Tag: social media

Kamala and Tampon Tim Are Caught Astroturfing Support – Paying Social Media Users to Post Pro Kamala-Walz Content on Instagram

What a shock!

The Kamala-Walz campaign was caught today astroturfing their grassroots support. Everyone knows Kamala Harris, the worst vice president in US history, has no wide support from the American people – especially after the Biden coup!

But this won’t stop Democrats from buying the appearance of support! Just like they buy votes.

State Senator Jake Hoffman from Arizona posted evidence that Democrats are reaching out to social media users to pay them to say nice things about Kamala and Tampon Tim.

Senator Hoffman posted the proof. Kamala’s campaign worker, Alicia Howard, sent out letters to Instagram users to pay them for supporting her campaign.

The email reads in part:

Over a series of three posts, we’re inviting you to share what you admire about the Biden-Harris Administration, what initiatives you support, or simply why you believe Kamala Harris, with Biden’s endorsement, is the best candidate for the job.

At MJ Ventures, we specialize in organizing impactful projects – and I’d be happy to share with you some of our previous work if you’re interested.

This project is moving quickly, so if you’re interested in creating content on Instagram, please let me know as soon as possible. We can discuss the details and compensation for your involvement.

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Crazed Authoritarians Demand X Be Shut Down in UK

Mimicking a policy that the west once condemned Communist China for pursuing, authoritarians are now calling for X to be shut down completely in the UK to stop civil unrest.

After the country was rocked by a series of riots over the past week in response to a 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants killing three little girls in Southport, the media and the political class blamed the anger on “misinformation” shared on X.

In reality, the UK has been a boiling pot of resentment and rage over mass migration for years, with huge numbers continuing to arrive, putting massive strain on the country and making some parts of major towns and cities unrecognizable, despite nobody having ever voted for it.

However, the disorder is being exploited to grease the skids for mass censorship.

Cambridge professor Sander van der Linden said the government could “geo-restrict access to a platform if the situation got so bad” and Twitter could also be “banned from the app store for violating policies.”

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Court Slaps Down NIH for Unconstitutional Censorship

The D.C. Circuit Court has declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated the Constitution by using keyword filters to censor comments on its social media platforms. The court’s decision stems from a dispute involving People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which argued that their comments were unfairly targeted by NIH’s filtering system on Facebook and Instagram. This case highlights ongoing tensions between government control and free speech on digital platforms.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The crux of the court’s decision hinged on three critical findings regarding the nature of the forums in question. First, the NIH’s social media accounts were determined to be limited public forums, a classification that allows for certain restrictions but not indiscriminate censorship. Second, while the NIH has the authority to curtail off-topic discussions, the court found that the agency’s keyword filters overstepped this boundary by blocking on-topic and potentially valuable contributions, particularly those from PETA on posts related to animal testing.

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UK Police Arrest Man For ‘Offensive’ Facebook Posts

A British man filmed as a pair of police officers entered his home and arrested him for “improper use of the electronic communications network” under the Communications Act.

A female cop stood in the man’s living room and explained he was being hauled into the police station over “some comments” he made “on a Facebook page.”

“Oh, a Facebook crime is it?” the man asked.

“We have reports that you made some comments that are offensive, obscene and people have made complaints about that and they’ve come from a Facebook account with your names,” the female officer said.

When the man asked if he was going to be “locked up for the night,” the cops said, “Hopefully not,” with the policewoman adding, “unless you film us.”

The video ended with the “suspect” standing up for the officers to place him in handcuffs.

There are no details regarding what the man posted online, but it could be related to recent unrest in the nation with violent protests erupting across the country.

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FBI To Resume Meetings With Social Media Companies, Ignoring Censorship Concerns

Here we go again – another US election is coming up, and there’s another push to find ways to censor “disfavored” voices, and one of those ways is the focus on the foreign malign influence (FMI) boogeyman.

Americans (and the world) have seen this play out already before and after the contested 2020 vote.

The infamous case of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop news story came after the FBI issued a warning to social media companies about an incoming FMI “disinformation dump” – from Russia.

We know how that went and was eventually debunked, the laptop being authentic, rather than a figment of some “disinformation” peddling operation’s imagination. But here is the FBI again, more than just emboldened by the recent Supreme Court’s ruling in the Murthy v. Missouri case.

