Tag: social media

Epic Ratio: Dallas Cops Brag About Civil Forfeiture and Get Owned on Social Media

Civil forfeiture is not a popular government activity. For those of you who don’t know, civil asset forfeiture according to the ACLU “allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government.”

If that sounds crazy to you, I assure you, it’s real. I don’t know how it’s real, because it’s certainly not constitutional—who needs the Fourth Amendment, am I right?— but it is real.

The Dallas Police Department stepped in a hornet’s nest on social media when they posted a braggadocious photo of a seizure of $100,000 in cash. Police confiscated the haul at Dallas Love Field Airport and then posted the photo on social media. The local CBS station picked it up and wrote a glowing article about it. I guess they thought the photo of an adorable German Shepherd (good boi!) standing over piles of cash he found with his incredibly smart and furry nose would make everyone forget that the police just robbed someone…legally. It didn’t work.

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You’d Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Has a Naughty List, and You’re On It

“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake!”

—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

Santa’s got a new helper.

No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice.

Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year. This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s rudimentary phone and metadata surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list.

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Twitter Bans Account That Posted Updates About Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein Trial

In a post written to the PatriotOne substack, The Free Press Report wrote “I woke up this morning and the @TrackerTrial account on Twitter was suspended. All the other accounts that I have made in the past were also suspended.”

According to a screen shot provided in the Substack article, the @TrackerTrial account was suspended for allegedly breaking Twitter’s “rules against platform manipulation and spam.”

“The @TrackerTrial account was the largest account on Twitter that specifically tracked the Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein trial.”

The Free Press Report noted that all other accounts previously created by the same user were banned, including another popular account that tracked Nancy Pelosi’s stock market purchases and sales.

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Mainstream media complains about “alternative” tech platforms, frames them as “echo-chambers”

Mainstream media outlets are continuing their crusade against alternatives to Big Tech social media networks and other services – which mainstream media just happens to be firmly aligned with.

Ignoring the fact that what spurred the emergence of these alternatives in the first place was a wave of unprecedented censorship on both legacy media and tech platforms over the past couple of years, the new “conservative” media are branded as rising “aggressively” and reviled as creating an “echo chamber.”

As if acknowledging that the left wing already has its media echo chamber – and a powerful one, consisting of the largest platforms with the biggest reach – outlets like Axios frame these developments as right wing building “its own” echo chamber, as well as an ecosystem.

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Military Officers: To Combat ‘Disinformation,’ The Government And Its Big Tech Buddies Should Tell You What To Think

Four military officers who describe themselves as “researchers” at the Army’s highly respected Cyber Institute have published an article that adds to the growing concern about the ongoing politicization of the military. Published by the military’s National Defense University (NDU), their article purports to analyze the dangers of misinformation and disinformation and to advise the Biden administration about how to counter it.

The article’s authors all are military officers and at least two are professors at West Point. They say their article “is written in response to the Capitol insurrection.”

Ironically, the article is itself misinformation. That this misinformation is published by military officers associated with two highly prestigious institutions, the NDU and the Cyber Institute, makes it all the more inappropriate and dangerous.

The article attempts to address a real and dangerous issue: how mis- and disinformation can endanger national security. Preparing for and combatting disinformation is a complex issue that involves disciplines from sociology and psychology to highly technical cyberwarfare issues.

The difference between misinformation and disinformation is generally understood to be a matter of intent; disinformation is intentionally and maliciously deceptive. Disinformation is as old as warfare itself; only the techniques vary. The U.S. military has been practicing and studying it and related disciplines for many years. Misinformation has been a staple of military operations since the days of the Trojan horse and Sun Tzu.

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YouTube CEO says content censorship is “consistent” for all creators, contradicting previous statements

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has defended the company’s moderation and censorship decisions in an interview as being consistently implemented for all creators in the same way – but that sits at odds with the reality of the platform’s policy which promotes what it considers “authoritative sources” over independent creators.

Wojcicki herself in the past admitted that legacy media are allowed to post content that would otherwise fall into the “hate speech” category because they provide their own “context” for it. This would mean that the same moderation rules therefore do not apply to all.

But speaking for Marketplace, Wojcicki claims that censorship (“moderation”) decisions are not taken lightly, and are applied in a consistent manner that doesn’t discriminate between creators.

She also used the fact both sides in the US political divide criticize YouTube (one side saying there is too much censorship, deplatforming and other kinds of restrictions, while the other believes there isn’t enough) as proof that YouTube is getting it right and “striking a balance.”

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Orwellian Facebook censorship strikes again

Facebook’s fake fact checkers, working on behalf of various money interests, have long been known to ignore blatant false information when it’s put out by favored government, public health officials or other special interests as long as it’s on-the-narrative.

And they censor factual information.

It’s a dynamic that might even make George Orwell shake his head and say, “Even I never predicted it would be this blatant, and allowed to continue.”

Now, a new tale under the category of “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Facebook banned a post I made that was nothing more than a factual citation of a historical quote from Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels.

It was posted entirely without comment. But a fair read of it would be to infer how dangerous and powerful false propaganda can be.

How that becomes worthy of censorship can only be explained in today’s highly-managed information landscape where facts are not to be heard and read if the chosen minders don’t want people to know them and share them.

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Meta asks users to send nudes

Meta, the new name for Facebook Inc., has co-developed a platform that asks people to submit their intimate photos and videos in order to prevent them from being used as ‘revenge porn’ on Facebook or Instagram.

The tool is for “adults over 18 years old who think an intimate image of them may be shared, or has already been shared, without their consent,” Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday.

The new platform, which Meta developed together with the UK Revenge Porn Helpline and 50 other NGOs, aims to prevent the publication of ‘revenge porn’, rather than just removing the delicate files after they’ve already appeared online.

Concerned users are being asked to submit photos or videos of themselves naked or having sex to a hash-tagging database through the StopNCII.org (Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Images) website.

The special hashtags, or “digital fingerprints,” are then assigned to those materials by the tool, and can be used to instantly detect and curb attempts to upload them online by the perpetrators.

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