Tag: social media

Twitter Will Enforce a ‘Strike System’ Against Coronavirus Vaccine ‘Misinformation’

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.

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This extension lets you know when a website is secretly phoning home to Big Tech

Want to see Big Tech’s monopoly over the internet? There is a browser extension that blocks any website that sends requests to IP addresses owned by the four Big Tech companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. If you use the extension just for a few hours, you will realize the modern internet is almost impossible to use without these companies.

To prove Big Tech’s monopoly, the Economic Security Project developed a browser extension called the Big Tech Detective.

Available on Chromium browsers and Mozilla’s Firefox, the extension tracks requests sent by websites and what companies the requests are sent to. You can configure the extension to block websites that send requests to the four Big Tech companies. A red pop-up will appear with information on the requests so you can get an idea of what is being requested.

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Possible Biden Pick for NEC Scrubs Twitter Feed

A New York Times contributing writer who is reportedly the Biden administration’s top candidate for a seat on the National Economic Council recently purged his Twitter feed of thousands of Twitter posts, many of which mocked conservatives and Republican leaders.

Tim Wu, who is also a Columbia Law School professor, recently deleted nearly 11,000 tweets that he sent prior to Dec. 2, 2020, Fox News reported on Thursday.

Wu also appeared to scrub several highly charged partisan messages he posted on Twitter after Dec. 2, 2020, according to archived copies reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. In one dating from Dec. 12, Wu wrote that a Wall Street Journal op-ed that criticized Jill Biden was “a reminder that the old-fashioned pre-Trump conservatives were pretty wretched too.”

The news comes as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget director, Neera Tanden, faces bipartisan opposition in the Senate for her own tweets attacking conservatives and Bernie Sanders supporters.

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Report: Facebook a ‘Hotbed of Child Sexual Abuse Material’ with 20M Incidents

A recent report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children claims that Facebook had 20.3 million reported incidents of child sexual abuse material. In comparison, Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek had only 13,000 reports. Facebook accounted for 95 percent of the incidents in the report.

The Daily Beast reports that according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were linked to Facebook. The study found that over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking were linked to Facebook.

In comparison to the millions of incidents reported on Facebook, Google had 546,704 incidents, Twitter found 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. Facebook accounted for almost 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports combined across all platforms.

MindGeek, the Canada-based parent company of multiple porn websites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, reported far fewer incidents than Facebook. MindGeek reported 13,229 reports.

MindGeek participated in the study for the first time last year following a year-long campaign called #Traffickinghub which aimed to shut down Pornhub for its alleged role in promoting underage human trafficking by hosting content featuring minors.

It is noted that both Pornhub and Facebook alleged that the data they provided may include duplicates. Pornhub alleges that the 13,229 stat “includes several thousand duplicates, with most reports submitted multiple times in an abundance of caution.” They claim that the number of unique incidents is 4,171.

Facebook released a similar statement alleging that 90 percent of the failed incidents were “the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” If this is correct, Facebook’s total number of unique reports would still be 2,030,722, the largest number in the data pool by far.

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Liberty Activist Arrested, Held on $1M Bond Over Entirely Legal Facebook Posts Criticizing Gov’t

Last Wednesday Martinez posted a Facebook photo of a flag-draped coffin carried by uniformed officers with the caption, “How police officers take out their trash.” Above the photo, Martinez said, “I can’t wait to see the news and hear that Detective Kenneth Mead is in that casket.”

Showing how ridiculous the charges are, that post didn’t even violate Facebook’s terms of service and it is still up on Martinez’s Facebook page.

In another post, Martinez posted a photo of Dickerson with the statement, “This is Michael Dickerson. He is Detective Kenneth Mead’s bitch. Dickerson, I hope you and Mead die a slow and painful death… Mead, I have a message for you — Molon Labe.”

Again, though this post was distasteful, it was entirely legal. One need only scroll through Twitter or Facebook for a few seconds to find millions upon millions of similar posts about Trump, Biden, cops, judges, local politicians, and individuals whose politics draw them the ire of the political foes.

According to the criminal complaint against Martinez — which apparently justified the million dollar bond — Martinez threatened Mead with the intent that Mead be “placed in reasonable fear of death or substantial bodily harm.”

The idea that these posts placed him in “reasonable fear” is laughable. Literally every single day, TFTP gets hate mail and death threats, directed at our employees and even their families and children, and no one is ever placed in “reasonable fear” because of them.

