Tag: internet

Obama is expected to call for more internet censorship in Stanford speech

President Barack Obama is today attending Stanford University to give a speech about censoring “misinformation” online. He has delivered such speeches multiple times over the past year.

According to The Chicago Tribune, Obama “is expected to add his voice to demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies polluting public discourse.”

“In private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, warning that the scourge of falsehoods online has eroded the foundations of democracy at home and abroad,” the New York Times said.

Recently, Obama talked about censorship at an event organized by the Atlantic and the University of Chicago. He said social media companies should censor what is not good for society.

“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make money,” Obama said. “But say to them that there’s certain practices you engage in that we don’t think are good for society.”

In a tweet Tuesday, Obama promoted censorship, arguing misinformation is a threat to democracy.

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Adults and Children Continuously Targeted for Data Extraction, Surveillance and Censorship

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that not a single day goes by without a new data exploit, hack, breach, leak, or scandal involving censorship by private companies and government agencies. Of course, this is all compounded even further by the fact that more devices contain more sensors that connect to the internet than ever before, offering many new methods for targeting groups and individuals. It has been estimated that by 2030 there could be 125 billion devices — potentially 15 per user — that in some way will comprise the ever-expanding Internet of Things ecosystem.

Amid this sea of two-way data traffic, we have a massive amount of targeted advertising and personally identifiable information extraction that has shown very often to all be done without users’ consent. If there is consent at all, it very likely is through lenthy and confusing Terms and Conditions that almost no one reads in their entirety. Worse still is the proven targeting of children’s data. Lawmakers continue to attempt to rein in these consumer-unfriendly practices, but their current proposals will likely do more harm than good. At this point it should be obvious that even if legislative measures are effectively created, such a waiting game only leaves all of us, including our kids, increasingly vulnerable at any given moment. People want – and deserve – to become personally responsible for their own security and privacy.

Fortunately, there are residential proxy providers on the opposing side that understand the rising awareness by the public of these data violations and creepy intrusions. These companies are doing everything they can to offer the tools necessary for individuals to protect their family’s data and privacy, while also offering increasing freedom to reach the websites that we do want to visit.

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Hunter Biden Firm Invested In VR ‘Metaverse’ Used by Child Sex Groomers… And His Laptop Shows He Had an Account.

An investment firm directed by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a financial backer of the online virtual reality game “IMVU,” which has faced repeated controversies over child predators exploiting the app to find and connect with minors. The President’s son, Hunter, also appears to have established an account on the website, according to details confirmed by The National Pulse from his laptop.

Founded in 2004, the virtual world and social networking site ‘IMVU’ allows players to create a personalized avatar and interact with others users via public and private chat rooms.

The platform – described as a “metaverse” style concept– has repeatedly boasted of its “most vibrant and young” user base despite also allowing adult content and communities for fandoms including “furries.”

The investment sticks out among the rest of the portfolio of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) – a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital – which includes Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ukrainian biological laboratories.

RSTP counted both Biden and Heinz as managing directors. Heinz is the stepson of former U.S. Secretary of State and current Climate czar John Kerry.

Though the technology-focused investment fund’s website has been deleted, archived webpages reveal IMVU belonged to RSTP’s portfolio since at least March 2014.

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Barack Obama Suggests Social Media Anonymity Should Be Stripped From People Who Are “Rude” or “Lie”

Barack Obama has suggested that people who are “rude,” “obnoxious,” or “lie” on social media should have be stripped of their online anonymity.

Yes, really.

The former president made the comments during a keynote conversation with The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg at the ‘Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy’ conference.

After Obama initially claimed he was “close to a First Amendment absolutist,” his response to Goldberg asking him how he would regulate social media companies “to make sure that they’re not privileging anger, privileging division and polarization through their algorithms,” suggests otherwise.

Obama argued that online anonymity protections should be removed when it comes to speech of which he doesn’t personally approve.

“In some circumstances, it’s important to preserve anonymity…so that there’s space in repressive societies to discuss issues but as we’ve all learned, it’s a lot harder to be rude, obnoxious, cruel, or lie when somebody knows you’re lying and knows who you are and I think that there may be modifications there that can be made,” said Obama.

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Barack Obama Backs Internet Controls to Grapple with the ‘Demand for Crazy’

Government regulation and control over the internet can defeat a “demand for crazy” through the spread of incorrect messages, former President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, 60, spoke with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at an event hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the magazine.

