Tag: social media

Pentagon launches program to surveil military personnel’s social media

The Pentagon is planning on launching a program that would screen military personnel’s social media for “extremist material” — looking to retain a private firm to do the digging in order to circumvent First Amendment protections, according to a report.

Internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tasked with addressing “extremism” in the armed forces, is currently in the process of designing a social media screening program which will “continuously” monitor for “concerning behaviors.”

In the past, the Pentagon has shied away from surveilling members due to First Amendment protections, as well as other privacy concerns.

This program, according to the outlet, citing a senior Pentagon official, will rely on a private firm in order to avoid being accused of circumventing First Amendment restrictions through government.

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Biden Revokes Trump Order Protecting Users From Censorship on Social Media

President Joe Biden this week revoked an order from the previous Trump administration that sought to protect users from unfair or deceptive content restriction practices by Big Tech companies.

The effect of the revocation would require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the heads of executive departments to take steps to rescind any regulations or policies that enforced former President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Preventing Online Censorship,” which was signed in May last year.

Trump’s order sought to prevent social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from moderating users’ content in what his administration said was being done in an unbalanced and inconsistent way. The order cited examples from Twitter that added “fact-checking labels” to certain tweets in a manner that the administration said clearly reflects political bias.

Twitter added a “fact-checking” label on two of Trump’s tweets two days before the president issued his executive order. Trump accused Twitter of “selectively applying” its warning labels, arguing such action amounted to political activism.

Biden’s order also seeks to roll back liability protections under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That law largely exempts online platforms from liability for content posted by their users, although they can be held liable for content that violates anti-sex trafficking or intellectual property laws.

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Biden Secretary of Defense adviser pick once said online misinformation is a digital “plague”

In an op-ed from 2018, Biden’s pick for senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense, Bishop Garrison, described free speech as a “digital black plague.”

In the 2018 op-ed, resurfaced by Revolver News, Garrison described alleged disinformation, which to others is free speech, as a “digital black plague,” which if allowed to “spread further,” soon “the shining city on the hill will undoubtedly find itself alone in the darkness for years to come.”

Garrison also said that technology was responsible for the spread of disinformation, which to some, is any information they don’t like.

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Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online

Activists reported that social media companies have been removing their content, stating it violated community guidelines or deeming it “hate speech.” Reports also included suspended and deactivated accounts and text-only content labeled “sensitive,” a designation usually reserved for photos and videos containing violence, gore or derogatory images. The “Save Sheikh Jarrah” Facebook group was also deactivated, according to Mohammed El-Kurd.

Reports were largely centered on Instagram and Twitter, with some restrictive behaviors conducted by Facebook and even TikTok.

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DHS to scan social media posts looking for “domestic terrorists” after Capitol breach

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to launch a warning system to detect “domestic terrorism” threats by gathering and analyzing intelligence on public social media posts and making predictions on future actions.

The purpose of the system is to detect the sort of posts that allegedly proceeded the breach of the US Capitol on January 6. Law enforcement agencies were criticized for ignoring or missing the posts.

According to a DHS official involved in the efforts, the focus is supposedly not on the posters, but to identify the targets of domestic terrorism. The official also said that, for now, the DHS is using human data analysts, not computer algorithms, to analyze public social media posts.

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At Vatican conference, Chelsea Clinton calls for global crackdown on anti-vaccine social media posts

Chelsea Clinton has spoken out against freedom of vaccine-critical speech at a Vatican conference dedicated to dialogue.

Speaking during a pre-recorded online meeting, Clinton, 41, responded to a question about so-called “vaccine hesitancy” regarding COVID-19 vaccines by saying that there must be a global effort to crack down on vaccine-critical social media posts.

“I personally very strongly believe there has to be more intensive and intentional and coordinated global regulation of the content on social media platforms,” she said.

“We know that the most popular video across all of Latin America for the last few weeks that now has tens of millions of views is just an anti-vax, anti-science screed that YouTube has just refused to take down.”

Clinton added that anti-vaccine content created in the United States “flourishes” across the world by way of social media platforms. Her attempts to convince the managers of these sites to remove the material has not worked, she said.

“We know that — because I have tried — that appealing to the leadership of these companies to do the right thing has just not worked, and so we need regulation.”

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