Tag: social media

Twitter sabotages itself in attempt to stop Elon Musk takeover

In a bid to thwart Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s attempted takeover of Twitter to make free speech changes, the company’s board has announced that existing shareholders will be able to purchase additional shares at a discount if a person or group builds a stake of more than 15% in the company without board approval.

The move, which is known as a “poison pill,” makes it harder for a person or group to take control of the company because their stake can be diluted whenever they own more than 15% of the company. However, it could also hurt existing shareholders because their stock would be diluted too and this dilution would lower the share price.

The poison pill will be in place for the next year.

Twitter’s poison bill defense follows Musk announcing a 9.2% stake in the company earlier this month and then offering to take the company private to make free speech changes yesterday. Musk had offered to pay $54.20 per share in cash and the stock last traded at a price of $46.66 – 13.9% below Musk’s offer price.

After offering to buy Twitter, Musk continued to defend free speech in an appearance at TED 2022.

“A good sign as to whether there’s free speech is, is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case then we have free speech,” the billionaire said.

“And it’s damn annoying, when someone you don’t like says something you don’t like. That is a sign of a healthy, functioning, free speech situation.”

During the interview, Musk said that his reasons for buying Twitter were not for profit.

“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” said Musk.

“I don’t care about the economics at all.”

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Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar Refuses to Answer Question on Whether Saying There are Only Two Sexes Considered as “Health Misinformation”

Minnesota Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar declined to answer a question on Friday during DisInfo 2022 Conference whether the senator’s recent bill banning “health misinformation” on social media will include a ban on saying there are two sexes—male and female.

Senator Amy Klobuchar sat on a panel to talk about “Taming the Wild, Wild Web” with the former Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, and a moderator from The New York Times.

UChicago student, Evita Duffy, co-founder and managing editor of Thinker Chicago asked the democratic senator whether saying there are only two sexes can be considered “health misinformation” and should be banned on social media platforms.

“You introduced the bill that you talked about today that would punish social media companies like Facebook and Twitter for having health misinformation on their platforms. And I’m going to ask you if I were to say that there are only two sexes, male and female. Would that be considered misinformation that you think should be, banned speech on social media platforms?” Duffy questioned.

Klobuchar just laughed at the question and refused to answer saying, “Okay, I’m not going to get into what misinformation.”

“First of all, I think the bill you’re talking about is different than the one we have mostly been talking about. So I want to make that clear. We’ve been talking about the competition bill. But there is another bill that I have on vaccine misinformation. It is that specific in a public health crisis,” Klobuchar argued.

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Twitter Just Banned Ex-UN Weapons Inspector For Revealing Crimes Against Humanity Committed By Ukraine

On Wednesday, Twitter ‘permanently suspended’ retired US Marine Corps officer Scott Ritter.

By disputing Ukrainian authorities’ accusations that Russian soldiers massacred residents in Bucha near Kiev, Twitter accused the former UN weapons inspector of participating in prohibited behavior.

On his Telegram channel, Ritter shared a screenshot of the message he received.

“So apparently I’ve been suspended from Twitter for the crime of challenging the orthodox narrative of the so-called Bucha massacre”

He said hehad appealed the decision adding that “Freedom of speech in America today is an endangered concept.”

RT reports: According to the screenshot, Twitter’s censors had decided that Ritter violated their rules against “harassment and abuse” by saying the Ukrainian police had committed crimes against humanity in Bucha, and were trying to shift blame onto Russia with US help.

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Hunter Biden Firm Invested In VR ‘Metaverse’ Used by Child Sex Groomers… And His Laptop Shows He Had an Account.

An investment firm directed by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a financial backer of the online virtual reality game “IMVU,” which has faced repeated controversies over child predators exploiting the app to find and connect with minors. The President’s son, Hunter, also appears to have established an account on the website, according to details confirmed by The National Pulse from his laptop.

Founded in 2004, the virtual world and social networking site ‘IMVU’ allows players to create a personalized avatar and interact with others users via public and private chat rooms.

The platform – described as a “metaverse” style concept– has repeatedly boasted of its “most vibrant and young” user base despite also allowing adult content and communities for fandoms including “furries.”

