Tag: social media

NY Governor Kathy Hochul announces law forcing online platforms to report “hateful” content

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has reacted to a recent mass shooting in Buffalo by signing as many as ten new laws, including one that concerns social media. From the wording of the bills, the focus is not so much on content, as on online conduct.

The new legislation is supposed to prevent future incidents of this type, and cover limiting availability of guns and bulletproof vests, but also ordering social media companies to come up with new rules that would be used to “respond to potential threats.”

Reports say that the Buffalo shooter, an 18-year-old who was previously hospitalized after making threats against a school, also took these threats online in a number of posts a short time before the Buffalo massacre, and that he was also live streaming the deadly event.

One of the bills Hochul signed relates to “online hate” and wants companies behind social platforms to further tighten their policies around content flagged as such.

Hochul said that New York will require social media companies to report “hateful” content.

“And in the state of New York, we’re now requiring social media networks to monitor and report hateful conduct on their platforms,” Hochul announced.

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Reddit warns US Copyright Office internet upload filters would harm memes

Reddit has warned the US Copyright Office against internet upload filters, arguing the technology will harm free expression.

The US has been looking to update the DMCA to keep up with the copyright issues found online. Many proposals have come and gone, but the US Copyright Office is now looking into automated tools that can prevent content from being re-uploaded, aka upload filters.

In a submission to the US Copyright Office, Reddit, a platform known for user-submitted content, warned against Standard Technical Measures (STMs), including upload filters.

We obtained a copy of the submission for you here.

“Filtering technologies and STMs ill-suited to the variety of content on Reddit would limit the vitality of some of our platform’s most active communities,” Reddit said.

In its subreddits users post copyrighted content, taking advantage of the fair use principles to create memes and more. An upload filter would substantially harm the free flow of thought.

“Filtering technologies have difficulty merely identifying copyrighted material, let alone assessing the specific context the content was found. They cannot make nuanced judgments about fair use or transformative works,” the platform said.

The automated filters and the false positives they would bring will significantly harm free speech, Reddit argues.

“As a result, standardized measures are likely to remove non-infringing content and suffer from false positives. Worse, these over-removals would strike at the heart of the transformative user-generated content that makes Reddit communities unique,” Reddit explained.

“That is a severe, unnecessary, and unacceptable cost to the free expression of our users and the communities they build.”

Google has implemented such a measure through YouTube’s Content ID system, which is notorious. According to Reddit, Content ID cannot work for every type of platform or site.

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Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding the country from the news.”

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Canada’s broadcasting regulator confirms proposed online censorship bill will apply to user-generated content

During a hearing on Canada’s attempt to regulate what users can say on the internet, Bill C-11 (The Online Streaming Act), the head of Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator again confirmed that the far-reaching regulations will apply to user-generated content.

Ever since the bill was announced, critics have been warning that it empowers the Canadian government to censor the content users post to social media platforms by forcing these platforms to abide by content rules set by Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator – the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

These fears were confirmed by CRTC Chairman Ian Scott earlier this month when he acknowledged that Bill C-11 would apply to user-generated content. And in an appearance at Tuesday’s Canadian Heritage committee hearing, Scott reaffirmed that Bill C-11 allows the CRTC to regulate “user uploaded content.”

CRTC General Counsel and Deputy Executive Director Rachelle Frenette subsequently attempted to downplay the CRTC powers under Bill C-11 by insisting that the regulations apply to platforms, not users. However, she admitted that the CRTC could “issue rules with respect to discoverability.”

Dr. Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, noted (link) that Frenette’s admission is “entirely consistent with the concerns of digital creators, namely that platforms will be required to develop outcomes that result in some content being prioritized in the name of discoverability.”

The critics of Bill C-11 include politicians, creators, and even pro-censorship Big Tech platforms.

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Connecticut To Hire ‘Misinformation’ Specialist To Police The Internet

Connecticut is hiring a “misinformation” specialist to police the internet ahead of the midterm elections, according to the state’s budget statement.

The position of a misinformation “security analyst” was proposed by Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill to combat alleged election misinformation that has “undermined public confidence in the fairness and capability of election results,” according to the budget statement.

