Tag: censorship

Are we being watched?

Ashadowy state agency with no statutory footing, previously used to monitor perfectly lawful yet dissenting speech during the Covid lockdowns, has been deployed by the Labour Government to monitor social media amid ongoing civil unrest across the UK.

The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), now rebranded as the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), has been given the task just months after the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee questioned “the lack of transparency and accountability of [NSOIT] and the appropriateness of its reach”, and recommended that the Government commission an independent review of “the activities and strategy” of the unit to report back within 12 months.

Peter Kyle, Labour’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has tasked NSOIT with monitoring online activity following the outbreak of widespread public disorder in the wake of the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport on 29th July.

David Davis, the Conservative MP who previously called for the CDU to be shut down, told the Telegraph he had no real objection to the unit being used to monitor social media during the riots because “it’s perfectly legitimate for the state to monitor things that might incite violence”. 

That’s true, of course – but the question is whether in doing so NSOIT will also be monitoring and flagging for removal online posts that fall well within the law.

Last year, a report by Big Brother Watch unmasked the scale of the digital surveillance system established during the Covid lockdowns, with the government now able to call upon at least three domestic surveillance units, all of which have previously been tasked with monitoring social media posts in the UK, flagging “misleading” content to their Whitehall paymasters who then urge tech platforms to remove them.

These units are the NSOIT in DCMS, the Intelligence and Communications Unit in the Home Office, the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit (since disbanded, according to the government) and the 77th Brigade, a combined Regular and Army reserve unit within the Ministry of Defence.

NSOIT was originally established to fight what the government calls “disinformation”. 

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World Federation of Advertisers shuts down GARM project after Elon Musk, Rumble sue over ad boycott

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media has decided to “discontinue activities” after a lawsuit filed against them by Elon Musk’s X and the Rumble platform. The group was under fire for antitrust violations after they had orchestrated ad boycotts of both platforms using their monopoly. 

The House Judiciary said this was a “Big win for the First Amendment” and a “Big win for oversight.” The House Committee brought questions about GARM, their monopoly on advertisers, and their use of that monopoly to influence online speech to a hearing. 

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski simply wanted to know “what are they hiding?” He has been forthcoming in discussing the ad boycott of his platform.

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Dunkin’ Donuts and Diageo Booze Company Threaten to Remove Ads from Rumble if the Platform Does Not Remove Videos by Conservative Personalities

On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s X filed an antitrust lawsuit, which was filed in Texas federal court, seeking trebled compensatory damages and injunctive relief, against a left-leaning advertising cartel and several member companies.

The suit alleges X was targeted with an illegal ad boycott.

The lawsuit was filed against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, its parent firm, World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever, who reportedly controls a staggering 90% of marketing efforts worldwide.

Soon after Elon Musk’s announcement, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski announced he was joining the lawsuit with Elon Musk against the GARM cartel.

Rumble CEO Pavlovski explains how organizations like GARM and the World Federation of Advertisers have monopolized control over the major advertising budgets.

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Google’s App “Quality” Crackdown Raises Censorship Concerns

AppCensorship, a project that monitors and reports about censorship on major app stores, is warning that Google’s decision to start removing what it considers low-quality apps could lead to consequences other than “improving quality and user experience.”

An article on the project’s site notes that while some users see Google’s move as a positive and justified step, others see the potential for censorship “baked in” the decision.

The second point of view is all the more important given the amount of apps that Google removes from the Play Store over a year. The giant’s newest transparency report cites the number as 2.28 million – 59% more compared to the 1.43 million in the previous period.

But AppCensorship writes that the transparency report itself – and large media outlets reporting about it – all focus on the numbers without engaging in what the project calls a complete picture that would include discussion around (removal) policy, analysis, and critical examination.

Otherwise, the article warns, we may be looking at the media “lending them (app removal statistics) a degree of credibility disconnected from substantive scrutiny.”

As far as Google is concerned, the activity around the Play Store is proof that it is improving security, but also the app review process, and incorporating “advanced machine learning.”

On the flip side are fears that, as the article put it, Google may be using “its influence and high market share to dictate the global app environment.”

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‘Display of Cowardice’- Meta Reinstates Malaysian PM’s Posts on Haniyeh’s Assassination

Meta has apologized for removing posts by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim regarding the assassination of Hamas politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh.

The social media posts have been reinstated with the note: “This post goes against our Community Guidelines but has been left on Instagram for public awareness.”

Ibrahim’s posts included a video of him on a phone call with Hamas official, Dr Bassim Naim, expressing his condolences on Haniyeh’s killing in the Iranian capital last week.

In the caption, the premier called his death “a murder of the most heinous kind, plainly designed to derail ongoing talks aimed at ending the carnage in Gaza that has claimed over 40,000 lives.”

Malaysian government officials had reportedly met with Meta representatives on Monday to seek an explanation.

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Crazed Authoritarians Demand X Be Shut Down in UK

Mimicking a policy that the west once condemned Communist China for pursuing, authoritarians are now calling for X to be shut down completely in the UK to stop civil unrest.

After the country was rocked by a series of riots over the past week in response to a 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants killing three little girls in Southport, the media and the political class blamed the anger on “misinformation” shared on X.

In reality, the UK has been a boiling pot of resentment and rage over mass migration for years, with huge numbers continuing to arrive, putting massive strain on the country and making some parts of major towns and cities unrecognizable, despite nobody having ever voted for it.

