Tag: social media

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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World Economic Forum ‘Press Freedom’ Panel Calls for Algorithmic Suppression of Hate Speech, Rumours

Rumours, falsehoods, division, and hate speech should be suppressed by social media algorithms, according to a “freedom of the press” panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

The WEF panel, which was held in collaboration with Time magazine, featured the head of Soros-backed Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, who argued that social media should not focus on banning or overt censorship but rather on algorithmic manipulation in order to promote content from a “subset of society… journalists” to convey information as “carefully as possible” to the public.

“The algorithms are written to promote engagement because engagement is profitable, engagement is more eyeballs, and what is engaging? The provocative, rumours, falsehoods, hate speech, divisiveness.

“I don’t focus so much on what should be taken down, the overt censorship, but rather what is being promoted. If algorithms are promoting information that in essence is false or divisive because it is profitable, there I think there is accountability that is quite warranted for these companies”, Roth said.

The statements from Roth fall in line with previous arguments from the globalist World Economic Forum, which has previously called for the promotion of “diversity and anti-bias” on social media.

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YouTube CEO at World Economic Forum: “There’ll always be work that we have to do” to censor “misinformation”

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting for 2022, an event where powerful CEOs and world leaders meet to “find solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki committed to persistent censorship of “misinformation” and praised YouTube’s existing censorship efforts.

Wojcicki made the comments after Alyson Shontell Lombardi, the Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Magazine, asked her whether YouTube’s efforts to censor misinformation will always be a “work in progress.”

“I think there’ll always be work that we have to do because there will always be incentives for people to be creating misinformation,” Wojcicki said. “The challenge will be to keep staying ahead of that and make sure that we are understanding what they are and the different ways that people may use to try to trick our systems and make sure that our systems are staying ahead of what’s necessary to make sure that we are managing that.”

Wojcicki continued by praising YouTube’s 5-6 year initiative of cracking down on content that’s deemed to be misinformation and said that users who look at YouTube search results or the homepage will see content from “authoritative sources” (mainstream media outlets that YouTube designates as authoritative) for “sensitive topics.”

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Chicago cops team up with FBI to create fake social media profiles

Chicago police have free rein to use fake social media profiles to spy on people and eventually make arrests. This is seen as a more aggressive and potentially illegal use of social media by law enforcement. Previously, cops scanned social media posts to track down protesters.

Documents obtained by The Intercept revealed that the Chicago Police Department has a task force called Social Media Exploration (SOMEX) that is overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). The team uses fake social media profiles, created by the FBI, to catfish and investigate people.

The documents state that the photos in the fake profiles should be “uniquely created and not attributed to an actual individual.”

Additionally, the officers are “authorized to take these online identities into the real world” to further assist investigations. But the fake profiles are only to be used if there is adequate “articulable suspicion” of crime.

The documents detail the FBI’s involvement in SOMEX. Aside from creating fake online personas, the FBI oversees “the day-to-day operations” of the task force.

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Meet the Conspiracy Theorist Behind Twitter’s ‘Crisis Misinformation Policy’

Twitter’s pick to stop the spread of misinformation in times of crisis has a history of pushing falsehoods.

Yoel Roth, the head of Twitter’s safety and integrity unit, unveiled the site’s “crisis misinformation policy” on Thursday. In a blog post, Roth outlined how Twitter will place warning labels on tweets deemed to contain misinformation and prevent them from being “amplified or recommended” in times of armed conflict, natural disasters, or public health emergencies.

Roth is a questionable pick to launch the policy, given his own track record with misinformation. Roth oversaw Twitter’s decision to block the sharing of an October 2020 New York Post report on emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Roth told the Federal Election Commission he made the decision based on “rumors” shared by the United States government’s intelligence community that the Russian government might release materials hacked from Hunter Biden.

There has been no credible evidence that Biden’s laptop was hacked, or that Russia played a role in publishing emails from it. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admitted that blocking the article was “a total mistake.”

Roth came under fire earlier in 2020 for referring to Trump officials as “actual Nazis” in a 2017 tweet. He also called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) a “bag of farts.”

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House passes antisemitism resolution calling for surveillance and censorship of online content

The House of Representatives has voted to pass a resolution that calls for increased surveillance and censorship of online speech, to help reduce antisemitism.

The resolution goes beyond condemning antisemitism; it goes into the realm of calling on social media platforms to do more to stop it.

We obtained a copy of the resolution for you here.

The resolution calls on social media platforms to “institute stronger and more significant efforts to measure and address online antisemitism” and, like most resolutions of this kind, pays lip-service to the idea of “protecting free speech concerns,” without providing details on how this is possible.

The resolution also calls for the house to work “in tandem with the cross-party Inter-parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Anti- semitism to help craft thoughtful global initiatives designed to address online antisemitism.”

The resolution names platforms specifically, saying there has been an uptick in “antisemitic language, conspiracy theories, and hatred has increased on multiple social media platforms—from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and TikTok.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, was the only member of the House that recognized the implications of government once again trying to insert themselves into moderation on online platforms and voted against the bill on free speech grounds.

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