Tag: big tech

‘Pretty Weird’: Facebook Now Sending Warnings to Users About Potentially ‘Extremist’ Friends

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 of the purported messages read. “We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support,” it adds before offering the button to “Get Support,” which ostensibly 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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Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’

 Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.

Since then, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called for an end to the overuse of secret gag orders, arguing in a Washington Post opinion piece that “prosecutors too often are exploiting technology to abuse our fundamental freedoms.” Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, has said the Justice Department will abandon its practice of seizing reporter records and will formalize that stance soon.

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Twitter Suspends NY Times’ Columnist’s Account After He Denounces Equity as ‘Racism’

Twitter has suspended the account of a Pultizer Prize-winning New York Times op-ed writer one day after he wrote a column denouncing woke ideology as a form of “racism.”

The New York Times posted Bret Stephens’ latest column, titled “The New Racism Won’t Solve the Old Racism,” on its website on June 28 and published it in the print issue dated June 29.

In the piece, Stephens wrote that the drive to bring about intersectional “equity” — often designated by the term “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) — “is insulting to everyone who still believes we should be judged by the content of our character.”

The idea that the government should redistribute wealth along racial lines has taken on new life since Ibram X. Kendi made it the central pillar of his bestseller, “How to be an Antiracist.”

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Facebook censors those who spread ‘misinformation,’ but looks the other way while pimps abuse children

Before losing a recent landmark court case, Facebook attempted to distance itself from the human trafficking taking place on its platform. If only it were as hands-on about child sex crimes as it is about political speech.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Facebook can be held liable for the conduct of pimps and traffickers on its platform – a landmark decision that opens the firm up to further legal action from a trio of teenage trafficking victims. 

In the suit, filed in 2018, the three young women accused the company of running “an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade.” One was 15 when an older man contacted her on Facebook, offered her a modeling job, photographed her, posted the pictures on the now-defunct BackPage website, and prostituted her to other men, leading her to be “raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking.” The other two girls were 14, and reported almost identical experiences, with one openly pimped out for “dates” on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary.

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Amazon Studios ‘inclusion playbook’ includes guidelines on hiring diverse crew, avoiding “problematic” jokes

Amazon Studios has released an “Inclusion Playbook” with hard rules on writing humour and satire, going against the long-held standard that talent matters more than identity. The critical race theory-driven initiative is yet another attempt by Big Tech to reinforce and drive “equity” policies to the public. 

On Monday, Amazon Studios’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team released a playbook that sets the standards for the number of minority and underrepresented employees and characters required to create a TV show or a movie. 

The Daily Wire reports that the playbook is based on Amazon Studios’ inclusivity policy, which requires “Each film or series with a creative team of three or more people in above-the-line roles (Directors, Writers, Producers) should ideally include a minimum 30% women and 30% members of an underrepresented racial/ethnic group.” 

The company says it wants to increase these goals to 50 per cent by 2024. 

The policy calls on filmmakers to include at least one speaking character from a minority background, with half of them being women: “LGBTQIA+, person with a disability, and three regionally underrepresented race/ethnic/cultural groups.” The policy states that filmmakers can get away with having a single character (i.e. a transgender Hispanic woman in a wheelchair) to fulfill the requirement of these identities. 

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World Economic Forum makes censorship pledge to “tackle harmful content and conduct online”

The World Economic Forum, an international group that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” has formed a new “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” that’s made up of Big Tech executives and government officials and intends to come up with new “innovations” to police “harmful content and conduct online.”

The scope of so-called “harmful” content that will be targeted by this Global Coalition for Digital Safety is far-reaching and encompasses both legal content (such as “health misinformation” and “anti-vaccine content”) and illegal content (such as child exploitation and abuse and violent extremism).

Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts under their far-reaching rules that prohibit harmful content and misinformation. They also publish detailed quarterly reports about this censorship.

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Babylon Bee CEO says satirical site ‘punching back’ against liberal media, Big Tech censorship

“Facebook recently announced they’ll be moderating satire to make sure it doesn’t ‘punch down.’ Anything that punches down—that is, anything that takes aim at protected targets Facebook doesn’t want you joking about—doesn’t qualify as ‘true satire,’” Dillon wrote. “In fact, they’ve made it clear they’ll consider jokes that ‘punch down’ to be hatred disguised as satire.” 

Dillon noted that Slate recently published a piece that accused the Bee of punching down. 

“This is not a coincidence. Having failed in their effort to lump us in with fake news, the media and Big Tech are looking for new ways to work together to deplatform us. They now hope to discredit us by saying we’re spreading hatred—rather than misinformation—under the guise of satire,” Dillon wrote. “But we’re not punching down.’ We’re punching back.”

Dillon feels “the left’s new prohibition of ‘punching down’ is speech suppression in disguise” and blasted anyone who plays along. 

“It’s people in positions of power protecting their interests by telling you what you can and cannot joke about. Comedians who self-censor in deference to that power are themselves a joke,” he wrote. 

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Emails Show Biden Campaign Demanding Facebook Censor Posts on Election Integrity

A number of emails seen by CNN — which uses them to make the case that the platform isn’t censoring enough — show that the Biden campaign repeatedly pressured Facebook to censor posts from the Trump campaign and its supporters about election integrity.

CNN’s own reporting confirms that Facebook changed its policies following the email exchange with Biden officials, yet goes on to quote Democrat activists who complain that the platform is still not censoring enough conservative content.

One post that the Biden campaign tried to have censored during the 2020 election was a video from Donald Trump Jr. in September 2020 calling for supporters to monitor early voting and counting boards.

Biden campaign officials tried to characterize the video as a call for violence, because Don Jr used the term “army” to refer to the volunteer effort, claims that were rebuffed by Facebook.

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Twitter censors UK hypocrite Health Secretary “Matt Hancock” from Photos and Videos search amid public scandal over affair and social distancing breach

The UK’s Health Secretary is currently embroiled in controversy after being caught on CCTV in a secret affair with an aide. The leaked CCTV footage shows Matt Hancock breaching social distancing guidelines and engaging in kissing and an embrace with his aide Gina Coladangelo. Hancock has been married to his wife Martha for 15 years and the couple have three children together.

Yet, while the video has caused national outrage at the hypocrisy of the Health Secretary, the video itself is suddenly harder to find on Twitter as the platform has censored the term Matt Hancock from its photos and videos search.

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