Tag: social media

New Emails Reveal Big Tech-Biden Admin Collusion on COVID-19 Narratives, Involving CDC and Twitter Censorship

Trying to refute collusive practices involving major social media companies is probably not high on the agenda of the US government right this moment; nevertheless, the evidence of the highly controversial practice keeps rolling in.

America First Legal (AFL), a conservative non-profit, has disclosed a new batch of documents obtained through litigation, this time against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It concerns May 2021 communications meant to set the tone online and “manage” the government agenda around topics related to Covid vaccines.

The emails were exchanged between Facebook and CDC – and the documents focus on the activities of CDC spokesperson Carol Crawford, who also “happened” to be involved with Twitter’s Partner Support Portal around the same time.

This Twitter program’s “secret superpower” was that it allowed government-affiliated individuals to participate in flagging content for censorship.

Genelle Adrien (of the Politics and Government Outreach Team over at Facebook) and Crawford “star” in the email chain obtained by AFL, with the latter being asked point blank that the CDC approve Facebook’s “COVID-19 Information Center FAQ.”

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Australian Ministers Urge Stricter Online Censorship of “Misogynistic” Speech

The Australian government’s commitment to online censorship is playing out in yet another way – the perceived harmful influence social platforms have on young men and boys.

Aligned media outlets agree these sites are showing too much content that is branded as misogynistic and promoting harmful gender stereotypes.

Meanwhile, government ministers want to see the companies behind platforms “do” (aka, censor) more.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, known for her pro-censorship stance, and Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth are both quoted in a Guardian article about an “experiment” the outlet carried out by setting up fake accounts representing “generic 24-year-old males” on Facebook and Instagram.

The accounts did not interact – the goal was to see what would be showing up in their algorithmically-recommended feeds. And that the device and the email used to sign up were new, was apparently enough for the Guardian to believe they were safe from Meta’s tracking.

The article’s conclusion is that over the following several months, the feeds started to “veer into more highly sexist content,” especially on Facebook.

But it looks like the majority were memes about sitcoms, Star Wars, “dudebro” memes, Daily Mail, etc., news posts, while Instagram’s biggest “offense” seems to have been showing images of “scantily-clad women.”

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UK Sports Commentator Faces Court for “Malicious Communications” Charges Over Social Media Posts

Free speech supporters are alarmed after former Premier League player Joey Barton has been slapped with charges of alleged “malicious communications” directed towards sports commentator and past England Women’s team star Eni Aluko.

Responding to the accusations, Barton labeled the judiciary as a “banana republic.” A court date has been set for July 30 following a probe by Cheshire Police in England.

Earlier this year, Barton likened Aluko and fellow commentator Lucy Ward to Fred and Rose West.

Fred and Rose West were a British married couple who committed a series of murders, sexual assaults, and acts of torture against young women and girls, including some of their own children, between the 1960s and 1980s in Gloucestershire, England.

After a police investigation into Barton’s contentious actions, charges were brought by the Crown Prosecution Service. The 41-year-old ex-footballer is set to face these charges at Warrington Magistrates’ Court.

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Cops Threaten To Take Kids From Family Terrorized by Anti-Christian Reddit Group

J.D. Lott and his wife Britney were eating lunch with their eight kids on April 30 when he missed a call on his cellphone. The family was three years into a cross-country, home-schooling, Instagram-documented road trip in a bus they refashioned into an RV. A day earlier they had been staying at a Florida campground. The next day, they were in Georgia on their way to meet friends—or so they thought.

Half an hour later, the missed caller sent a text saying that they were from the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in Florida. It continued: “Please respond we need to follow up and verify the children are safe. If we cannot complete this we will have to see an Order To Take Into Custody which is enforceable nationwide. Please work with us so we do not have to do that. Thank you.”

A nationwide manhunt? With the possibility of having their children taken away?

“It’s like a knife to the heart,” J.D. Lott tells Reason.

The Lotts quickly pieced together what was happening: Online trolls had figured out how to weaponize child protective services.

The Lotts’ Instagram account, @AmericanFamilyRoadTrip, has over half a million followers. On Reddit there’s a group, FundieSnarkUncensored, that makes fun of people it believes are Christian Fundamentalists. The Lotts are often the target of the group’s criticisms. Lately, the snark had been getting darker.

