Tag: social media

Barack Obama Suggests Social Media Anonymity Should Be Stripped From People Who Are “Rude” or “Lie”

Barack Obama has suggested that people who are “rude,” “obnoxious,” or “lie” on social media should have be stripped of their online anonymity.

Yes, really.

The former president made the comments during a keynote conversation with The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg at the ‘Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy’ conference.

After Obama initially claimed he was “close to a First Amendment absolutist,” his response to Goldberg asking him how he would regulate social media companies “to make sure that they’re not privileging anger, privileging division and polarization through their algorithms,” suggests otherwise.

Obama argued that online anonymity protections should be removed when it comes to speech of which he doesn’t personally approve.

“In some circumstances, it’s important to preserve anonymity…so that there’s space in repressive societies to discuss issues but as we’ve all learned, it’s a lot harder to be rude, obnoxious, cruel, or lie when somebody knows you’re lying and knows who you are and I think that there may be modifications there that can be made,” said Obama.

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Twitter IS “State-Affiliated Media”

British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.

“Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.

Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

“ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”

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Viral ‘Russian Mobile Crematorium’ Tweet is From an 8-Year-Old YouTube Video

A viral tweet that remains unchecked by “fact checkers” claims to show a Russian-operated ‘mobile crematorium’ in Mariupol, but the image is taken from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

Whoops.

The tweet was posted by news outlet NEXTA, which boasts nearly a million followers on Twitter. The tweet has received over 7,000 retweets and almost 11,000 likes.

“Mobile crematoria in #Mariupol,” states the tweet.

“Mayor of Mariupol Vadim Boychenko said today that #Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in the city.”

“According to him, tens of thousands of people could have died in Mariupol and the cremation, “covering up the traces of crimes”.

Except a simple reverse image search reveals the ‘mobile crematorium’ to be a screenshot from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

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The Online Safety Bill gives the UK government unprecedented power to determine “harmful” content

The UK’s latest attempt to clamp down on free speech online, the 225 page Online Safety Bill, will give sweeping new censorship powers to the UK’s Secretary of State and its communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), if passed.

It gives the UK Culture Secretary the power to decide on and designate “priority content that is harmful.”

Once the Secretary of State has designated this content, social media platforms and search engines that fall under the scope of the bill’s regulations have to “use proportionate systems and processes” to prevent children from encountering this priority content.

These platforms are also required to specify in their terms of service how they’ll tackle priority content that’s deemed to be “harmful to adults” and apply these measures consistently.

Additionally, the Culture Secretary gets the power to decide the user number and feature thresholds that determine whether a company falls under the scope of these requirements to remove and tackle priority content.

Collectively, these provisions give the Culture Secretary unprecedentedly broad powers to not only choose the types of speech that is allowed but to also set the rules around which platforms have to censor content.

Under the bill, Ofcom will be granted the power to issue harsh punishments to platforms that fail to meet the Secretary’s censorship demands.

These punishments include applying for court orders that restrict access to platforms in the UK and fining platforms up to £18 million ($23.78 million) or 10% of their revenue (whichever is higher).

In another authoritarian turn, if Ofcom decides that a platform is failing to comply with any aspect of the Online Safety Bill, it can also demand information from the platform via an “information notice” and require the platform to name a senior manager who can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years if they’re found guilty of failing to comply with the requirements.

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Barack Obama Backs Internet Controls to Grapple with the ‘Demand for Crazy’

Government regulation and control over the internet can defeat a “demand for crazy” through the spread of incorrect messages, former President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, 60, spoke with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at an event hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the magazine.

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.

Obama lamented how misinformation plays out across the U.S., accusing those who say President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election as guilty of falling for conspiracy theories.

He called out “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

The former president blamed smartphones for accelerating “an erosion of accountability norms and standards in political life” from 2010 onwards.

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Black Lives Matter shows how liberal groups weaponize social media censorship

The talking points have apparently gone out, and it is now OK for the mainstream press to gently criticize the Black Lives Matter movement. Accordingly, New York magazine has issued a critique of BLM’s financial management — particularly, the organization’s purchase in 2020 of a $6 million, 6,500 square foot house in Southern California.

Almost exactly a year ago, the New York Post reported on the purchase of four other multi-million dollar high-end homes by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. The story described the homes no differently than it would any other celebrity home purchase. All the information contained in the article was gleaned from public records, including the photos. No addresses were listed.

