Tag: big tech

Twitter’s ‘Safety Mode’ is just a new way to silence opponents to the tech giant’s woke social justice agenda

Ever keen to be seen doing more about online abuse among its users, Twitter has decided to nobble free speech with a novelty ‘Safety Mode’ button, which might reduce offence. Exactly what ‘offence’ means is up to the tech giant.

Something about Twitter has long irritated me, not so much the platform itself but the smug self-righteousness of a bunch of tech nerds adopting the moral high ground over the inalienable right to free speech.

I’m not just talking about Jack Dorsey and his Silicon Valley sidekicks who blocked Donald Trump’s social media account, but about their woke-fevered, sanctimonious, purse-lipped wowserish approach in imposing their own values in judging what should and shouldn’t be allowed to be said within their software apps.

Now, using the pretext of “Safety” –I mean, gimme a break– Twitter has announced a new “Safety Mode” which will automatically block, for seven days, “accounts that add unwanted replies, Quote Tweets and mentions to your convos.” Seven days. Smiley face with tears emoji.

Firstly, if unwanted replies or mentions on Twitter are the sort of thing that spoil your day, then might I suggest, my little snowflake friend, that social media is not the place for you. And if you believe that your life will be enhanced because you chose to switch on “Safety Mode,” then more fool you for signing up to the latest tech that implicitly denies the right to free speech.

Because Twitter has turned taking offence into a maths problem. No one is actually reading your tweets or replies to figure out if offence was caused – intentionally or otherwise – no, as a senior product manager explained, “When the feature is turned on in your Settings, our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier.”

Our systems, hey? What sort of systems are they? And what sort of data will they be trawling through, analysing, keeping and using in the future? Just one click on a little green button on your phone can forever change your relationship with Twitter and the way they target you with their insidious promotions. Think about that.

That fatal click could also blow a real human-to-human relationship out of the water. Twitter’s bot decides you’ve been slighted and the offender it identifies is sin-binned for seven days. While you can unblock, it’s too late, the damage is done. They were deemed ‘abusive’ before Twitter came to the rescue and they were silenced. Now you have to pick up the pieces.

It sounds petty, but it’s the prim, disapproving nanny looking over your shoulder that gets my goat. No one voted for anyone at Twitter to monitor the public discourse on social justice and that’s exactly where you know they’ll be targeting their bots. Discussions on race, gender and even climate change will most likely be judged on Twitter’s terms, the conversation manipulated by an algorithm so that those voices taking the most offence prevail in the debate and those that dissent are simply labelled ‘abusive’ and silenced.

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Facebook and Google Partner Compiles Report On How to Manipulate People To Get The Vaccine Using Their Reputation, Public Image, Shopping Habits, Religion

A Facebook and Google partner that uses artificial intelligence to compile data from tracking people’s web history has put together a report that outlines ways to mentally program people to get the Coronavirus vaccine. NATIONAL FILE has obtained a copy of the cynical report from Resonate, a company based in Reston, Virginia in the Washington, D.C. area that goes out of its way to denounce “racism” and employs executives who previously worked for the Washington Post, AOL and other corporations. The report is called Moving The Needle: How To Reach The Vaccine-Hesitant And Resistant. The report gives tips on how to manipulate people’s values of “safety,” “reputation and public image,” “social clout,” and even their religion and shopping habits to coerce them to get the vaccine. The report explicitly states, “DRAW THEM TO VACCINATION SITES BASED ON THEIR SHOPPING PREFERENCES.” The report also compiles information on the children of vaccine-hesitant people and vaccine resisters.
Resonate’s listed partners include Facebook and Google. Resonate acknowledges that its data collection allows its clients to “gain a deeper understanding of every consumer who engages with your digital media presence across all platforms including Facebook, Linkedin, etc.” This Facebook and Google partner has used people’s personal information to build an extremely creepy profile of the “Vaccine-Hesitant” community. And Resonate makes it clear that they are tracking people’s “web traffic” in order to build their research. Here are some screenshots from Resonate’s website describing how they get their information from “web traffic” and how they partner with Facebook, Google, Oracle, and others.

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Twitter Permanently Bans Alex Berenson After Viral COVID Tweets

It was never a matter of if, but when.

Science journalist Alex Berenson has been permanently suspended from Twitter, just one day after a viral series of tweets spotlighting an Israeli preprint study which showed that natural immunity from a prior Covid-19 infection is 13 times more effective than vaccines against the delta variant.

“The account you referenced has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told Fox News.

The last tweet he posted, meanwhile, accurately noted that the vaccine “doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission.”

“Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” he added. “Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.”

“And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

“This was the tweet that did it. Entirely accurate. I can’t wait to hear what a jury will make of this,” wrote Berenson on his substack blog, Unreported Truths.

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Twitter Locks House Candidate Jarome Bell’s Account Because Taliban Has ‘Recognized Right to Privacy’ When They Execute People

Virginia Congressional candidate Jarome Bell was locked out of his Twitter account after posting a Taliban execution video, because the Big Tech site determined that Afghan terrorists have a “recognized right to privacy.”

Conservatives and others across the political spectrum have been critical of the Joe Biden administration over the chaos that has resulted from the attempt to pull US troops out of Afghanistan. One of them was Jarome Bell, a candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 2nd District. “These men assisted our troops and were left behind with over 15000 Americans,” Bell wrote on Twitter, attaching a video of Taliban fighters executing men who were believed to have worked with American and Allied forces in the country. “This will be Joe Biden’s legacy and the democrats and some of you approve of this message.”

