Tag: censorship

Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok and more just signed the EU’s “anti-disinformation” code

Big Tech companies have signed a new version of the European Union’s “anti-disinformation” code. Some of the companies that signed include Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok, and Twitch – but also smaller players such as Vimeo and Clubhouse.

There are 34 signatories in total:

Apple declined to sign.

The “code of practice on disinformation,” will require online platforms to show how they are tackling “harmful content.”

It will also require platforms to fight “harmful misinformation” by forming partnerships with fact-checkers and developing tools. They will be forced to include “indicators of trustworthiness” on information verified independently on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Perhaps the most notable requirement is providing their efforts to tackle harmful content and disinformation on a country-by-country basis. The move was opposed by online platforms, but national regulators demanded that they need more specific data to better address the spread of disinformation.

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Biden Advisor Says Social Media Should Silence Anyone Who Criticises Green Energy “Transition”

One of Joe Biden’s senior advisors told a reporter this week that social media companies should be cracking down on and censoring anyone who speeds information critical of the administration’s so called ‘green energy transition’.

National climate advisor Gina McCarthy made the comments in an interview with a reporter for Axios, stating “Now it’s not so much denying the problem. What the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

She continued, “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” on “disinformation,” noting that criticising a green energy transition upheaval is “equally dangerous to denial,” and adding “we have to move fast.”

The Axios interviewer just nodded in agreement without any pushback.

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PayPal and Etsy ban evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright

Dr. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, has been banned from PayPal and Etsy. The online financial service and e-commerce platform did not specify why he was banned.

At the end of May, Dr. Wright provided an expert declaration for the Women’s Liberation Front, which is working to protect single-sex prisons.

“The only factual, objective meaning of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are as references to adult human females, and adult human males, respectively,” Wright wrote in the declaration.

“From an objective standpoint, a person’s subjective feelings do not define or change their sex, which is factually and statically either male or female, determined before birth, and defined by objective reproductive anatomy.”

Dr. Wright announced the PayPal ban on Twitter, saying that he used the service to receive both recurring and one-time donations from his supporters.

PayPal wrote to Dr. Wright that, “after a review, we have decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

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Obama: We have to “detoxify” the “scourge of disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate online”

Former US President Barack Obama made a fresh push for online censorship during an appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit by calling for crackdowns on content that he deems to be “disinformation,” “hate,” or a “conspiracy theory.”

Before Obama took the stage, 2022 Obama Foundation Leader Sarah-Josephine Hjorth hinted at what was to come by railing against “fake news and misinformation.”

“While the increase in use of smartphones and social media first came with the whisper of renewed democratic participation, fake news and misinformation dominate the digital landscape and result in an erosion of the fabric of truth and polarization,” Hjorth said.

Shortly after taking the stage, Obama continued this theme by invoking the January 6 Capitol riot and tying it to “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

“In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories,” Obama said.

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Google relents after Post fights censorship of YouTube interview with Jan. 6 rioter

Google said Wednesday it will allow a Post video interview with a Capitol rioter to remain on YouTube — after The Post exposed the platform’s censorship of the clip in a front-page story that pointed out the video helped convict the man.

The latest Big Tech attempt to squash The Post’s reporting occurred Monday when the Google-owned video site deleted the interview taped inside the Capitol — saying Brooklyn man Aaron Mostofsky, 35, spouted “misinformation.”

The video featuring Mostofsky, the son of Brooklyn judge Steven Mostofsky, was one of the only professional interviews conducted with a rioter inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was cited by many news outlets and the Justice Department used it to help prosecute Mostofsky, who last month was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Mostofsky, who was wearing fur pelts, a police vest and a riot shield that he said he “found,” said in the interview that he joined the first wave of intruders because the election was “stolen” from then-President Donald Trump, who had just finished making a speech with similar claims.

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YouTube censors New York Post interview

YouTube removed a video of the New York Post’s interview of Aaron Mostofsky, one of President Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. YouTube claimed the video was removed over election misinformation.

“We realize this may be disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all,” YouTube said in the removal notice. The removed video was posted on the personal channel of the reporter who conducted the interview just before the riot began.

“Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the US 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube,” the platform added.

Mostofsky, the son of Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Steven Mostofsky, was one of the first rioters to storm the Capitol. He was clad in a fur costume, a police vest, and a police shield when he was interviewed by the Post. He said he had found the police gear.

