Tag: big tech

Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

A narrative in flux: Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

Keep reading

Facebook Whistleblowers Reveal Campaign To Censor Vaccine Hesitancy

Whistleblower organization Project Veritas has obtained internal documents from Facebook insiders detailing the company’s efforts to censor concerns over the COVID-19 vaccine.

Leaked company documents provided by two whistleblowers detail Facebook’s plan to combat “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) worldwide via “comment demotion”.

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” one insider told Project Veritas. “If I lose my job, it’s like, what do I do? But that’s less of a concern to me.”

The social media giant’s goal is to “reduce user exposure” to those with VH, while also reducing the ability to engage with said posts.

Keep reading

Doctor’s message about low pediatric deaths from COVID blocked by Facebook

Facebook removed a comment by a doctor on the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths. Facebook claimed the comment violated it “Community Standards on Spam.”

A Facebook user asked about the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths in the month of April. Dr. Tracy Høeg, a sports, spine, and regenerative medicine doctor, responded with factual information from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and even included a graph.

“Part of the reason I have (for the most part) left Facebook is they delete my post/responses that are factual, which I triple check,” Dr. Tracy Høeg wrote in a May 20 Facebook post. “I was responding to a question about what the number of pediatric deaths were due to COVID in April. I don’t feel like directly citing numbers from CDC and AAP should be deleted as spam, but maybe that is just me. I have moved to Twitter FYI.”

Keep reading

Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It

So, this isn’t good. Your iPhone settings enable you to tell Facebook you don’t want your location tracked. It’s clear and non-ambiguous. Why then, if you tell Facebook “never” to access your location, is the data harvesting giant doing exactly that?

Apple’s iOS 14.5 is just a few weeks old, and the data already suggests it has delivered the expected strike against Facebook . Unsurprisingly, more than 80% of users do not opt in to being tracked. Millions of you have seen through the brazen warnings that Facebook’s free apps won’t remain free unless we surrender our right to privacy.

Facebook generates almost all its revenue from digital advertising—targeting ads by harvesting as much data from you and about you as it can. “Facebook marketing is generally dominated by iOS,” one ad industry article laments, “it’s pretty safe to assume Facebook has lost at least half their data, arguably the most valuable half.”

All of which means that Facebook will be doing ever more with the data that remains. And there’s a hidden danger in all the iOS 14.5 publicity—a false sense of security for iPhone users, thinking that the Facebook data issue is suddenly over, that everything has now changed. That would be very wrong—it really hasn’t.

Keep reading

How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

Keep reading

Amazon’s Ring is the ‘largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen’ with one in ten police departments using video from doorbell cameras, warns security expert

Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera ‘is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen,’ it has been claimed.

The stark warning came from Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania, who told The Guardian that one in ten police departments around the country have access to video from the civilian cameras after the company partnered with more than 1,800 local law enforcement agencies.

Bridges raises serious concerns that cops are able to request Ring videos from members of the public without a warrant, which she claims is deliberately circumnavigating the Fourth Amendment – the right not to be searched or have items seized without a legal warrant.

Last year alone, law enforcement agencies filed 22,337 individual requests for Ring videos, according to data compiled by Bridges.

A report in the California Law Review claimed that Amazon even assisted and coached law enforcement on how to circumvent legal requirements—such as the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. 

The claims are supported by ‘scripts’, obtained by Vice in 2019 from the Topeka, KS police department, which tell police how to encourage users to share camera footage with police and encourage friends to download the Neighbors app.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, nonprofit organization for ‘defending civil liberties in the digital world,’ has even formed petitions calling on Ring to end its partnerships with law enforcement agencies. 

Keep reading

7 Apple suppliers in China have links to forced labor programs, including the use of Uyghur Muslims from Xinjiang, according to a new report

Seven of Apple’s suppliers were found to be linked to suspected forced labor of Uyghur Muslims and other persecuted groups sourced from the Xinjiang region, according to an investigation by The Information.

Apple has previously denied using suppliers that rely on the forced labor of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group that has faced persecution in China. The Information’s investigation suggests the use of forced labor by some of Apple’s largest suppliers is more widespread than previously reported.

Apple did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

As the Information notes, just one of the suppliers is in Xinjiang, the western region of China that consists predominately of the Uyghur Muslim population, which is native to the area. Other workers were shipped from Xinjiang to companies like Luxshare, which is one of Apple’s biggest Chinese suppliers, according to records viewed by the outlet.

Keep reading