Tag: social media

The RESTRICT act aims to tackle TikTok. But it’s overly-broad and has major privacy and free speech implications.

Senator Mark Warner’s Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (“RESTRICT”) Act is currently in Senate procedure, as is widely thought to be targeting China‘s TikTok in particular.

However, those who bothered to read the text of the proposed act – which will next be considered by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, are warning that it is not merely about TikTok, but aims to grant wide powers over all forms of domestic and foreign communications to the government – such as enforcing “any” mitigating measure to deal with risks to national security.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

And, observers critical of these legislative activities note, there would be no due process in taking these measures, and not much in terms of safeguards.

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CNN Blasted After Lecturing People Not To Use ‘Digital Blackface’

Mass backlash has ensued after a CNN report accused white people of using ‘digital blackface’ by posting memes of black people’s reactions as a way of expressing their feelings about situations.

In the piece, headlined What’s ‘digital blackface?’ And why is it wrong when White people use it, CNN writer John Blake states the following:

“If you’re White and you’ve posted a GIF or meme of a Black person to express a strong emotion, you may be guilty of wearing ‘digital blackface,”

Blake argues that such memes and gifs are “radicalized reactions,” and that while black people “get a pass” for using them, white people posting them have “inadvertently perpetuated one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism.”

Blake goes on to declare that the use of the memes by whitey is a “modern-day repackaging of minstrel shows.”

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OpenAI co-founder creates digital ID protocol

Digital ID company World ID, created by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, claims to offer a “privacy-first” solution to the problem of verifiable identification. The project was created by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.

However, many remain skeptical about the overall idea of digital ID, and therefore about World ID as well.

The company claims that more than half of the global population lacks legally verifiable identification and wants to be the provider of that.

World ID describes itself as a self-sovereign and decentralized protocol that provides “proof of personhood” without putting any sensitive information of the holder at risk of being compromised.

The platform says it’s powered by zero-knowledge cryptography, an open protocol that provides developers with a software developer kit (SDK) to leverage the innovative digital identity solution.

Moreover, World ID claims it will become the largest network of authentic humans on the internet.

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Censorship Masquerades and Disinformation Control

Twitter Files #19 have dropped. I am happy to have assisted Matt Taibbi and team to put that release together, along with release #18.

The Files show widespread censorship masquerading as “anti-disinformation,” and intense collusion between government agencies, NGOs, academia, Big Tech, media, philanthropy, the intelligence community, and more.

Tinfoil hat stuff? The Twitter Files show it is real.

They uncover a level of corruption that is hard to grasp, much of it among the “anti-disinformation” and digital-rights fields where I have worked for almost 20 years.

To say this is disappointing would be an incredible understatement. A 180 on what I understood to be our values.

Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by Stanford and bringing together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social-media monitoring, with six of the biggest social-media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects.”

Partnered in the effort were Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter.

Reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled “misinformation” under Virality Project decrees. Had Kerryn Phelps (the first female president of the Australian Medical Association) taken to Twitter to describe her and her wife’s vaccine injuries, these too would have been labelled misinformation. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach would have also been censored last week for admitting that as a result of the vaccines “there are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent”.

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Stanford partnered with Twitter, Biden admin to censor ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’: Twitter Files

Matt Taibbi has unearthed still more evidence of collusion and censorship at Twitter, all done by people and institutions who believed that they were righteous in their efforts to ban and block Americans from telling the truth about their own personal experiences with the Covid vaccine. This time, it’s Stanford University and their Virality Project that told officials what information should be banned.

Taibbi reports that Stanford’s Virality Project took issue with accounts that used factual information to question the “expert guidance” of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the NIAID. He notes that accounts that questioned the “Wuhan wet market” origin story of Covid, instead suggesting that the virus could have leaked from a Wuhan Virology Lab, were suspect per Stanford. That “lab leak” theory is now the primary Covid-origin theory per officials.

