Tag: social media

New Docs Reveal Fed’s Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life

 Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe.

The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society.

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QAnon ‘momfluencer’ sentenced to jail for accusing Latino couple of abducting her children

A social media influencer with ties to the QAnon movement has been sentenced to jail for falsely accusing a Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children, Law & Crimereported on Friday.

“Kathleen ‘Katie’ Sorensen, a white mother of two, made an Instagram video in which she made up a story about Sadie Vega-Martinez and Eddie Martinez — a Hispanic couple she did not know — trying to kidnap her then 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter,” reported Jason Kandel.

She was sent to prison for 90 days Thursday on a count of knowingly making a false report of a crime, the website reported.

Sorensen, who lives in California, originally went viral in 2020 as she claimed in a video from her car that a couple, later revealed to be Eddie and Sadie Vega-Martinez, tried to abduct her children at a Michael’s craft store.

But her story fell apart almost immediately as police found “inconsistencies,” and it turned out the whole thing was fabricated. She was arrested in May 2021.

Prosecutors believe she fabricated the story to boost and monetize her following, prosecutors noted — but there may have been a political and conspiracy theory basis for it, too.

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Homeland agency expanded authority to wage ‘domestic surveillance and censorship,’ House report says

Secret documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that a Department of Homeland Security agency “expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public,” according to an interim staff report released Monday night.

The findings add details to reporting by Just the News about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its work with private entities to remove, throttle and label purported misinformation on elections, Hunter Biden and COVID-19 — efforts that might even constitute election meddling and sometimes target true content.

The “severe public outcry” in spring 2022 against DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board, shuttered a few months later, so alarmed CISA and its advisors that they “tried to cover their tracks” on censorship and surveillance, which “included scrubbing CISA’s website of references to domestic ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,'” the report says.

By outsourcing its “censorship operation” to a CISA-funded nonprofit in the wake of First Amendment litigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, CISA was “implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional,” House Judiciary Republicans said.

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FACEBOOK HIRES EX-CIA AGENT ‘MISINFORMATION’ CHIEF TO LEAD ‘ELECTIONS POLICIES’

Meta has promoted a former CIA agent from a senior role on Facebook’s “misinformation” team to “Head of Elections Policies” at the social media giant.

Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA, served as Facebook’s “misinformation” chief during the 2020 election.

In the run-up to the 2020 election Facebook and other Big Tech companies buried information, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, that was damaging to Democrats.

Those same “misinformation” teams allowed social media to be flooded with false claims that helped Biden and the Democrats, such as the Russia Hoax or the fabricated Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative.

Nevertheless, Berman, who played a key role in Facebook’s failed censorship efforts, will now lead the company’s “elections policies” in the run-up to the critical 2024 race.

Berman served at the CIA between March 2002 and July 2019.

During that time, he wrote for and edited the President’s Daily Brief, an influential top-secret document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community given to the president each morning, according to Breitbart.

According to Berman’s Linkedin, he enjoyed positions of considerable influence at the agency, including “supervising teams of dozens of analysts and with multi-million-dollar budgets,” and leading briefings for members of Congress and National Security Council members.

In 2019, he left the agency and joined Facebook (now known as Meta), where he became a senior product policy manager for “misinformation.”

According to Berman, he “built the misinformation policy team’s US workforce and put policies into practice during critical events.”

While Berman does not say what these “critical events” were, his time in Facebook’s “misinformation” department coincides with the run-up to the 2020 election.

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Your Tax Dollars at Work: Military Monitors Social Media for Mean Posts About Generals

The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.

Per a report by the Intercept, the PSB’s remit includes protecting officers from “embarrassment,” in addition to more pressing threats like kidnapping and assassination.

An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” — Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch — “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel.”

Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment,” but also to pinpoint the location of posters.

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Obama suggests ‘digital fingerprints’ to counter misinformation ‘so we know what’s true and what’s not true’

Former President Barack Obama suggested in a new interview the development of “digital fingerprints” to combat misinformation and distinguish between true and misleading news for consumers.

Obama sat down with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod for a conversation on the latter’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” on CNN Audio. During the interview, Axelrod noted he’s seen “misinformation, disinformation, [and] deepfakes” targeting Obama.

“As I’ve told people, because I was the first digital president when I left office, I was probably the most recorded, filmed, photographed human in history, which is kind of a weird thing,” responded Obama. “But just the odds are that I was. As a consequence, there’s a lot of raw material there.”

The former president added that the deepfakes — digitally manipulated images, audio or video that appear legitimate — started with a version of him dancing, “saying dirty limericks” and similar kinds of activity.

