Tag: social media

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

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WHO Chief Doubles Down on Free Speech Crackdown

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus used the UN agency’s Summit 2024 to launch into yet another tirade against online “misinformation/disinformation.”

The WHO’s contribution against that threat, Tedros said, was countering it by “working” with a number of companies and other partners.

In his speech, the WHO chief repeated the many-times heard accusations against social media as “turbo-charging” the spread of misinformation which then added to people’s skepticism toward vaccines and some other medical treatments.

Tedros added to this the “stigma, discrimination, and even violence” toward health workers, but also “marginalized groups,” allegedly all a result of said disinformation.

This one has also been heard many times from various politicians and affiliated media: that disinformation was “almost as deadly” as the virus (we’re talking coronavirus, not smallpox here).

But still, Tedros states that disinformation regarding the pandemic, lockdowns, masks, etc. – or what he considers to be misinformation, was indeed “deadly.”

Now that the problem has been presented in such a dramatic way, the “solution,” however drastic, should be an easier pill to swallow. And the solution is, basically, Big Tech and government(s) censoring free speech.

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The International Censorship Regime Goes on the Offensive Ahead of 2024 U.S. Election

Online censorship, which tends to rank among my three main beats, is a subject I haven’t touched on in a while but has predictably become more relevant as we draw closer to November 5th. The focus of late has naturally been on an election year brimming with many whimsical happenings, from Trump narrowly avoiding the mass trauma of having his brains blown out in front of thousands of onlookers in Butler Pa., to the anointing of Kamala Harris as the democrat party’s heir apparent, to the escalations in both the Middle East and the ongoing U.S./Russia proxy war in Ukraine.

Despite the obvious importance of these issues, I truly believe the most pressing concern facing the Western world is the multifaceted attack on free expression, particularly in the digital realm.

We’ve all probably heard the idiom that “Freedom of Speech is the First Amendment because it’s the most important”. I never fully appreciated this sentiment, but in the past eight years—after being de-platformed and demonetized on several occasions—I’ve learned the hard way how truly accurate that statement is.

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EU’s Věra Jourová Labels Elon Musk a “Promoter of Evil” for Permitting “Hate Speech” on X

Věra Jourová is not a psychologist but she decided to play one during an interview, by “diagnosing” X owner Elon Musk as a person unable to “recognize” good and evil.

But then, he apparently can, after all – because Jourová in the same breath accused him of being “a promoter of evil.”

Jourová is an EU bureaucrat on her way out, after serving as Vice President of the Commission for Values and Transparency for the past five years.

“Good riddance. If she wants to see evil, I suggest she use a mirror,” Musk shot back in a post on X, adding that Jourová is the “epitome of banal, bureaucratic evil.”

Jourová is known for pushing anti-free speech legislation such as enabling mass surveillance of private messages (which she claims is “privacy-preserving” and “not breaking encryption”), combating “disinformation and hate speech,” and even going after whoever the EU decides is a conspiracy theorist by using law enforcement.

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