Tag: social media

Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal previously rejected free speech in favor of “healthy public conversation”

In a far-reaching November 2020 interview, Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal, who was the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the time, rejected free speech protections that are enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, wished the company had censored QAnon sooner, and touted the company’s approach of censoring content based on “potential for harm.”

“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” Agrawal said in response to a question about protecting free speech as a core value and the role of the First Amendment.

He added that the company now focuses “less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.” In this context, Agrawal said the role of Twitter is increasingly moving toward recommendations and “how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

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FBI Document Says the Feds Can Get Your WhatsApp Data — in Real Time

As Apple and WhatsApp have built themselves into multibillion-dollar behemoths, they’ve done it while preaching the importance of privacy, especially when it comes to secure messaging.

But in a previously unreported FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone, the bureau claims that it’s particularly easy to harvest data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services, as long as the FBI has a warrant or subpoena. Judging by this document, “the most popular encrypted messaging apps iMessage and WhatsApp are also the most permissive,” according to Mallory Knodel, the chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has articulated a “​​privacy-focused vision” built around WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service in the world. Apple CEO Tim Cook says privacy is a “basic human right” and that Apple believes in “giving the user transparency and control,” a philosophy that extends to the company’s wildly popular iMessage app. For journalists, activists, and government critics who worry about government mass surveillance and political retribution, secure messaging tools can mean the difference between doing their work safely or facing imminent danger.

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Australia declares war on ‘trolls’

The Australian government will introduce new legislation forcing social media companies to “unmask” anonymous users who post offensive comments, or make them pay defamation fines if they are unable or refuse to do so.

The new initiative seeks to define social media giants as publishers, making them responsible for the user-generated content on their platforms, as well as to introduce special mechanisms through which anyone can file a complaint and demand a post takedown if they think they are being defamed, bullied or harassed, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced during a televised press briefing on Sunday.

The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people. 

If a platform refuses to delete offensive content, a court may order it to reveal the identity of the anonymous commenter. In case the company again refuses or is unable to identify the troll – then it will be held ultimately liable and will have to pay any resulting fines.

“Free speech is not being allowed to cowardly hide in your basement and sledge and slur and harass people anonymously and seek to destroy their lives,” Morrison stated. “In a free society such as Australia where we value our free speech, it is only free when that is balanced with the responsibility for what you say.”

Morrison offered little insight into details of the proposed legislation, or if it will be up for public debate, but said he expects strong support from parliament. He previously hinted at an imminent crackdown on online anonymity during a G20 summit last month, where he said “the rules that apply in the real world should apply in the digital world.” However, it remains unclear how exactly the Australian government expects social media companies to verify the identities of their users.

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Facebook’s ‘Race Blind’ Algorithm Found 90% Of Hate Speech Directed Toward White People And Men

We now know why Facebook decided to change its “race-blind” hate speech detection algorithm last year to allow more anti-white hatred.

The Washington Post reported last week that an “April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of ‘hate speech’ subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men.”

They viewed this as a failure of the system because white people are supposed to be the targets of all hate.

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Hillary Clinton: “lack of gatekeepers” and “misinformation” online is clouding Biden’s accomplishments

Former Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are not appreciating Biden’s accomplishments due to the spread of misinformation online.

The former secretary of state joined the growing list of Democrats who have said Americans are not fully understanding the issues affecting their daily lives.

Clinton made the comments in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Clinton added that the US lacks “gatekeepers” and “people with a historic perspective” who can help Americans understand what is currently happening in the country.

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The Metaverse Is A Scam: We’re Being Herded Into The Matrix

How do they get our souls?

Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The [soul], exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most en and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.

The passage is from Whitley Strieber’s “The Key”, a purportedly true account as related by Streiber of an encounter with a mysterious humanoid being who simply knocked on the door of his Toronto hotel room at 3am on June 6, 1998, entered his suite and told him about mankind’s place in the cosmos and his inescapable fate.

Strieber’s account may be a synthesis: partly “true” (in that he believes it occurred as he relates it), part visioning, part somnambulistic dream state. Whatever emanates from the mind of Whitley Strieber, it originates from some realm outside of our Cartesian,  materialist notion of consensus reality.

He reminds me of that other prophetic visionary of yesteryear: Rudolf Steiner, whom as I wrote previously, spent much of his life in a hypnogognic state, possibly without even realizing it.

Steiner and Strieber. Odd that. They are both talking about the same thing. The idea that the souls of humanity could be captured in a technological machine, where they would wander forever, believing they have omniscience, even Godhood.

“At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended  beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology”.
— Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering @ Google and author of The Singularity is Near.

Steiner called it The Eighth Sphere and warned that sometime in the late 20th century, Arhiman would incarnate in the west and drive a global process of harvesting human souls into it. The zeitgeist of radical material reductionism would dampen, deaden and dumb down humanity to its coarsest, most basic layers: meat. Our minds, what we think is our own consciousness, our souls, self-awareness even our freewill, it’s all just an illusion. Our experts say. It’s just something that happens when our brains gas off certain neurochemicals.

