Russia will ban Twitter from the country in 30 days if the platform does not remove illegal content, including child pornography, information on committing suicide, and drug-related content.
Vadim Subbotin, deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Russia’s equivalent of the FCC, said Twitter was not reacting to the regulator’s requests to remove illegal content “as they should,” and that the social network would be blocked in the country in a month if its failure to comply continues.
Social media giant Twitter announced this week that it will begin labeling tweets that share “misleading information” about the coronavirus vaccine and will implement a strike system for repeat offenders of the “misinformation policy.”
The Verge reports that Twitter announced on Monday that it will begin labeling tweets that share what the company decides is misleading information about coronavirus vaccines. The labels will link to relevant information from government bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a system allowing for five strikes will be implemented for users that repeatedly violate its misinformation policies.
Repeated violations of the policies could lead to Twitter locking or permanently suspending accounts. The new labels are similar to Facebook’s anti-misinformation banners which were launched as part of Facebook’s attempts to curb what it considers coronavirus misinformation last December.
Twitter plans to apply the new labels through a combination of human and automated review systems and will begin the rollout with English language content first. The criteria for labeling coronavirus posts have been outlined in Twitter’s misleading information policy but overall Twitter is focusing on five categories of false or misleading information, according to the Verge:
Misinformation about the nature of the virus
Misinformation about the efficacy of treatments and preventive measures
Misinformation about regulations, restrictions, and exemptions in association with health advisories
Misinformation about the prevalence of the virus and the risk of infection or death
Misleading affiliations (for example, claiming to be a doctor or public health official)
Labels will also play a major part in the new strike system. Twitter has stated that a tweet deemed harmful by the company counts as one strike. A tweet that adds to a larger conspiracy connected to the virus that Twitter deems dangerous, such as the idea that vaccines include microchips to track people, may also be deleted by the platform.
On Monday, Twitter filed a complaint in court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who launched an investigation into the platform’s content censorship policies. Twitter argues that Paxton launched the investigation in retaliation to the de-platforming of former president Trump, which the company ironically claims is an abuse of power.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” the company wrote in the court filing.
Following the suspension of Trump’s accounts on most mainstream social media platforms after the Jan 6 riot, Paxton launched an investigation into the moderation policies at Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon.
A highly-rated nonprofit vaccine safety charity has been censored by Facebook on behalf of pharmaceutical industry interests in a purge of vaccine safety information.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) had maintained a Facebook page since 2008.
The organization was started 39-years ago. Co-founder and president Barbara Loe Fisher has a child who got autism after vaccination.
Far from a fringe group, Fisher has provided consumers with crucial vaccine safety information for decades and served as an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee as part of the Vaccine Safety Writing Group, on the agency’s Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative, on the Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety, and Chair of the Subcommittee on Vaccine Adverse Events.
Additionally, Fisher has served as a member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. And she has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum.
In addition to readily censoring conservatives, the social media platform has also cracked down on users sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”
Amidst the heavy-handed censorship, Alison Fauci has been working at the company since graduating in 2014, The National Pulse can reveal.
“She works as a software engineer and, according to her LinkedIn profile, was focused on developing “ad formats for the Twitter for Android app.” (Her LinkedIn profile has since been made private or deleted),” Heavy magazine summarizes.
Alison Fauci maintains a profile on Twitter’s official blog, with one entry from November 2017 entitled “Introducing Serial: improved data serialization on Android.”
“Smooth timeline scrolling on the Twitter for Android app is important for the user experience, and we’re always looking for ways to improve it. With some profiling, we discovered that serializing and deserializing data to and from the database using standard Android Externalizable classes was taking around 15% of the UI thread time,” the blog post begins.
The position at the social media company, however, appears to represent a conflict of interest given the platform’s decision to censor COVID-19 information that goes against the diktats of her father – who notoriously insisted there was “no reason” to wear a mask.
In early March, Twitter decided to broadly ban any tweet that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”
Primarily, the platform vowed to crack down on tweets that represent a “denial of expert guidance.”
“Encouragement to use fake or ineffective treatments, preventions, and diagnostic techniques” and “misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities” were other categories targeted by the social media platform.
And the platform has used its powers to censor users who defy the recommendations of Alison Fauci’s father.
The treasure trove of data currently being gathered through social media networks and other electronic means is a completely unregulated space, with microtargeting, in particular, spurring intense discussion in the wake of widely publicized allegations of Russian “interference” in the 2016 U.S. elections and the liberal use of data analytics, by Brexit promoters in the UK and the Trump campaign itself, to sway voters.
Hovering in the background of the simmering debate is the growing power of Facebook, Apple and other platform owners, whose monopolistic business practices are facing increasing push back around the world. Nevertheless, our content landlords still hold the key to the big-data realm by virtue of their dominant position, and whoever wants access to the new oil must kiss the ring of the Big Tech overlords.
Twitter failed to respond to a letter by Republican Reps. Jim Jordan from Ohio, and Ken Buck from Colorado, who requested documentation and data to aid a Congressional investigation by the House Judiciary Committee. The request was first made in July 2020.
In the letter, the Republican House representatives requested Twitter provide the House Judiciary Committee with documentation and data related to several issues, including the platform’s content moderation policies, its assertion that President Trump’s warnings to protesters violated its policies (last summer Trump warned rioters they would face violence from the National Guard), and its decision to fact check the then-President’s tweets.
In the recent letter, dated March 4, the Republican Reps claim that the request was first sent last July. Twitter did not provide the requested information then, and is yet to respond to the most recent letter.
An article in the Minnesota Reformer reveals, that the Minneapolis City Council is hiring social media influencers to change the public’s opinion about George Floyd’s killing.
“The area around the downtown Minneapolis courthouse where Derek Chauvin will soon go on trial for the murder of George Floyd is gradually taking on the look of military occupation.”
It appears that the Minneapolis Police Department police is not happy with using the traditional ways of influencing the public.
“Before Scott Fletcher was elected to the City Council, he was out in the streets organizing protests, training protesters, serving as protest marshal — all of it. Now that he’s part of the government, he’s trying to use his protest experience to help residents through the trial.“
Freedom of speech on the internet did not lead to a rise in “hate crimes,” according to a report sent from the U.S. Department of Commerce to Congress in January — a report that has yet to appear on any government website.
Breitbart News has obtained a copy of the report, which is published in full below. But sources close to the government say they are baffled as to why it wasn’t released publicly after being sent to Congress.
The report was prepared by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is responsible for advising the President on all matters related to telecommunication and the internet.
It was drafted to revise the findings of a previous report from NTIA in 1993 titled The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Although it was prepared under the Trump administration, the request to revise the report came from the 116th Congress, which was controlled by a 35-seat Democrat majority in the House and only a slim Republican majority in the Senate.
The 1993 report is still publicly available on the web. But the latest revision to its findings is not.
Hellbound and Down 
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