Tag: social media

If Facebook, Twitter, And Google Hide Information For The World’s Rulers, Elections Are A Scam

In a September interview that went viral on social media Sunday, a United Nations operative admitted the U.S. government-funded organization “partnered with Google” to rig the results returned on the world’s dominant search engine for the phrase “climate change.”

This follows multiple casual disclosures that, yes, politics control the information on monopoly tech platforms. In fact, government officials all the way up to the White House routinely use Big Tech to control what citizens are allowed to say to each other online, as an ongoing lawsuit from several U.S. attorneys general recently divulged.

The Biden White House is fighting further disclosures about high-level federal officials’ involvement in this government-pressured censorship regime, including Anthony Fauci and the White House press secretary. The companies involved include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the court documents say.

Earlier this year, a clip of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — who threw hundreds of millions of dollars obtained from his communications monopoly company into helping Democrat activists embed inside government election offices in 2020 — also went viral. It showed him telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI also controls the information Facebook allows people to share. The FBI’s meddling affected the 2020 presidential election outcome.

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Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020

Aconsortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file “tickets” requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.  

Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensif[ying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.

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Vietnam considers limiting who can post “news” on social media

Vietnam is working on new rules to limit news content on social media accounts. The new rules will limit the accounts that can share news, according to sources familiar with the matter.

“The government wants to fix what it sees as the ‘news-lisation’ of social media,” a source told Reuters. ‘News-lisation,” also called báo hoá in Vietnam, is a term used by the government to describe misleading social media users into believing that a social media account is an authorized news outlet.

According to the sources, the government has been holding private meetings with internet companies and platforms to discuss the accounts that will be allowed to post news content. Under the new rules, the government would have the authority to order social media companies to ban accounts that violate the rules.

The rules on news content, and other social media rules, are expected to be introduced later this year or early next year.

Vietnam is among the countries with the strictest internet and social media rules. The government has made many efforts to control the flow of news from unauthorized sources.

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Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child pornography accounts

Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, the companies told Reuters.

DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter.

Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal and Coca-Cola Co to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.

Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.

“We’re horrified,” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. “Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”

In another example, a user tweeted searching for content of “Yung girls ONLY, NO Boys,” which was immediately followed by a promoted tweet for Texas-based Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. Scottish Rite did not return multiple requests for comment.

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Germany has charged or punished over 1,000 people for “online speech-related crimes” since 2018

An in-depth report from The New York Times has revealed the scale of Germany’s prosecution of “online speech-related crimes” and provided a behind-the-scenes look at the units who are tasked with surveilling social media to build cases against German citizens for what they post online.

The Times said that after reviewing German state records, it found that there were more than 8,500 cases related to alleged online speech-related crimes and more than 1,000 people have been charged or punished since 2018. However, no national figures exist on the total number of people charged with online speech-related crimes, and experts that spoke with The New York Times said the true figure is probably much higher.

The Times’ report also provides details on the copious amounts of social media surveillance that are being conducted by a task force in the German city, Göttingen. This task force was created in 2020 and reportedly has hallways, bookshelves, and desks filled with red evidence files. These files contain printouts of German citizens’ Facebook comments, tweets, and Telegram posts. Investigators that work on the task force search through social media feeds, public records, and government data to gather evidence of purported online speech-related crimes.

This task force is in charge of cases across Lower Saxony, a state in northern Germany. Authorities in Lower Saxony reportedly raid homes multiple times per month and in some cases, a local television crew records and broadcasts the raids.

Citizens who are raided but refuse to give up their phones have them seized and sent to a lab. This lab uses software made by the digital intelligence company Cellebrite to unlock the seized phones.

This task force alone investigated 566 “internet speech-related crimes” last year and expects to investigate double that number in 2022. The unit also fines or punishes around 28% of those who are investigated.

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German Domestic Intelligence Is Running 100s Of Fake Right-Wing Extremist Social Media Accounts

Hundreds of the radical Nazis and right-wing extremists online are actually German domestic intelligence agents, and many of them may even responsible for “inciting hatred” and even violence. These agents, who once needed to drink and directly socialize with members of the extreme right, are now running right-wing extremist accounts online in Germany.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) argues that these accounts are needed to gather information, but critics say that they may also be promoting and actively encouraging radicalism, according to a report from German newspaper Süddeutshce Zeitung.

“This is the future of information gathering,” an unnamed head of a relevant state office told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

According to research by the newspaper, the authority has invested heavily in “virtual agents” since 2019, which it finances with taxpayers’ money. Both the federal office and the federal states employ spies, who besides right-wing extremists, are also tasked with keeping an eye on the left-wing extremists, Islamists, and the “conspiracy-ideological” scene.