That decision lifted an injunction that banned the US government from colluding with Big Tech in order to promote censorship. Now the case is back in the lower courts, and in the meanwhile, mere months before the election, the legal hurdle to resume suspected collusion has been cleared.

And so the FBI will now “resume regular meetings” with social media companies, the pretext being finding ways to combat “potential” FMI threats. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal illustrates very well how the supposed hunt for FMI can go astray, straight into the political censorship territory.

But none of that seems to matter now, as the current White House presses on with the old practices. On July 12 this year, just after the Supreme Court’s decision, Department of Justice (DOJ) Associate Deputy Attorney General George D. Turner penned a memo that shows the collusion never really stopped – even after last October’s court injunction restricting this type of “collaboration.”

We obtained a copy of the memo for you here.

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UK PM Keir Starmer Uses Riots To Call For Mass Surveillance and Social Media Censorship

The more things change, the more they remain the same, at least in the UK; after many years of Tory governments’ vigorous efforts to extend mass surveillance indiscriminately targeting citizens and enact stringent anti-free speech laws, the new Labour government seems to be picking up right where the previous one left off.

The wake of the Southport riots has elicited the usual medley of reactions: moves to address societal issues with more surveillance, strengthen the police state, blame “misinformation” and unproven, but always handy to bring up, “foreign meddling.”

But the real malady seems to be squarely at home: in fact, in the prime minister’s office. Keir Starmer happens to be sitting there now, but the policy hardly ever changes: he, too, wants more mass surveillance based on facial recognition, and more pressure on social media to ramp up censorship.

If anything does change it is the intensity of these demands that have long since been rejected as “Orwellian” by rights groups like Big Brother Watch.

Here, Starmer told a news conference called after the events branded as far-right riots, that participants in the protests (whom he called “thugs” and compared with football hooligans) are “mobile” and for that reason, police forces will, going forward, be a part of a network of sorts.

The prime minister added that there will be intelligence and data sharing, as well as “wider deployment of facial recognition technology, and preventative action, criminal behavior orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train, in just the same way that we do with football hooligans.”

Movement restrictions are said to apply only to those with previous convictions, and those who have committed “violence at protests.” But here things get complicated because even those who were charged with relatively minor offenses like disorderly conduct could end up having their movements surveilled and restricted.

Starmer isn’t in favor of enacting new laws; he seems satisfied that all this can be achieved within the existing legislation and announced a “coordinated response” within the police across the country and law enforcement taking advantage of those laws more than before. But he does want more police officers, and it seems that increasing their numbers will be one election campaign promise that will be kept.

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Biden-Harris Task Force Urges Online Age Verification Digital ID Tool Development

The online digital ID age verification creep in the US continues from a number of directions, through “recommendations” and “studies” – essentially, the government is nudging the industry to move in the direction of implementing digital ID age verification tools.

At this point, it is happening via various initiatives and legislation, still, without being formally mandated.

One instance is a recommendation coming from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force, which is telling online service providers they should “develop and inform parents about age verification tools built into the app or available at the device level.”

The task force is led by the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS (its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, SAMHSA,) in what is referred to in official statements as “close partnership” with the Department of Commerce.

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Senate Passes Kids’ “Safety” Bills Despite Privacy, Digital ID, and Censorship Concerns

Two bills combined – the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) – have passed in the US Senate in a 91-3 vote, and will now be considered by the House.

Criticism of the bills focuses mainly on the likelihood that, if and when they become law, they will help expand online digital ID verification, as well as around issues like censorship (removal and blocking of content).

The effort to make KOSA and COPA 2.0 happen was spearheaded by a parent group that was pushing lawmakers and tech companies’ executives to move in this direction, and their main demand was to enact new rules that would prevent cyberbullying and other harms.

And now the main sponsors, senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and Republican Marsha Blackburn are trying to dispel these concerns, suggesting these are not “speech bills” and do not (directly) impose age verification.

Further defending the bills, they say that the legislation does not mandate that internet platforms start collecting even more user data, and reject the notion it is invasive of people’s privacy.

