Tag: social media

“Science” group spent $40 million censoring free speech on social media

As millions of Americans are struggling just to make ends meet, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under fake president Joe Biden is shelling out “nearly $40 million into social media censorship grants and contracts,” according to a new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).

To keep a lid on what people say online, the NSF is throwing American taxpayer money at all sorts of projects aimed at controlling what gets posted to the internet. Since Biden started occupying the Oval Office, some $38.8 million has been spent by the NSF to battle “misinformation.”

A total of 64 grants totaling $31.8 million were also handed over to 42 colleges and universities to conduct “research” into the concept of “stopping viral ideas” – meaning ideas that people come up with themselves as opposed to the ones being fed to them by the globalist deep state.

The claim is that said research is “neutral” and “scientific” in nature, but the descriptions slapped on some of the grants openly and explicitly indicate that their true aim is to “explicitly target ‘populist politicians’ and ‘populist communications’ to scientifically determine ‘how best to counter populist narratives’.”

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Twitter Suffers From “Ridiculous” Number Of “Psy Ops”, Elon Musk Says

Twitter owner Elon Musk said Monday that the platform suffers from a “ridiculous” number of professional psychological operations (or, “psy ops”), a concept that typically refers to the dissemination of propaganda or, when used by state actors like the military, psychological warfare tactics meant to manipulate one’s enemies.

“The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous!” Musk wrote in a post on Twitter.

He added jokingly that “at least with new Verified, they will pay $8 for the privilege—haha.”

Musk later qualified his statement, responding to a Twitter user’s comment that the psychological operations are “mid”-level rather than professional. Musk conceded that “it’s mostly basic.”

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Binance’s ‘CZ’ Says Half Billion WhatsApp User Records For Sale On Dark Web

Nearly half a billion WhatsApp users’ mobile phone numbers are allegedly for sale on a dark web community forum, according to multiple sources, including Binance’s billionaire Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. 

“A new set of 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers for sales in the Dark Web,” CZ tweeted Sunday. He said a sample of hacked data “indicates the phone numbers are legit.”

CZ warned users on the Meta-owned platform that “threat actors downstream will use this data to conduct smishing (phishing messages) campaigns.” 

Cybernews initially confirmed the hack. They said: 

On November 16, an actor posted an ad on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming they were selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.

The dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. Threat actor claims there are over 32 million US user records included.

Another huge chunk of phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million).

The dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.

The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK – $2,500, and Germany – $2,000.

Cybernews also posted a screenshot of the seller’s post on the forum featuring the total number of phone numbers per country. 

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CNN analyst declares that freedom of speech is ‘nonsense,’ claims Elon Musk’s new Twitter empowers Vladimir Putin and is ‘destructive to American national security’

A CNN analyst aspersed the freedom of speech as “nonsense,” and claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia will be “all over Twitter” dispersing disinformation to the entire world.

Former CIA case officer and current CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer appeared on the cable news network on Friday to discuss the opening up of Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk.

“CNN Newsroom” host Boris Sanchez began by bringing up the news that Musk plans to grant mass amnesty to accounts that were previously suspended. Musk made the decision after running a Twitter poll, in which 72.4% approved of welcoming the previously banned accounts.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Sanchez asked Baer about his opinion regarding formerly banned accounts being reinstated.

Baer responded, “Well, Boris, I can tell you one thing, Putin will be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this. Fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it, this is a great opportunity for him.”

Without evidence, Baer added, “And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence.”

“The Russians are waiting for something like this,” the former CIA agent claimed.

“They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine,” he continued. “And they’re going to be all over Twitter. I guarantee this. Supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. You just wait.”

Baer alleged that the Russians will “put up” misinformation and it will “cascade everywhere, in India, in Europe.” He said the Russian disinformation would “appeal” to the European far right and Chinese. He said that Putin and the Russians are going to weaponize Musk’s new pro-free speech Twitter “as a vehicle to save himself and Ukraine.”

The CNN security and intelligence analyst bizarrely asserted, “And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go in a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law.”

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Meta Confirms US Military Running Fake Social Media Accounts to Push Propaganda

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.

Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.

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The UK plots to ban private messaging

UK’s media regulator Ofcom will get more surveillance powers than spy agencies under the Online Safety Bill, according to a legal analysis by the Index on Censorship organization.

The legislation would allow Ofcom to force tech companies to clamp down on “child abuse” and “terrorist content” by ending end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger and force all communications to be scanned.

Human rights lawyer Matthew Ryder, in a legal opinion commissioned by Index on Censorship, said that the powers that Ofcom would be afforded by the bill allow “allow the state to compel [tech companies] to carry out surveillance of the content of communications on a generalized and widespread basis.”

The regulator would not need prior authorization before making a demand to a tech company to scan messages and there would be no independent oversight over how the regulator uses its powers.

Ryder added: “We are unable to envisage circumstances where such a destructive step in the security of global online communications for billions of users could be justified.”

Communications by journalists, whistleblowers, and victims would no longer be safe. Additionally, it is not clear if Ofcom would make public the demands it issues or whether it would keep them secret.

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Far-Left Antifa Thugs Still Active on Twitter While Many Conservatives Remain Banned

Elon Musk has mostly championed free speech since taking over Twitter. There are a still a number of conservatives who remain banned, including The Gateway Pundit, while he has ignored leftists supporting violence on the platform.

The case of Antifa ‘journalist” Vishal Singh is a particularly acute example. Independent journalist Andy Ngo documented multiple cases of Singh celebrating and calling for violent actions on Twitter.  His latest post called for deadly violence against Republicans and Libs of Tiktok.

Singh previously celebrated assaults on actual journalists and demanded assaults against law enforcement. 

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Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

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FDA social media posts on COVID under legal, medical scrutiny for misleading claims

The FDA’s Twitter habits are getting scrutiny in court and from medical professionals as the feds seesaw between walking back their once-confident COVID-19 assertions and making sweeping new claims without providing evidence.

Having long ago conceded that COVID vaccines can’t stop viral transmission and that assertions to the contrary by President Biden among others were based on “hope” rather than science, the feds are now downplaying the influence of their social media to escape liability for allegedly violating statutory limits by interfering in medical judgments.

At the same time, over the past two months, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf has gone on a spree of evidence-free tweets about bivalent boosters and oral antivirals, such as Pfizer’s rebound infection-prone Paxlovid, prompting exasperation from leading doctors.

The FDA’s “social media statements … are what bother me the most,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown said in a hearing this month on the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by three doctors who claim the agency’s false portrayals of ivermectin have harmed their ability to treat patients and threatened their licenses.

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High-End Fashion Brand Ads Show Young Kids Holding Sex Bondage Teddy Bears With Child Porn Court Papers In Background

A keen Twitter user going by “Shoe” posted screenshots of an advertising campaign for the luxury fashion brand Balenciaga showing disturbing images of young children holding stuffed animals wearing bondage gear.

Perhaps the most unusual part of the ad campaign was that a paper document on a table in one of the images talks about a child pornography court case.

In a Twitter thread posted Monday, Shoe wrote, “the brand ‘Balenciaga’ just did a uh….. interesting… photoshoot for their new products recently which included a very purposely poorly hidden court document about ‘virtual child porn’ normal stuff.”

The thread also pointed out the fashion brand left Twitter less than a week ago, with Shoe writing, “interesting timing.”

In another odd move, the company deleted every single one of their Instagram posts.

Their Instagram page has over 14 million followers.

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