Tag: big tech

A Case of “Intellectual Capture?” On YouTube’s Demonetization Of Bret Weinstein

Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others.

This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.

Profiled in this space two weeks ago, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying — both biologists — host the podcast DarkHorse, which by any measure is among the more successful independent media operations in the country. They have two YouTube channels, a main channel featuring whole episodes and livestreams, and a “clips” channel featuring excerpts from those shows.

Between the two channels, they’ve been flagged 11 times in the last month or so. Specifically, YouTube has honed in on two areas of discussion it believes promote “medical misinformation.” The first is the potential efficacy of the repurposed drug ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment. The second is the third rail of third rails, i.e. the possible shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.

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YouTube censors video of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Satoshi Ōmura discussing ivermectin

Before the coronavirus pandemic, ivermectin was described as a “wonder” drug by the medical community. And in 2015, Dr. Satoshi Ōmura and Dr. William C. Campbell were awarded half the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work that led to the development of ivermectin.

“The importance of Ivermectin for improving the health and wellbeing of millions of individuals with River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, primarily in the poorest regions of the world, is immeasurable,” the Nobel Assembly stated in its press release for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

But after the pandemic began, the tech giants have gone all out to purge content that recommends ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

And today, these Big Tech policies against ivermectin resulted in one of Ōmura’s speeches where he discussed ivermectin being struck down for “violating YouTube’s community guidelines.”

“When the fascists at YouTube censor the Noble Prize winner Dr. Satoshi Omura, a man whose discoveries have saved a hundred million + from blindness, the world has entered a very, very dark place,” Australian Member of Parliament Craig Kelly tweeted. “I cannot express in words how angry & sad this makes me & fearful for the future.”

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‘Violation of First Amendment’ – Judicial Watch YouTube Video Censored at Request of California Government Officials

The California Secretary of State’s office pressured YouTube to remove Judicial Watch’s videos on election integrity.Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch received 165 pages of new documents showing the California Secretary of State directly emailing YouTube to remove Tom Fitton’s videos on election integrity.

The video titled “ELECTION INTEGRITY CRISIS — Dirty Voter Rolls, Ballot Harvesting & Mail-in-Voting Risks!” was removed three days after California government officials made the request.

Judicial Watch had previously sued California over its dirty voter rolls and Los Angeles County agreed to remove 1.6 million inactive voters.

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Facebook bans propaganda expert Professor Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

You may now be able to discuss coronavirus origins on Facebook – because the current US administration happened to say so – but it appears people are still most decidedly banned from discussing their own scientific work – if it happens to be related to how exactly Facebook goes about censoring and canceling people.

That circle is now complete for renowned UK academic Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, an information and propaganda control researcher, who has been presented with an abrupt, but “lifetime” ban on the platform – for posting about his own research that has in the meanwhile been cited by the academic community.

On June 26, reports say, this professor emeritus at two London University colleges and a Cambridge Quondam fellow was informed that his account got banned. Facebook at least was “egalitarian” here in that it provided the noted academic with no more explanation about what he had supposedly done wrong than it does any of its “ordinary” censorship victims – beyond accusing them of violating unspecified “community standards.”

But the note did have a tone of sinister finality to it, reading, “unfortunately, we won’t be able to reactivate it (the account) for any reason. This will be our last message regarding your account.”

And because even after failing in his attempts to pry the reason for his banning from Facebook’s cold censorship hands, the professor, like the rest of us, is now left guessing why this happened.

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‘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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