Tag: social media

Biden Appoints Social Media Censorship Advocate To White House Digital Strategy Team

The Biden administration reinforces its ranks with what some reports see as yet more ardent censorship advocates.

This time it’s Andy Volosky, whose “claim to fame” thus far has been to wholeheartedly support the banning of President Donald Trump by former Twitter (while Trump was still president).

Unsurprisingly, his other efforts are advocating for even stricter online censorship (“content moderation”) than what social platforms have been doing for almost a decade now.

Volosky has now been given the right to serve this administration as deputy director of platforms for the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy. Serving the people, critically minded cynics might remark, would probably require a different mindset and a different set of skills.

But depending on how long the current administration manages to hang on to power, Volosky may not be on in the new job for long.

George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley makes a note of this appointment as he explores what might turn out to be one of the nadirs in US history where freedom of expression is concerned.

Turley goes as far as to assert that President Biden is “the most anti-free speech president since John Adams.” This is a bold statement, not least because more than two centuries of “enlightenment” in many areas of politics in the US separate the two figures.

But, not when it comes to progress in the realm of free speech, according to the legal scholar. And moves like bringing Volosky in certainly do little to discredit these claims.

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Pro-Israel Group Censoring Social Media Led by Former Israeli Intelligence Officers

CyberWell, an Israeli nonprofit with deep ties to the intelligence arm of an Israeli government propaganda effort, has been influential in shaping social media content since October 7. The group, which purports to be independent, has lobbied Meta, X (formerly known as Twitter), and TikTok to remove social media posts under the banner of fighting hate and antisemitism.

The group claimed a major victory regarding Meta’s decision on Tuesday to expand its definition of antisemitic hate speech to include many criticisms of “Zionists” – those who call for an independent state in the Middle East that privileges Jews over other ethnic groups. “CyberWell intends to leverage its technological tools and analysis efforts to ensure this policy is implemented efficiently and fully, and that Meta’s moderation tools are trained to effectively bar this content,” the organization claimed in a press release.

The success is the latest string of victories to shape permissible speech when it comes to Israel and its actions.

In January, CyberWell reported that it had pushed to censor accounts that disputed the false allegation that Hamas had slaughtered dozens of babies during the October 7th attack. Any accounts disputing claims around babies killed during the attack, CyberWell argued, are akin to “content denying or distorting the Holocaust.” President Joe Biden and leading Israeli figures have falsely claimed that Hamas beheaded or burned forty babies during the assault into Israel.

That claim has been widely debunked. Despite repeated false assertions to the contrary, only one baby was killed during the Hamas assault: a 10-month-old infant named Mila Cohen, who was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri. In more recent months, CyberWell has lobbied TikTok and Meta to censor social media posts with the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” claiming that the slogan constitutes hate speech.

CyberWell is one of many agenda-driven nonprofits now censoring social media discourse, including benign or true information, under the cover of fighting hate and misinformation. The pharmaceutical industry, for instance, funded a nonprofit that worked to censor tweets critical of pandemic-related policies. The U.S. government funds several think tanks that work to moderate social media content critical of NATO’s policies impacting Ukraine.

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Musk Announces X To Sue ‘Perpetrators And Collaborators’ Behind Advertising Censorship Cartel

Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue ‘perpetrators and collaborators’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.

“Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on his platform, adding “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”

The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.

As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.

This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.

GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.”

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Biden Administration Files Emergency Motion to Strike Down Injunction in RFK Jr., CHD Censorship Case

Lawyers for the Biden administration today filed a motion with the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals seeking to block an injunction that would have prohibited White House officials from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content.

The move came less than 24 hours after a lower court denied two crucial motions by government defendants seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction, set to take effect July 7, in the Kennedy v. Biden censorship lawsuit.

Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on Tuesday rebuffed the administration’s attempts to delay or modify the Kennedy v. Biden preliminary injunction.

The injunction was granted in February but temporarily stayed until 10 days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar injunction in a related censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri.

On June 26, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri did not have standing to bring the case.

In their dissenting opinion, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. argued that the majority decision was “blatantly unconstitutional” and that the court was “shirk[ing] its duty” by failing to rein in government censorship.

Attorneys for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden — said they believe CHD and Kennedy have standing, and overall, a stronger case.

Given the 5th Circuit’s previous ruling upholding the injunction in the related Missouri v. Biden case (later named Murthy v. Missouri), attorneys who spoke with The Defender were cautiously optimistic about the new developments.

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House Report Reveals GARM’s Role in Stifling Online Discourse

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday, and confirming our previous reporting, casts the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) under scrutiny, suggesting potential violations of federal antitrust laws due to its outsized influence in the advertising sector.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Established in 2019 by Rob Rakowitz and the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM has been accused of leveraging this influence to systematically restrict certain viewpoints online and sideline platforms advocating divergent views.

The organization, initially conceived to manage the surge of free speech online, is reported to coordinate with major industry players including Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Unilever, Diageo, GroupM, and others. The collaboration appears to stretch across the largest ad agency holding companies worldwide, known collectively as the Big Six. Such collaboration raises concerns about a concerted effort to police content, especially content that challenges mainstream narratives.