Their role will be to “monitor and combat election misinformation on a full-time basis,” the statement read. Additionally, the budget allocates millions of dollars toward election education, including information on absentee voting and security.

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Florida Republican Rep victim of Twitter hoax claiming he said children are ‘small sacrifice’ for Second Amendment

When rumors began circulating online that Republican Florida representative Randy Fine tweeted children are a “small sacrifice” for the Second Amendment, a look into the Tweet’s origin revealed it was clearly fake.

The account handle, which used the representative’s name, lacked the “FL” that’s part of representative Fine’s real Twitter username. Additionally, the fake account uses the official’s headshot, but trades his cover photo for an aggressive message about pronouns.

Reuters, an intelligence company and news source, and the Associated Press both evaluated the post and alerted audiences to its inauthenticity.

Early Saturday morning, Fine released a statement from his real account, saying the false post was issued by a convicted felon.

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Turkey to jail people for spreading “misinformation”

The Turkish government introduced a new law in parliament that will give the government more control over the internet. The law was drafted by President’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

The law, which is expected to pass, will punish “spreading misinformation on purpose.” It prohibits publicly spreading “false information regarding internal and external security, public order and the general health of the country, in a way that is suitable for disturbing the public peace, simply for the purpose of creating anxiety, fear or panic among the people.”

The punishment for intentionally spreading “false information” will be one to three years in prison. If the court finds that a person spread false information as part of an organization that is illegal, the sentence will be doubled.

Journalists might also be arrested under the new law for hiding sources who gave them “false information.”

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Chilling new footage shows Texas gunman Salvador Ramos during shirtless video call with 15-year-old German girl on social media app Yubo – days before he told her about his school massacre plans

The Texas school shooter made two FaceTime calls – one of them while topless – with a German girl he met on social media, who was told of his warped plot to murder.

Ramos, 18, was filmed posing with his shirt off in a call made to the girl, known only as CeCe, after meeting her on social media site Yubo.

Other new images obtained by CNN, show Ramos filming himself while holding the phone under his chin, and while wearing a face mask.

On the day of the massacre, Ramos messaged CeCe on Yubo to tell her he’d just shot his grandma Celia, and that ‘Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.’

Ramos ultimately carried out the plan, killing 19 young children at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, as well as two female teachers, before being shot dead.  

Ramos threatened to rape girls he talked to on social media app Yubo and said that he would shoot up schools, just weeks before the massacre.

The three teenage users, who revealed the messages to several news outlets, said that they didn’t take Ramos’ threats seriously until the news of Tuesday’s shooting broke out. 

They also reported Ramos’ threats to the app’s support team, which included a series of messages sent by the gunman, threatening to commit sexual violence and carry out school shootings.

Yubo is a French social media app that was created in 2015 and that is designed to ‘meet new people,’ as well as create a sense of community. It was developed by  TWELVE APP in 2015 and allows users to create video livestreams with up to 10 friends. The app currently has 50 million users around the world.

Ramos was still able to keep his profile active on the platform despite reports made to safety teams about his disturbing behavior. CeCe his German Yubo friend says the shooter warned her on the app that he was going to shoot up Robb Elementary School just 15 minutes before he opened fire.  

Screenshots of the pair’s correspondence, provided by the girl to CNN, reveal they were exchanging messages just after 11:01am CT – less than half hour before the massacre had started. 

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Senate Candidate Herschel Walker proposes social media monitoring

Georgia Senate Candidate Herschel Walker has suggested that a government agency be set up to monitor the social media accounts of young men and women in the wake of Tuesday’s mass shooting at a Texas elementary school where the shooter killed 19 students and two adults before being fatally shot by law enforcement officers.

Walker made the comments while being asked about his stance on gun control during a Fox News interview on Thursday.

Walker began the interview by blasting those “that want to continue to talk about our constitutional rights rather than talking about the person that did this shooting.” He continued by suggesting increased mental health funding, pushing back against those who want to take away constitutional rights, and suggesting that the solution is to “look into the person that did the shooting.”

However, he then followed these comments with a suggestion that extended far beyond the scope of the perpetrator – social media surveillance.

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