How to tell the difference…
Tag: big tech
About that Facebook whistleblower…
FACEBOOK’S SECRET BLACKLIST OF “DANGEROUS INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS”
TO WARD OFF accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.
The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on “organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity.” This modest rule has since ballooned into what’s known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale.
In recent years, the policy has been used at a more rapid clip, including against the president of the United States, and taken on almost totemic power at the social network, trotted out to reassure the public whenever paroxysms of violence, from genocide in Myanmar to riots on Capitol Hill, are linked to Facebook. Most recently, following a damning series of Wall Street Journal articles showing the company knew it facilitated myriad offline harms, a Facebook vice president cited the policy as evidence of the company’s diligence in an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.
But as with other attempts to limit personal freedoms in the name of counterterrorism, Facebook’s DIO policy has become an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities, critics say. It is built atop a blacklist of over 4,000 people and groups, including politicians, writers, charities, hospitals, hundreds of music acts, and long-dead historical figures.
Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor
Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week’s anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a “whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.
The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen’s star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook’s dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.
There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google’s YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden’s business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.
But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party’s ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.
Oh no!
Twitter backtracks after censoring a mother’s obituary
Twitter’s fact-checkers appended a “misleading” alert to an obituary about a young woman who allegedly died after contracting a rare blood-clotting condition provoked by the COVID-19 vaccine.
After being accused of going so far with its censorship that it would resort to censoring an obituary, Twitter relented to the backlash and reversed the censorship.
The woman in question, Jessica Berg Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of two, died in the first week of September from Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, a rare blood disorder in which small clots grow throughout the body, damaging platelets and preventing blood from reaching key organs. According to her obituary, Wilson’s greatest life ambition was to “be the best mother possible” to her daughters Bridget and Clara.
“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat,” it read.
Kelly Bee, a Twitter user, posted Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary with the statement, “an ‘exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions,’ passed away from COVID Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia. She did not want to get vaccinated.”
Twitter Fact Checkers Just Revealed Their Whole Entire Backside as Shameless Shills For Big Pharma
Fact checkers at Twitter and elsewhere furiously took to their keyboards yesterday in defense of America’s Big Pharma Covid profiteers. This time, the fact checkers circled the wagons around Pfizer, which is developing an expensive drug that serves a suspiciously similar function to the cheap, time-tested, generic drug ivermectin. This time, Twitter’s approved fact checkers trafficked in deception, misinformation, and carefully worded lies, as they so often do, in order to “debunk” an article from ZeroHedge.
Let’s dissect their work.
Here is what Twitter highlighted at the top of their “fact check”:
Pfizer is not developing a version of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, according to fact-checkers and medical professionals
A new oral drug being produced by Pfizer is not a repackaged version of the antibacterial medication often used to prevent parasites in animals, according to PolitiFact, Snopes and Full Fact. While the drugs share similar functions and effects, this does not mean they are identical or interchangeable, according to fact-checkers. Pfizer’s new oral drug “is not similar to that of an animal medicine and is not the same mechanism,” according to a statement from the company.
Further on down the page, Twitter deigned to tell us “What We Need to Know.” Thanks, Twitter!
What you need to know
– Pfizer told Snopes that the new drug is “designed to block the activity of the main protease enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate”
– Dr. Stephen Griffin, a virologist at Leeds Institute of Medical Research, told Full Fact that the two drugs “are extremely structurally different”
– Health agencies around the globe have declined to authorize ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, and studies on its potential use have been inconclusive, according to FactCheck.org
Here’s more from the Twitter-approved fact checkers, who we can obviously trust so much. They are overly fixated on the fact that ivermectin and the new Pfizer drug do not share the same chemical structures.
So, Twitter and our highly trusted “Fact Checkers” tell us that the two drugs are totally different, because they have a different chemical structure, which makes the Zero Hedge totally false, right? An open and shut case?
Enlightened Algos: Democrats Demand Increased Corporate Controls To Protect Citizens From Their Own Dangerous Curiosities
Below is my column in USA Today on the recent call by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) for Amazon to steer readers to “true” books on climate change. It is the latest example of Democrat’s embracing a type of corporate governance model to carry out tasks barred to the government under the Constitution. Companies are now being asked to protect us from our own dangerous interests and inquiries. An array of enlightened algorithms will now watch over citizens to help them make good choices and read “true” things.
Two centuries ago, rulers sought to convince subjects that they should embrace the notion of “enlightened despotism,” living without rights under the beneficent watch of overlords. Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II summed up the idea with the maxim “everything for the people, nothing by the people.”
Today, we seem to be living in an age of enlightened corporate despotism, where social media and technology companies watch over what we read and what we discuss to protect us from ourselves.
That corporate governance model was on display this month when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called on Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to use algorithms to steer readers away from books that spew “misinformation.”
Enlightened algorithms are already responsible for large-scale censorship across social media platforms that reach global audiences. They “stand the wall” as sentinels against dangerous ideas.
Warren argued that people were not listening to the enlightened views of herself and leading experts.
Instead, they were reading views of vaccine skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books, including “falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures, including those written by the most prominent spreaders of misinformation.”
Warren blamed Amazon for failing to limit searches or choices:
“This pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.”
In her letter, Warren gave the company 14 days to change its algorithms to throttle and obstruct efforts to read opposing views.
What was most striking about this incident is that Warren was eager for others to see her efforts to promote a form of censorship.
YouTube will now ban misinformation on all common vaccines, not just those for COVID-19
YouTube is now blocking several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists like Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy, and banning any videos that claim “commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The video platform had previously blocked misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, but not videos that made erroneous or misleading claims about vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox, per the Post.
YouTube Vice President of Global Trust and Safety Matt Halprin said the company did not act sooner because of its myopic focus on COVID-19 vaccines. Its ban was expanded when YouTube realized misinformation regarding other vaccines was contributing to that regarding the COVID vaccine. “Developing robust policies takes time,” said Halprin.
Internet ‘freedom’ at its lowest in 11 years: study
The internet is an increasingly unwelcome place for many. A new study suggests that online “freedom” is in decline — for two very different reasons, depending on who you ask.
The annual report by Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group, said this year is the 11th consecutive to see a global internet freedom decline.
The “Freedom on the Net” report rates countries on a 100-point scale, with the bottom considered least free. This year, scores internationally range from as low as 10 points in China to 96 points in Iceland. Scores 71 and above are designated “free,” while scores below 40 are “not free”; everything in the middle is considered “partly free.”
Considerations made in scoring include the extent to which free speech is legally protected, the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech and whether government authorities were known to target individual users, such as in India or Hungary where journalists and activists have been hit with state-supported spyware.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.