Tag: social media

Incidents of Voter Suppression and Election Irregularities in Pennsylvania FLOOD Social Media — Report

On Tuesday morning, Election Day, reports began flooding social media of various incidents of voter suppression and irregularities in Pennsylvania. The commonwealth, home to an estimated 12,961,683 people in 2023, is a key swing state, the winner of which will garner 19 electoral votes.

Scott Presler of Early Vote Action has called for those experiencing election issues to report them.

In Martinsburg, an election official went to a line of residents ready to cast their votes and told them, reportedly, that the polling station has the wrong ballot tabulators and the wrong ballots.

Another report stated that while standing in line to vote in Allegheny County, a poll worker told the residents that necessary paperwork for one of the two districts of the voting center was not submitted and that one of the necessary officials hadn’t yet arrived, effectively separating the two districts and only allowing one district to vote.

Keep reading

Hands Off My Social Media!

Democrats have found a new superstar to help get out the progressive vote: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan. Khan has done town halls with Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), Senate candidate and current Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Khan’s appearances are official government events—not campaign rallies. However, politicians would not appear at an event in an election year unless they where sure it would appeal to a key constituency. It may seem odd that politicians would consider it helpful to appear with an FTC chair. However, Lina Khan is no ordinary agency head. Khan has been a star in progressive circles since, while still a law student, she penned “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” This article argued that the rise of Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google required government to take a more aggressive approach to antitrust. Khan has brought high-profile antitrust cases against Amazon and META (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App), as well as attempts to block mergers and acquisitions in areas ranging from  handbags to grocery stores.

Khan advocates a “holistic” approach to antitrust that recognizes how “workers and independent businesses, in addition to consumers, can be harmed by antitrust and consumer protection violations.” She has also called for the FTC to consider how certain business practices can help facilitate antitrust violations. This holistic approach gives federal antitrust enforcers justification for second-guessing almost any decision made by almost any American business.

The FTC chair has a number of fans on the “populist-nationalist” right. These “Khanservatives” want Republicans to embrace a Lina Khan-like approach to antitrust. Khanservatives want to use antitrust to punish Big Tech for manipulating their algorithms to suppress conservative news and opinions. Some Khanservatives believe the Big Tech companies influenced the outcome of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The most prominent Khanservative is Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. Senator Vance (R-OH) has publicly praised Khan and, before being picked as Donald Trump’s running mate, suggested that if Trump returns to the Oval Office he should “use the administrative state” to advance a conservative agenda. Senator Vance has also called for the government to break up Google because “the monopolistic control of information in our society resides with a progressive company.”

Keep reading

Inside the Push for Police-Run “Misinformation” Units

Lexipol, a private consultancy geared towards providing services to law enforcement in the US, has come up with a recommendation to law enforcement to set up a “Misinformation/Disinformation Unit.”

A piece published on the company’s platform, Police1.com, asks its client police departments whether they are “prepared (for) the battle against mis/disinformation.”

Coming from Lexipol, this is no ordinary question, as the firm is said to have contracts with more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies, and is consequently considered to be a key player in what is known as “privatized police policymaking.”

According to Lexipol’s own statements, its reach in March 2020 extended to 8,100 agencies that used the company’s services and manuals (a year earlier, reports said that these agencies were located across 35 US states).

From that position, Lexipol is now making recommendations to its “subscribers” in the law enforcement community to establish a unit that would not only tackle supposed misinformation and disinformation, but also “collaborate with tech companies and civil society organizations to develop early-warning systems and identify harmful content in real time.”

This can be read as brazen defiance of the ongoing efforts, including in the US Congress, to put an end to just such “collaboration” between private and government (here, law enforcement) entities – investigated in one instance as government-Big Tech collusion.

But Lexipol’s write-up plays on fears that it is “disinformation” that might increase public hostility toward police officers and put them at greater risk.

Keep reading

Fact check: Harris campaign social media account has repeatedly deceived with misleading edits and captions

A social media account run by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been repeatedly deceptive.

The @KamalaHQ account, which has more than 1.3 million followers on the X social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has made a habit of misleadingly clipping and inaccurately captioning video clips to attack former President Donald Trump.

The Harris campaign deploys @KamalaHQ as a kind of irreverent attack dog, using jocular posts to draw attention to controversial, incorrect, or dubious comments by Trump and his allies. But the account, which the Harris campaign calls its “official rapid response page,” has itself made inaccurate comments on multiple occasions.

Below are eight examples of false or misleading video posts from the account since mid-August, including three from the latter part of this week. All of them have previously been highlighted by an anonymous rebuttal account called @KamalaHQLies, which itself has more than 268,000 followers.