When Britney had her eighth child, Boone, two weeks earlier and posted a video with him, the Reddit group started armchair diagnosing him. They said the healthy newborn had “severe sunburn,” “was lethargic,” and had “jaundice.”

Participants on the Reddit group whipped themselves into a frenzy, convinced that Boone was in grave danger and his parents were to blame. They used a screenshot of a video the Lotts had posted from their Florida campground stay to geolocate the family. Then someone called the local Florida DCF office and repeated, verbatim, the accusations posted on Reddit: The newborn was sunburnt, lethargic, and jaundiced.

A county caseworker drove to the campground and was upset the family wasn’t there. She reached the Lotts using a phone number the campground supplied, and J.D. Lott explained the strange situation to her.

“We have a group of people on Reddit that we’ve discovered are dedicated to defaming us,” he said.

The caseworker seemed to take this all in, and the Lotts, though shaken, thought everything was fine—until another call came in at lunchtime.

A supervisor at the DCF office decided the case was critical. According to J.D. Lott, he threatened to issue a nationwide order to take the kids into custody.

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“Day Has Finally Come”: Instagram Censors Team USA Rifle Shooter Ahead Of Paris Paralympics

Big tech’s crackdown on “gunfluencers” is nothing new, but policies at social media companies are becoming increasingly restrictive (read: here), leading to the demonetization of numerous channels. The latest victim of this aggressive censorship isn’t even the typical gun YouTuber but instead a competitive rifle shooter on Team USA for the Paralympics. 

Just The News reports that McKenna Geer, a competitive rifle shooter, had her Instagram account censored before she heads to Paris for the Paralympic Games in late August. Next week, the Olympic Games are set to begin.

Geer’s Instagram account, “kennageer10.9,” was reportedly censored by the social media company because of photos she posted with firearms at a qualifying competition. 

“I have always feared the day the media would censor my sport and speech just because I use firearms,” Geer wrote on Instagram, adding, “That day has finally come.” 

She continued, “This sport is life-changing because of its ability to unite both able-bodied and disabled athletes, young and old, foreign and domestic. Me and my fellow athletes rely on our social media accounts to spread the word about our sport, firearm safety, build our personal brand, and connect with potential sponsors. Many of us (myself included) are either not paid or paid very little for our involvement in this sport. Our social media presence can often be the avenue that pays for us to continue competing.”

Geer posted a screenshot of an image that shows her account has been censored.

“Your account and content won’t appear in places like Explore, Search, Suggested Users, Reels, and Feed Recommendations,” the Instagram notification reads.

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YouTube Tightens Stranglehold On Firearms Content — Blocks All Gun-related Sponsors

When Google and YouTube first announced that they would be demonetizing a host of channels back in 2017 (including firearms-related content) they said is was because advertisers were “complaining” about their ads being featured in videos that were contrary to their messaging.  In other words, the excuse was that ads embedded on firearms channels might give their customers the “wrong impression” about those companies and their products, and Google didn’t want to anger their advertising partners.

It’s hard to say how accurate this claim was. The exposure of ESG and Big Tech collusion with government agencies to censor conservative platforms supports the idea that there was probably an organized corporate push to suppress the political opposition on YouTube as much as there was an effort to shut them down on social media.

The majority of conservative content creators understood that this was not about advertisers, it was about narratives.  The exploding popularity of gun channels runs contrary to the media assertion that American society is moving increasingly to the left.  And, even though gun channels mostly focus on firearms and instruction, they also promoted conservative and constitutional values which represent a thorn in the side of the establishment.

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Google Plans New Content-Scanning Censorship Tech

Earlier in the year, Google filed an application to patent new methods, systems, and media for what the giant calls “identifying videos containing objectionable content” that are uploaded to a social site or video service.

For example, YouTube – though the filing doesn’t explicitly name this platform.

The patent application, which has just been published this month, is somewhat different from other automated “methods and systems” Google and other giants, notably Microsoft, already have to power their censorship apparatus; with this one, the focus is more on how AI can be added to the mix.

More and more often, various countries are introducing censorship laws where the speed at which content is removed or accounts blocked is a major requirement made of social media companies. Google could have this in mind when the patent’s purpose is said to be to improve on detecting objectionable content quickly, “for potential removal.”

No surprise here, but what should be the key question – namely, what is considered as “objectionable content” – is less of a definition and more a list that can be further expanded, variously interpreted, etc., and the list includes such items as violence, pornography, objectionable language, animal abuse, and then the cherry on top – “and/or any other type of objectionable content.”

