Tag: social media

Obama Bashes Trump Saying ‘What if I had Done Any of This?’ – Gets Major Reminders From Twitter/X Users

Former President Obama made an appearance at Hamilton College this week and tried to take some cheap shots at the Trump administration.

He was clearly trying to echo the talking points currently being pushed by his party and the media.

For some reason, Obama thinks no one remembers anything about his presidency.

From NBC News:

Former President Barack Obama said he is “deeply concerned” with some of the actions that President Donald Trump and his administration have taken and seemed to call out the Republican Party for not pushing back on them…

Obama said he’s more troubled by a White House that takes aim at law firms that represent ideas or parties that its occupants disagree with, and that the administration has punished media outlets. Trump has signed executive orders penalizing major law firms and lawyers, prompting outrage within the legal community. The White House has also barred The Associated Press from coverage over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

“That kind of behavior is contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans,” he said.

Obama suggested that Republicans would be outraged if he had done similar things as president.

“Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps,” he said, adding, “It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors.”

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EU Targets Elon Musk’s X with Potential $1 Billion Fine Under Censorship Law

When the European Commission goes to war, it doesn’t send tanks. It dispatches compliance officers with angry emails and billion-dollar fines.

The European Union’s eurocrats’s next target is Elon Musk’s social media fixer-upper, X.

According to the New York Times, four anonymous whisperers from inside the EU machine say the bloc is loading up a billion-dollar bazooka aimed squarely at X, citing violations of their shiny new Digital Services Act, the latest attempt to regulate speech by committee. And what better way to showcase the importance of online civility than by dragging the world’s loudest billionaire into court?

The DSA, which was sold to the public as a digital hygiene law to make the internet a kinder, gentler place, has become a blunt instrument in the hands of bureaucrats who never met a control lever they didn’t want to pull. They’ve apparently decided that Musk’s flavor of digital chaos — too many unregulated opinions, not enough “fact-checking,” and a stubborn refusal to grovel — is a clear and present danger to the European project.

Among X’s alleged crimes against the algorithmic gods: refusing to hand over data to “independent researchers” (friendly academics who publish pro-censorship PDFs no one reads), hiding the secrets behind those little blue check marks, and failing to spill the tea on who’s advertising to whom.

Naturally, this has prompted Brussels to threaten a fine that could “top $1 billion,” a figure clearly pulled from the same place all government fines originate — an angry dartboard. One idea floating through the regulatory fog? That if X itself can’t pay up, maybe SpaceX can. Because when you’re short on jurisdiction, why not go fishing in another company’s wallet?

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New Info on How the Feds Helped Censor a Bombshell

The US House Judiciary Committee has released internal chat logs, that show the FBI moved into cover-up mode the very day the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, on October 14, 2020.

The logs, first reported about by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, reveal that the FBI employees were immediately instructed “not to discuss the Biden matter,” while an intelligence analyst who, during a call with Twitter, accidentally confirmed that the story, i.e., the laptop, was real, was placed under a “gag order.”

The reason the analyst, who was with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was able to so quickly confirm the reporting was based on credible information was the fact the FBI had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop several months earlier.

Big Tech platforms – notably Twitter and Facebook – then started censoring the article, branding it falsely “Russian disinformation.” By maintaining the “no comment” policy instead of confirming that the laptop was real and under investigation, the FBI was in effect tacitly promoting the false narrative about foreign interference.

These moves originated from the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was shut down earlier this year for its activities related to censorship through pressure on social platforms.

The laptop scandal was unfolding during a crucial time in the 2020 campaign and represents one of the most egregious publicly known examples of political censorship of free speech and media orchestrated by government agencies.

The chat logs that have now been published reveal that one of the FBI staff involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was Bradley Benavides.

Only weeks prior, Benavides featured in another controversy: that time in what appeared to be a smear campaign against Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who were allegedly “advancing Russian disinformation.”

At the time, the senators just so happened to be investigating Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments.

A letter the Judiciary Committee sent Benavides in June 2023, shows that he had by that time gone through the Big Tech-Big Government “revolving door” – and was senior risk manager at Amazon.

