Tag: big tech

Aspen Disinformation Group Includes Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Story

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute’s disinformation commission.

Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen’s Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice’s reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.

Commission members’ censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The commission blamed “decreasing levels of public trust” in public institutions for the crisis, which it dubs a “whole-of-society problem that can have life-or-death consequences.” Its report calls for Congress and the White House to take action to counteract disinformation.

Roth, the head of site integrity at Twitter, blocked access to an Oct. 14, 2020, New York Post article regarding emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Roth told the Federal Elections Commission he blocked the story in part because the intelligence community had briefed him that foreign governments might release hacked materials prior to the election. No evidence has emerged that Biden’s laptop was stolen or hacked, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has since acknowledged that the company should not have blocked links to the story.

The Aspen Commission report criticizes Twitter and other social media companies for failures to rein in disinformation but does not cite Twitter’s censorship of the Biden article.

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Instagram censors highly regarded Cochrane Collaboration for medical “misinformation”

Instagram has censored the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit organization focused on medical research, for spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19.

In an effort to stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus, social media platforms have been censoring content that contradicts the stance of public health bodies, including the CDC and WHO. However, by playing the role of arbiters of truth, online platforms have ended up censoring trustworthy sources.

The latest example of overzealous and rash censorship affected the Cochrane Collaboration on Instagram. The platform prohibited users from mentioning the organization because it “repeatedly posted content that goes against our community guidelines on false content about COVID-19 or vaccines.”

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international team of over 30,000 experts who publish high-quality reviews on medical topics. The organization had published over 7,000 systematic reviews.

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Instagram Bans All Mention of James O’Keefe & Project Veritas

Project Veritas and founder James O’Keefe can no longer even be mentioned on Instagram following the FBI’s raid on his home and organization headquarters earlier this month.

When one tries to tag the whistleblower organization or O’Keefe on the platform, a notification pops up stating they can’t be mentioned because they have “repeatedly posted content that goes against our Community Guidelines on false content about COVID-19 or vaccines.”

Veritas has recently released a series of damning videos of government officials and pharmaceutical executives admitting in their own words that they covered up data about vaccine side effects and that the vaccines were not as effective as natural immunity.

This comes just days after the FBI raided O’Keefe’s private residence and his organization’s headquarters over charges they had stolen the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden.

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According to Facebook (Meta), the metaverse will be censored

The Facebook executive spearheading the company’s virtual reality efforts hopes to create virtual worlds with “almost Disney levels of safety” but has also acknowledged that moderation “at any meaningful scale is almost impossible.”

Facebook’s parent company Meta is working on creating virtual reality worlds where people will socialize, work, game, and even do shopping using 3D avatars of themselves.

In an internal memo, obtained by the Financial Times, Andrew Bosworth, who will be spearheading Meta’s $10 billion “metaverse” project, alleged that virtual reality can potentially be a “toxic environment,” especially for minorities and women.

The memo notes that content and behavior censorship and moderation could be a big challenge, especially given the company’s poor record in fighting “harmful” content.

“The psychological impact on humans is much greater,” said Kavya Pearlman, chief executive of the XR Safety Initiative, a non-profit focused on developing safety standards for VR, augmented and mixed reality. She further explained that users would retain what happened in the metaverse like it happened in reality.

Bosworth outlined a plan that the company could use to tackle the issue, but experts have noted that policing behavior in a virtual reality setting requires a lot of resources and might not even be possible.

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YouTube Temporarily Suspends Sen. Johnson’s Channel Over Vaccine Injury Panel

YouTube has again suspended Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) channel over a roundtable that featured people who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines and experts discussing the shots.

“For the 5th time this year, YouTube is censoring me from telling you the truth. This time they don’t want you to hear 3.5 hours of stories from doctors, scientists, and the vaccine injured,” Johnson said in a statement.

A 34-minute portion from the roundtable, held on Nov. 2, is still available for viewing on YouTube. The full version is up on Rumble, a YouTube competitor.

The roundtable stretched for nearly four hours. It included multiple people who say they suffered severe side effects from COVID-19 vaccines, including Theresa Long, an Army lieutenant colonel, and several experts, including Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.

A YouTube spokesperson told The Hill that the suspension stemmed from Johnson citing statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System, a passive system run by federal authorities. Public health officials have repeatedly encouraged Americans to submit possible adverse events to the system for review.

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After Cheerleading Censorship for Years, WaPo Now On Receiving End of It, And They’re Pissed

In 2017, the Washington Post made an announcement that they are making their newspaper’s slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This slogan, while true, was incredibly ironic and hypocritical as the newspaper has long championed the censorship of their political rivals. If only one side of an argument is allowed to be heard, this is hardly democracy, yet it is the policy of those at the WaPo.

