Tag: big tech

How Amazon’s $10 Billion Contract Squabble with the Pentagon Reveals the Shady Nature of Military Contracts

Earlier this month the US Department of Defense (DOD) canceled a $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract awarded to Microsoft in 2019. The goal of the contract was to modernize the Department’s IT operations using cloud computing.

The JEDI cancellation occurred following a lawsuit from Amazon after the company was denied the contract. Amazon alleges that they were rejected because the Department of Defense was pressured by then President Donald Trump to “screw Amazon.” The motivation for this move, it was claimed, was driven by Trump’s personal animus for then-CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

Amazon claims insider sources responsible for the book Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis provide evidence for Trump’s direct intent to “screw Amazon,” but you need not trust another book published by Washington insiders for this story. Trump’s personal problems with Bezos, valid or not, are extremely public. Tweets targeted at Bezos’ include:

“The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.” December 7, 2015.

“If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!” December 7, 2015.

“Really sick to watch the Fake and totally Slanted News(?) coming out of MSDNC and CNN. It bears NO relationship to the Truth or Facts. They are merely offshoots of the DNC, much like the @nytimes and the Amazon @washingtonpost. Just like 2016, but worse. Sad, but we will win big!” June 3rd, 2020.

“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!” August 16, 2017.

Prompted by Amazon’s lawsuit, the DOD launched an investigation that yielded a 317-page report evaluating Amazon’s allegations. The authors claimed that lack of cooperation from White House officials prevented them from reaching any clear conclusions.

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PayPal Working with ADL to Financially Blacklist and Spy on ‘Extremists’

PayPal took its first step towards suppressing dissent when it banned the account of Julian Assange in 2011. In recent years it has targeted the right, blacklisting the free speech video platform BitChute, Republican congressional candidate and activist Laura Loomer, and the conservative street artist Sabo.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a liberal digital rights organization, has opposed the rise of financial censorship for over a decade. In 2018, the organization warned that banks, payment processors, and credit card companies were becoming “de facto internet censors.”

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‘Alarmed And Suspicious’: Senators Tell Biden To Explain Crackdown On ‘Misinformation’

Members of the Senate warned President Biden that his policy of coordinating with social media companies to flag “misinformation” violates Americans’ First Amendment rights.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently said that users “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others” if they post “misinformation online.” She also revealed that the Biden administration is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Last week, President Biden alleged that Facebook is “killing people” by allowing a particular subset of users to spread their views about COVID-19.

“These twelve people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” Biden said. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.”

In response, a letter sent to the Commander-in-Chief on Monday by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) — joined by Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Braun (R-IN), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Rick Scott (R-FL), James Lankford (R-OK), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) — cited Psaki’s statements and expressed concern that the Biden administration’s policy toward “misinformation” is unavoidably partisan.

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Anglo-Censored? English History YouTuber Purged from Facebook

Rowsell warned that Facebook censorship has consequences. “This will inevitably negatively impact my earnings but also my social life and that of my wife who uses that platform to stay in touch with her family in Sweden,” he said.

He offered a grim estimation of why he was censored:

“I think this has social implications since I am only posting about historical subjects and not the controversial topics of immigration and vaccines that normally get people banned. I may be the first person banned not for what [I] have said, but for what they suspect me to think. Obviously this isn’t as big a deal as when they banned the President, but can be seen as a next step in their steady decline into totalitarian censorship.”

His videos explored everything from Anglo-Saxon/Norse warriors to the roots of Indo-European pagan religions in India, England and Sweden. 

Videos on his page also range from explorations into niche English rural folklore to speaking with Vedic guru Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya or even traveling to Bali to learn about Balinese Hinduism. He described himself as a YouTuber with “over 10 million views” and said he previously worked for a subsidiary of the World Health organization in Sweden. His academic writings include headlines such as “Gender Roles and Symbolic Meaning in Njáls Saga” and “Representation of Hakon sigurdsson in Viking Age literature,” indicating a clear scholarly background.

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Cybersecurity Experts Encourage System of Reporting Workers to Employers for “Online Abuse”

A new initiative launched by cybersecurity experts encourages companies to create a system that makes it easier for people to be reported to their employers for “online abuse.”

The new program is called Respect in Security and was created by Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson and Red Goat Cyber Security’s Lisa Forte.

According to Forte, the current system, which is largely based on a combination of AI and human reviewers working for social media companies, is a “no man’s land” and not very effective.

“The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer,” she argues.

According to Ferguson, companies currently only deal with “abuse” that happens internally and are ill-equipped to monitor what their staff are saying online.

Companies who sign up for the initiative are required to agree to seven principles and create a public reporting system that encourages employees to keep tabs on each other’s behavior.

“If you know your organization has made that commitment, it may make you think twice about doing it,” Ferguson said. “We need to take action.”

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Facebook Flags the Name of a Gardening Tool When Used in a Gardening Group

The Biden White House leans on Facebook to censor your speech online if what you say goes against what the Biden White House wants you to say.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact. Let’s see how well Facebook handles the very sensitive topic of policing even non-political speech in a nation that’s built on the principle that speech must be free, and where people have wide varieties of interests that may fall outside Silicon Valley’s collective experiences.

Facebook flagged the word hoe in a gardening group.

Oh. No. They censored “hoe.”

Wait ’til they figure out what people do with certain emojis…

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

This is funny and would be a lot funnier if the Biden White House hadn’t deputized Facebook to chase you and me around on its platform if we post something the regime doesn’t like. But it has.

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Twitter suspended New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon for questioning vaccine passports and mandates

New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon was silenced on Twitter and was only reinstated when he agreed to delete his tweet.

The tweet, posted on June 25, read “Given that we have crushed Covid with combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for.”

Twitter’s response to O’Scanlon’s Twitter post was to lock him out of his account without giving a specific reason as to why.

On Twitter, Republicans blasted the lawmaker’s detention. The state GOP called the action a “continuous and rising limitation of freedom of expression.”

On O’Scanlon’s timeline, the tweet has been deleted, with a warning that says, “This Tweet is no longer available because it violates the Twitter Rules.”

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