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.

Obama lamented how misinformation plays out across the U.S., accusing those who say President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election as guilty of falling for conspiracy theories.

He called out “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

The former president blamed smartphones for accelerating “an erosion of accountability norms and standards in political life” from 2010 onwards.

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Canada’s Heritage Minister says online censorship bill will help free speech

To advise the Heritage Minister on regulating Canada’s internet, a panel of experts, most of them academics, has been appointed. One of the government’s internet regulation plans, alongside the online censorship bill, is to create a federal internet censorship agency.

When announcing the panel of experts, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said, “We are open to all ideas. The only thing we want is to do the right thing, is to make it right, is to make it happen.”

The minister was asked if it was a priority for the internet censorship bill not to infringe Canadians’ rights. He said that freedom of expression is a fundamental right and is “at the core” of the bill.

“But I’ll tell you something else,” Rodriguez said. “Actually there are a lot of people who don’t want to share what they think anymore, who are afraid of going online to speak freely because of the negative and violent reaction they may get. I think in some ways this will really help freedom of speech.”

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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How Much Real-World Extremism Does Online Hate Actually Cause?

While calls to censor hate speech and violent extremist content on social media platforms are common, there’s little evidence that online incitement leads to real-world radicalization. Ironically, such calls may actually galvanize extremists, who interpret hostile media coverage, commentary, and censorship policies as confirmation of their victimhood narratives and conspiratorial thinking.

A 2018 journal article entitled “Exposure to Extremist Online Content Could Lead to Violent Radicalization: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence” scanned the content of more than 5,000 previous studies, but found that only 11 included “tentative evidence that exposure to radical violent online material is associated with extremist online and offline attitudes, as well as the risk of committing political violence among white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and radical Islamist groups.” The authors acknowledged that they could not conduct a systematic meta-analysis “due to the heterogeneous and at times incomparable nature of the data.” To the extent generalizations were possible, the authors reported that “active seekers of violent radical material [appear] to be at higher risk of engaging in political violence as compared to passive seekers.” If that is the case, then preventing extremist content from being published on large-scale social-media platforms is unlikely to be highly effective, as it is primarily being consumed by those who already have committed to its message.

In 2013, the RAND corporation released a study that explored how Internet usage affected the radicalization process of 15 convicted violent extremists and terrorists. The researchers examined five hypotheses generated by a review of the existing literature:

  1. The Internet creates more opportunities to become radicalized;
  2. The Internet acts as an “echo chamber,” in which individuals find their ideas supported and echoed by like-minded individuals;
  3. The Internet accelerates a pre-existing process of radicalization;
  4. The Internet allows radicalization to occur without physical contact; and
  5. The Internet increases opportunities for self-radicalization.

The researchers found that the Internet generally played a small role in the radicalization process of the individuals studied, though they did find support for the idea that the Internet may act as an echo chamber and enhance opportunities to become radicalized. However, the evidence did “not necessarily support the suggestion that the internet accelerates radicalization, nor that the internet allows radicalization to occur without physical contact, nor that the internet increases opportunities for self-radicalization, as in all the cases reviewed … the subjects had contact with other individuals, whether virtually or physically.”

The limited empirical evidence that exists on the role that online speech plays in the radicalization-to-violence journey suggests that people are primarily radicalized through experienced disaffection, face-to-face encounters, and offline relationships. Extremist propaganda alone does not turn individuals to violence, as other variables are at play.

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New copyright bill appears to push for internet upload filters

You might have thought there is something fundamentally wrong and overarching with the (infamous) DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in dire need of comprehensive reform? Well, two US senators think what it needs is to be implemented much more vigorously.

A bipartisan legislative proposal is now emerging in the US to further shore up the country’s efforts to protect copyright and go after those designated as infringers.

The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022 is the “brainchild” of US Senators Thom Tillis, a Republican, who has long-championed corporate interests when it comes to copyright, and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and the main goal is to make sure the burden of developing what are described as effective and widely available measures would going forward, be on tech companies.

The proposal is supposed to be an update to the DMCA, which is now a quarter-century old. The way Tillis and Leahy phrased it while announcing the draft bill is that it will be better suited to combat what they repeatedly call “copyright theft” and “piracy” – in conditions on the internet that have since changed dramatically.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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This Is the End of Free Speech Online

The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.

This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.

Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.

What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.

Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.

Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.

After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.

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