The emails directly threaten our families, claiming they will murder, rape, etc. If you are reading this now, you can probably even scroll down to the comments and find a threat below. But we don’t even report them, as some pissed off asshole ranting on the internet does not justify reasonable fear.

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SENATOR BLUMENTHAL DEMANDS FACEBOOK AND TWITTER CURB VACCINE-SKEPTIC CONVERSATIONS

Connecticut’s Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, is calling on Facebook and Twitter to act on vaccine skeptic conversations, particularly around pregnant women.

Sen. Blumenthal penned a letter to both Facebook and Twitter. 

“Time and again, Facebook and its peers have moved far too slow in responding to the targeted harassment and promotion of destructive conspiracy theories against women and people of color.

“These mothers, through raising awareness to the vaccine and setting an example for the community, are doing an immense public service and lovingly protecting their infants. They are also acting responsibly,” Blumenthal wrote in the letter to Facebook.

The letter was sent a few days after The Daily Beast published a story on how vaccine skeptics have been sending messages to pregnant women who have gotten the vaccine. In one incident, vaccine skeptics were accused of harassing a medical worker who miscarried a few days after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

From the letter:

“Such disinformation is clearly coordinated, often through private groups and public pages that scour social media for targets and anecdotes for feeding their campaign. One Instagram account, in operation since December with over 100,000 followers, continues to promote misinformation and misleading anecdotes about vaccine safety and the effectiveness of facemasks. These accounts and groups, on both Facebook and Twitter, have also become a launching point for swarms of believers to prey on mothers to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Despite a clear pattern of violating platform policies, these accounts are still active, with large numbers of followers and are easily findable.”

Blumenthal’s concerns seem to stem from the fact that vaccine-skeptic content is still available on social media platforms, despite the Big Tech platforms having new policies against it.

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New “See Something, Say Something Online Act” Turns Social Media Users Into Spies

Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors, “If You See, Something Say Something”  program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into Federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.

Just how bad is this bill?

This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.

“Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.”

Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)

What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?

The term “suspicious transmission” means any public or private post, message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime.

How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users, etc. know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?

The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red-flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.

This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.

Social media users would be forced to submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) on suspicious individuals within 30 days.

“In General.—If a provider of an interactive computer service detects a suspicious transmission, the interactive computer service, including any director, officer, employee, agent, or representative of such provider, shall submit to the Department a STAR describing the suspicious transmission in accordance with this section.”

As Reason warned, the See Something, Say Something Online Act would put reporting on your fellow American on steroids. It would create a glut of frivolous reports, including many that are politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous.

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On Irreverence, or, Why the Left Can’t Meme.

At Urban Dictionary, a user named Dankulous Memeulon plumbs the wisdom of the ancient truism that the political left tends to generate inept, insipid internet memes. He describes this phenomenon as “an absolute fact: Leftists and their shills CANNOT meme, and any attempt by them to do so ends up as either cringe-worthy and biased propaganda, or [as] cancerously inaccurate.” But Memeulon goes a step further and posits an explanation as to why this is true: “a possible cause […] is perhaps a leftist’s despicable attempts to stay politically correct, like all cucks, and thus they cannot, by their very nature, produce memes without fear of offending a minority who couldn’t care either way.”

I must confess that as a bald, cis-gendered, white, monogamous, conservative, heterosexual, Christian, male, English professor in his early 40s, I am too square to claim any expertise in creating dope-ass memes. But I do study them, along with the ongoing meme war that continues to intensify. Look no further than the WallStreetBets crowd over at Reddit, who have now learned how to burn hedge fund managers by pumping “meme stocks.”

Many scholars have demonstrated the academic relevance of meme culture to understanding how digital communication helped to bring right-wing populism to a new prominence in American politics. But the circulation of political memes (and their resulting formalization as a genre of public discourse) hints at why it is that as mainstream culture moves further left, the culture also grows more ossified, more staid, and more rigid in its demands that people conform to a particular set of puritanical expectations regarding political speech.

Distilled to its essential rhetorical function, the purpose of the political meme is to expand the range of topics that are eligible for public scrutiny. Generally, this is achieved through an imagistic, minimalist lampooning of our culture’s prevailing pieties and the supposedly unquestionable assumptions that undergird them. In short, the key pathos of meme culture is irreverence: a disrespectful attitude toward the things that polite society holds sacred. Understanding how irreverence has operated in modern American life, and how the objects of American reverence have recently changed, not only sharpens the contours of the political realignment that is unfolding, it also explains why the left exhibits such inferior skill when it comes to creating internet memes.

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