CNN Mask Karen Freaks Out, Calls Police On Super Bowl Revellers

“I gave a call to Tampa Police to ask them what’s going on with all these people that are out and about and not wearing masks because there is a mask mandate in the City of Tampa while this pandemic is underway and during this time of the game there,” she whinged.

“You’re supposed to be wearing a mask if you’re anywhere near Raymond James Stadium, if you’re in a bar or a restaurant or anywhere in one of these event or entertainment areas. And you can see from the pictures and the video that we have that people are just not paying much attention to that mask mandate,” Kaye urged.

She continued, “They are supposed to be fined up to $500.00. So I asked the Tampa Police, how many citations have been issued? What do you want to say in response to this? What’s being done about it?”

The police didn’t bother responding to her frothing.

Keep reading

The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows

A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Keep reading

MELTDOWN: AOC Begs Supporters To Mass Report #AlexandriaOcasioSmollet Hashtag In New Email

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) begged supporters to mass report the viral #AlexandriaOcasioSmollett hashtag on Facebook and Twitter this week, signalling that she is not handling the fallout from her debunked tales of fearing for her life and hiding from pro-Trump protesters who were “trying to kill” her on Jan. 6 all that well.

In an email sent from Team AOC, supporters of Ocasio-Cortez are asked for their help in forcing “Facebook and Twitter to take action and enforce their own rules.”

“We need your help,” the email reads. “Here’s what you can do… scan your social media to find posts with this misleading information, especially those using the trending hashtag. Don’t tweet any hashtags yourself, because we don’t want to spread them further!”

Supporters are then commanded to “Identify any posts that are threatening or harassing and use the built-in report features to flag them for moderators. Facebook and Twitter both have built-in tools for reporting posts and tweets that break the rules.”

Keep reading

Bill Would Force Social Media Users To Secretly Report Suspicious People To Law Enforcement

Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors “If You See, Something Say Something”  program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.

Just how bad is this bill?

This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.

Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer  service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.

Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)

What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?

Suspicious Transmission is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that government officials later determine commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime. Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a serious drug offense.

How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users etc., know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?

The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.

This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.

Keep reading

Turn snitch and get rich: Texas teen gives his own dad in to the FBI, pays his way through college

A Texas teenager has turned his father in to the FBI for taking part in the Capitol Hill riot, and pocketed tens of thousands of dollars from liberal admirers in the process.

When Jackson Reffitt’s father returned to the family home in Wylie, Texas, after the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Jackson claimed that he warned his son to keep his mouth shut. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,” he reportedly said. “And you know what happens to traitors. Traitors get shot.”

However, Jackson had already reported the 48-year-old Guy Reffitt to the FBI, telling agents he thought his father was planning “something big” during the certification of election results at the capitol, per a New York Times article on Sunday. After the riot, Reffitt was identified in video footage from the Capitol, tracked down in Texas, and arrested, according to a sworn affidavit by an FBI agent.

Keep reading

Twitter Encourages Users to Snitch on Each Other with ‘Birdwatch’ Feature

Social media giant Twitter has announced a new feature called “Birdwatch” which aims to encourage users to police and flag each other’s tweets if they believe they spread misinformation. The company claims it wants to “broaden the range of voices” fighting against misinformation, but the feature has the potential to devolve into flagging wars between different factions of users.

In a recent blog post, Twitter announced a new feature on its site called “Birdwatch,” which allows users to add notes with “helpful context” to tweets that they believe are misleading. To participate, users must have certain information on file with Twitter such as their phone number, ostensibly to prove the account belongs to a real person.

Keep reading

This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos

WHEN HACKERS EXPLOITED a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.

Keep reading

Feds Ask Travel Companies (Hotels, Car Rentals, Bus Companies) To ID Suspected Capitol Rioters

The War on Terror has officially crossed the line by using the Capitol riot to destroy what little is left of our civil liberties.

Bloomberg News reported that the House Oversight Committee has asked travel companies to help law enforcement ID suspected Capitol rioters.

“The committee sent letters to hotel chains, bus lines, car rental companies and online travel agents, asking them to retain all records regarding reservations and services for the entire month of January for potential use, if necessary, in future law enforcement or Congressional investigations.”

When the feds openly ask travel companies to help them ID suspected rioters EVERYONE’S privacy is at risk.

As Forbes noted, the Feds sent letters to more than two dozen travel companies, including nine bus companies.

Keep reading

Parler helped the FBI identify at least one person charged in connection with the Capitol riot

Parler is sharing information with the FBI for the Department of Justice’s investigations into the riot at the US Capitol.

An affidavit from an FBI special agent filed in court Tuesday says Eduardo Florea stockpiled more than 1,000 rounds of ammo and threatened to kill Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

The affidavit says the FBI received records from Parler to identify the user behind the account “LoneWolfWar,” where the threats originated. Parler provided the phone number associated with the account, the affidavit says, and the FBI used it, and info from T-Mobile, to identify Florea.

Keep reading

After Capitol Hill riots, children rat out their right-wing parents to the media

With authorities tracking down the Trump supporters who barged into the US Capitol, teenagers have eagerly turned in their own family members who took part in the riot, and the media has encouraged the Stasi-style snitching.

Days after President Donald Trump’s supporters forced their way into the US Capitol and ran riot throughout the building, police and prosecutors are working to identify and track down members of the mob. DC police have already arrested at least 80 people, and Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine told ABC News on Friday that his office would scour the internet for leads and ask the public to send in tips.

Keep reading