Tag: facebook

Be careful what you post: How Facebook and the US government have united against Americans with the ‘wrong’ views

It’s been revealed by sources within the US Department of Justice that direct messages sent through Facebook by American users, along with public postings, have been rigorously monitored, and reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) if they express anti-government, anti-authority views, or if they question the legitimacy of the November 2020 presidential election’s outcome.

Witch hunt on the web

Under the terms of a secret collaboration agreement with the FBI, a Facebook staffer has, over the past 19 months, been red-flagging content they consider to be “subversive” and immediately transmitting it to the Bureau’s domestic terrorism operational unit, without the FBI having filed a single subpoena – outside the established US legal process, without probable cause, and in breach of the First Amendment, in other words.

Just as shockingly, these intercepted communications were then provided as leads and tips to FBI field offices across the US, which in turn secured subpoenas in order to officially obtain the private conversations that they already possessed, and thus cover up the fact the material had been obtained extra-legally. Facebook invariably complied with these subpoenas, and would send back “gigabytes of data and photos” within an hour, suggesting the content sought was already packaged and awaiting legal confirmation before distribution.

It is uncertain quite how many users were flagged, but it’s abundantly clear a specific type of person was of interest to the FBI – “red-blooded” conservative right-wingers, many of whom supported the right to bear arms. No one connected to Antifa, BLM or any other left-wing group was ever informed on. 

It seems not a single Facebook user snitched upon for daring to be possessed of troublesome political opinions was ever arrested, or prosecuted, for their wrongthink, even though some were reportedly subject to covert surveillance and other forms of intrusion and harassment. Their views were consistently found to not translate to criminality or violence – their words were simply brutal condemnations of Biden’s election and presidency, and aggressive calls for protests.

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Memphis Maniac Who Live-Streamed Killing Spree Served Just 11 Months After Attempted Murder Arrest, Mayor Reveals

The 19-year-old Memphis man accused of killing four and terrorizing the city for hours Wednesday night as he drove around shooting people was let out of prison after serving less than a year for an attempted murder charge that was plea-bargained down to aggravated assault.

The Daily Wire is not naming the suspect or publishing his photo as part of a policy to deprive mass shooters of the attention they crave. But after police captured him in a stolen car, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said he should never have been on the loose.

“If [the suspect] served his full three-year sentence, he would still be in prison today and four of our fellow citizens would still be alive,” Strickland said.

Records show the suspect was freed on March 16 after serving just 11 months of his three-year sentence. A new law Strickland backed which went into effect in July may have kept the suspect locked up.

The bloody spree began just before 1 a.m. with the apparently random killing of a 24-year-old man in his driveway, said Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who laid out a timeline at a post-arrest news conference late Wednesday. The rampage resumed around 4:30 p.m., when police learned a man had been shot dead in his car.

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CDC Gave Facebook Misinformation About COVID-19 Vaccines, Emails Show

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) passed misinformation to Facebook as the partners worked to combat misinformation, according to newly released emails, in the most recent example of CDC officials making false or misleading claims.

In a June 3 message, a Facebook official said the CDC had helped the company “debunk claims about COVID vaccines and children,” and asked for assistance addressing claims about the vaccines for babies and toddlers, including the claim that the vaccines were not effective.

Several weeks later, after U.S. regulators authorized the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for young children and the CDC recommended them, a CDC official responded by offering unsupported information.

“Claims that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective for children ages 6 months to 4 years are false and belief in such claims could lead to back vaccine hesitancy,” the CDC official wrote. The names of all of the officials mentioned in this story were redacted in the emails, which were released as part of ongoing litigation against the U.S. government.

“COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are effective at protecting people, including children ages 6 months to 4 years, from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized, and even dying,” the CDC official added.

There’s no evidence that the vaccines are effective against severe illness and death in young children.

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Facebook Fact-Checkers Are Now Dropping by the Comments Sections of Your Posts to Re-Educate You

Facebook just keeps finding new ways to be awful. The latest stunt is to jump into the comments section of your posts to insert some approved agitprop that stays near the top of your feed.

This particular “fact” check concerns an estimate from a car dealership showing that a customer would be charged nearly $30,000 for an EV battery for his Chevy Volt. A Facebook page called Car Coach Reports, which focuses on auto news, posted a picture of the invoice on August 29. Two days later, PolitiFact waded into the comments section to add their take on the story—namely that the battery in question was for a 10-year-old vehicle with 70,000 miles that is no longer under warranty. PolitiFact wrote, “The battery had to be purchased from a third-party supplier because General Motors discontinued the Volt in 2018 and no longer makes the battery.” They quickly added that newer batteries “cost much less.”

