Tag: election interference

Stanford insists Internet Observatory, which engaged in election-time censorship, will stay open

The status of Stanford University’s controversial Internet Observatory, a research group accused of participating in social media censorship, appears unclear after recent conflicting reports about its future.

A recent report by the tech newsletter Platformer suggested the observatory may be closing after several key staffers, including founding director Alex Stamos, left or did not have their contracts renewed.

Other news outlets reported the observatory was “collaps[ing] under pressure,” being “wound down” and “closing.” Some popular social media posts suggested it was being permanently “shut down.”

However, the university contradicted those reports in a recent statement on the observatory’s website.

“Stanford has not shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside pressure,” it stated. “SIO does, however, face funding challenges as its founding grants will soon be exhausted. As a result, SIO continues to actively seek support for its research and teaching programs under new leadership.”

SIO will continue its “critical work” through the “publication of the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, the Trust & Safety Research Conference, and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium,” it stated.

Furthermore, the observatory’s staff will be conducting research on “misinformation” during the 2024 election, according to the statement.

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Claudia Tenney calls for DOJ investigation of Hunter Biden laptop signers for election interference

Conservative New York Rep. Claudia Tenney announced Monday that she was sending a letter to the Justice Department that requests an investigation into the 51 signers of a letter that labeled reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop as a potential “Russian information operation.”

Dozens of former intelligence officials warned in the letter, which was published one month before the 2020 presidential election, that the emails from the laptop bore the markings of a Russian influenced operation that was trying to sway the election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

Just the News recently reported that two of the signers were CIA contractors and that agency officials knew about the letter ahead of its publication.

Tenney said the Justice Department needs to investigate whether the signers put out a false statement regarding the letter in 2019, because the laptop was later proven as authentic when used as evidence in the first son’s federal gun trial. 

“I’ve written a letter [that] will come out either today or tomorrow, asking for a referral and an investigation into the criminality and the wrongfulness of these agents and Anthony Blinken, in trying to interfere with our election and making a false statement back in 2020,” Tenney said on the “Just The News, No Noise” television show.

The congresswoman also urged them to consider whether the letter violates the Hatch Act.

“This is a violation because you’re engaging in political interference with an election as a member of the executive branch and as a federal employee,” Tenney said.

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Google Tightens Influence on UK Elections with New “Moderation” Tactics

Google has found itself yet another election to “support.”

After the company made announcements to this effect related to the EU (European Parliament) June ballot, voters in the UK can now also look forward to – or dread, as the case may be – the tech giant’s role in their upcoming general election.

A blog post by Google UK Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy Katie O’Donovan announced even more “moderation” and a flurry of other measures, most of which have become tried-and-tested instruments of Google’s censorship over the past years.

They are divided in three categories – pushing (“surfacing”) content and sources of information picked by Google as authoritative and of high quality, along with YouTube information panels, investing in what it calls Trust & Safety operations, as well as “equipping campaigns with the best-in-class security tools and training.”

Another common point is combating “misinformation” – together with what the blog post refers to as “the wider ecosystem.” That concerns Google News Initiative and PA Media, a private news agency, and their Election Check 24, which is supposed to safeguard the UK election from “mis- and dis-information.”

Searches related to voting are “rigged” to return results manipulated to boost what Google considers authoritative sources – notably, the UK government’s site.

As for AI, the promise is that users of Google platforms will receive “help navigating” that type of content.

This includes the obligation for advertisers to reveal that ads “include synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events” (this definition can easily be stretched to cover parody, memes, and similar).

“Disclosure” here, however, is still differentiated from Google’s outright ban on manipulated media that it decides “misleads people.” Such content is labeled, and banned if considered as having the ability to maybe pose “a serious risk of egregious harm.”

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Merrick Garland and Chris Wray Proudly Announce Government Censorship Apparatus to Target “Cyber-Enabled Campaigns” and Censor Americans in Run-up to 2024 Election

Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Monday their latest plan to censor Americans under the guise of combatting “election threats.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland who is directly tied to the historic persecution of opposition candidate Donald J. Trump led the discussion today in Washington DC on election threats.

He should have mentioned his name first when he lectured on current election threats.

Merrick Garland today mentioned the DOJ and FBI’s work to protect elections from national security threats. Garland added, “It includes our National Security Division’s and the FBI’s work to protect our elections from national security threats, including malign foreign influence and cyber-enabled campaigns.”

Talk about gaslighting! These are three of the most controversial and corrupt officials in Washington DC today lecturing on clean elections.

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Facebook Has Interfered in U.S. Elections 39 Times Since 2008

A recent study conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC) has uncovered 39 instances of Facebook interfering with U.S. elections since 2008, raising concerns about the platform’s influence on the democratic process.

According to a recent study by MRC Free Speech America, Facebook has been caught interfering in U.S. elections 39 times since 2008. The platform’s election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached its peak in 2020, and has started to fade somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle.

Mark Zuckerberg has made several pro-free speech statements, including his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University, where he said, “We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great.” He has also called politically-motivated censorship “dangerous” and stated that Facebook and other social media platforms should not act as the “arbiter of truth.”