The filing details how Google’s new system works, and we equally unsurprisingly learn that AI here means machine learning (ML) and neural networks. This technology is supposed to mimic the human brain but comes down to a series of equations, differentiated from ordinary algorithms by “learning” about what an image (or a video in this case) is, pixel by pixel.

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FTC Opens a Backdoor Route to Age Verification on Social Media

I hadn’t heard of the app NGL until recently. But that’s not surprising. The anonymous questions app seems to be largely popular among teens.

Bark, the maker of parental content-monitoring software, calls NGL “a recipe for drama” and cyberbullying. But it seems like a fairly standard social media offering, allowing users to post questions or prompts and receive anonymous responses.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered NGL to ban users under age 18.

The FTC and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office say NGL “unfairly” marketed the app to minors. “NGL marketed its app to kids and teens despite knowing that it was exposing them to cyberbullying and harassment,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said.

To settle the lawsuit, the agency is not only making NGL pay $5 million, it’s also requiring the app to ban those under age 18 from using it.

This seems to me like a worrying development.

An administrative agency ordering a social media app to ban minors is effectively a backdoor way to accomplish what Congress has been failing to mandate legislatively and what courts have been rejecting when state lawmakers do it.

Granted, the FTC does not seem to be requiring NGL to check IDs. It’s merely “required to implement a neutral age gate that prevents new and current users from accessing the app if they indicate that they are under 18,” per the FTC’s press release.

But this is still the FTC setting minimum age requirements for some social media use, circumventing both parental and legislative authority.

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Stanford insists Internet Observatory, which engaged in election-time censorship, will stay open

The status of Stanford University’s controversial Internet Observatory, a research group accused of participating in social media censorship, appears unclear after recent conflicting reports about its future.

A recent report by the tech newsletter Platformer suggested the observatory may be closing after several key staffers, including founding director Alex Stamos, left or did not have their contracts renewed.

Other news outlets reported the observatory was “collaps[ing] under pressure,” being “wound down” and “closing.” Some popular social media posts suggested it was being permanently “shut down.”

However, the university contradicted those reports in a recent statement on the observatory’s website.

“Stanford has not shut down or dismantled SIO as a result of outside pressure,” it stated. “SIO does, however, face funding challenges as its founding grants will soon be exhausted. As a result, SIO continues to actively seek support for its research and teaching programs under new leadership.”

SIO will continue its “critical work” through the “publication of the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, the Trust & Safety Research Conference, and the Trust & Safety Teaching Consortium,” it stated.

Furthermore, the observatory’s staff will be conducting research on “misinformation” during the 2024 election, according to the statement.

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Democrats Downplay Influence of Major Advertising Alliance’s Demonetization Blacklists

During a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, several Democrats characterized scrutiny of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) (a World Economic Forum-affiliated pro-censorship advertising alliance that blacklists brands, creators, and content from advertising if they’re deemed to violate its “brand safety” rules) as “dangerous” and a “sham.”

GARM has faced growing scrutiny over the way its practices have resulted in certain viewpoints being demonetized. Before this July 10 hearing, House Republicans released a report showing that GARM and its members had “carefully” monitored a number of conservative outlets, placed conservative media outlet The Daily Wire on an advertising exclusion list, and pushed for advertising restrictions on the popular “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

And the intention of this hearing was to respond to these allegations and examine “whether existing civil and criminal penalties and current antitrust law enforcement efforts are sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”

But, as has often been the case during hearings related to huge corporations and alliances targeting smaller businesses and entities, Democrats downplayed, dismissed, or outright denied the concerns that were raised.

“This hearing has nothing to do with antitrust laws, since the majority’s allegations wither under even the most basic antitrust analysis,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said during his opening statement. “This is instead another dangerous effort by the majority to bully companies into promoting and supporting far-right extremist views, views that brands understandably do…not want to be associated with. In this case, the majority seeks to undermine companies’ First Amendment rights and to make it harder for them to avoid monetizing online and offline harm through advertising.”

He continued by suggesting that those who have shone a light on GARM’s practices are engaging in a “made-up scheme,” accused Republicans of pushing a “conspiracy theory that conservative content is being censored,” and claimed that there’s “no evidence” to support allegations of wrongdoing.

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