The investment sticks out among the rest of the portfolio of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) – a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital – which includes Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ukrainian biological laboratories.

RSTP counted both Biden and Heinz as managing directors. Heinz is the stepson of former U.S. Secretary of State and current Climate czar John Kerry.

Though the technology-focused investment fund’s website has been deleted, archived webpages reveal IMVU belonged to RSTP’s portfolio since at least March 2014.

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Barack Obama Suggests Social Media Anonymity Should Be Stripped From People Who Are “Rude” or “Lie”

Barack Obama has suggested that people who are “rude,” “obnoxious,” or “lie” on social media should have be stripped of their online anonymity.

Yes, really.

The former president made the comments during a keynote conversation with The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg at the ‘Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy’ conference.

After Obama initially claimed he was “close to a First Amendment absolutist,” his response to Goldberg asking him how he would regulate social media companies “to make sure that they’re not privileging anger, privileging division and polarization through their algorithms,” suggests otherwise.

Obama argued that online anonymity protections should be removed when it comes to speech of which he doesn’t personally approve.

“In some circumstances, it’s important to preserve anonymity…so that there’s space in repressive societies to discuss issues but as we’ve all learned, it’s a lot harder to be rude, obnoxious, cruel, or lie when somebody knows you’re lying and knows who you are and I think that there may be modifications there that can be made,” said Obama.

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Twitter IS “State-Affiliated Media”

British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.

“Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.

Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

“ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”

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Viral ‘Russian Mobile Crematorium’ Tweet is From an 8-Year-Old YouTube Video

A viral tweet that remains unchecked by “fact checkers” claims to show a Russian-operated ‘mobile crematorium’ in Mariupol, but the image is taken from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

Whoops.

The tweet was posted by news outlet NEXTA, which boasts nearly a million followers on Twitter. The tweet has received over 7,000 retweets and almost 11,000 likes.

“Mobile crematoria in #Mariupol,” states the tweet.

“Mayor of Mariupol Vadim Boychenko said today that #Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in the city.”

“According to him, tens of thousands of people could have died in Mariupol and the cremation, “covering up the traces of crimes”.

Except a simple reverse image search reveals the ‘mobile crematorium’ to be a screenshot from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

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The Online Safety Bill gives the UK government unprecedented power to determine “harmful” content

The UK’s latest attempt to clamp down on free speech online, the 225 page Online Safety Bill, will give sweeping new censorship powers to the UK’s Secretary of State and its communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), if passed.

It gives the UK Culture Secretary the power to decide on and designate “priority content that is harmful.”

Once the Secretary of State has designated this content, social media platforms and search engines that fall under the scope of the bill’s regulations have to “use proportionate systems and processes” to prevent children from encountering this priority content.

These platforms are also required to specify in their terms of service how they’ll tackle priority content that’s deemed to be “harmful to adults” and apply these measures consistently.

Additionally, the Culture Secretary gets the power to decide the user number and feature thresholds that determine whether a company falls under the scope of these requirements to remove and tackle priority content.

Collectively, these provisions give the Culture Secretary unprecedentedly broad powers to not only choose the types of speech that is allowed but to also set the rules around which platforms have to censor content.

Under the bill, Ofcom will be granted the power to issue harsh punishments to platforms that fail to meet the Secretary’s censorship demands.

These punishments include applying for court orders that restrict access to platforms in the UK and fining platforms up to £18 million ($23.78 million) or 10% of their revenue (whichever is higher).

In another authoritarian turn, if Ofcom decides that a platform is failing to comply with any aspect of the Online Safety Bill, it can also demand information from the platform via an “information notice” and require the platform to name a senior manager who can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years if they’re found guilty of failing to comply with the requirements.

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Barack Obama Backs Internet Controls to Grapple with the ‘Demand for Crazy’

Government regulation and control over the internet can defeat a “demand for crazy” through the spread of incorrect messages, former President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, 60, spoke with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at an event hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the magazine.

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.

Obama lamented how misinformation plays out across the U.S., accusing those who say President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election as guilty of falling for conspiracy theories.

He called out “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

The former president blamed smartphones for accelerating “an erosion of accountability norms and standards in political life” from 2010 onwards.

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