During his trial, where he was sentenced to eight months in prison, it was revealed that he wore fur to show that “even a caveman knows the election was stolen.”

“Can you tell me what you’re doing here today?” the interview started.

“Well, to express my opinion as a free American, my belief that this election was stolen. We were cheated. I don’t think 75 million people voted for Trump, I think it was close to 85 million. I think certain states that had been blue for a long time had been red and were stolen like New York,” Mostofsky said.

“And where did you travel from?” the Post’s reporter asked.

“Brooklyn,” Mostofsky said.

“Can you tell me anything about the shield here?” the interviewer pressed.

“The shield? Found it on the floor. I found a cap and I gave it to the cops because it may be someone’s personal thing. This [shield], I have no idea. There’s no name. They probably just grab it. Looks like it’s been used a lot,” Mostofsky said.

“Should senators be afraid? Should House members be afraid?” the interviewer asked.

“They shouldn’t be afraid,” he replied. “They should find their courage to do their duty … to examine the fraud, maybe delay the election. I don’t know what to do. But we have a Constitution. You don’t rewrite the law because of COVID. It’s not ‘Give me liberty or give me death, but COVID.’”

The Post says YouTube’s election misinformation policy, like many other policies, is enforced arbitrarily.

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Politif*cked: An Office Manager from Florida and a Gates-Funded Professor Are Censoring Studies Linking Mask Usage to Increased Deaths.

APolitiFact “fact checker” who has attempting to discredit National Pulse reporting on mask mandates and recent medical journal papers has almost zero experience in real news reporting, medical reporting, COVID-19 reporting, or even national news, The National Pulse can reveal.

The information is the latest in a slew of “fact checker” stories which reveal dubiously credentialed individuals working to remove anti-Big Pharma content from the internet at the behest of big tech companies and their sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry.

Floridian liberal Gabrielle Settles appears to have begun working for Politifact in March 2021, bylining at least 70 stories for the corporate-backed censor.

Settles, however, has no experience in dealing with any of this kind of information, having performed the majority of her “fact checks” simply by copying and pasting from the Centers for Disease Control website, and even veering off into “fact checking” pictures of Christmas cards and photos of singer Rihanna.

Prior to Politifact, Settles worked at a small, St. Petersburg outfit called “The Weekly Challenger”, and prior to that, as an “Office Administrator” at “Moody Radio” and a “contributing writer” at a blog called “The Power Broker Magazine.” The sites receive almost zero web traffic.

In fact, Settles’s journalistic contributions are extremely limited. But naturally, her contributions to partisan rhetoric are not.

The Politifact “reporter” – a job which includes no actual reporting – has a history of pro-Democrat and anti-Trump tweets. Naturally, she took umbrage with The National Pulse’s story on masks and deaths, derived from two separate stories of May 16th and May 26th.

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Reddit warns US Copyright Office internet upload filters would harm memes

Reddit has warned the US Copyright Office against internet upload filters, arguing the technology will harm free expression.

The US has been looking to update the DMCA to keep up with the copyright issues found online. Many proposals have come and gone, but the US Copyright Office is now looking into automated tools that can prevent content from being re-uploaded, aka upload filters.

In a submission to the US Copyright Office, Reddit, a platform known for user-submitted content, warned against Standard Technical Measures (STMs), including upload filters.

We obtained a copy of the submission for you here.

“Filtering technologies and STMs ill-suited to the variety of content on Reddit would limit the vitality of some of our platform’s most active communities,” Reddit said.

In its subreddits users post copyrighted content, taking advantage of the fair use principles to create memes and more. An upload filter would substantially harm the free flow of thought.

“Filtering technologies have difficulty merely identifying copyrighted material, let alone assessing the specific context the content was found. They cannot make nuanced judgments about fair use or transformative works,” the platform said.

The automated filters and the false positives they would bring will significantly harm free speech, Reddit argues.

“As a result, standardized measures are likely to remove non-infringing content and suffer from false positives. Worse, these over-removals would strike at the heart of the transformative user-generated content that makes Reddit communities unique,” Reddit explained.

“That is a severe, unnecessary, and unacceptable cost to the free expression of our users and the communities they build.”

Google has implemented such a measure through YouTube’s Content ID system, which is notorious. According to Reddit, Content ID cannot work for every type of platform or site.

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Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding the country from the news.”

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