Keep reading

Civil Liberties Groups Push DOJ to Probe UK-US Collusion in Online Censorship

America First Legal (AFL) has announced that it has filed a formal complaint, based on new evidence, urging an investigation into the activities of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

This UK-based group has been accused of direct involvement in online censorship, including in the US, notably in the affair around the “naming and shaming” of the supposed Covid “Disinformation Dozen” – which is why the AFL’s complaint has now been submitted to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

The key question that AFL wants to be answered is whether those behind CCDH should be treated as “agents of a foreign principal” who took on the role of stifling free speech in the US.

Such a designation of the group, if confirmed, would be in line with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

We obtained a copy of the request for you here.

Keep reading

Unmasking a Social Media Crackdown: NCLA Seeks Full Discovery on Government Censorship Tactics

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is pushing forward in Missouri v. Biden, aiming to uncover the depth of government-led censorship on social media. This legal action follows a June Supreme Court ruling that vacated a preliminary injunction in the case, previously known as Murthy v. Missouri, which barred officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, CISA, and the Surgeon General’s office from pressuring social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech.

NCLA’s clients, including prominent figures such as Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, as well as free speech advocate Jill Hines, allege that they were systematically blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and even suspended across major social media platforms due to their viewpoints on Covid-19, public health, and government policies. NCLA claims this censorship campaign was orchestrated as part of a “whole-of-government” initiative that saw coordinated efforts across a dozen federal agencies, with direction from top White House officials.

We obtained a copy of this new filing for you here.

While the Supreme Court ruled that NCLA’s clients lacked the standing needed to sustain the preliminary injunction, the organization argues that this ruling does not spell an end to the lawsuit. According to NCLA, the standard for standing at the injunction stage is higher than what’s required to advance a case through its initial pleadings. The Alliance is seeking further discovery to show that government actions indeed stifled speech and violated the First Amendment—an assertion that Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch echoed in their partial dissent, in which they warned that the government’s actions raised “serious First Amendment concerns.”

Keep reading

The Democracy Fund: Trudeau’s Online Harms Act could weaponize courts and stifle free speech

The Democracy Fund (TDF) has warned the public that the proposed Online Harms Act of the Canadian government could “weaponize” the courts and instill fear while doing little to curb social conflict and promote safety online.

In February, Minister of Justice and Attorney General Arif Virani proposed the Online Harms Act, also known as Bill C-63. The bill, which includes amendments to the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act, claims to protect children from online sexual abuse, cyberbullying and self-harm.

Bill C-63 seeks to reinstate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, a “hate speech” provision abolished in 2013 by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The bill would enable the government to target and remove specific online content.

The bill aims to create a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with monitoring and regulating internet content.

Additionally, a five-person government-appointed panel would monitor internet platforms and hold “secret commission hearings” against rule-breakers. Under the bill, those who commit hate speech online could face severe penalties, including life imprisonment or fines of up to CA$50,000 ($36,150).

However, in a 26-page legal brief, TDF argued that the proposed bill would grant excessive government power to clamp down on online speech.

“Historically, the power to censor has been a weapon of authoritarian regimes. This power inevitably expands and eventually eliminates the civic process by which society adapts and progresses,” the TDF wrote in the legal brief. “It will not reduce social conflict. On the contrary, it is likely to exacerbate the problem of social conflict, weaponize the courts and the human rights tribunal for political purposes, and introduce fear into the online social environment.”

Moreover, TDF stated that “open dialogue and education” are better alternative solutions to address harmful attitudes rather than censorship.

Keep reading

All The World’s a Stage: Everything Is Fake

No wonder we’re restless, teetering on the edge, frustrated by our addictions to fakery and excess, starved for what cannot be marketed or made profitable, so it no longer exists except in the shadows.

Everything is staged, and therefore fake. Given the near-zero cost of posting content in the digital world, everyone discovered that staging wasn’t limited to high-end political events, parades and Hollywood sets; since all the world’s a stage, everything could be staged, from every selfie on social media to every video on YouTube to every public display.

With staging comes spectacle, with spectacle comes self-serving artifice, and with artifice comes excess. The captivating idea of staging is by mimicking authenticity, we manifest an implicitly self-serving purpose: we stage the film to mimic “real life” to entertain the audience, and by this means reap a fortune.

By staging a political event, we rouse blood lust to serve our ascension to power. By staging a selfie in a swank bar sipping a costly cocktail, while home is a shared room in a squalid, overpriced flat, we serve our desire for a digitally distributed simulacrum of a status we cannot possibly achieve in our real lives.

