Tag: social media

CIA VENTURE CAPITAL ARM PARTNERS WITH EX-GOOGLER’S STARTUP TO “SAFEGUARD THE INTERNET”

TRUST LAB WAS founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

Keep reading

Macron wants more Twitter censorship to stop people saying “crazy things” about vaccines, pandemics, and war

French President Emmanuel Macron criticized Twitter’s owner Elon Musk for relaxing content censorship policies on the platform, arguing that content on Twitter needs more regulation. Macron made the comments in an appearance on ABC News ahead of his visit to The White House.

Macron said that democracies are under “very strong pressure” from forces like social media where users can say “crazy things about a vaccine, a pandemic, the war.”

This week, Musk said he would relax content moderation policies surrounding topics like the coronavirus.

Good Morning America and ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “He’s making it worse, isn’t he?”

“I think this is a big issue,” Macron responded. “I think it deserves to be largely engaged. What I push very much for, want, is exactly the opposite – more regulation.”

Macron further argued that speech in a democracy has to be “based on respect and political order.”

Keep reading

Kanye West was permanently suspended from Twitter last night for vile antisemitic posts that included the swastika symbol of an alien sex cult

Well, you can’t say you didn’t see it coming.

After his bombshell interview with Alex Jones yesterday, Kanye West went on an hours-long tweet-storm in which he posted many anti-semitic and generally insane things on the bird app.

Elon Musk himself stepped in and eventually decided the right thing to do was to nuke the account.

Here are a few of the things Kanye West tweeted and retweeted on his way out.

Ye said, unequivocally, that he loves everybody.

This includes the fashion brand Balenciaga which has been in the news lately for child sexual exploitation.

Also, Kanye said some very vile antisemitic things on Alex Jones’ show and doubled down on the antisemitism on Twitter.

Yep, it was this tweet with his bizarre swastika inside a Star of David that crossed the line for Musk and Twitter.

If you don’t know (and honestly what sane person would?) that symbol is actually from a ’70s sex cult called “Raelism” that believes aliens named “Elohim” created life on earth.

Keep reading

CURSORGATE: Internet explodes after California Democrat accuses Charlie Kirk of orchestrating a hate campaign in bizarre tweet

Woke and perpetually creepy California state Senator Scott Wiener got lit up on Twitter late Wednesday night after he tried to accuse Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk of orchestrating a hate campaign against him.

Wiener’s preposterous accusation is based on the fact that Kirk called out his record of supporting leniency for child sex predators.

On Tuesday, Kirk tweeted a picture of Wiener Shirtless in the street in a vest and tie and wrote, “Thousands of pedophiles in California are going free after just a few months in jail, thanks to the state’s radically reduced penalties for child molestation. One reason so many of these predators are going free so early is California lawmaker Scott Wiener.”

Wiener posted on Twitter late Wenesday night, “Not even 24 hours after MAGA grifter Charlie Kirk tweeted homophobic lies about me, I received this threat repeating one of his lies. But that was the point: Riling people up against me & other LGBTQ people. Words have consequences & Twitter is becoming a cesspool for this crap.”

Keep reading

“Science” group spent $40 million censoring free speech on social media

As millions of Americans are struggling just to make ends meet, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under fake president Joe Biden is shelling out “nearly $40 million into social media censorship grants and contracts,” according to a new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).

To keep a lid on what people say online, the NSF is throwing American taxpayer money at all sorts of projects aimed at controlling what gets posted to the internet. Since Biden started occupying the Oval Office, some $38.8 million has been spent by the NSF to battle “misinformation.”

A total of 64 grants totaling $31.8 million were also handed over to 42 colleges and universities to conduct “research” into the concept of “stopping viral ideas” – meaning ideas that people come up with themselves as opposed to the ones being fed to them by the globalist deep state.

The claim is that said research is “neutral” and “scientific” in nature, but the descriptions slapped on some of the grants openly and explicitly indicate that their true aim is to “explicitly target ‘populist politicians’ and ‘populist communications’ to scientifically determine ‘how best to counter populist narratives’.”