But the problem is that although technically true, this interpretation of the bills’ impact is ultimately incorrect, as some of their provisions do encourage censorship, facilitate the introduction of digital ID for age verification, and leave the door open for mass collection of online users’ data – under specific circumstances – and end ending anonymity online.

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Elon Musk’s ‘Election Interference’

A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call reportedly raised $4 million in donations for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. After the call, the @dudes4Harris account on X was briefly suspended.

Is this election interference?

If we remain in reality, the answer is of course not.

Even if X CEO Elon Musk ordered the account suspended because of its politics, there would be no (legal) wrongdoing here. X is a private platform, and it doesn’t have any obligation to be politically neutral. Explicitly suppressing pro-Harris content would be a bad business model, surely, but it would not be illegal. Musk and the platform formerly known as Twitter have no obligation to equally air conservative and progressive views or give equal treatment to Republican and Democratic candidates.

But there’s no evidence that X was deliberately trying to thwart Harris organizers. The dudes4Harris account—which has no direct affiliation to the Harris campaign—was suspended after it promoted and held its Zoom call and was back the next day. That’s a pretty bad plan if the goal was to stop its influence or fundraising. And there are all sorts of legitimate reasons why X may have suspended the account.

The account’s suspension is “not that surprising,” writes Techdirt Editor in Chief Mike Masnick (who, it should be noted, is intensely critical of X policies and Musk himself on many issues). “Shouldn’t an account suddenly amassing a ton of followers with no clear official connection to the campaign and pushing people to donate maybe ring some internal alarm bells on any trust and safety team? It wouldn’t be a surprise if it tripped some guardwires and was locked and/or suspended briefly while the account was reviewed. That’s how this stuff works.”

If we step out of reality into the partisan hysteria zone, however, then the account’s temporary suspension was clearly an attempt by Musk to sway the 2024 election.

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Gab Founder Andrew Torba Allegedly Finds Evidence that Trump Would-Be Assassin Thomas Crooks Had an Account on Gab and Supported Joe Biden

On Wednesday, Gab founder Andrew Torba reported that his staff had allegedly found evidence that Trump shooter Thomas Crooks may have had an account on the free speech social media platform.

Torba published nine posts that he believes were written on the social media platform by Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Andrew Torba reported on Gab:

Approximately 30 minutes ago, Gab learned that Thomas Crooks, the deranged Joe Biden supporter who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump, may have had an account on our platform. We are unable to confirm that the account in question actually belonged to him.

The account was last active on the site in 2021. As far as we are aware, the account did not use the site to send any direct messages. He posted on the site nine (9) times total.

While the account made very few posts on the site, the majority of them were in support of President Biden. A number of posts in particular expressed support for President Biden’s COVID lockdowns, border policies and executive orders.

We have saved the account data pending receipt of a search warrant.

Andrew Torba later posted a request for prayers.

Would appreciate some prayer. I’m sticking my neck out big time on this one, but I felt it was the right thing to do in the public interest.

Kanekoa the Great later published on his Twitter page the images allegedly posted by Thomas Crooks on Gab.

Kanekoa added this:

NEW: Thomas Matthew Crooks made nine posts on Gab supporting President Biden, COVID lockdowns, and Biden’s border policies, according to Gab Founder Andrew Torba (
@BasedTorba
).

“Im sorry explain to me how trump was ever concerned with what the left wanted, or anybody in the GOP for that matter?”

“The reason all the deaths are down is because you are in stuck in your house.”

“Actually the executive order allows an easier path to US citizenship therefore no longer making them illegals and allowing children to join their already legalized immigrant parents in the US.”

“first of all Biden executive orders don’t incentivize human trafficking as human traffickers aren’t interested in citizenships, likewise the majority of illegal immigrants are not criminals and in fact some studies(such as the one linked below) show lower rates of crime committed by these individuals, it is also unclear if the extensive path to citizenship is in fact effective at routing out potential bad actors hence why there is a review of that system.”

“Thats funny because the first order mandates a reuniting of any families separated at the border, the 2nd and 3rd orders a review of trumps immigration policies and other previous policies. However his order doesn’t actually open borders or reduce the authority of border patrol, or anything that would substantially reduce BP effectiveness.”

Of course, additional context is needed to confirm these Gab posts belonged to Crooks.

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