Tag: social media

YouTube deletes entire back catalog of Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges

YouTube is at it again, this time setting its sights on Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges, whose entire video archive for the On Contact program published on Google’s platform has been deleted.

Hedges announced this in a blog post, saying that the show, which was broadcast for six years on RT America and RT International and even received Emmy nominations, is now gone from YouTube.

Hedges goes on to list some of the high profile people he spoke with over the years and explains that those interviews are now gone: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf, Slavoj Zizek, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, among dozens of others.

Hedges has been treated by YouTube like so many other creators over the years of stepped-up censorship that has little time, and sees little reason to explain itself: namely, there has been no explanation.

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Canada’s Heritage Minister says online censorship bill will help free speech

To advise the Heritage Minister on regulating Canada’s internet, a panel of experts, most of them academics, has been appointed. One of the government’s internet regulation plans, alongside the online censorship bill, is to create a federal internet censorship agency.

When announcing the panel of experts, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said, “We are open to all ideas. The only thing we want is to do the right thing, is to make it right, is to make it happen.”

The minister was asked if it was a priority for the internet censorship bill not to infringe Canadians’ rights. He said that freedom of expression is a fundamental right and is “at the core” of the bill.

“But I’ll tell you something else,” Rodriguez said. “Actually there are a lot of people who don’t want to share what they think anymore, who are afraid of going online to speak freely because of the negative and violent reaction they may get. I think in some ways this will really help freedom of speech.”

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Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp., among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

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Bi-partisan bill would push Big Tech and Big Media to make content distribution deals

Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC], Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA], Sen. Booker, Cory A. [D-NJ], Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI], Sen. Lummis, Cynthia M. [R-WY], Sen. Feinstein, Dianne [D-CA], Sen. Collins, Susan M. [R-ME], and Sen. Paul, Rand [R-KY] are all backing a bill that empowers mainstream media at the expense of smaller outlets and independent content creators.

The senators are co-sponsoring the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act which has been accused of actually hindering competition.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Instead of promoting competition in the world of media, the bill would allow mainstream media companies, like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC to form an alliance and collectively bargain with Big Tech platforms.

These mainstream outlets would be able to form new deals with online platforms that would force tech platforms to uprank their own content at the expense of independent content creators and independent voices.

The bill has a provision allowing legacy media to exclude companies that are not “similarly situated,” meaning independent journalists and small media companies will not get the benefits of the bargains with Big Tech.

Tennessee’s Senator Marsha Blackburn has warned the bill would result in more censorship by Big Tech. Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio aired similar concerns, saying the bill would strengthen the “collusion between Big Media and Big Tech.”

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Meta paid GOP operatives to push negative stories about TikTok

Meta has hired a top GOP consulting firm to gin up rage against TikTok and deflect political scrutiny away from Facebook and Instagram, according to a report on Wednesday. 

The consulting firm, Targeted Victory, pushed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to an internal email from February reported by the Washington Post.  

Targeted Victory reportedly advanced Meta’s agenda by pushing news stories blaming dangerous online trends such as the “slap a teacher challenge” on TikTok — even though the trend actually originated on Facebook. 

The group also helped place op-eds and letters to the editor in local papers like the Denver Post and Des Moines Register, raising concerns about China “deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids,” according to the report. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blamed TikTok for Facebook’s slowing user growth, which has contributed to its stock tanking 32.5% so far this year. 

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Thought Police: Germany Conducts Mass Raids over Online ‘Insults’ Against Politicians

Federal police in Germany have conducted mass raids across 13 states on Tuesday over online ‘insults’ levied against politicians.

A large number of apartments and houses were raided in Germany on Tuesday as Federal police in the country look to prosecute those who made allegedly hateful remarks against elected officials online.

In total, federal authorities have said that they have checked over 600 statements for so-called “criminal content”, with 100 people being “searched and questioned” across 13 different German states.

According to a report by Der Spiegel, a significant number of raids have also been conducted, with the houses and apartments of those suspected of posting illegal online messages being searched by law enforcement for incriminating evidence.

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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Social media company Minds and Daryl Davis tell Joe Rogan about new anti-censorship project

Minds.com co-founder Bill Ottman and activist Daryl Davis went on the “Joe Rogan Experience” to unveil their #ChangeMinds deradicalization initiative.

The team at blockchain-based social network Minds and Davis published a research paper outlining how “deplatforming actually intensifies extremism,” and argue how a new approach to online moderation is necessary.

One part of the discussion had Davis outlining his experiences on having debates with others on the Minds platform. While Rogan brings up how Davis convinced members of the KKK to change their viewpoints on race—as explored in his previous appearance—here the longtime activist refines his main point.

In explaining how a hypothetically intense discussion plays out, Davis highlights the importance of having the other person’s “walls come down.” That is to say, if Davis and a racist who hates black people can listen to each other’s viewpoints, at all whatsoever, it can have a significant impact on the racist in the long run.

Internet entrepreneur and Minds CEO Bill Ottman builds off the “walls coming down” point by adding how neuroscientist Sam Harris previously studied people’s actual brain waves with regards to how an individual subconsciously reacts to being presented with ideas or concepts they don’t like.

The key to #ChangeMinds, according to Ottman and Davis, is building long-term relationships between people of opposing viewpoints as its own main objective.

In describing the research paper, Minds staffers stated that their “paper examines the adverse effects of social media censorship and proposes an alternative moderation model based on free speech and Internet freedom.”

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How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

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