But within days, users on Facebook were banned from sharing the story — on the platform itself, on Facebook messenger, and on Instagram, which Facebook owns. Despite the fact that all the information discussed was a matter of public record, Facebook flagged the article for violating their community standards, specifically the “privacy and personal information policy.”

A year later, Facebook (now Meta) still classifies the story as “abusive” and prevents it from being shared on its platforms.

Now we know why.

Buried in New York magazine’s reporting is this little nugget: “Other conversations on the BLM Security Hub chat show efforts to monitor social media for negative mentions of [the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation], with members using their influence with the platforms to have such remarks removed.”

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Pinterest bans all climate change misinformation on its platform

Pinterest announced today it’s becoming the first major digital platform to introduce a comprehensive misinformation policy designed to combat false and misleading claims around climate change on its platform. According to the company’s newly updated misinformation guidelines, Pinterest will now be able to remove content that denies the existence of impacts of climate change, denies human influence on climate change and denies climate change is backed by scientific consensus, among other things.

It will also remove false and misleading content about climate change solutions that contradict scientific consensus, content that misrepresents scientific data either by omission or cherry-picking in order to erode trust in climate science and experts and harmful and misleading content about public safety emergencies including natural disasters and extreme weather events.

The company noted the new Community guidelines don’t only apply to posts on the social network, but also to ads. Pinterest advertisers will have to follow the same rules and the Pinterest Advertising guidelines were updated to also prohibit ads containing conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation related to climate change.

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YouTube is emailing users to say “members of the community” are “concerned” about their comments

YouTube’s “Community Outreach Team” has been emailing users to tell them that “members of the community were concerned about some of the comments you’ve posted on YouTube.”

The emails, forwarded to Reclaim The Net by YouTube users, don’t tell users which of their comments allegedly caused concern to members of the community and instead urges them to take a survey.

“After you take the survey, someone from our team may follow up to better understand your feedback,” YouTube’s email adds.

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The FBI is spending millions on social media tracking software

Social media users seemed to foreshadow the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — and the FBI apparently missed it. 

Now, the FBI is doubling down on tracking social media posts, spending millions of dollars on thousands of licenses to powerful social media monitoring technology that privacy and civil liberties advocates say raise serious concerns.

The FBI has contracted for 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software made by Babel Street that lets users search social media sites within a geographic area and use other parameters.

The contract began March 30 and is worth as much as $27 million. The FBI has already agreed to pay an IT vendor around $5 million for the first year of the contract, procurement records indicate. The contract has not previously been reported.

The Justice Department has previously had Babel X in its arsenal, contracting records show. But the new contract appears to be by far the most the agency has ever shelled out for the software, and is one of the largest contracts for the software by a civilian agency, experts said.

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Twitter’s “autoblock” feature blocks citizens from responding to, or even seeing, elected politicians’ tweets

Twitter is a “social” network that is paradoxically becoming ever more insular and anti-social – apparently, all in a bid to “protect” users from one another. This seems to be the idea behind testing new features such as the one called “Safety Mode,” that includes something called, “autoblock.”

At some point, the question might start arising in the minds of some, or even many, people: why even use a platform that you consider to be so potentially dangerous that it has to implement such a granular and complex system of separation and prevention of access to content and accounts?

But at this time, Twitter is still widely used and marching on its chosen path. And, right now, the “autoblock” is producing effects like a user getting blocked from viewing the profile of a public servant – in this case, that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While the problem has affected many, it was Laura Marston, an advocate for lowering the cost of insulin for diabetes sufferers, that most recently found her account blocked from highlighting problems with a recent bill that Marston feels falls short.

Those affected by the issue not only can’t comment on the politician’s tweets but they are also not even allowed to see them.

The Twitter notice that popped up instead of the Pelosi profile said that the user is temporarily blocked from interacting with the account’s tweets because “they were in Safety Mode” – while Twitter flagged previous interactions as “potentially” abusive or spammy.

The notice goes on to state that the social media company is aware “autoblocks” don’t work as intended all the time – another way of saying that flimsy automated algorithms and/or unreliable third party fact checkers are once again used to carry out the “Safety Mode” goals, and will highly likely be getting things wrong.

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