Tag: social media

Biden Advisor Says Social Media Should Silence Anyone Who Criticises Green Energy “Transition”

One of Joe Biden’s senior advisors told a reporter this week that social media companies should be cracking down on and censoring anyone who speeds information critical of the administration’s so called ‘green energy transition’.

National climate advisor Gina McCarthy made the comments in an interview with a reporter for Axios, stating “Now it’s not so much denying the problem. What the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

She continued, “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” on “disinformation,” noting that criticising a green energy transition upheaval is “equally dangerous to denial,” and adding “we have to move fast.”

The Axios interviewer just nodded in agreement without any pushback.

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Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it

Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists.

It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet.

NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms. 

These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web. They point to direct knowledge of child exploitation investigations and sting operations, interviews with victims and perpetrators of abuse, and interactions with individuals soliciting child sexual abuse material as evidence that Wickr is being used by many people who exploit children.  

Posts linking Wickr and child sexual abuse material are also littered across the internet. On social media platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter, NBC News found dozens of forums, accounts and blogs where hundreds of posts have been made soliciting minors, those who have access to them, or those interested in trading child sexual abuse material alongside Wickr screen names. No child sexual abuse imagery was viewed in the course of reporting this article.

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Obama: We have to “detoxify” the “scourge of disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate online”

Former US President Barack Obama made a fresh push for online censorship during an appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit by calling for crackdowns on content that he deems to be “disinformation,” “hate,” or a “conspiracy theory.”

Before Obama took the stage, 2022 Obama Foundation Leader Sarah-Josephine Hjorth hinted at what was to come by railing against “fake news and misinformation.”

“While the increase in use of smartphones and social media first came with the whisper of renewed democratic participation, fake news and misinformation dominate the digital landscape and result in an erosion of the fabric of truth and polarization,” Hjorth said.

Shortly after taking the stage, Obama continued this theme by invoking the January 6 Capitol riot and tying it to “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

“In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories,” Obama said.

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DHS disinformation board pushed for partnership with social media platforms

The unraveling of the US Department of Homeland Security’s “disinformation board” has brought to light a number of controversial and interesting insights.

One of them is that the board was supposed to serve as a tool for the government to “work with” privately-owned social media platforms – specifically Twitter – by co-opting them as “stakeholders” in efforts to suppress debate about “conspiracy theories” – such as information around Covid, vaccines, and election integrity.

Silicon Valley social media platforms wield enormous power in the digital public square but refuse to accept any responsibility that comes with it.

Whenever that issue is raised in the context of widespread censorship on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc., these giants habitually choose to play dumb by declaring themselves as nothing more than private companies. But there has long been suspicion that some of the censorship apparatus they employ often works on behalf of political actors.

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Google relents after Post fights censorship of YouTube interview with Jan. 6 rioter

Google said Wednesday it will allow a Post video interview with a Capitol rioter to remain on YouTube — after The Post exposed the platform’s censorship of the clip in a front-page story that pointed out the video helped convict the man.

The latest Big Tech attempt to squash The Post’s reporting occurred Monday when the Google-owned video site deleted the interview taped inside the Capitol — saying Brooklyn man Aaron Mostofsky, 35, spouted “misinformation.”

The video featuring Mostofsky, the son of Brooklyn judge Steven Mostofsky, was one of the only professional interviews conducted with a rioter inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was cited by many news outlets and the Justice Department used it to help prosecute Mostofsky, who last month was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Mostofsky, who was wearing fur pelts, a police vest and a riot shield that he said he “found,” said in the interview that he joined the first wave of intruders because the election was “stolen” from then-President Donald Trump, who had just finished making a speech with similar claims.

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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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