Tag: social media

FBI launches open attack on ‘foreign’ alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy

The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Silicon Valley social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.

In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to remove or restrict ads on the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale, however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.

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Report: Half of Trump’s Twitter and Facebook Posts Since Election Day Flagged as Misinformation

A recent report states that half of President Donald Trump’s posts since election day have been flagged as misinformation by Facebook and Twitter and censored on each platform.

Forbes reports that half of President Trump’s social media posts on Facebook and Twitter since election day have been labeled as false or questionable by the social media giants.

Of President Trump’s 22 posts on Facebook and Twitter, 11 have been labeled by the Silicon Valley tech firms. The posts include the President’s claims to victory and assertions of election fraud taking place. Twitter hid some posts on the President’s timeline and warned users that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” and restricted users’ ability to like or retweet the tweets.

Underneath some of President Trump’s Facebook posts, the social media company warned users that “final votes may different from the initial vote counts” or “elections officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling and reporting,” but users were still able to reply to and share the posts.

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Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania

As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.

As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.

Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.

When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.

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Joe Biden, Kamala Harris Got a Big Social Media Boost from Indian Troll Farms

Joe Biden’s Twitter account got a sizable boost beginning in August from tens of thousands of fake followers purchased on the open market from troll farms in rural India, an investigation has found.

Within two weeks of Biden selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12, his Twitter following jumped by 738,595 new followers—a 9.1 percent leap. The number hit 11 million by the third week of October.

A close examination has revealed unusual patterns. A large number of Twitter accounts that followed Biden’s appear to have been created exclusively for that purpose. And a large number of the users are located in small towns in rural India—in places where English-speakers are rare, and from handles run by people who don’t speak English as their first language, nor appear to be genuinely invested in American politics.

A Zenger News investigation reveals that Biden’s increasing social media footprint in India came from the country’s infamous troll farms boosting his candidacy.

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Told You So: After Supporting Censorship of Others, Mother Jones Now on the Receiving End of It

One of the main outlets who pushed the censorship of Alex Jones and others was Mother Jones. When Alex Jones was wiped from the internet, Mother Jones praised it, running the headline, “Facebook Finally Removes Another 22 Alex Jones Accounts.” This was one of several articles.

“These three add nothing to planet Earth by their existence, so I don’t mind banning them,” wrote Mother Jones contributor, Kevin Drum, in an article about the censorship of Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, and Milo Yiannopoulos.

But now, those words are coming back to haunt them and they are likely realizing the error of their ways.

Mother Jones is now waging a campaign to expose the exact same censorship used to wipe out their political rivals — because it is being used against them.

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From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent

Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.

Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.

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