Tag: social media

New X Policy Forces Earners To Verify Their Government ID With Israeli Verification Company

X, formerly Twitter, is now mandating the use of a government ID-based account verification system for users that earn revenue on the platform – either for advertising or for paid subscriptions.

To implement this system, X has partnered with Au10tix, an Israeli company known for its identity verification solutions. Users who opt to receive payouts on the platform will have to undergo a verification process with the company.

This initiative aims to curb impersonation, fraud, and improve user support, yet it also raises profound questions about privacy and free speech, as X markets itself as a free speech platform, and free speech and anonymity often go hand-in-hand. This is especially true in countries where their speech can get citizens jailed or worse.

“We’re making changes to our Creator Subscriptions and Ads Revenue Share programs to further promote authenticity and fight fraud on the platform. Starting today, all new creators must verify their ID to receive payouts. All existing creators must do so by July 1, 2024,” the update to X’s verification page now reads.

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Dutch Lawyer Faces Prosecution For Social Media Post Slamming Mass Migration

A Dutch conservative female lawyer is being prosecuted on charges of “racism” and “inciting hatred” after she expressed fury over mass migration in response to a viral video showing a white boy being beaten up and thrown onto a railway track by a gang of migrants.

Raisa Blommestijn revealed how she had received a letter that amounted to an order to appear before a Dutch prosecutor at a court hearing in front of multiple judges on August 19th.

The charges stem from comments Blommestijn made on social media in response to a video of a defenseless Dutch boy being brutally kicked and punched as he lay on the ground at an Amsterdam Metro station in May last year before he was thrown onto the railway track.

“Yet another white man got kicked around in the street by a group of black primates. How many defenseless white people remain to become victims? Countless probably: the open borders elite is importing these people in droves, with all the consequences that entails,” she wrote.

Blommestijn said she was subjected to a four hour police interrogation over her comments and later learned that she would be facing prosecution.

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The Trouble With World Government

A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.

Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.

This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?

Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.

Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.

That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.

In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”

The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.

It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.

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Banning TikTok isn’t the flex proponents think it is

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance this week sued to block a new law banning the social media app, claiming it is unconstitutional because it infringes upon Americans’ right to free speech and prevents access to lawful information.

The law, passed in April, would ban TikTok in the U.S. if ByteDance does not liquidate its American assets within nine to 12 months — citing national security concerns about the app. National security has been at the forefront of U.S. bans on Chinese tech, such as the ban on selling telecom equipment and services from Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese providers.

Another concern about TikTok — data privacy and security — is not entirely unfounded, as about 150 million Americans use it. However, China does not need apps like TikTok to collect that data. U.S. consumer data can be bought on the open market from data brokers, including precise location and financial transaction data. Even the U.S. National Security Agency has leveraged data brokers to collect Americans’ data. Anonymized data is also not the fail-safe measure that it is touted to be, as it can be de-anonymized using data that is not considered personally identifiable, like sex, ZIP code, and birthdate. In some ways, TikTok even collects less private information than Meta. In short, TikTok is no more a unique threat to data privacy and security than are data brokers and other American social media sites.

Banning TikTok or any other Chinese business in the U.S. won’t protect U.S. citizens’ data from exploitation. The sheer profitability of U.S. citizens’ data for businesses — both buyers and sellers – is undergirded by the lack of protections for collecting data or compensating individuals for their data. Solving this problem eventually would require federal-level, comprehensive data privacy and protection regulations. Without such regulation, there is little incentive for social media companies — Chinese or not — to responsibly buy, sell, collect, or otherwise exploit user data. If the U.S. government’s goal is to protect private American citizens’ data to enhance national security, then it must legislate acceptable limits on the exploitation of Americans’ data, perhaps even following a framework like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Some believe that banning TikTok and other Chinese apps in the United States could force China to provide more equitable access to the Chinese market and put pressure on China to change unfair business practices towards foreign firms, like intellectual property theft, opaque subsidization and preferential treatment, raids, and fines. These inequities have long been a major concern and subject of high-level conversations between U.S. and Chinese officials. However, the U.S. bans on Chinese businesses so far appear to have neither compelled Chinese businesses nor the Chinese government to change their behaviors, instead spurring them to reduce reliance on the U.S. market and focus on exploring alternative markets.

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CISA, FBI Resuming Talks With Social Media Firms Over Disinformation Removal, Senate Intel Chair Says

Key federal agencies have resumed discussions with social media companies over removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears, a stark reversal after the Biden administration for months froze communications with social platforms amid a pending First Amendment case in the Supreme Court, a top senator said Monday.

Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters in a briefing at RSA Conference that agencies restarted talks with social media companies as the Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that first began in the Fifth Circuit appellate court last July. The case was fueled by allegations that federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were coercing platforms to remove content related to vaccine safety and 2020 presidential election results.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether agencies are allowed to stay in touch with social media firms about potential disinformation. Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed the suit on the grounds that the Biden administration violated First Amendment rights pertaining to free speech online in a bid to suppress politically conservative voices.