Keep reading

Twitter Suffers From “Ridiculous” Number Of “Psy Ops”, Elon Musk Says

Twitter owner Elon Musk said Monday that the platform suffers from a “ridiculous” number of professional psychological operations (or, “psy ops”), a concept that typically refers to the dissemination of propaganda or, when used by state actors like the military, psychological warfare tactics meant to manipulate one’s enemies.

“The amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous!” Musk wrote in a post on Twitter.

He added jokingly that “at least with new Verified, they will pay $8 for the privilege—haha.”

Musk later qualified his statement, responding to a Twitter user’s comment that the psychological operations are “mid”-level rather than professional. Musk conceded that “it’s mostly basic.”

Keep reading

Binance’s ‘CZ’ Says Half Billion WhatsApp User Records For Sale On Dark Web

Nearly half a billion WhatsApp users’ mobile phone numbers are allegedly for sale on a dark web community forum, according to multiple sources, including Binance’s billionaire Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. 

“A new set of 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers for sales in the Dark Web,” CZ tweeted Sunday. He said a sample of hacked data “indicates the phone numbers are legit.”

CZ warned users on the Meta-owned platform that “threat actors downstream will use this data to conduct smishing (phishing messages) campaigns.” 

Cybernews initially confirmed the hack. They said: 

On November 16, an actor posted an ad on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming they were selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.

The dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. Threat actor claims there are over 32 million US user records included.

Another huge chunk of phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million).

The dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.

The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK – $2,500, and Germany – $2,000.

Cybernews also posted a screenshot of the seller’s post on the forum featuring the total number of phone numbers per country. 

Keep reading

CNN analyst declares that freedom of speech is ‘nonsense,’ claims Elon Musk’s new Twitter empowers Vladimir Putin and is ‘destructive to American national security’

A CNN analyst aspersed the freedom of speech as “nonsense,” and claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia will be “all over Twitter” dispersing disinformation to the entire world.

Former CIA case officer and current CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer appeared on the cable news network on Friday to discuss the opening up of Twitter by new CEO Elon Musk.

“CNN Newsroom” host Boris Sanchez began by bringing up the news that Musk plans to grant mass amnesty to accounts that were previously suspended. Musk made the decision after running a Twitter poll, in which 72.4% approved of welcoming the previously banned accounts.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Sanchez asked Baer about his opinion regarding formerly banned accounts being reinstated.

Baer responded, “Well, Boris, I can tell you one thing, Putin will be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this. Fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it, this is a great opportunity for him.”

Without evidence, Baer added, “And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence.”

“The Russians are waiting for something like this,” the former CIA agent claimed.

“They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine,” he continued. “And they’re going to be all over Twitter. I guarantee this. Supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. You just wait.”

Baer alleged that the Russians will “put up” misinformation and it will “cascade everywhere, in India, in Europe.” He said the Russian disinformation would “appeal” to the European far right and Chinese. He said that Putin and the Russians are going to weaponize Musk’s new pro-free speech Twitter “as a vehicle to save himself and Ukraine.”

The CNN security and intelligence analyst bizarrely asserted, “And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go in a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law.”

Keep reading

Meta Confirms US Military Running Fake Social Media Accounts to Push Propaganda

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.

Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.

Keep reading

The UK plots to ban private messaging

UK’s media regulator Ofcom will get more surveillance powers than spy agencies under the Online Safety Bill, according to a legal analysis by the Index on Censorship organization.

The legislation would allow Ofcom to force tech companies to clamp down on “child abuse” and “terrorist content” by ending end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger and force all communications to be scanned.

Human rights lawyer Matthew Ryder, in a legal opinion commissioned by Index on Censorship, said that the powers that Ofcom would be afforded by the bill allow “allow the state to compel [tech companies] to carry out surveillance of the content of communications on a generalized and widespread basis.”

The regulator would not need prior authorization before making a demand to a tech company to scan messages and there would be no independent oversight over how the regulator uses its powers.

Ryder added: “We are unable to envisage circumstances where such a destructive step in the security of global online communications for billions of users could be justified.”

Communications by journalists, whistleblowers, and victims would no longer be safe. Additionally, it is not clear if Ofcom would make public the demands it issues or whether it would keep them secret.

Keep reading