Tag: social media

LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Spreads Misinformation While Calling For Misinformation Regulation

In a recent conversation with The Washington Post on the implications of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman expressed his perspective on what he thinks is the need for modern restrictions on speech to combat “misinformation.” But even his own call to action contained misinformation.

Hoffman’s argument revolves around two main points: freedom of speech and freedom of reach. He says the amplification and discovery of content, especially AI-generated content, can impact the socio-political landscape.

“We don’t really have the right discourse mechanisms for doing that. And you know, one of them obviously is freedom of speech and freedom of reach. And that’s again, within the AI content is, you know, well what gets amplified and, how is that all discovered is one of the things that will matter within the electoral context.”

Hoffman referenced a commonly misunderstood idea. He mentioned the proverbial concept of “yelling fire in a crowded movie theater,” hinting at the existence of restrictions on free speech.

However, this analogy does not accurately represent the actual US law and therefore gives an incorrect impression of the nature of free speech. The idea that you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater is one of the most erroneous statements regarding free speech.

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Here Are 7 Major Cases The Supreme Court Has Yet To Decide This Term

Among the dozens of opinions yet to be released by the Supreme Court this term are cases on affirmative action, compelled speech and social media companies’ liability for content posted on their platforms.

To date, the Court has released 18 opinions, issuing rulings that enabled those facing complaints from administrative agencies to press constitutional challenges in federal court and allowed a death row inmate’s request for a DNA test to proceed. But opinions in 40 more cases are expected to be released before the end of June, including some of the most consequential cases on this term’s docket.

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Sen. Rand Paul Warns RESTRICT Act Would Allow Feds to Nullify First Amendment

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been a major critic of the RESTRICT Act, which has been sold to Congress and the public as a ban on TikTok.

He warned that it would authorize the federal government to censor any online communications it deems subversive and would nullify the First Amendment.

The popular social media app, which is controlled by a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, has more than 150 million monthly users in the United States alone and is used mainly by people under 30.

The app has been controversial for years, as concerns over security have led to several statewide bans of the app on government devices.

Legislation Faces More Opposition

Former President Donald Trump failed in his attempt to ban TikTok in the United States during his presidency, but momentum has been building ever since.

In April, President Joe Biden demanded that TikTok’s owners divest their stakes in the company or face a nationwide ban.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) co-sponsored the RESTRICT Act, which now has the support of over 20 senators, to give the Commerce Department the power to impose restrictions—up to and including outright bans—on TikTok and other technologies that may pose a national security risk.

It would mainly apply to foreign apps and software from countries deemed hostile to the United States, like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba.

The legislation also empowers the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally add any other country to the list.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the House would draw up a bill to address the Chinese app, but the timeline is unclear.

On May 5, Paul published a column on conservative news website Townhall, warning that the bill “bestows an astonishing amount of power to the Executive branch in a manner that the Chinese Communist Party would approve of.”

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“Consider it a fake, even if it’s not” – FBI accused of assisting Ukraine with Facebook censorship

The FBI has been pressuring Facebook and other platforms to censor misinformation on behalf of Ukraine, even when the information is not necessarily untrue, according to a report by independent journalist Lee Fang.

Fang learned about the FBI’s alleged role in the censorship after interviewing the head of the Department of Cyber Information Security of Ukraine, Illia Vitiuk.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said Vitiuk.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that.”

They also flag information that might be true.

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

From the report:

“During the panel, Vitiuk thanked the Ukrainian government’s many public and private sector allies in the United States, including Mandiant, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Clearview, Google, Amazon, and Starlink, among others. Cyber security support from American partners has helped thwart Russian cyber attacks on civilian and military infrastructure and have been a “psychological game changer,” Vitiuk said. He emphasized that the FBI has been his agency’s ‘top partner.’”

While such tactics are a common, but controversial, warfare practice, the FBI is supposed to have the First Amendment to think about.

The allegations that the FBI continue to be involved in online censorship is concerning, especially given that the FBI’s censorship efforts have already been exposed by Matt Taibbi and other journalists who released the Twitter Files.

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How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

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YouTuber Guilty For Selling ‘Metal Cards’ That DoJ Says Are “Machine Gun Conversion Devices” 

A Wisconsin gun dealer whose YouTube channel has 180,000 subscribers was convicted of “conspiring to transfer unregistered machine gun conversion devices” that were nothing more than metal bottle openers etched with patterns called “lightning links” that, when milled, can convert a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle into an automatic machine gun. 

Gun dealer Matthew Hoover, who operated the CRS Firearms channel, was found “guilty of conspiring to transfer unregistered machine gun conversion devices that they referred to as “Auto Key Cards,”” the Department of Justice wrote in a press release. He was convicted of four counts of transferring unregistered machine gun conversion devices and faces 45 years in jail. 

