Tag: censorship

Censorship Allegations Resurface as New Demonetization Coalition Takes Shape

A new organization has emerged, seemingly as a successor to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which disbanded in early August under a cloud of controversy and accusations of corporate censorship, according to a new letter.

This new entity dubbed the “Dentsu Coalition,” was formed by Dentsu, a major Japanese PR firm and original GARM member, alongside The 614 Group, a prominent ad consulting firm. Their stated mission is to bolster “credible news” and foster a thriving journalistic environment through the collective effort of leading advertising industry figures.

However, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, expressed concerns in a letter sent to Dentsu Americas CEO Michael Komasinski that the Dentsu Coalition might be walking a path similar to its predecessor. Jordan highlighted that GARM, during its operation, engaged in practices that appeared to suppress certain media voices by guiding major advertisers on which news sources were deemed “credible,” with a noticeable bias favoring left-leaning media. He noted that these practices could potentially violate the Sherman Act by unlawfully restraining trade under the guise of social justice.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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Curbing Global Censorship: House Republicans Take Aim at US-Funded Speech Crackdowns Abroad

A new bill introduced by House Republicans, the No Funding or Enforcement of Censorship Abroad Act (HR 9850), aims to prevent the US government from bankrolling censorship in other countries of content that is legal under US laws.

Chris Smith, Jim Jordan, and Maria Elvira Salazar are behind this draft that they say would protect and promote American values abroad – and those include free speech.

The bill’s authors hope to stop the use of foreign assistance funds to support censorship abroad, as well as US law enforcement from cooperating with authorities abroad conducting such policies.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Israeli airbase sustains extensive damage from Iranian missile strikes, but Israel is censoring reports on the damage

Iran’s recent attack on Israel, which saw nearly 200 missiles being lobbed at the country in retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, is largely being framed in the media as a failure. According to their narrative, Israel managed to intercept most of the missiles and the population was largely spared.

However, satellite images tell a different story, with Israel’s Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert apparently being hit hard by ballistic missiles from Iran.

The imagery, which was released by the AP, showed a large hole in the base’s aircraft hangar as well as a crater on one of its runways. The base houses Israel’s F-35 fighter jets.

Iran claims that 90 percent of the missiles it sent hit their targets after being fired in successive waves, but Israel has been doing its best to cover up the damage. Although the IDF did eventually admit that some of their air force bases were impacted, they specified that no aircraft, troops or weapons were hit. However, the entire topic is the subject of heavy military censorship.

For example, when the Wall Street Journal asked the IDF about an initial assessment by the Israeli army that the damage was only minor, they refused to provide further details on the grounds that they “didn’t want to give information to Iran” about the extent of the damage.

Israel has also closed off a number of military zones and barred reporting on where Iranian missiles hit the ground.

However, some Hezbollah sources have claimed that they put the Hatzerim, Nevatim and Ramon airbases out of service with their missile strikes.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, one senior Hezbollah source claimed: “Most of the bases targeted by Iran in Israel were hit directly, especially the airbases. Most of the objectives of the strike were achieved according to the set plan. Nevatim, Hatzerim, Tel Nof, Netzarim and Glilot bases were targeted. The scale of Israeli missile interception was weak. It has been confirmed that there were significant casualties among Israeli soldiers.”

The Wall Street Journal did report that two fallen missiles from Iran were found near the Dead Sea close to Dimona, which is the location of Israel’s nuclear facilities, although it is not known if they fell there or were shot down.

In addition, a missile hit a road just outside of the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service near Tel Aviv. Another strike damaged around 100 houses in a town to the north of Tel Aviv.

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Rep. Adam Schiff and Other Democrats Demand Social Media Companies Censor “Misinformation” and “Disinformation” This Month

In the US, the Democrats continue with their sustained efforts to pressure major social media platforms, now about a month ahead of the presidential election.

The Twitter Files give some idea about what may be happening behind closed doors (if previous campaigns/elections are any indication), but this is about public pressure. This time, Congressman Adam Schiff’s turn is to “demand action” from companies behind social media.

Meta (Instagram separately), X, Google (and YouTube separately), TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and Microsoft are the recipients of a letter Schiff signed along with seven fellow members of the House of Representatives (four of them, like Schiff, California Democrats).

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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Weaponizing Peer Review

In their book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway argue that scientists “know bad science when they see it”:

“It’s science that is obviously fraudulent — when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data is have been cherry-picked— when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.”

Few would disagree with the Oreskes and Conway criteria of “bad science,” but how do we use the criteria to distinguish bad science from good science? Oreskes and Conway have an answer (emphasis in original):

“But while these scientific criteria may be clear in principle, knowing when they apply in practice is a judgment call. For this scientists rely on peer review. Peer review is a topic that is impossible to make sexy, but it’s crucial to understand, because it is what makes science science—and not just a form of opinion.”

Oreskes and Conway characterize “Potemkin village science” as the efforts of “merchants of doubt” to make their bad-science arguments look science-like using data and graphs — to fool the uninformed and contest the good science in the peer-reviewed literature. The good guys publish in peer reviewed publications, while the bad guys do not.

The idealization of peer review as the arbiter of good science is problematic for many reasons, but one is that it downplays the possibility that bad science can appear in the peer reviewed literature and good science outside of those outlets.

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Minnesota ‘Acting as a Ministry of Truth’ With Anti-Deep Fake Law, Says Lawsuit

A new lawsuit takes aim at a Minnesota law banning the “use of deep fake technology to influence an election.” The measure—enacted in 2023 and amended this year—makes it a crime to share AI-generated content if a person “knows or acts with reckless disregard about whether the item being disseminated is a deep fake” and the sharing is done without the depicted individual’s consent, intended to “injure a candidate or influence the result of an election,” and either within 90 days before a political party nominating convention or after the start of the absentee voting period prior to a presidential nomination primary, any state or local primary, or a general election.

