Tag: social media

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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Australian cop who said there are only two genders faces investigation

An Australian policeman, a 62-year-old policeman, Sergeant Bruno Stafiieri, is being investigated after an online comment telling another officer that there are only two genders.

“So you are doing tertiary education studying genders,” Staffieri wrote, “I’ll make it easy for you to pass … there are 2.”

As reported by The Age, the ongoing investigation into Staffieri “shapes as a test case for freedom of speech and the force’s recently revised social-media policy, particularly for officers expressing religious or political opinions online.”

It was not the first time Staffieri has landed in trouble for commenting on LGB and Trans stories.

He was under investigation for criticizing the government’s decision to cancel Anzac Day and Australia Day but allowed Gay Pride March.

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Twitter To Ramp Up Censorship Of ‘Misinformation’ About The Ukraine War

Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”

If you’ve been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we’ve been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied.

Twitter says that it “won’t amplify or recommend content” found to violate its new policy, and will also attach warning labels to individual tweets and even hide offending content behind a warning label and disable the retweet function on particularly naughty posts.

The problem here is of course the question of how to impartially establish whether something is objectively false without it turning into at best a flawed system guided by fallible human biases and perceptual filters and at worst a powerful institution shutting down unauthorized speech. Twitter says it formed its new policy with input from unnamed “global experts and human rights organizations,” and will be enforcing it with the help of “conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more.” This will come as no comfort to anyone who’s familiar with the history of propaganda peddling that can be found in every single one of those respective categories.

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‘They’re Going To Get Their Ministry Of Truth One Way Or The Other’: Twitter Announces ‘Crisis Misinformation Policy’

Just one day after the White House confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board had been put on hold — and that board chief Nina Jankowicz had resigned — Twitter announced plans to implement a new “crisis misinformation policy.”

The plan, according to a tweet from @TwitterSafety, would be implemented to ensure that Twitter as a platform did not amplify or contribute to the spread of misinformation.

“People turn to Twitter during crisis times to share news, find support, and stay connected. Today, we’re launching a crisis misinformation policy so Twitter doesn’t recommend or amplify viral, false content that can further harm already vulnerable groups,” the tweet read.

“We’ve been refining our approach to crisis misinformation, drawing on input from global experts and human rights organizations. As part of this new framework, we’ll start adding warning notices on high visibility misleading Tweets related to the war in Ukraine,” the thread continued.

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