However…

We can take that illusion, what we call our consciousness, and pretty soon now (just as soon as The Singularity happens), we’ll be able to upload that illusion “into the cloud”, into The Metaverse and we’ll be able to experience anything we want, for as long as we want, forever.

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How China Managed to Wipe Out All Mentions of Its Most Explosive #MeToo Case

Hours after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former Communist Party official of sexual assault in a shocking online post, Eric Liu witnessed one of the most intensive censorship campaigns carried out before his eyes. 

The process looked familiar to Liu, who worked as a content censor at Weibo, the microblogging site where Peng described how former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before the two entered into an on-and-off affair. But the scale was unprecedented, the 34-year-old said, due to the shocking nature of Peng’s story, the sheer number of people on social media, and the Communist leadership’s growing desire to keep public opinion under control.

“It is an extremely grand-scale campaign,” said Liu, who quit the company in 2013 and is now tracking Chinese censorship for China Digital Times from the United States. “There is nothing that could be compared to this. Although more serious political events have taken place in the past, the internet censorship was not that strict. I would expect them to use their full capacity to carry this out.” 

The Communist Party leadership regards any scandal involving its core members as a threat to its rule. Since Peng’s post came out, Beijing has sought to wipe it out from the country’s history by banning media coverage, requiring around-the-clock human efforts from social media companies, and, through a system of punishments, coaxing citizens into self-censorship. It has demonstrated the country’s ability to keep its cyberspace insular even as the case was making international headlines every day. 

The goal is to make Peng’s accusations taboo, just like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, so even those who have read the post would avoid talking about it, letting the incident recede from memory and lose its significance as China’s biggest #MeToo case.

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LAPD Used Fake Social Media Accounts to Spy on Users

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers used fake online personas to monitor social media users, and at one point considered employing tools that critics say would lead to law enforcement profiling innocent people, according to recently revealed government documents.

The documents, released by the Brennan Center for Justice following an open records request with the LAPD, have raised concerns among critics that law enforcement’s online surveillance operations harm freedom of expression and encourage profiling.

“Social media surveillance can facilitate surveillance of protest activity and police presence at protests, which can chill both online and offline speech,” the organization said. “Further, the highly contextual nature of social media also makes it ripe for misinterpretation.”

The Brennan Center released an initial set of documents in September, showing that LAPD officers use fake social media accounts to monitor online activity. The FBI and other federal intelligence agencies are restricted from using such tactics under a Reagan-era executive order that require agents to reveal their identities when participating in private organizations.

“Social media situational awareness is gained by the passive and active searching for information impacting operations, including information found in discussion forums, posts, videos, and blogs,” a 2015 LAPD social media user guide says, adding. “In this capacity, social media use can be covert and/or clandestine.”

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WHISTLEBLOWER: Facebook Internal Docs Likely Show How Tech Giant Blacklisted Kyle Rittenhouse

In order to do this, Facebook likely exploited a loophole that allowed them to skate around their terms of service and selectively moderate content. Internal documents shared with National File by Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig shine light on these practices.

Hartwig worked on Facebook’s content moderation team while employed at a company called Cognizant from 2018-2020 until he eventually blew the whistle after realizing the platform’s content moderation efforts pushed political agendas and punished those who disagree. Hartwig now says he believes he knows the mechanisms Facebook used to purge all positive mention of Kyle Rittenhouse.

According to Hartwig, Facebook most likely branded the Kenosha shootings as a “mass murder”, then used that designation to purge pro-Rittenhouse content under the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy.

“In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook,” reads the policy rationale.

Facebook will assess organizations both online and offline in order to gauge the likelihood of groups or individuals causing real world harm. Groups that fall under the dangerous organizations policy include terrorist organizations, “hate organizations”, organized crime syndicates such as drug cartels, and multiple-victim murderers.

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Facebook Employees Pushed Company To Exclude Criticism Of White People, Men From Hate Speech Rules

Facebook employees urged executives to exclude criticism directed towards white people and men from the company’s hate speech policies, according to internal documents reported on by The Washington Post.

Facebook researchers tried to change the company’s content moderation algorithms that automatically delete hate speech, because they viewed the algorithms as inadequately protecting minority users, The Washington Post reported, citing internal memos and research. The effort came following a document from April 2020 which showed that around 90% of hate speech algorithms were detecting and removing content directed towards white people and men.

Researchers argued that these figures indicated bias in Facebook’s automatic deletion algorithms because the content reported to be the most “harmful” or “the worst of the worst” was more often directed at minority groups, the Post reported.

The employees then urged Facebook executives, including the vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, to ditch Facebook’s “race-blind” hate speech algorithms which did not discriminate based on the race to which the hate speech was directed, according to the Post. Instead, the researchers pushed for algorithms that automatically removed hate speech directed only towards black people, Jews, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims and people of multiple races.

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