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Good News for You Dumb People: YouTube Thought Police Think for You, Big Tech’s Bots Look After Your Best Interests

There’s an interesting moment in a recent YouTube video posted by Dr. John Campbell, a nurse educator who shares informational videos about the latest SARS-CoV-2 and other science on his educational channel. After reviewing government data, Campbell pauses for several seconds and scratches his head. A few beats later he mumbles an apology to the audience, confessing that his head felt a little itchy.

There was no hint from the deadpan tone that Campbell was doing anything other than scratching an itch. But, as some of his over 2.45 million loyal subscribers have boldly pointed out in the comment section, in recent videos Campbell seems darker than usual, almost depressed. Indeed, the nurse educator appears to be doing a lot of hand-wringing and head scratching lately.

It seems, however, that Campbell cannot openly share his concerns with his audience without putting his channel in jeopardy. In order to continue to post videos on YouTube, as he explored in that same head-scratching video, he must censor himself or risk being de-platformed.

YouTube Censors Vaccine Safety and Efficacy Information

YouTube has written guidelines against making videos that discuss vaccine safety, efficacy, and necessity.

This “vaccine misinformation policy” reads: “YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.”

The policy applies to vaccine safety, vaccine efficacy, and even information about vaccine ingredients (pdf).

In fact, YouTube will actively delete any content that suggests that vaccines may cause chronic side effects, “outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

This includes YouTube videos posted by medical doctors, scientists, academic researchers, and even patients who have themselves suffered from side effects.

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California’s war on internet freedom

California appears to be waging war on internet freedom.

Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed off a new social-media transparency law that poses a serious threat to free speech. Known as AB 587, the law will force social-media companies to disclose their content-moderation policies, and submit detailed descriptions of their efforts to police speech in certain categories, including hate speech, extremism and harassment. Failure to demonstrate that they are regulating, editing and no doubt censoring what appears on their platforms could land social-media companies with big fines.

As noted by Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, the law will have draconian consequences. It effectively forces social-media companies to please the regulatory authorities now empowered to watch over them.

But that was not the only attack on online freedom launched by California lawmakers last week. Newsom also signed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law. This is arguably an even more troubling move than AB 587.

The Age-Appropriate Design Code Act aims to protect children from harmful online content, by insisting that children’s interests are prioritised when businesses are designing and developing their online services. This law effectively insists that all internet users should be treated like children.

After all, the law will apply to any business ‘likely to be accessed by a child’, or unable to establish the age of its consumers ‘with a reasonable level of certainty’ – which goes for most businesses. Businesses will therefore have to assume that the child, defined by the act as any individual under 18, is the default user

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Pentagon Opens Review Of Its Clandestine Psychological Operations

A report published last month by research groups Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory detailed the activity of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter that were promoting pro-Western narratives in posts targeting audiences overseas. The social media companies removed around 150 accounts over the past few years, with some removed recently as they were promoting anti-Russia narratives about the war in Ukraine.

The report did not attribute blame for the accounts, but two unnamed military officials speaking to the Post hinted that US Central Command (CENTCOM) was involved. Separately, the Post said that Facebook removed fictitious personas created by CENTCOM to counter a Chinese claim that Covid-19 originated from the US Army bio lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

In response to the Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory report, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, ordered the review, which instructed US military command involved in psychological operations to fill the White House in on their activities by next month. Kahl said he wanted to know what types of operations were being carried out and if they were effective.

The US military has a long history of psychological operations, but its activities online in that area are shrouded in secrecy. While there are military units that specialize in psyops, such as the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the Pentagon also employs more covert forces in this area.

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Influencer says he was offered money to spread anti-Trump Jan 6 lies on TikTok, brings receipts

Attorney and TikToker @TrialByPreston revealed in a video that the Good Information Foundation attempted to pay him $400 to spread unsubstantiated rumours and misinformation about January 6, President Trump, and his 2020 presidential campaign. 

“I was just offered $400 to make an anti-Donald Trump propaganda post related to the January 6 investigation that is completely not true,” Preston Moore, Esq. said in the video. The Good Information Foundation, headed by Rick Stengel, Former Under Secretary of State in Obama administration, emphasizes that “America is in an information crisis,” and that “disinformation is threatening public health, safety, social trust and democracy.”

Moore emphasized that he’s not a Trump supporter to “give a little bit of context,” and noted that he’s an attorney who posts legal news on TikTok. Other videos on his channel include discussions of the special master that was appointed to review documents seized by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, on the Parkland school shooter, on the Constitution, or other matters.

Then he launched into what happened, saying: “I get an email from somebody at the Good Information Foundation.” That person, he said, obscuring the name, “sent me a message letting me know she represented the Good Information Foundation and that she was willing to offer a paid collaboration to discuss some topics related to January 6.

“I said ‘sure, why not,’ I’ll learn some more,” he said. He learned that the Good Information Foundation would pay him $400 to make a post on his page and share it to Instagram, and that there were specific bullet points that they’d like him to hit to earn that fee. 

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