“That technology’s here now,” continued Obama, who warned about the issue getting worse moving forward. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

He then suggested “digital fingerprints” to discern truth from misinformation.

“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of work that’s going to have to be done there, but in the short term, it’s really going to be up to the American people to kind of say.”

Obama and Axelrod went on to say that today many consumers are only viewing information from sources they are predisposed to agree with and will likely believe what they see.

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NASA Blocks Replies To Its ‘Pride Month’ Tweet

Generally, the posts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at Twitter are open for replies. But, that is not the case for NASA’s June 2 tweet regarding “Pride Month.”

When the United States government agency shares an impressive photograph or video, such as video of a spacewalk in a June 9 tweet, the ability of Twitter users to post replies below the tweet is left open. As would be expected, most of the 150 replies as of June 12 to that spacewalk tweet are positive. Score for NASA public relations.

Compare this with a tweet from NASA a week earlier — on June 2 — regarding “Pride Month.” Above a photo of the “Progress Pride Flag” flying alongside the flags of the US and, it appears, NASA, that tweet states:

There’s space for everyone this #PrideMonth, and we’re celebrating the LGBTQI+ employees who help us reach for the stars, examine humanity’s place in the universe, and study our home planet: go.nasa.gov/3C9ncnU

The only reply to this tweet is from NASA itself on the same day. That reply states:

The diversity of our NASA team is what brings different perspectives to our missions, and we celebrate and share their stories. To protect our people from personal attacks, we have decided to limit comments on this post.

Replies to this second June 2 tweet are also barred.

Hmmm. What’s the deal with a US government agency selectively blocking the public from commenting on its actions because those comments may be harsh or critical? Shouldn’t free speech be valued and respected by the US government? Isn’t a government trying to silence speech critical of itself and its agents incompatible with respect for liberty?

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WHO Member Says Agency Needs To “Nullify The Conspiracies” About Covid Vaccines

In 2020, as people challenged the “expert guidance” on Covid during the first few months of the pandemic, the use of the term “misinformation” in news articles almost doubled. This rapid increase in the use of the term by legacy media outlets was followed by an equally rapid rollout of new Big Tech misinformation rules which targeted content that questioned the Covid guidance being pushed by authorities.

Fast forward to 2023 and the first signs of this censorship pattern are starting to play out again.

The WHO, an unelected global health agency, is less than a year away from finalizing an international pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). These two instruments will collectively give the World Health Organization vast new powers to target misinformation and increase its surveillance powers.

And as this WHO power grab faces mounting criticism and pushback, several representatives of this unelected global health agency decided to use the recent seventy-sixth World Health Assembly (WHA) (the annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body) to claim that dissent is misinformation and call for more action against dissenting voices.

During a WHA committee meeting, the WHO representative for the Bahamas said “dissenting voices can clutter the airwaves and derail the public health good with disinformation and misinformation.” She added that “more is needed to nullify the conspiracies.”

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DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users

In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to develop a project, dubbed “Night Fury,” designed to analyze and assign “risk scores” to social media accounts.

The Brennan Center for Justice procured these documents through a public records request, and Motherboard was the first to report on them. Project Night Fury aimed at utilizing automation to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to terrorism, illegal opioid distribution, but also disinformation campaigns.

The DHS document stated, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”

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‘We were right’: PizzaGate peddlers feel vindicated about bombshell report on Instagram’s pedophile networks

The term #PedoGram became a top trend across Twitter on Wednesday after a report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that Instagram’s algorithm has been promoting child abuse material and helping connect pedophiles.

The report, a joint investigation between the Journal and academics from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that Instagram’s recommendation systems aided pedophiles in finding accounts selling illegal content.

Shockingly, many accounts offering such material openly used hashtags such as #preteensex to promote their content. Even worse, many accounts that were reported for promoting the sale of illegal content were either ignored or rejected by Instagram.

While users across social media networks expressed shock at the findings, far-right accounts used the very real problem to push debunked conspiracy theories such as PizzaGate.

The PizzaGate conspiracy theory, which rose to prominence in 2016, alleged that then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was helping run a secret child sex slavery ring in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.

The report found that emojis were used by pedophiles to communicate. An image of a map was intended to allude to the acronym “minor-attracted person.” Cheese pizza emojis were also used given that the words’ initials are the same as “child pornography.”

While it has long been known that the term cheese pizza has been used among pedophiles, before the 2016 election, PizzaGate conspiracy theorists attempted to accuse prominent politicians of abusing children after an email from then-Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta mentioned ordering pizzas was released by WikiLeaks.

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