As a result, Bell’s Twitter account was locked, with the Big Tech platform seemingly determining that the video of Taliban executions violated the privacy of those involved. Specifically, Bell’s tweet allegedly violated their rules on “posting private media of an individual from a country with a recognized right to privacy law.” It is unclear how this could be the case, given that the Afghanistan government and therefore any regime that could implement such a law, has fallen to the Taliban.

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Facebook Reported To Secretly Be Building An Election “Misinformation” Censorship Board

Forming an “election commission” to oversee a fair and smooth election process, until recently, used to be something exclusively reserved for nation states, but now Facebook is reported to be meddling in that domain, at least semantics-wise.

The New York Times reported that the “commission” could be coming this fall, just in time to affect the way US midterm election campaigns are carried out on the giant platform.

The way these announcements are interpreted currently is that the “election commission” will play a role similar to that the Oversight Board already has in dealing with content censorship on Facebook, only clearly focused on election related content.

The Board is referred to as independent, brings together a number of academics and experts, and is ultimately seen by critics as another way for Facebook to wash its hand off the responsibility in how diverse politically and ideologically sensitive content is treated and “moderated.” Another notorious way is Facebook’s third party “fact checkers.”

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US Surgeon General says there’s “not nearly enough” social media censorship

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, criticized social media platforms for not doing enough to stop the spread of “misinformation” online.

“The speed, scale and sophistication with which it is spreading and impacting our health is really unprecedented,” Murthy said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “And it’s happening largely, in part, aided and abetted by social-media platforms.”

The Surgeon General did acknowledge that these platforms were already working to censor but said what they are doing is “not nearly enough.”

“There are people who are super-spreaders of misinformation,” he said. “And there are algorithms, still, which continue to serve up more and more misinformation to people who encounter it the first time. These are things that companies can and must change. And I think they have a moral responsibility to do so quickly and transparently.”

Murthy’s remarks came shortly after Facebook released its “content transparency report,” revealing the most viewed content.

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Facebook Now Sending Messages to Some Users Asking About Potentially ‘Extremist’ Friends

Some Facebook users have recently reported being sent warning messages from the social media giant relating to “extremists” or “extremist content.”

“Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” one message reads. “We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support.”

The message also provides a button to “Get Support,” which leads to another Facebook page about extremism.

Redstate editor Kira Davis, who said was sent a screenshot of the message from a friend, wrote: “Hey has anyone had this message pop up on their FB? My friend (who is not an ideologue but hosts lots of competing chatter) got this message twice. He’s very disturbed.”

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Potential Ohio Legislation Aimed at Curbing Social Media Censorship

Social media companies would not be allowed to censor Ohioans from expressing their views without notifying the user and offering an appeal process or risk being sued under a proposed bill.

Rep. Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, said he plans to introduce legislation that prohibits social media platforms from censoring users unless statements violate state or federal law.

“With social media being a quintessential form of communication these days, this bill is to ensure people’s Constitutional right to freedom of speech is not infringed on,” Cutrona said in a news release. “As Americans, obviously we are not all going to agree with one another on thoughts and ideas, and that’s okay. But it’s surely not the job of Big Tech employees to choose favorites on what deserves censorship based on ambiguous policies and their personal views.”

Cutrona said recent polling has shown the majority of Americans support regulating big tech companies, and he said he has heard concerns about social media platforms banning former President Donald Trump, while allowing Taliban social media accounts to continue.

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One Of Google’s Top Engineers Abandons The Company, Reveals Big Tech Rewrote Algorithms for An Insidious Goal

A Big Tech whistleblower said Google altered its algorithm in order to ensure that negative stories from the establishment media about former Present Donald Trump were what people saw when using the highest-trafficked website on the internet.

Zach Vorhies, who previously worked for Google, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the tech titan specifically tailored its news algorithm to harm the former president.

Vorhies has written a book about his experience working at Google. He said he wanted to “take conspiracy theory and turn it into conspiracy fact” by sharing the practices he saw as a longtime former employee, working on both Google and YouTube projects.

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Biden administration demands Facebook hands over data on “misinformation” and vaccine skeptics

The Biden administration continues to pressure Facebook to collaborate and help it achieve its goals, one of them being to counter COVID vaccine skepticism and get more people in the US vaccinated.

After Biden shockingly denounced Facebook and others as “killing people” because they are allegedly letting COVID misinformation run rampant on their platforms, that pressure now continues in media reports, like the one The Washington Post published, citing three anonymous administration sources.

According to them, The White House and Facebook have had a series of meetings whose aim was to get the social media giant to turn over massive amounts of user data to the government, apparently as a “good will gesture” – since there doesn’t seem to be any legal ground for such a request.

Instead, the “tense” meetings saw the administration’s COVID crew “begging” Facebook to give them access to data showing how many people on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp see content branded as coronavirus misinformation, how many are still undecided whether to get the jab, and also the efficiency of Facebook’s censorship algorithms, i.e., how many people still get to see content that it aims to block.

It’s not obvious why the officials quoted by the article thought Facebook was under obligation to do this, but they accused the company of “hiding, filibustering and deflecting” – while at the same time commending Google and Twitter for apparently being much more accommodating in similar meetings around the same subject.

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