According to Warner, communications between agencies and social platforms resumed roughly around the same time that multiple justices appeared to favor the executive branch’s stance on the issue, he said. 

“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” he said, adding that, in the event of election interference attempts akin to Russia in 2016, the Biden administration should more forcefully call out nation-state entities that attempt to meddle in the U.S. election process.

Warner said his committee will convene a hearing on elections security in two weeks. The panel was supposed to hold the session with CISA Director Jen Easterly and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines last month, but it was postponed amid GOP attempts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

For around six months, agencies chilled their communications with social firms about election security and other disinformation flash points. Warner previously said that White House lawyers had been “too timid” in their legal interpretation of the case, especially given that the high court allowed the Biden administration to temporarily continue their talks until a ruling was made.

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TikTok Sues US Government Over Forced Divestment Law

TikTok filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to block a new law requiring either the sale of the app by its Chinese parent company or its removal from app stores and web-hosting services. About two weeks ago, President Joe Biden signed the bill, which had passed both legislative chambers with broad bipartisan support.

In a filing with a federal appeals court in Washington, TikTok challenges the constitutionality of the new law on the grounds that the U.S. government infringed the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its hundreds of millions of users over national security concerns.

The new law sets the initial deadline for a TikTok sale by January 2025, and President Biden can decide to extend the deadline by another three months to allow the deal to be completed.

Lawmakers supporting the new law argued that it was not a ban but a divestiture aimed at preventing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from accessing American consumer data and the algorithm owned by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, from potentially influencing Americans.

However, the company has maintained that it has not and will not share American user data with the CCP. According to China’s counterespionage law, ByteDance must hand over data on American users if requested.

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Mitt Romney Says Congress Supports Banning TikTok for Israel

In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) acknowledged that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.

Blinken blamed social media in general when asked by Romney why Israel was losing the global PR war. Palestinian journalists have been able to broadcast to the whole world the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza using social media, including graphic videos of dead or wounded children being dug out of rubble following an Israeli airstrike.

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Latest Government Report Reveals 10 Times Biden Regime Pressured Facebook to Take Down What Ended Up Being Truthful Information on COVID and the Vaccines

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee released an 800 page report on the Biden White House censorship regime.

The report included numerous times the Biden regime threatened social media companies to censor, silence and take down information on the COVID origins and the COVID vaccines.

Here is the full 800 page report released by the House Judiciary Committee on the Biden Administration’s Censorship Industrial Complex.

On Thursday, investigative reporter Mike Benz revealed “10 flaming examples” Facebook, YouTube and Amazon explicitly said they only passed censorship policies because they were threatened by the Biden government.

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The TikTok Ban Is The Next Patriot Act

HR 7521, called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, is a recent development in American politics. TikTok has been in the news for the past few years, after the public became aware of its connections to China. The popular social media mobile app is currently owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese company. China and the United States currently have a rocky relationship, leading to fears that the Chinese government could potentially use this app to spy on American citizens. Several states and counties voted to restrict the usage of the app in some ways, mostly disallowing government employees from using it on government-owned phones. Earlier this month, the United States Congress passed a piece of legislation that would restrict the app’s availability if certain requirements are not met by ByteDance.

Putting aside the idea that politicians rarely have pure motives, this act has the potential to be just as dangerous as the Patriot Act. With a supposed goal of protecting American national security, the Patriot Act granted sweeping permissions to the federal government and the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens, with far less due process. In addition to having the potential to violate privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, this new act is a blatant attack on property rights. Mobile device manufacturers and owners have every right to install whatever software they would like, as it is their property. Any illusion of a right to national security is immediately contradicted as collective rights are positive in nature and thus not rights at all.

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Maricopa County and Arizona State Collaborate To Surveil Social Media and Censor “Misinformation”

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office and the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office have been exposed as doing their best to team up with social media companies, non-profits, as well as the US government to advance online censorship.

This, yet another case of “cooperation” (aka, collusion) between government and private entities to stifle speech disapproved of by federal and some state authorities has emerged from several public records, brought to the public’s attention by the Gavel Project.

The official purpose of several initiatives was to counter “misinformation” using monitoring and reporting whatever the two offices decided qualified; another was to censor content on social platforms, while plans also included restricting discourse to the point of banning users from county-run accounts.

“Online harassment” was another target, and Maricopa County took it upon itself to “identify” – and then report to law enforcement.

One striking example of the mindset behind all this is a draft of a speech County Recorder Stephen Richer delivered to Maricopa Community Colleges.

As reports note, Richer is hoping to be reelected this year, while back in September 2021, he complained that “lies and disinformation” are undermining “the entire election system.”

“And it is in this respect, that the Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment,” Richer said – before declaring himself “a huge fan of the Constitution.”

When his office was earlier in the month asked to, essentially, “make it make sense” – they didn’t, stating only that Richer “stands by his speech (…) especially the part where he says he’s ‘a huge fan of the Constitution’.”

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