Not to long after proclaiming that democracy dies in the darkness, the WaPo waged a massive campaign of censorship symbolically blowing out candles to ensure their political rivals “die in darkness.” It started with Alex Jones and a hit piece calling for his removal from social media titled “Facebook Wants To Cut Down On Misinformation. So Why Isn’t It Doing Anything About InfoWars”

But even before they changed their motto, WaPo had long championed censorship and they had no problem using lies to achieve these means. In 2016, the Free Thought Project was brought up in the WaPo, who claimed — with zero evidence — that we were part of a Russian propaganda effort to “spread fake news” during the election.

Citing the now-heavily discredited “think tank” known as Prop or Not, the post claimed TFTP and dozens of other news media websites “got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”

Clearly no one cared to look at our articles at the time which criticized both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What’s more, despite being completely disproven and despite the entire ‘Russian meddling’ narrative crashing into ashes earlier this month, the article remains up on their website. 

WaPo’s calls for censoring their political rivals are as numerous as they are scandalous and continue this very day. Just this week, WaPo published a piece demanding that Big Tech immediately censor anyone who challenges the establishment’s narrative on climate change.

The WaPo has even gone so far as to push for modifying the actual First Amendment’s provision for free speech. Yes, they advocated for changing the very constitution of the United States to remove speech they didn’t like. Of course this was done in the vein of “preventing hate speech” but they completely ignored the inevitable effects of such lunacy.

“Yes, the First Amendment protects the “thought that we hate,” but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another,” the article read.

But there are already laws on the books against inciting violence toward others. Not to mention, the WaPo has long pushed “hateful speech” that incites violence against groups with which they disagree. In fact, just last year, the paper took a page straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook which was used to demonize Jews and used it to dehumanize Trump supporters — as rats who should be exterminated.

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Facebook partners with New Zealand media for funding, will help outlets censor “false comments”

Facebook’s parent company Meta has launched a program to “support” journalism in New Zealand and has made a new commitment to managing “defamation.”

The aim of the program is presented as a way to help media organizations in New Zealand create sustainable business models.

The program includes a Grant Fund, Audience Development Accelerator, the creation of a News Innovation Advisory Group, and the provision of digital training focused on engagement for news organizations.

According to Facebook’s head of public policy for Australia and New Zealand Mia Garlick, the program will involve 12 media organizations with regionally, culturally, and digitally diverse publications. The idea is that these organizations will “come together and try to innovate and learn from experts and really collaborate on new strategies to drive business growth both on and off Facebook.”

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Open letter asks Big Tech to collude to censor climate change “misinformation”

Pressure continues from varied corners on Big Tech to make the climate issue the next big target of censorship on their global social media platforms, this time with the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) chiming in.

An open letter from this group – whose manifestos center around things like anti-ad fraud, diversity, children’s well being, and misinformation – is demanding from Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other major tech companies, as well as those gathered for the COP26 summit in Glasgow (whose own legitimacy is undermined by major countries relevant to the climate problem snubbing it) to work together.

They are urged to essentially take on what would be the self-styled role of arbiters who can produce a definition of what climate misinformation is.

Other than having CAN’s backing, the letter presents the idea as having a broad enough consensus among stakeholders around the world that would provide these entities with legitimacy to come up with such a definition, since 250 signatories have supported it – including Ben and Jerry’s, and Virgin Media.

But once they agree on a definition, and make sure it is “clear and universal,” the group says, that definition should be used as a tool to censor online ads and content that go against the climate change narrative, which is referred to in the letter as “facts.”

So far, Google is said to be a leading Big Tech supporter of CAN’s ideas since it is already banning and demonetizing content that it sees as going against “well-established scientific consensus” around climate change. In essence, Google didn’t even have to wait for CAN to spearhead the search for a “clear and universal” definition – they already have one.

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Instagram censors suggestions Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense

Musician and podcaster Jordan Sarmo has announced that Instagram deleted his post about Kyle Rittenhouse, a teen who is on trial for first degree murder of two men – that he says he committed in self-defense, as he was being chased and feared for his life.

But the case has become just the latest in a flurry of highly divisive issues plaguing US society, and mainstream social media seem to have chosen to err on the side of censorship and stifle any voices supporting Rittenhouse, even though the trial is still in progress and he is therefore presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Sarmo’s post that Instagram censored showed Rittenhouse break down in tears while he was testifying about the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the rioting in the summer of 2020.

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Twitter disables retweet function on Rittenhouse mother’s tweet condemning Big Tech censorship of her son

Kyle Rittenhouse, who is currently facing trial for shooting three men, killing two of them, on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, was branded as a “white supremacist” from the beginning by left-wing politicians and personalities.

His trial has done much to back the claims of self-defense that his defense attorneys are arguing, yet Twitter has disabled the retweet function on a tweet by Rittenhouse’s mother stating that media had lied about her son and condeming Big Tech’s attempts to “crush & deplatform” the young defendant.

“The media & many who know better viciously lied about my son from he start. Tech companies tried to crush & deplatform @freekyleusa over 20x, often w/o explanation,” wrote Wendy Rittenhouse.

“We are facing tremendous expenses to help Kyle win this case & could use your help,” she continued, linking to a donation page.

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