Tag: big tech

Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook

Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.

“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.

Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.

When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.

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Fact-checkers demand YouTube censor more content, boost “credible information”

Despite Big Tech censorship being at an all-time high, at GlobalFact 9, a fact-checking conference organized by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), YouTube was blasted for its failure to address “mis- and disinformation.”

IFCN had previously published an open letter to YouTube, asking the platform to do more to address the spread of misinformation.

“As an international network of fact-checking organizations, we monitor how lies spread online — and every day, we see that YouTube is one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide. This is a significant concern among our global fact-checking community,” the IFCN wrote in the letter signed by over 100 fact-checking organizations.

During the fact-checking conference, several fact-checking organizations expressed similar sentiments.

“YouTube does not seem to raise accurate, credible information in its algorithms. We have had a lot of experience with YouTube making videos of fact-checking content. It doesn’t seem to do very well,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact. “I think most news organizations are extremely frustrated with your platform.”

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Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements

All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.

Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you’ve ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I’m talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you’re effectively influencing someone’s experience of reality.

The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they’re all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They’re all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire’s narrative control system.

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Twitter bans epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Bostom who linked to vaccine-sperm study

Dr. Andrew Bostom, an epidemiologist who had over 47,000 followers and who was a significant dissenting figure during the coronavirus pandemic, has been permanently banned from Twitter after posting a peer-reviewed study on Covid vaccination effects.

According to a screenshot posted by free-market policy analyst and political organizer Phil Kerpen, Dr. Bostom was locked out for linking to an Israeli study titled “COVID-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors.”

Dr. Bostom made several appearances in the media and qualified as an expert witness in epidemiology in a lawsuit filed by parents against an executive order in Rhode Island requiring children to wear masks in schools.

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THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF TWEETS: TWITTER IS HIRING AN ALARMING NUMBER OF FBI AGENTS

Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.

Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace. “The FBI’s investigative authority is the broadest of all federal law enforcement agencies,” the “About” section of its website informs readers. “The FBI has divided its investigations into a number of programs, such as domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence [and] cyber crime,” it adds.

For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.

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Google Worker Fired For Blowing The Whistle on ‘Spiritual Organization’ Within Company That’s Been Accused of Sex Trafficking

Google fired one of its employees for blowing the whistle on a “doomsday” cult-like “spiritual organization” within the company.

The employee, Kevin Lloyd, a video producer who worked in the Google Developer Studio, is now suing the tech giant, claiming he was unfairly fired in retaliation after he raised alarm about the religious group.

Lloyd warns the group called the Fellowship of Friends has increasingly gained power at the company by hiring members of its cult-like organization to fill key positions.

Members of the Fellowship of Friends believe they are called to create a new civilization following a doomsday event and implores its followers to attain enlightenment to transcend a state of “waking sleep” state.  The group, which has approximately 1,500 members internationally,  also believes enlightenment is attained by embracing arts including ballet, painting, opera and wine. Friends of Fellowship

The alleged cult-like organization, which collects 10 percent of its’ members’ income, was founded in the 1970s by Robert Earl Burton, who has been sued for sexually assaulting male members of the group.

“Once you become aware of this, you become responsible,” Kevin Lloyd told the New York Times while recounting his decision to sound the alarm on the group’s infiltration of Google. “You can’t look away.”

In his lawsuit, which was filed in a Californian Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd claims Peter Lubbersthe, director of the Google Developer Studio and a member of Fellowship of Friends, is funneling money from Google to enrich the religious organization and that he was wrongfully terminated for informing his supervisors about the issue.

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Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok and more just signed the EU’s “anti-disinformation” code

Big Tech companies have signed a new version of the European Union’s “anti-disinformation” code. Some of the companies that signed include Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok, and Twitch – but also smaller players such as Vimeo and Clubhouse.

There are 34 signatories in total:

Apple declined to sign.

The “code of practice on disinformation,” will require online platforms to show how they are tackling “harmful content.”

It will also require platforms to fight “harmful misinformation” by forming partnerships with fact-checkers and developing tools. They will be forced to include “indicators of trustworthiness” on information verified independently on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Perhaps the most notable requirement is providing their efforts to tackle harmful content and disinformation on a country-by-country basis. The move was opposed by online platforms, but national regulators demanded that they need more specific data to better address the spread of disinformation.

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Google plots to curb the effectiveness of ad-blockers

It’s common for corporations to take actions that ultimately are to the detriment of most consumers and Google is one of the world’s biggest. The tech giant is making changes to its Chrome Web Store, specifically an end to supporting Manifest v2 (Mv2) extensions, which will make it more difficult for adblockers to operate.

Currently, Mv2 supports all extensions on the Chrome Web Store, including ad-blocker extensions such as uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc. Ad-blockers are extremely popular features of the Chrome Web Store with millions of currently active users due to their functionality in blocking ads and maintaining privacy. However, starting in January 2023, Google will shift from Mv2 to Mv3, making most of these popular features obsolete.

The shift wouldn’t make it entirely impossible to adapt existing extensions; however, Mv3 would certainly reduce the functionality of ad-blockers and limit innovation in the ad blocking space.

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PayPal and Etsy ban evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright

Dr. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, has been banned from PayPal and Etsy. The online financial service and e-commerce platform did not specify why he was banned.

At the end of May, Dr. Wright provided an expert declaration for the Women’s Liberation Front, which is working to protect single-sex prisons.

“The only factual, objective meaning of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are as references to adult human females, and adult human males, respectively,” Wright wrote in the declaration.

“From an objective standpoint, a person’s subjective feelings do not define or change their sex, which is factually and statically either male or female, determined before birth, and defined by objective reproductive anatomy.”

Dr. Wright announced the PayPal ban on Twitter, saying that he used the service to receive both recurring and one-time donations from his supporters.

PayPal wrote to Dr. Wright that, “after a review, we have decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

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A Google employee warns that the company’s AI has become sentient

A senior artificial intelligence (AI) software engineer at Google has claimed that the company’s AI robotics system has become sentient and has thoughts and feelings.

Google’s AI system, known as the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), allegedly took part in a series of complex conversations with Blake Lemoine, the 41-year-old software specialist, the Daily Mail reported.

Lemoine claimed that he and LaMDA had discussions that covered religious themes and whether the AI system could be goaded into using discriminatory language or other forms of distasteful rhetoric.

The software engineer came away with the belief that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was filled with sensations and original thoughts of its own design.

In a recent interview, Lemoine said, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”

In order to present the evidence he had collected that detailed LaMDA’s sentience, Lemoine worked with a collaborator and presented the findings to the company. Reportedly, Google’s vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the company’s head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, dismissed the claims and concerns.

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