However, Facebook’s actions have often contradicted these statements. In 2012, the platform suspended a Veteran PAC for a meme drawing attention to the attack on Benghazi. In 2016, Facebook censored then-Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders and “conservative topics” and news. The censorship escalated in 2018, with Facebook removing ads for several candidates for Congress and state legislatures.

The 2020 election saw an explosion of censorship on Facebook, with the platform censoring posts and ads from then-sitting President Donald Trump at least four times and taking down seven political ads paid for by the political right. The most notable incident was the censorship of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden report and the subsequent indefinite suspension of President Trump’s accounts in early 2021.

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YouTube Says It Has a “Responsibility” To Manipulate Algorithms Leading Up to the 2024 Election

“Responsibility” is a good word. It’s even better as an actual thing. But even just as a word, it’s a positive one. It signals that reliable people/entities are behind some project, or policy.

So no wonder then, that the thoroughly disgraced Google/YouTube – as far as censorship and biased political approach – are trying to use the word “responsibility” as a narrative fig leaf to cover what the giant platform is actually up to – and has been, for a long while.

Enter, YouTube’s newest chief product officer, Johanna Voolich. What are the priorities here? It could be summed up as, four R’s and One C – namely, YouTube’s “remove, raise, reward, reduce” content approach – that’s as per a blog post published by YouTube itself.

And then, C would be speculative, for “censorship” – which is what these supposedly fair and “uplifting” actions in reality end up achieving.

If you thought any of this could be achieved by YouTube without “boosting authoritative content” – think again. That is still a solid pledge, regurgitated by Voolich.

And if you thought somebody would finally come out and clearly spell out how, and according to whose definition, content gets to be dubbed “authoritative” or otherwise – just don’t hold your breath.

The sum total is that YouTube has a new product manager, but that nothing has changed.

Certainly not in this year of election.

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The CIA & the Russian Fascists Who Fight Russia

In the days leading to the Russian presidential election that concluded on Sunday, a network of three Russian paramilitary organizations working under the auspices of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, or GUR, launched a series of attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation.

The purpose of the attacks was clear — to disrupt the three-day Russian presidential election by creating an atmosphere of weakness and impotence around President Vladimir Putin designed to undermine his authority, legitimacy and appeal at the voting booth.

The operation was months in the planning, and involved the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR), and the Siberia Battalion. All three of these organizations are controlled by the GUR, whose spokesman announced the attacks.

Left unsaid is the degree to which the C.I.A. was involved in what amounts to an invasion of the territory of the Russian Federation by forces operating under the umbrella of what is openly acknowledged to be a proxy war between the United States and its NATO allies against Russia.

While Ukraine maintains the attacks by the RDK, LSR, and Siberia Battalion are the actions of “patriotic Russians” opposed to Putin, the involvement of the GUR in organizing, training, equipping, and directing these forces makes their attack on Russian soil a direct extension of the proxy war between Russia and the West.

Given the extensive involvement of the C.I.A. in the work of the GUR, it is highly unlikely that an action of this scope and scale could have been executed without the knowledge of the C.I.A. and in the attacks, including its goals and objectives.

Indeed, the presence of high-end U.S. military equipment, including M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), in the order of battle in the attack by Russian insurgent forces points to a direct U.S. role, as does the political nature of the mission of election disruption, which has been a long-term objective of the C.I.A. in Russia stretching back decades.

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Why CISA’s Censorship And Election Interference Work Is The ‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.

The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”

“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states. 

The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” 

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Supreme Court rules Trump cannot be kicked off ballot

The Supreme Court on Monday handed a sweeping win to former President Donald Trump by ruling states cannot kick him off the ballot over his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — bringing a swift end to a case with huge implications for the 2024 election.

The court in an unsigned ruling with no dissents reversed the Colorado Supreme Court, which determined that Trump could not serve again as president under section 3 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The court said the Colorado Supreme Court had wrongly assumed that states can determine whether a presidential candidate is ineligible under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The ruling makes it clear that Congress, not states, has to set rules on how the 14th Amendment provision can be enforced. As such the decision applies to all states, not just Colorado.

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Ohio Senate Republican Candidate Frank LaRose Took Over $1 Million in ‘Zuck Bucks’ to Help Run 2020 Election

Ohio Senate Republican candidate and Secretary of State Frank LaRose took more than $1 million in funding from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election nonprofit to help run the November 2020 election.

LaRose announced his Senate bid on Monday, making him the third prominent Republican hoping to unseat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

LaRose actively sought more than a million dollars in funding from Zuckerberg’s Center for Election Innovation and Research as some Republican officials questioned whether or not to take the grants. A local outlet reported in September 2020:

But Ohio lawmakers on Monday without debate approved accepting $1.1 million from the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a Washington D.C. nonprofit. That money will pay for radio, TV and digital ads describing absentee voting procedures, combatting misinformation, poll worker recruitment and other items, according to a request submitted by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican.

Ray Weber, a local Republican, said, “I just have a real problem with private organizations getting involved with funding and dictating what we’re supposed to do.”

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