Accounts that purported that natural immunity was as good a protection against Covid as the vaccines, if not better, were also suspect, as well as what the Virality Project called “worrisome jokes.” Over the past few years, jokes have gotten many accounts in trouble with Twitter censors, and some mainstream media outlets questioned whether or not satire itself was an actionable offense.

All of these, Taibbi reports, were “characterized as ‘potential violations’ or disinformation ‘events’ by the Virality Project, a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs.”

The Virality Project had targeted “stories of true vaccine side effects” as actionable content, and in 2021, they “worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were ‘onboarded’ to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review.”

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“Disinformation experts” blame “conspiratorial narratives,” “far-right websites,” for Silicon Valley Bank panic

Just days after a Senator was caught asking whether there were systems in place to censor social media in an attempt to prevent a bank run, “disinformation experts” are partially blaming the Silicon Valley bank collapse exacerbation on online conspiracy theorists on social media.

“Russian media outlets, far-right websites, short sellers and doomsday preppers were among those who pushed and amplified conspiracy theories online focused on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” Bloomberg alleges.

According to anti-disinformation for-profit firm Alethea, a wide range of accounts used the bank’s collapse to promote their own agendas.

The firm’s founder Lisa Kaplan told Bloomberg that the claims by venture capitalists speculating the collapse of the bank that were amplified “propagandists and foreign influencers” contributed to the collapse of the bank.

“We assess that these outlets may have increased online panic and contributed to the broader cross-platform spread of false or misleading content about SVB,” Kaplan said to Bloomberg.

“We also assess that conspiratorial narratives may have accelerated panic, which then posed a risk to the broader financial system,” she said.

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Senator Mark Kelly inquired about social media censorship to curb bank runs

On Sunday, while discussing the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in an emergency conference call led by Senate President Chuck Schumer, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) reportedly inquired about the possibility of censoring social media posts to avoid a bank run.

This information was reported by Republican House members who were also present on the call and heard by representatives of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

“Just got off of a zoom meeting with Fed, Treasury, FDIC, House, and Senate,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie tweeted. “A Democrat Senator essentially asked whether there was a program in place to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert also tweeted, “On a briefing with Biden Under Secretary of the Treasury Nellie Liang regarding the SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] BAILOUT they are working towards and a member asked if they were reaching out to Facebook and Twitter to monitor misinformation and ‘bad actors.’”

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Locked-Away In ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Camps: The Orwellian Dystopia Of The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex”

I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”

(Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

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The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof

“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.

Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech. 

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans. 

In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified. 

“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”

Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” 

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Republican Lt. Gov. Vows to Keep Thirsting Over Queer Instagram Nudes

A PERSON IS always wise to remember that Instagram likes and comments are public. But a 79-year-old man who likes what he sees is not always disposed to restrain himself, and it looks as though Tennessee Lt. Governor Randy McNally is one such fellow.

As the Tennessee Holler first reported on Wednesday, McNally has for some time been a devoted fan of Franklyn McClur, a 20-year-old gay man who grew up in Knoxville and aspires to move to Los Angeles to make it in show business. McClur’s Instagram photos and captions are often suggestive in nature; he shows off his body, sometimes posing fully nude, and wears makeup. All pretty standard as far as the app goes. What’s unusual is that McNally has for months used his own verified account to unabashedly compliment McClur’s thirst traps — this while his state moves to criminalize drag shows and gender-affirming care for transgender children as part of the nationwide Republican push for laws targeting the LGBTQ community.

“Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine!” McNally wrote, using McClur’s nickname, on a January photo in which the younger man shows off his butt in tight-fitting underwear. In a follow-up comment, he appended heart and flame emojis. Elsewhere, McNally has complimented McClur’s skimpy outfits and told him, “You need to be on dancing with the stars.” On a nude photo which McClur captioned “I Love being naked.. the Garden of Eden, is My Vibe. I Understand God,” McNally replied, “Great picture, Finn! Best wishes for continued health and happiness.”

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