Tag: facebook

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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Facebook Built a VIP Censorship Pipeline For The White House

In case you thought 2021 was just about ever-shifting “expert advice,” think again. Thanks to America First Legal, we now know that behind the chaotic public health messaging, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Facebook were playing a little game of “whack-a-mole” with your freedom of speech.

Today, new onboarding documents were unearthed, which shows just how cozy Facebook got with the CDC. The social media giant wasn’t merely policing what it thought was “misinformation” on COVID and vaccines; it was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative. The Biden-Harris Administration, while trumpeting their “fight for truth,” had essentially deputized Facebook to clean up the messy world of online discourse. And who decides what’s messy? Apparently, anyone with a .gov email address.

Let’s rewind to 2021, the peak of the pandemic drama. The public was dealing with a mutating narrative on what constituted “the truth.”

In other words, what was factual one week might be misinformation the next, depending on who you asked—or more accurately, who was in power.

At the time, the administration faced heavy criticism for overseeing a clampdown on dissent. Social media platforms, like Facebook, took on the noble mantle of censoring anything that didn’t align with the latest CDC talking points.

One day it was, “Don’t wear masks,” and the next, “You must wear two.” If you were quick enough to quote the CDC’s latest declaration, congratulations, you won a reprieve from the online guillotine. But heaven forbid you posted a month-old statement—down came the banhammer.

The First Amendment? Ah yes, that pesky little thing. It felt like an afterthought in the administration’s relentless quest to manage the pandemic, or rather, manage the narrative about the pandemic.

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Meta Scrubs Trump Would-Be Assassin Ryan Routh’s Facebook Page, X Suspends His Account – Both Pages Littered with Pro-Ukraine Propaganda

Meta scrubbed Trump would-be assassin Ryan Routh’s Facebook page and X suspended his account.

The Gateway Pundit has verified that both of Routh’s social media accounts have been taken down.

Shots were fired at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach on Sunday afternoon at 1:30 pm as the former president was playing a round of golf with real estate investor Steve Witkoff.

Ryan Wesley Routh pushed the muzzle of his rifle through the fence line at Trump’s golf course before Secret Service agents fired at him.

Law enforcement said the gunman was about 300 to 500 yards away from Trump. He was hiding in the shrubbery when he pointed his rifle with a scope through the fence.

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Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes for Biden Administration Censorship, Sending Liberal Elites Into Denial

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter last week to the House Judiciary Committee saying he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” from the Biden administration to “censor” COVID-19 content, causing liberal pundits and media outlets who have denied this censorship to panic and deny what Zuckerberg wrote. The Meta CEO also admitted that his company demoted a story critical of Biden’s son—the Hunter Biden laptop scandal—right before the 2020 election.

In 2021, senior officials in the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree …. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it …. and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

Journalist Kara Swisher began lying about the matter in a CNN interview, alleging that the Supreme Court had found there had been no censorship and that the Biden administration had not pressured Meta. Both claims are false.

In the recent Supreme Court ruling, judges skipped over claims of whether the Biden administration had actually censored Americans, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the White House. Swisher could have learned this by reading an article on the decision in the New York Times, the very publication where she was a contributor.

As for the Biden administration pressure to censor—something that Swisher denies—the evidence of this was made clear from Meta internal communications released by the House Judiciary Committee last May.

Zuckerberg texted three Meta officials—Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Joel Kaplan—on July 16, 2021, “Can we include that the [White House] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”

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Facebook Blocks Secret Recording of DOJ Official Saying Trump Case is “Nonsense”

Facebook is once again at the center of a censorship storm after being accused of blocking the circulation of a video exposing harsh criticisms by a official regarding the prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

The video, also published on Rumble features undercover footage showing Nicholas Biase, the chief spokesman for the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office, which brought cases against President Trump, slamming Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Trump case as a “perversion of justice.”

“Honestly, I think the case is nonsense,” Biase says in the video.

Users who went to share the video on Facebook were hit with the following message: “We can’t review this website because the content doesn’t meet our Community Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know.”

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Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now To Confess?

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. 

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. 

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now. 

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. 

After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels. 

The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. 

The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle. 

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Zuckerberg says Biden officials ‘pressured’ Meta to ‘censor’ content: What to know

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” from the Biden administration to “censor” content on its platforms.

“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction,” he wrote in the letter.

Here’s what to know about the claims.

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