Tag: facebook

Facebook Fails to Silence Smith & Wesson

One can always count on social media to carry out the regime’s anti-American agenda.

Social media giant Facebook has long been a thorn in the side of gun owners ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. Since that period, Big Tech has taken it upon itself to become the private enforcement arm of the managerial state. In effect, Big Tech companies have functioned as Pinkerton-style law enforcement agencies who do the regime’s dirty work of censoring any individuals or organizations who voice explicitly right-wing views on issues ranging from immigration to gun rights.

Facebook’s privatized tyranny was on full display when the social media giant indefinitely suspended the account of legendary firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson on Nov. 22, 2024. Smith & Wesson was founded by gunmakers Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson by 1852 and has remained one of the U.S.’ flagship gun manufacturers. Smith & Wesson has a large social media following with over 1.6 million users. Facebook’s act of censorship against Smith & Wesson was not by accident and was certainly done to send a message.

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Meta Pushes for a Digital ID Revolution

Meta is coming out as a supporter of age verification, and the proposal the giant is putting forward exposes and sums up many of the points critics have been consistently making.

A blog post by Meta VP and Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis proposes to implement age verification at the operating system/app stores level.

Although the narrative around child safety and difficulties of parenting “in the digital age” dominates the article, “the meat of it” are the implications that this approach brings with it: namely, it creates a situation where, down the line, people would be forced to link real-world identity to their phone’s operating system (OS).

And everything they do using the phone is exposed to that OS.

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Meta Brings Back Face Scanning

After three years, Meta’s apps will once again include facial recognition (this is currently in the testing phase). The giant is “selling” the move to its users as a way to fight scammers and make account recovery easier.

The feature was abandoned because of widespread criticism of this tech, but Facebook and Instagram users can now expect to have it back on their apps.

The first scenario involves deploying facial recognition to remove what is known as celeb-bait ads, which use photos of public figures to get users to visit scam websites.

Meta said that if it suspects this is happening, faces in the ad will be compared to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile photos using facial recognition.

For now, the feature is applied to a group of celebrities and public figures, on an “opt-out” basis. The company also revealed that since it is happening in real-time, the process is “faster and more accurate” than when done manually.

And now, onto “ordinary people.” The second test involves getting the apps’ users to take video selfies and upload them to Meta. Once again, facial recognition will be used to match these to people’s profile photos, this time in order to speed up the account recovery process.

Meta is clearly counting on the “convenience factor” to persuade users that subjecting themselves to facial recognition carried out by a tech juggernaut is a good idea.

Another promise is that the process will help when accounts are believed to be compromised by hackers logging in with stolen credentials.

The inevitable question is, what happens to this sensitive personal biometric data, especially once in the hands of Meta? The company said it will not use it for any other purposes, that it will be encrypted, and “immediately” deleted once a comparison has been made.

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

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Facebook Faces Heat for Blocking Report on Arrest of US Journalist in Israel

Facebook has come under scrutiny for censoring an article by Matt Orfalea that reported on the arrest of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel. Loffredo was arrested shortly after publishing a detailed investigative report on Iranian missile strikes near significant Israeli military and intelligence locations, including an Israeli Air Force base and Mossad headquarters.

Loffredo has since been released pending an investigation and is not allowed to leave the country.

Orfalea’s article highlighted the circumstances surrounding Loffredo’s arrest and his findings that reportedly contradicted some official Israeli statements about the missile attacks.

According to the Times of Israel, as noted by Orfaela, “The exact locations of such impacts and damage are barred from publication by the IDF censor.”

Facebook’s censorship of Orfalea’s piece raises significant concerns about freedom of the press and the role of social media platforms in moderating content related to sensitive geopolitical issues. Orfalea questioned the transparency and fairness of Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially given the public interest in Loffredo’s arrest and the broader implications for press freedom.