However, the disorder is being exploited to grease the skids for mass censorship.

Cambridge professor Sander van der Linden said the government could “geo-restrict access to a platform if the situation got so bad” and Twitter could also be “banned from the app store for violating policies.”

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Court Slaps Down NIH for Unconstitutional Censorship

The D.C. Circuit Court has declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the Constitution by using keyword filters to censor comments on its social media platforms. The court’s decision stems from a dispute involving People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which argued that their comments were unfairly targeted by NIH’s filtering system on Facebook and Instagram. This case highlights ongoing tensions between government control and free speech on digital platforms.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The crux of the court’s decision hinged on three critical findings regarding the nature of the forums in question. First, the NIH’s social media accounts were determined to be limited public forums, a classification that allows for certain restrictions but not indiscriminate censorship. Second, while the NIH has the authority to curtail off-topic discussions, the court found that the agency’s keyword filters overstepped this boundary by blocking on-topic and potentially valuable contributions, particularly those from PETA on posts related to animal testing.

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FBI To Resume Meetings With Social Media Companies, Ignoring Censorship Concerns

Here we go again – another US election is coming up, and there’s another push to find ways to censor “disfavored” voices, and one of those ways is the focus on the foreign malign influence (FMI) boogeyman.

Americans (and the world) have seen this play out already before and after the contested 2020 vote.

The infamous case of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop news story came after the FBI issued a warning to social media companies about an incoming FMI “disinformation dump” – from Russia.

We know how that went and was eventually debunked, the laptop being authentic, rather than a figment of some “disinformation” peddling operation’s imagination. But here is the FBI again, more than just emboldened by the recent Supreme Court’s ruling in the Murthy v. Missouri case.

That decision lifted an injunction that banned the US government from colluding with Big Tech in order to promote censorship. Now the case is back in the lower courts, and in the meanwhile, mere months before the election, the legal hurdle to resume suspected collusion has been cleared.

And so the FBI will now “resume regular meetings” with social media companies, the pretext being finding ways to combat “potential” FMI threats. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal illustrates very well how the supposed hunt for FMI can go astray, straight into the political censorship territory.

But none of that seems to matter now, as the current White House presses on with the old practices. On July 12 this year, just after the Supreme Court’s decision, Department of Justice (DOJ) Associate Deputy Attorney General George D. Turner penned a memo that shows the collusion never really stopped – even after last October’s court injunction restricting this type of “collaboration.”

We obtained a copy of the memo for you here.

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UK PM Keir Starmer Uses Riots To Call For Mass Surveillance and Social Media Censorship

The more things change, the more they remain the same, at least in the UK; after many years of Tory governments’ vigorous efforts to extend mass surveillance indiscriminately targeting citizens and enact stringent anti-free speech laws, the new Labour government seems to be picking up right where the previous one left off.

The wake of the Southport riots has elicited the usual medley of reactions: moves to address societal issues with more surveillance, strengthen the police state, blame “misinformation” and unproven, but always handy to bring up, “foreign meddling.”

But the real malady seems to be squarely at home: in fact, in the prime minister’s office. Keir Starmer happens to be sitting there now, but the policy hardly ever changes: he, too, wants more mass surveillance based on facial recognition, and more pressure on social media to ramp up censorship.

If anything does change it is the intensity of these demands that have long since been rejected as “Orwellian” by rights groups like Big Brother Watch.

Here, Starmer told a news conference called after the events branded as far-right riots, that participants in the protests (whom he called “thugs” and compared with football hooligans) are “mobile” and for that reason, police forces will, going forward, be a part of a network of sorts.

The prime minister added that there will be intelligence and data sharing, as well as “wider deployment of facial recognition technology, and preventative action, criminal behavior orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train, in just the same way that we do with football hooligans.”

Movement restrictions are said to apply only to those with previous convictions, and those who have committed “violence at protests.” But here things get complicated because even those who were charged with relatively minor offenses like disorderly conduct could end up having their movements surveilled and restricted.

Starmer isn’t in favor of enacting new laws; he seems satisfied that all this can be achieved within the existing legislation and announced a “coordinated response” within the police across the country and law enforcement taking advantage of those laws more than before. But he does want more police officers, and it seems that increasing their numbers will be one election campaign promise that will be kept.

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Senate Passes Kids’ “Safety” Bills Despite Privacy, Digital ID, and Censorship Concerns

Two bills combined – the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) – have passed in the US Senate in a 91-3 vote, and will now be considered by the House.

Criticism of the bills focuses mainly on the likelihood that, if and when they become law, they will help expand online digital ID verification, as well as around issues like censorship (removal and blocking of content).

The effort to make KOSA and COPA 2.0 happen was spearheaded by a parent group that was pushing lawmakers and tech companies’ executives to move in this direction, and their main demand was to enact new rules that would prevent cyberbullying and other harms.

And now the main sponsors, senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and Republican Marsha Blackburn are trying to dispel these concerns, suggesting these are not “speech bills” and do not (directly) impose age verification.

Further defending the bills, they say that the legislation does not mandate that internet platforms start collecting even more user data, and reject the notion it is invasive of people’s privacy.

But the problem is that although technically true, this interpretation of the bills’ impact is ultimately incorrect, as some of their provisions do encourage censorship, facilitate the introduction of digital ID for age verification, and leave the door open for mass collection of online users’ data – under specific circumstances – and end ending anonymity online.

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