TrackerTrial account was the largest account on Twitter that specifically tracked the Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein trial.”

The Free Press Report noted that all other accounts previously created by the same user were banned, including another popular account that tracked Nancy Pelosi’s stock market purchases and sales.

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Military Officers: To Combat ‘Disinformation,’ The Government And Its Big Tech Buddies Should Tell You What To Think

Four military officers who describe themselves as “researchers” at the Army’s highly respected Cyber Institute have published an article that adds to the growing concern about the ongoing politicization of the military. Published by the military’s National Defense University (NDU), their article purports to analyze the dangers of misinformation and disinformation and to advise the Biden administration about how to counter it.

The article’s authors all are military officers and at least two are professors at West Point. They say their article “is written in response to the Capitol insurrection.”

Ironically, the article is itself misinformation. That this misinformation is published by military officers associated with two highly prestigious institutions, the NDU and the Cyber Institute, makes it all the more inappropriate and dangerous.

The article attempts to address a real and dangerous issue: how mis- and disinformation can endanger national security. Preparing for and combatting disinformation is a complex issue that involves disciplines from sociology and psychology to highly technical cyberwarfare issues.

The difference between misinformation and disinformation is generally understood to be a matter of intent; disinformation is intentionally and maliciously deceptive. Disinformation is as old as warfare itself; only the techniques vary. The U.S. military has been practicing and studying it and related disciplines for many years. Misinformation has been a staple of military operations since the days of the Trojan horse and Sun Tzu.

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YouTube CEO says content censorship is “consistent” for all creators, contradicting previous statements

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has defended the company’s moderation and censorship decisions in an interview as being consistently implemented for all creators in the same way – but that sits at odds with the reality of the platform’s policy which promotes what it considers “authoritative sources” over independent creators.

Wojcicki herself in the past admitted that legacy media are allowed to post content that would otherwise fall into the “hate speech” category because they provide their own “context” for it. This would mean that the same moderation rules therefore do not apply to all.

But speaking for Marketplace, Wojcicki claims that censorship (“moderation”) decisions are not taken lightly, and are applied in a consistent manner that doesn’t discriminate between creators.

She also used the fact both sides in the US political divide criticize YouTube (one side saying there is too much censorship, deplatforming and other kinds of restrictions, while the other believes there isn’t enough) as proof that YouTube is getting it right and “striking a balance.”

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An FDA Official Demanded Google Censor A YouTube Video The Agency Didn’t Like

Federal efforts to censor social media extend past discussions with companies like YouTube over broad guidelines about Covid-19 “misinformation” to specific demands for suppression of individual posts, an email from an FDA official reveals.

In the April 30 email, the Food and Drug Administration director of social media, Brad Kimberly, told a Google lobbyist about that the agency expected YouTube to pull a video touting the potential of a new monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid. (Google owns YouTube.)

“Overall, the video is very problematic when it comes to COVID misinformation,” Kimberly wrote to the lobbyist, Jan Fowler Antonaros.

“This video should be pulled.”

YouTube initially declined to remove the video. However, it has since been taken offline.

How often the FDA has made other censorship demands is unknown, because the agency is apparently hiding the existence of its efforts in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

In October, I asked the FDA and several government agencies to disclose both their internal discussions about me and their communications with social media companies like Twitter and YouTube about censoring Covid “misinformation” in general.

On Nov. 30, the FDA responded it had found some emails about me – mainly in response to questions I had asked in April and May for a story about VAERS, the federal vaccine adverse events reporting system. But FDA said it could not find any emails between its officials and social media companies that met my request.

Yet at the bottom of the emails containing the agency’s discussions about me was the email between Kimberly and Antonaros – apparently attached there by accident, as it had nothing to do with me.

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Orwellian Facebook censorship strikes again

Facebook’s fake fact checkers, working on behalf of various money interests, have long been known to ignore blatant false information when it’s put out by favored government, public health officials or other special interests as long as it’s on-the-narrative.

And they censor factual information.

It’s a dynamic that might even make George Orwell shake his head and say, “Even I never predicted it would be this blatant, and allowed to continue.”

Now, a new tale under the category of “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Facebook banned a post I made that was nothing more than a factual citation of a historical quote from Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels.

It was posted entirely without comment. But a fair read of it would be to infer how dangerous and powerful false propaganda can be.

How that becomes worthy of censorship can only be explained in today’s highly-managed information landscape where facts are not to be heard and read if the chosen minders don’t want people to know them and share them.

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Meta asks users to send nudes

Meta, the new name for Facebook Inc., has co-developed a platform that asks people to submit their intimate photos and videos in order to prevent them from being used as ‘revenge porn’ on Facebook or Instagram.

The tool is for “adults over 18 years old who think an intimate image of them may be shared, or has already been shared, without their consent,” Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday.

The new platform, which Meta developed together with the UK Revenge Porn Helpline and 50 other NGOs, aims to prevent the publication of ‘revenge porn’, rather than just removing the delicate files after they’ve already appeared online.

Concerned users are being asked to submit photos or videos of themselves naked or having sex to a hash-tagging database through the StopNCII.org (Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Images) website.

The special hashtags, or “digital fingerprints,” are then assigned to those materials by the tool, and can be used to instantly detect and curb attempts to upload them online by the perpetrators.

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Twitter labels American Heart Association link as ‘unsafe’ over Covid vaccines

Twitter is flagging an American Heart Association website link as ‘unsafe’ after the organization published an abstract of research linking Covid-19 vaccines to heart disease.

The abstract of the study looking into a possible correlation between mRNA Covid shots and heart inflammation was published in one of the Association’s journals, Circulation, on November 16. The research points to a 14-point rise in the risk of acute coronary syndrome within five years in those who have been injected with this type of vaccine, concluding that the “mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

It is worth noting, however, that while the American Heart Association did publish the abstract, it later attached an “expression of concern” to the study over “potential errors” in it. Among other things, it cites the author’s reliance on anecdotal data and a lack of statistical analyses. The Association warned the “abstract in its current version may not be reliable.” On top of that, the study has yet to be peer-reviewed.

Twitter’s ‘unsafe’ label was up until recently reserved for webpages thought to contain viruses and malware; its use has, however, now been extended to also cover cases where ‘misleading content’ is suspected.

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YouTube censors Dr. Fauci satire song video

YouTube censored and demonetized a song criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci. The platform claimed that the song violated its policy on medical misinformation.

The song, called “Sad Little Man” by Five Times August, accuses Fauci of lying. It references experiments performed on beagles that the Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was accused of funding.

The song also says people worship Dr. Fauci, accepting everything he says.

The video of the song contains animated images of Fauci in a crown, clown shoes, and at some point with devil’s horns.

Speaking to The Federalist, the writer of the song and member of the Five Times August band Brad Skistimas said that the video was temporarily removed. The removal came after it started going viral following a mention by radio host Glenn Beck.

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