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PimEyes Says Meta Glasses Integration Could Have ‘Irreversible Consequences’

Two Harvard students made headlines after converting Meta’s smart glasses into a device that automatically captures people’s faces with facial recognition and runs them through face search engines. One of the companies providing the face search function, PimEyes, is not too happy about it.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio released a video of themselves using the smart glasses to identify people on the street and look up their personal information through services such as PimEyes. The students used the integrated camera on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to capture live video through Instagram and ran it through their software I-XRAY.

“We stream the video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream,” Nguyen says in the video. “We use AI to detect when we’re looking at someone’s face, then we scour the internet to find more pictures of that person. Finally, we use data sources like online articles and voter registration databases to figure out their name, phone number, home address and relatives names and it’s all fed back to an app we wrote on our phone.”

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Meta’s new “Movie Gen” AI system can deepfake video from a single photo

On Friday, Meta announced a preview of Movie Gen, a new suite of AI models designed to create and manipulate video, audio, and images, including creating a realistic video from a single photo of a person. The company claims the models outperform other video-synthesis models when evaluated by humans, pushing us closer to a future where anyone can synthesize a full video of any subject on demand.

The company does not yet have plans of when or how it will release these capabilities to the public, but Meta says Movie Gen is a tool that may allow people to “enhance their inherent creativity” rather than replace human artists and animators. The company envisions future applications such as easily creating and editing “day in the life” videos for social media platforms or generating personalized animated birthday greetings.

Movie Gen builds on Meta’s previous work in video synthesis, following 2022’s Make-A-Scene video generator and the Emu image-synthesis model. Using text prompts for guidance, this latest system can generate custom videos with sounds for the first time, edit and insert changes into existing videos, and transform images of people into realistic personalized videos.

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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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Big Tech-Government Collusion: Biden-Haris Admin, Meta, Google, and Others Launch AI Partnership to Combat “Disinformation” and “Hate Speech”

The current US White House seems to be exploring every possibility that might secure another avenue for what opponents (and quite a few lawmakers) refer to as “collusion” with (Big) Tech.

A new scheme has just been announced, that revolves around the “AI” and “disinformation” buzzwords, and includes the US State Department, Meta, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI.

Looks like quite an “ensemble cast” – or “usual suspects” – right there.

It’s called, Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI, and it was announced by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken along with a decision to bankroll programs “identifying disinformation using AI” with $3 million.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

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EXPLOSIVE CENSORSHIP DOCUMENTS – America First Legal Releases Complete Internal Facebook Onboarding Documents Used to Train CDC Employees on How to Censor the American Public

Today, America First Legal released additional documents from its litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), exposing the complete onboarding documents Facebook used to train CDC employees on their government censorship portal to block free speech on “Covid & Vaccine Misinformation.” 

Many Americans remember the unprecedented level of censorship by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021. Unelected public health officials constantly revised their guidance, leading to repeating something that was “true” a week ago could suddenly get an account suspended. The Biden-Harris Administration’s clumsy and heavy-handed attempts to keep up with the rapidly evolving information environment entailed by a global pandemic gave all Americans a stark reminder of why the First Amendment was listed first.

These documents reveal how Facebook, on the heels of extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House (including from Rob Flaherty, a current senior Harris Campaign staffer) to remove specific posts, responded:

  • Facebook created a new “end-to-end workflow” so that government officials could submit links for removal from Facebook;
  • Facebook only gave access to the portal to approved government and law enforcement personnel;
  • The new portal dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring;
  • By moving from email chains to a Facebook-hosted portal, the new system also made it harder for organizations like AFL to provide oversight to individual censorship requests;
  • Each censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands;  
  • The documents further show how Facebook explained precisely what content it would remove and what it needed from the CDC in order to censor certain narratives within the bounds of its “community standards.” 

This release comes on the heels of recently released documents from that lawsuit, which exposed the United Kingdom’s influence on the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship policy, and Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook only engaged in censorship after extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House. 

The Intercept previously released excerpts from this slide deck, but AFL is now publishing the entire deck for the first time. 

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