Now that everything is staged, the competition to get noticed in a sea frothing with endless scrolls of “content” demands excess. Everything is now so sensationalized that we are desensitized to it all. As a result, everything distills down to self-parody, rendering parody impossible, for everything is already a parody of itself.

Mimicking authenticity to make the sale is now so embedded, so ubiquitous, that irony is also lost: we are living in a Philip K. Dick story come to life in which young women fabricating fake lives of glamor and luxury to boost their visibility are now competing with digitized imaginary young women that are idealized versions of the sexually compelling female.

Now that engagement is the coin of the Attention Economy realm, traditional media and social media have merged: everybody’s competing for engagement because that’s everyone’s source of income. Never mind that the Big Tech platforms skim the bulk of the engagement revenues and a handful of influencers reap the majority of what’s left; the mob is furiously dedicated to the task of picking up the pennies scattered in the sand-covered floor of the Coliseum.

In my view, engagement is the polite term for addiction, the core value proposition in Addiction Capitalism. As every dealer knows, there’s no more reliable source of revenue than a junkie with a monkey on his back, and encouraging addiction to screens is astoundingly profitable.

The fevered competition for eyeballs / visibility has generated a self-reinforcing feedback of faking authenticity better than other spectacles. The goal isn’t to present “real life,” what would be the point of such absurdly uncompelling, boring anti-spectacle?

The goal is to stage the mise en scene so cleverly that it really looks real: the rural kitchen in all its handmade glory, the “real food” lovingly prepared with simple tools, or the high-wire emotions of the indignant, filled to the brim with passionate intensity, planning their role when the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

But authenticity cannot be profitably milked for long; we caught on long ago. The transformation into sensationalized, self-parodying staging makes a mockery of authenticity, and as everyone crowds onto the world stage seeking visibility and the money the right staging brings, authenticity dissipates into dark energy, present but invisible, undetectable, a fleeting shadow lost in the churning wake of spectacle.

Keep reading

Meta Brings Back Face Scanning

After three years, Meta’s apps will once again include facial recognition (this is currently in the testing phase). The giant is “selling” the move to its users as a way to fight scammers and make account recovery easier.

The feature was abandoned because of widespread criticism of this tech, but Facebook and Instagram users can now expect to have it back on their apps.

The first scenario involves deploying facial recognition to remove what is known as celeb-bait ads, which use photos of public figures to get users to visit scam websites.

Meta said that if it suspects this is happening, faces in the ad will be compared to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile photos using facial recognition.

For now, the feature is applied to a group of celebrities and public figures, on an “opt-out” basis. The company also revealed that since it is happening in real-time, the process is “faster and more accurate” than when done manually.

And now, onto “ordinary people.” The second test involves getting the apps’ users to take video selfies and upload them to Meta. Once again, facial recognition will be used to match these to people’s profile photos, this time in order to speed up the account recovery process.

Meta is clearly counting on the “convenience factor” to persuade users that subjecting themselves to facial recognition carried out by a tech juggernaut is a good idea.

Another promise is that the process will help when accounts are believed to be compromised by hackers logging in with stolen credentials.

The inevitable question is, what happens to this sensitive personal biometric data, especially once in the hands of Meta? The company said it will not use it for any other purposes, that it will be encrypted, and “immediately” deleted once a comparison has been made.

Keep reading

Kamala’s Secret Weapon: The British Operatives Determined to “Kill” Elon Musk’s Free Speech Platform X

Amid the chaos of pre-election America, major information has surfaced, revealing internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). This UK-based group, which was founded by British political strategist Morgan McSweeney under the name Brixton Endeavours Limited before being renamed to the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2019, outlined a clear goal in their agenda: “Kill Musk’s Twitter.” The documents make it clear that the CCDH is targeting Elon Musk’s social media platform with full force. McSweeney, who helped guide Keir Starmer to victory in the UK, is now involved in US politics, advising Kamala Harris as she navigates the upcoming election, raising serious questions about the CCDH’s reach and motives.

Now, if you’re wondering why a think tank founded by a man who helped turn Keir Starmer into the British Prime Minister is so dead set on smashing up a social media platform thousands of miles across the pond, you’re not alone. But the CCDH isn’t just any ragtag team of keyboard warriors. These guys are plugged into Washington power circles like an iPhone into a dodgy charger, with ties so tight to the Biden-Harris campaign, that they might as well be writing the tweets. And with McSweeney now advising Kamala Harris, well, let’s just say the plot thickens.

Keep reading