On the “fact” checker’s website we learn that “The average cost of a replacement battery in an electric vehicle is about $6,300… though that price can be higher depending on the vehicle in question.” Prices can range anywhere from $6000 to $20,000.

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FACEBOOK TELLS MODERATORS TO ALLOW GRAPHIC IMAGES OF RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES BUT CENSORS ISRAELI ATTACKS

AFTER A SERIES of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

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FBI Knew of Potential Hunter Biden Story Leak Before Warning Facebook

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story because of warnings it had received from the FBI.

In response to Zuckerberg’s statement, the FBI issued a vague statement late on Friday, claiming that it had warned Facebook of “potential threat information.” Notably, the FBI did not dispute Zuckerberg’s account.

Any kind of collusion or cooperation between government actors and private companies to censor American citizens is a direct infringement of the First Amendment. But what the FBI did may be much worse than that as it now appears that the bureau actively interfered in the 2020 election to gift Joe Biden the presidency.

The FBI first found out about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the Summer of 2019 when they were notified by the repair shop where Hunter had left it. At first, the FBI appears to have shown no interest, but then, in December 2019, the FBI seized the laptop from the repair shop.

The FBI would have quickly realized that the information contained on the laptop was extremely damaging to Hunter Biden’s father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, as it proved that the older Biden had on multiple occasions met Hunter Biden’s business associates when he was vice president. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings.

The laptop also contained incriminating information about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated owner of CEFC China Energy Company Limited who mysteriously disappeared in 2018, shortly after another Hunter Biden associate, CEFC official Patrick Ho, was arrested by U.S. authorities on corruption charges.

Despite knowing that the laptop and its contents were real, FBI agent Brian Auten shut down the laptop investigation in August 2020, falsely claiming that derogatory evidence against the Biden family was Russian disinformation.

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Facebook to let “fact checkers” comment on posts that “may not be verifiably false”

Just in case anything slips through the existing “fact-checking,” narrative-enforcing cracks of Facebook’s censorship, a new “feature” is now being introduced as a pilot.

Through it, Facebook is letting a small group of US “fact-checkers” leave comments on public posts, which “may not be verifiably false, but that people may find misleading.”

This has been revealed in the tech and social media behemoth’s Community Standards Enforcement Report for the second quarter of this year. One of Facebook’s (Meta’s) activities covered in the report concerns its third-party fact-checker – aka, the “hired censorship guns” program.

At the very end of the report, Facebook briefly mentions the exceedingly interesting new pilot program. While critics will no doubt see it as yet another avenue for the giant to steer users in a particular direction, it is presented as quite the opposite: allegedly to “empower” users as they come across content and are deciding “what to read, share, and trust.”

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When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control Information

Facebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.

“The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.

As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.

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New Research Reveals Tiktok, Instagram And Meta Can Monitor Keystrokes, Seize Passwords And Credit Card Information

Recent research has revealed that social media platforms Tiktok, Instagram, and Meta, can pry on users’ personal information when it is entered into the in-app browser.

Felix Krause, a software engineer, and security researcher looked into the coding built into Tiktok, the Chinese-produced app’s infrastructure, which led to his shocking revelation.

Users who click on links on Tiktok are led to a native in-app browser produced by Tiktok, and not default browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.

The JavaScript code in Tiktok’s in-app browser can allow the company to monitor every keystroke. This means the social media company could access every action taken on the screen, even passwords or credit card information.

Krause explained that while Tiktok allegedly does not have the feature enabled at this moment, the infrastructure is in place. “Installing a keylogger is obviously a huge thing… according to TikTok it’s disabled at the moment. The problem is they do have the infrastructure and the systems in place to be able to track all these keystrokes… that on its own is a huge problem.”

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Facebook censors claims IRS posted job requiring “deadly force”

Facebook and Instagram have censored the Heritage Foundation and others for suggesting that a job posting by the Internal Revenue Services required a willingness to use deadly force.

The Heritage Foundation’s posts were slapped with a “missing context” label reading.

The original job posting, which has since been edited, read that “special agents” in the agency’s Criminal Investigation branch are required to “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force if necessary.”

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