Tag: social media

CDC, Universities are Paying Students to be Vaccine Influencers

Students can become paid COVID vaccine influencers through a new Student Social Media Engagement Campaign program.

The campaign recruits students to ‘combat vaccine misinformation and build vaccine confidence within their campus communities’ through TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms.

In partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American College Health Association (ACHA), and Youth Marketing Connection (YMC), universities are promoting paid internships for students who push COVID vaccines.

Students chosen for the Student Social Media Engagement Campaign program will act as influencers who “combat vaccine misinformation and build vaccine confidence within their campus communities.”

The program launched in June 2021 and will continue through the fall semester. Each student influencer will receive a cash stipend, according to a July 8 announcement put out by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

Job requirements include promoting the vaccine by sharing information on Instagram and TikTok, advocating for the ACHA’s CoVAC initiative, and leading “digital outreach efforts to increase vaccine confidence among peers.” Students are also expected to provide updates on campus COVID-19 vaccine attitudes.

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Cybersecurity Experts Encourage System of Reporting Workers to Employers for “Online Abuse”

A new initiative launched by cybersecurity experts encourages companies to create a system that makes it easier for people to be reported to their employers for “online abuse.”

The new program is called Respect in Security and was created by Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson and Red Goat Cyber Security’s Lisa Forte.

According to Forte, the current system, which is largely based on a combination of AI and human reviewers working for social media companies, is a “no man’s land” and not very effective.

“The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer,” she argues.

According to Ferguson, companies currently only deal with “abuse” that happens internally and are ill-equipped to monitor what their staff are saying online.

Companies who sign up for the initiative are required to agree to seven principles and create a public reporting system that encourages employees to keep tabs on each other’s behavior.

“If you know your organization has made that commitment, it may make you think twice about doing it,” Ferguson said. “We need to take action.”

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Facebook Flags the Name of a Gardening Tool When Used in a Gardening Group

The Biden White House leans on Facebook to censor your speech online if what you say goes against what the Biden White House wants you to say.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact. Let’s see how well Facebook handles the very sensitive topic of policing even non-political speech in a nation that’s built on the principle that speech must be free, and where people have wide varieties of interests that may fall outside Silicon Valley’s collective experiences.

Facebook flagged the word hoe in a gardening group.

Oh. No. They censored “hoe.”

Wait ’til they figure out what people do with certain emojis…

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

This is funny and would be a lot funnier if the Biden White House hadn’t deputized Facebook to chase you and me around on its platform if we post something the regime doesn’t like. But it has.

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Twitter suspended New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon for questioning vaccine passports and mandates

New Jersey State Senator Declan O’Scanlon was silenced on Twitter and was only reinstated when he agreed to delete his tweet.

The tweet, posted on June 25, read “Given that we have crushed Covid with combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for.”

Twitter’s response to O’Scanlon’s Twitter post was to lock him out of his account without giving a specific reason as to why.

On Twitter, Republicans blasted the lawmaker’s detention. The state GOP called the action a “continuous and rising limitation of freedom of expression.”

On O’Scanlon’s timeline, the tweet has been deleted, with a warning that says, “This Tweet is no longer available because it violates the Twitter Rules.”

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“We’ve Got To Fight Disinformation,” Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation

The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

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Right or Left, You Should Be Worried About Big Tech Censorship

Conservatives are being censored

Claiming that “right-wing voices are being censored,” Republican-led legislatures in Florida and Texas have introduced legislation to “end Big Tech censorship.” They say that the dominant tech platforms block legitimate speech without ever articulating their moderation policies, that they are slow to admit their mistakes, and that there is no meaningful due process for people who think the platforms got it wrong.

They’re right.

So is everyone else

But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants. It’s Palestinians and other critics of Israel, including many Israelis. And it’s queer people, of course. We have a whole project tracking people who’ve been censored, blocked, downranked, suspended and terminated for their legitimate speech, from punk musicians to peanuts fans, historians to war crimes investigators, sex educators to Christian ministries. 

The goat-rodeo

Content moderation is hard at any scale, but even so, the catalog of big platforms’ unforced errors makes for sorry reading. Experts who care about political diversity, harassment and inclusion came together in 2018 to draft the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation but the biggest platforms are still just winging it for the most part.

The situation is especially grim when it comes to political speech, particularly when platforms are told they have a duty to remove “extremism.”

The Florida and Texas social media laws are deeply misguided and nakedly unconstitutional, but we get why people are fed up with Big Tech’s ongoing goat-rodeo of content moderation gaffes.

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