Christopher Kohls, a content creator who goes by Mr. Reagan, and by Minnesota state Rep. Mary Franson (R–District 12B) argue that the law is an “impermissible and unreasonable restriction of protected speech.”

Violating Minnesota’s deep fake law is punishable by up to 90 days imprisonment and/or a fine of up to $1,000, with penalties increasing if the offender has a prior conviction within the past five years for the same thing or the deep fake is determined to have been shared with an “intent to cause violence or bodily harm.” The law also allows for the Minnesota attorney general, county or city attorneys, individuals depicted in the deep fake, or any candidate “who is injured or likely to be injured by dissemination” to sue for injunctive relief “against any person who is reasonably believed to be about to violate or who is in the course of violating” the law.

If a candidate for office is found guilty of violating this law, they must forfeit the nomination or office and are henceforth disqualified “from being appointed to that office or any other office for which the legislature may establish qualifications.”

There are obviously a host of constitutional problems with this measure, which defines “deep fake” very broadly: “any video recording, motion-picture film, sound recording, electronic image, or photograph, or any technological representation of speech or conduct substantially derivative thereof” that is realistic enough for a reasonable person to believe it depicts speech or conduct that did not occur and developed though “technical means” rather than “the ability of another individual to physically or verbally impersonate such individual.”

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Judge blocks California deepfakes law that sparked Musk-Newsom row

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a California measure restricting the use of digitally altered political “deepfakes” just two weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law.

The ruling is a blow to a push by the state’s leading Democrats to rein in misleading content on social media ahead of Election Day.

Chris Kohls, known as “Mr Reagan” on X, sued to prevent the state from enforcing the law after posting an AI-generated video of a Harris campaign ad on the social media site. He claimed the video was protected by the First Amendment because it was a parody.

The judge agreed.

“Most of [the law] acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel,” Senior U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez wrote, calling it “a blunt tool hinders humorous expression and unconstitutionally stifles the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.” He carved out an exception for a “not unduly burdensome” portion of the law that requires verbal disclosure of digitally altered content in audio-only recordings.

Theodore Frank, an attorney for Kohls, said in a statement they were “gratified that the district court agreed with our analysis.”

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Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts

Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”

When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.

According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”

The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.

Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”

“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.

Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”

“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”

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Censorship and Transparency Issues in “Anti-Terror” Tech Alliance

Big Tech’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance, often accused of censorship of legal content, continues to face allegations about an ongoing lack of transparency regarding its operations.

Founded two years ago by Meta, Microsoft, then Twitter, and YouTube (Google), it now has 25 members, and the stated goal is to flag and remove violent content from the internet.

The latest development regarding to controversial group – other than the ongoing transparency issues – is X deciding to leave the GIFCT board.

Two major problems have emerged around GIFCT’s activities and influence on the web: transparency, including around funding, and having a system in place that makes sure legal, non-violent content – such as that actually opposing terrorism, satire, media reports, etc – doesn’t get caught in the GIFTC net as well, resulting in censorship.

But, not one of the 25 members publicly shares how much content is removed (due to hash matches). Yet some idea of the size of the operation can be gleaned from YouTube’s contribution to the GIFCT database last year alone: 45,000 hashes.

There is also no information available about the number of appeals users lodge against content removal resulting from this process. It’s also unknown how many hashes are added by the companies themselves, and how many come from the government or researchers.

And apparently, GIFCT itself isn’t sure how many companies automate hash-sharing or flagging and removing content based on matches, and how many employ humans to do it.

The obscurity in which GIFCT labors is quite extraordinary, even by Big Tech standards: it is not known how many companies use the said database, and there is no independent auditing or internal review of the alliances’s work. In 2021, the BSR consultancy was hired to produce “a human rights impact assessment.”

47 changes were recommended, but the GIFCT board has not yet implemented any. And while at it – not even the founding four have always accepted suggestions coming from an independent advisory committee within GIFCT.

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A Florida Judge Blocked a Newspaper from Publishing Video of a Jail Death

A Florida newspaper reports that video of a mentally ill man’s violent death in a county jail contradicts the sheriff office’s narrative of what happened. But the public may never get to see what really happened.

Florida Circuit Judge James R. Baxley ruled last month that the Ocala Gazette could view, but not publish, jailhouse footage of the 2022 death of Scott Whitley, a mentally ill man who died in the Marion County Jail after deputies pepper-sprayed, dogpiled, and tased him. Publishing the footage, Baxley ruled, would raise safety concerns.

The Gazette reported on September 25, after finally being able to view the footage, that Whitley “exhibited no physical violence toward Marion County Jail detention deputies before he was rushed to the floor, restrained and hit with a Taser 27 times over 12 minutes.” Furthermore, “Contrary to initial reports from the sheriff’s office that claimed Whitley refused to comply with guards’ orders, the footage shows the inmate sitting as ordered and, when he sees the guards rush towards him, he raises his hands in defense and pleads ‘no’ and ‘wait’—to no avail.”

The order is the latest development in a two-years-and-running transparency fight over records related to Whitley’s death.

Whitley, 46, was booked into the Marion County Jail on November 16, 2022, on charges of resisting an officer with violence and violating a protective order filed by his elderly parents to remove him from their home because of his deteriorating mental health. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was placed on suicide watch in the jail. According to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), he was combative during his arrest and continued to be uncooperative and aggressive at the jail.

On November 25, Whitley refused to put his hands through his cell to be handcuffed during a routine cell inspection. Guards sprayed him with pepper foam, and after a few minutes they ordered Whitley to sit on the toilet. When he did, deputies rushed his cell and forced him to the ground.

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