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Revealed: Pro-Kamala Social-Media Millions That Couldn’t Sync ‘Brat’ With ‘Democrat’

The abrupt withdrawal last year of President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, followed rapidly by his replacement with Vice President Kamala Harris, irked many voters left out by the process. Yet social media seemed to ooze with enthusiasm and Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.

Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. Digital creator Amelia Montooth, in one viral TikTok video, kissed a woman and tried searching for pornography, actions her sketch suggested would be banned if Harris lost the election.

Harris, a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment, never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements. But the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist. 

As it turns out, the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content, including Montooth’s videos, was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters. 

RealClearInvestigations obtained internal documents and WhatsApp messages from Democratic strategists behind the influencer campaign. Way to Win, one of the major donor groups behind the effort, spent more than $9.1 million on social media influencers during the 2024 presidential election – payments revealed here for the first time. The amount was touted in a document circulated after the election detailing the organization’s accomplishments. 

The effort supported over 550 content creators who published 6,644 posts across platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and X. Way to Win coached creators on phrases, issue areas, and key themes to “disseminate pro-Kamala content throughout the cycle,” a post-election memo from the group noted.

The look behind the curtain reveals that at least some of the image-making around the Harris candidacy was carefully orchestrated by the same types of covert social media marketing often used by corporate brands and special interest groups. Such campaigns provide the illusion of organic support through the authentic appeal of trusted social media voices.

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Insanity: AfD’s Petr Bystron Loses Immunity for Sharing Merkel Photo They Said Wasn’t a Nazi Salute — Until He Posted It

The EU Parliament has lifted the immunity of AfD foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron because he shared a photo of Angela Merkel on Twitter in 2022.

The reason? Bizarre: since Merkel is seen raising her arm in the image, it’s being interpreted as a Nazi salute – but only because Bystron posted it.

Prosecutor: Waving is not a Nazi salute

This farce has a backstory: In 2022, during a protest against COVID-19 measures, Bystron waved to the crowd.

The public prosecutor immediately launched an investigation: “Nazi salute!”

In response, hundreds of AfD supporters filed complaints against Angela Merkel, who had been photographed waving in a similar manner. But in each case, the prosecutor ruled: “Not a Nazi salute, no investigation.”

Bystron used exactly that photo of Merkel in court to defend himself—successfully. The court ruled that not every raised right arm constitutes a Nazi salute. “Great!” Bystron thought. “Then using the Merkel photo should be no problem.”

Far from it! Now, the prosecutor claims it is a Nazi salute after all – and has indicted Bystron for spreading unconstitutional symbols!

Strange? More than that. The charges came a full year after the image was posted on X.

The alleged violation of §86 of the German Criminal Code only came to the prosecutor’s attention once the EU election campaign began – with Bystron leading the AfD list alongside top candidate Krah. What a coincidence!

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Rise of the catapult killer ‘influencers’: Children as young as 8 are brutally killing wildlife with slingshots during school time for social media clout – and police do nothing

Over the years social media has seen children take part in a host of horrific trends in exchange for likes and shares.

And the recent emergence of youngsters brutally killing wildlife with catapults for clout on the likes of Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok is a particularly sickening one.

Local wildlife rescue groups are sounding the alarm as they say there has been a dramatic rise in the number of reports they receive of animals being hit with slingshots.

They have also warned that the culprits are often primary school children ‘as young as eight years old’, with a lot of the incidents taking place during school time.

A quick search on TikTok and the like reveal shocking posts of young ‘influencers’ shooting down wildlife with catapults and posing with them for popularity online.

The trend is taking hold countrywide, with the Greenwich and Bexley areas of London as well as Essex and Kent particularly affected by a large number of cases.

Wildlife groups say not enough is being done by police to crack down on the incidents, are now calling for the sale and carrying of catapults in public to be made illegal, with a petition collecting more than 17,000 signatures.

Rae Gellel, founder of Greenwich Wildlife Network told MailOnline: ‘It’s kids. 