Also facing severe jail time is Kristopher Justinboyer Ervin. The DoJ said he was convicted “of seven counts of transferring unregistered machine gun conversion devices, three counts of possessing unregistered machine gun conversion devices, and one count of structuring cash transactions to avoid currency transaction reporting requirements.”

Ervin faces a maximum penalty of 110 years in federal prison. Sentencing for the two is scheduled for July 31. 

Hoover and Ervin sold lightning links, etched into metal cards, which he referred to as “Auto Key Cards,” from around $40 for one version to more than $180. Hoover touted the cards on his YouTube channel. 

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Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony

Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, is the delegate from the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Congress. Last month, when independent writers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, she described them as “so-called journalists” and sought to undermine their testimony about government pressure to restrict speech on Twitter.

She has now gone much further.

Plaskett recently sent a letter to Taibbi accusing him of perjury and suggesting that he could face up to five years in jail. The letter was obtained by Lee Fang, a writer who works with Taibbi and publishes on Substack. In it, Plaskett notes that providing false testimony to Congress “is punishable by up to five years imprisonment.”

The congresswoman’s basis for accusing Taibbi of perjury is a handful of errors that he made during the publication of the Twitter Files. These mistakes caught the attention of MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who skewered Taibbi in an interview and suggested the entire Twitter Files project rested upon a house of cards.

It is true that Taibbi made some errors: In one of his tweets about the web of organizations engaged in identifying so-called misinformation on Twitter, he confused CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—an organ of the federal government—with CIS, the Center for Internet Security—a nonprofit. Hasan has never sufficiently explained why this mistake would render the Twitter Files obsolete; in fact, both organizations participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, a Stanford University project that sought to monitor the election-related discourse on social media. Taibbi pointed out this fact in a tweet admitting to the mistake.

Regardless, it is obviously not the case that Taibbi committed perjury. Plaskett’s letter describes the CISA/CIS mistake as an “intentional” one; this is simply false. Taibbi did not willfully mischaracterize the two organizations; when he rewrote “CIS” as “CISA,” he honestly thought the tweet in question had referred to the government agency rather than the nonprofit.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), described Plaskett’s letter as shocking.

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The EARN IT Act, an attack on encrypted communications, to be reintroduced next week

Those behind the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act must be hoping that third time’s a charm for this previously widely-opposed piece of legislation, that is set to be reintroduced next week.

The previous two attempts to make EARN IT into law failed amid outcry from opponents who said that while designed to protect children, the bill would fail to do that – but would still damage online privacy.

Now here’s the third, bipartisan attempt sponsored by Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal to bring changes to the Communication Decency Act (CDA) Section 230.

Critics say that the amendment as envisaged by EARN IT would harm internet users by removing legal protections Section 230 gives tech companies for third party content.

The consequence would be those companies protecting themselves by engaging in (even more) censorship, and “working” with the government to this end – even more than we are aware they already do.

At the core of EARN IT is to target platforms for violations related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) rules that exist at the federal and state level.

But allegedly, these platforms are reluctant to “moderate” i.e., censor content in a heavy-handed manner, and for that reason oppose the legislation.

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Facebook Censors Seymour Hersh’s Article About US Involvement In Nord Stream Pipeline Attack

Facebook is censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story about US involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines using a ‘fact checker’ with links to the Norwegian government in what represents a clear conflict of interest.

Earlier this year, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation which was organized with the aid of the Norwegian government, Norwegian Secret Service and Navy.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger first noticed the issue when he tried to post Hersh’s article to Facebook, but saw the social media giant had slapped a warning label on the link stating, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”

Except the ‘fact-checkers’ in question aren’t independent at all.

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Parody Hitman Website Nabs Air National Guardsman After He Allegedly Applied For Murder-For-Hire Jobs

A Hermitage, Tennessee, man is facing federal charges after meeting with an undercover FBI agent to culminate a deal to murder an individual for payment, announced U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis.

Josiah Ernesto Garcia, 21, was charged yesterday in a criminal complaint with the use of interstate facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire.

According to the complaint, Garcia needed money to support his family and in mid-February began searching online for contract mercenary jobs and came across the website www.rentahitman.com. Originally created in 2005 to advertise a cyber security startup company, the company failed and over the next decade it received many inquiries about murder-for-hire services. The website’s administrator then converted the website to a parody site that contains false testimonials from those who have purported to use hit man services, and an intake form where people can request services. The website also has an option for someone to apply to work as a hired killer.

Garcia submitted an employment inquiry indicating that he was interested in obtaining employment as a hit man. Garcia followed up on this initial request and submitted other identification documents and a resume, indicating he was an expert marksman and employed in the Air National Guard since July 2021. The resume also indicated that Garcia was nicknamed “Reaper” which was earned from military experience and marksmanship. Garcia continued to follow up with the website administrator indicating that he wanted to go to work as soon as possible.

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