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Ohio Town Flooded With African Migrants After Social Media Apps Teach How To Illegally Enter USA

Hundreds of illegal aliens from the West African country of Mauritania have recently descended upon Cincinnati, Ohio, thanks to social media apps TikTok and WhatsApp providing them with instructions.

According to Fox 19 Cincinnati, around one thousand Mauritanians have settled in the city in recent weeks.

U.S. Border Patrol data shows over 8,500 Mauritanians entered the U.S. between March and June.

John Keuffer, the CEO of a Cincinnati non-profit called Valley Interfaith Community Resource Center, told Fox 19, “We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know how to communicate with them, and it created quite an issue for us.”

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Former FBI and Twitter Lawyer Jim Baker Joins Election Task Force Advocating for Social Media Censorship

From presidential election to another election, to Covid – to another election. That is how members of particular, mostly flying-under-the-radar power centers in the US have been moving over the last decades.

From time to time, however, circumstances demand that they show their faces: one is James “Jim” Baker, a former FBI lawyer whose “censorship portfolio” includes the infamous case of endorsing the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression – while he was on Twitter’s payroll.

And while there – Baker also wanted to know how come President Trump was not censored for a post saying – “Don’t fear Covid.”

Well, Baker also seems to be staying true to himself – unfortunately, his “truth” appears to be to never miss the chance to support the wrong thing (the “RussiaGate” saga happens to be among them). Right now, he has joined something called “the National Task Force on Election Crises.”

It’s a crisis, alright. A crisis of online censorship that can, and does, produce multiple “election” crises and a rapid erosion of trust in legacy media and political institutions.

The group’s parent operation is the Protect Democracy Project.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the group’s lobbying talking points: remove or downgrade “election misinformation” and make sure removing and labeling content (as false) is done ASAP by social and news media (time is clearly of the essence, at this point…)

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Advertiser Alliance Members Are Called To Testify After Allegations of Efforts To “Demonetize, and Censor Disfavored Viewpoints”

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is back in the headlines big time – what with the recent decision of X to rejoin the group, and now, as anticipated, the US Congress is stepping up its attempts to shed more light on what GARM actually does, censorship-wise.

Once again it is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan who is trying to hold Big Tech – and in this case, “the advertising industrial complex” as it were – accountable.

GARM is a World Economic Forum (WEF)-affiliated initiative, launched by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA); the latter by its own admission represents more than 150 biggest brands and over 60 advertiser associations around the world.

“Brand safety” is what the group says it is offering to these clients. But Jordan, and many conservatives and media outlets and businesses – allied or perceived to be allied with them – have strong suspicions that GARM can and is being used as yet another avenue of censorship and suppression – this time via actions that result in demonetization or boycott of those who hold “disfavored views.”

Concerning GARM, Jordan started fighting what supporters must see as “the good fight” last year (first by requesting information and then by issuing a subpoena once that was ignored).

Then, this March, the Committee sent letters to five members of the GARM Steering Team including Unilever and GroupM (a media investment group) asking for access to documents and communications that might prove the overall anti-conservative bias executed by the imitative.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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The Supreme Court Just Opened the Door to a New Orwellian Censorship Regime

The Supreme Court’s decision in a recent case challenging the Biden administration’s censorship efforts unleashed renewed threats to Americans’ ability to speak and listen freely online while effectively putting a legal remedy out of reach ahead of the 2024 election, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Last year on Independence Day, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty issued the initial injunction blocking a range of government agencies from communicating with social media companies to suppress speech, calling the government’s actions “Orwellian.” But one year later, with the Fifth Circuit’s narrower injunction now lifted by the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, officials have free rein to again employ the same tactics.

“It’s basically a roadmap for government actors, not just the federal government, but also state and local government actors, to reach out to social media companies and pressure them into censoring this disfavored speech,” Center for American Liberty associate counsel Eric Sell told the DCNF.

The Supreme Court held that plaintiffs in the case, who included two states and five individuals, did not have standing to seek an injunction against the government.

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the plaintiffs failed “to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” She also noted that platforms had “independent incentives to moderate content,” making it difficult for the plaintiffs to establish they were harmed directly as a result of the government’s requests.

Justice Samuel Alito worried in his dissent that the Supreme Court’s ruling, though it did not reach the merits of the issue, would send the message that coercive government campaigns against certain speech can run unchecked if “carried out with enough sophistication.”

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NewsGuard Co-Founder Advocates Banning Anonymous Social Media Posts, Enabling Lawsuits Against Tech Firms for “False” Content

NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steve Brill has published a book, “The Death of Truth” – but he’s not taking any responsibility. On the contrary.

Namely, Brill’s “apolitical (misinformation) rating system for news sites” as NewsGuard is promoted to customers, is often blasted – and currently investigated by Congress for possible First Amendment violations – as yet another tool to suppress online speech.

But corporate media sing his praises, presenting him as a “media maven.”

A censorship maven more like it, critics would say. And while getting his book promoted, Brill managed to add his name to the steadily growing list of governments, NGOs, and associated figures who are attacking online anonymity.

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