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German Dystopia: Friedrich Merz’s and Olaf Scholz’s Incoming Coalition To Turn Censorship Into Overdrive, Crack Down on Social Media and ‘Ban Lies’

If one thinks that de-industrialized and immigrant-flooded Germany was in a poor state, we just have to wait until the new incoming coalition is in place to see how bad things are about to become.

German tabloid BILD has had access to documents from the negotiators of the ‘black-red coalition’ (Friedrich Merz’s CDU and Olaf Scholz’s SPD). And what it found is quite disturbing: they want to take hard action ‘against lies’ – i.e. they are about to double down on censorship and propaganda.

These plans emerge from the negotiation paper ‘Culture and Media’ working group, predicting that the pressure on social media is to be considerably expanded and whatever they deem to call ‘fake news’ is to be severely restricted.

BILD reported:

“The exploratory paper already stated that ‘disinformation and fake news’ threatened democracy. The negotiating paper now even states: ‘The deliberate dissemination of false factual allegations is not covered by freedom of expression’.

The consequence: ‘Therefore, the media supervisory authority, which is independent of the state, must be able to take action against information manipulation as well as hatred and incitement on the basis of clear legal requirements, while preserving freedom of expression’.”

Pressure on platforms like X is expected to increase, and certain ‘false statements’ are to be ‘prevented’, i.e., CENSORED.

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Democrats’ Favorite Influencer Harry Sisson Accused of Tricking 11 Women—Including an Abuse Survivor—into Sending Explicit Photos via Snapchat

TikTok influencer and defacto Biden spox Harry Sisson is accused of convincing 11 women to send explicit photos via Snapchat by falsely claiming he had no other romantic interests and respected them for more than their bodies.

One accuser is a domestic abuse survivor. Specific accusers, including Carlee Hosch and Hannah, have shared detailed allegations on social media, with Hosch alleging a nine-month manipulation period.

The allegations against Sisson were brought to light by Sarah Fields, a Republican State Delegate and US Army veteran, who compiled and shared evidence of his alleged misconduct.

Fields posted on X that when the women eventually discovered each other, Sisson reportedly “called them all insane and attempted to coerce one of them into telling the public that the photos were ‘fake.’”

The allegations suggest Sisson manipulated these women by claiming he had “no roster” and respected them for more than their bodies, with one accuser being a domestic abuse survivor.

“Harry Sisson convinced 11 different women that ‘he had no roster’ and ‘respected them for more than their bodies’ while persuading them to send explicit photos of themselves through Snapchat, including one from a domestic abuse survivor,” Fields wrote on X.

She continued, “When the women discovered each other one by one, he called them all insane and attempted to coerce one of them into telling the public that the photos were ‘fake.’”

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Florida Man Busted by Secret Service and Local Authorities After Posting a Shocking Threat Against President Trump During Wild Social Media Rant

The United States government and the state of Florida are not messing around when it comes to demented individuals threatening the life of President Trump.

As WPBF reported, a 42-year-old Florida man from St. Lucie County was busted by both the Secret Service and sheriff’s deputies on Monday afternoon after posting a disturbing threat against Trump on social media during a wild social media rant.

Kendal Aaron Todd began his 80-second tirade by making a series of confusing accusations against Trump, including calling him the “Antichrist.”

“Because of Donald Trump, every single person in the world is cursed,” Todd begins. “Donald Trump is the Antichrist.”

“Donald Trump has personally made business decisions which have hurt so many different reincarnated Jesuses,” he adds.

Todd goes on to issue this shocking threat against the president, which calls his mental health further into question.

“Fight me naked to the death!” Todd said. “I’m going to cut you up with a chainsaw and put you in acid.”

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Elon Musk says X was knocked offline by ‘massive cyberattack’ that originated in ‘Ukraine area’

Billionaire entrepreneur and DOGE chief Elon Musk claimed Monday that X went dark as the result of a “massive cyberattack” that originated in the “Ukraine area.”

“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk told Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow about the apparent operation targeting his social media platform.

“But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” the world’s richest man added.

Musk, 53, did not immediately provide additional evidence of who may have been responsible.

Cybercriminals have been known to create false IP addresses to impersonate computer systems from different parts of the world, a practice known as “spoofing.”

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