Tag: big tech

WHISTLEBLOWER: Facebook Internal Docs Likely Show How Tech Giant Blacklisted Kyle Rittenhouse

In order to do this, Facebook likely exploited a loophole that allowed them to skate around their terms of service and selectively moderate content. Internal documents shared with National File by Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig shine light on these practices.

Hartwig worked on Facebook’s content moderation team while employed at a company called Cognizant from 2018-2020 until he eventually blew the whistle after realizing the platform’s content moderation efforts pushed political agendas and punished those who disagree. Hartwig now says he believes he knows the mechanisms Facebook used to purge all positive mention of Kyle Rittenhouse.

According to Hartwig, Facebook most likely branded the Kenosha shootings as a “mass murder”, then used that designation to purge pro-Rittenhouse content under the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy.

“In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook,” reads the policy rationale.

Facebook will assess organizations both online and offline in order to gauge the likelihood of groups or individuals causing real world harm. Groups that fall under the dangerous organizations policy include terrorist organizations, “hate organizations”, organized crime syndicates such as drug cartels, and multiple-victim murderers.

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Facebook Employees Pushed Company To Exclude Criticism Of White People, Men From Hate Speech Rules

Facebook employees urged executives to exclude criticism directed towards white people and men from the company’s hate speech policies, according to internal documents reported on by The Washington Post.

Facebook researchers tried to change the company’s content moderation algorithms that automatically delete hate speech, because they viewed the algorithms as inadequately protecting minority users, The Washington Post reported, citing internal memos and research. The effort came following a document from April 2020 which showed that around 90% of hate speech algorithms were detecting and removing content directed towards white people and men.

Researchers argued that these figures indicated bias in Facebook’s automatic deletion algorithms because the content reported to be the most “harmful” or “the worst of the worst” was more often directed at minority groups, the Post reported.

The employees then urged Facebook executives, including the vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, to ditch Facebook’s “race-blind” hate speech algorithms which did not discriminate based on the race to which the hate speech was directed, according to the Post. Instead, the researchers pushed for algorithms that automatically removed hate speech directed only towards black people, Jews, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims and people of multiple races.

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Social Media Companies Suppressed Claims of Kyle Rittenhouse’s Innocence

Social media platforms rendered a verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse long before he went to trial, suppressing claims that he was innocent and blocking users from searching for details of the case.

Immediately after the anti-police riots that thrust Rittenhouse into the national spotlight, social media companies began to block users who expressed support for the Illinois teen. Twitter suspended the accounts of users who called Rittenhouse innocent, including the defendant’s own lawyer. Facebook said it “designated this shooting as a mass murder and … removed the shooter’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram.” The platform also blocked searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse.”

Social media platforms often intervene to suppress posts expressing a particular stance on controversial issues. Both platforms censored news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the month before the 2020 election. Facebook blocked a Gold Star mother’s criticism of President Joe Biden and suppressed a song that criticized the president. Twitter and Facebook also suspended users who oppose vaccine mandates.

The fundraising platform GoFundMe also removed a page set up to support Rittenhouse, which the company said violated its ban on fundraisers involving “the legal defense of alleged crimes associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance.” GoFundMe supported fundraising for the family of one of Rittenhouse’s assailants, Anthony Huber. The site regularly hosts fundraisers for individuals associated with Black Lives Matter. ​

When smaller platforms began raising funds for Rittenhouse, hackers breached the donation lists. News outlets doxxed paramedics and police officers who gave small donations to Rittenhouse’s defense.

Twitter is still banning or suspending users for supporting Rittenhouse, even as the trial proceeds. Facebook searches for Rittenhouse’s name turn up no results. Neither platform responded to requests for comment.

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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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