Tag: social media

NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC Have Spent Just 14 MINUTES Combined Covering The ‘Twitter Files’

The major left leaning U.S. news networks have spent only 14 minutes between them covering Elon Musk’s ongoing release of the Twitter files, which have highlighted a policy of censorship based on the partisan political alignment of woke former company executives and employees.

The data drops, which have also revealed that former Twitter execs, were regularly meeting with U.S. intelligence officials and policing content at their behest, have been almost completely ignored by the likes of CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.

Fox News reports that Grabian’s analysis of news transcripts shows the term “Twitter files” has only been used six times by anchors.

The report notes that “CNN covered the story for three minutes, only on Dec. 9, while MSNBC spent two minutes on the story the same day, as well as five minutes on Dec. 11 and four minutes on Dec. 12.”

“CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News have not discussed the Twitter files in the last week,” it adds.

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TikTok’s algorithm promotes posts about eating disorders and suicide, report finds

TikTok’s algorithms are promoting videos about self-harm and eating disorders to vulnerable teens, according to a report published Wednesday that highlights concerns about social media and its impact on youth mental health.

Researchers at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate created TikTok accounts for fictional teen personas in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The researchers operating the accounts then “liked” videos about self-harm and eating disorders to see how TikTok’s algorithm would respond.

Within minutes, the wildly popular platform was recommending videos about losing weight and self-harm, including ones featuring pictures of models and idealized body types, images of razor blades and discussions of suicide.

When the researchers created accounts with user names that suggested a particular vulnerability to eating disorders — names that included the words “lose weight” for example — the accounts were fed even more harmful content.

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Florida High School Coach Paid Teen Girls for Nude Photos on Snapchat, Sheriff Says

A high school basketball coach and campus monitor in Martin County, Florida, was arrested for allegedly paying underage girls to send him nude photos on Snapchat.

Alton Edwards, 28, was allegedly paying the underage girls between $10 and $75 to send him the photos after targeting them over social media, according to West Palm Beach-based outlet WPTV. The Martin County Sheriff’s Office reportedly got an anonymous tip about Edwards and spoke with seven teenagers who claim they sent him explicit photos.

According to WPTV’s report, “most” of the young girls Edwards solicited were about 15 or 16 years old. 

“It looks like his major (modus operandi) would be to find the girls on Snapchat, take a look at their friends and then just start probing,” Sheriff William Snyder told the outlet. “Really, it’s grooming. He finds a child who might be more vulnerable, and he gets them to send pictures of them unclothed and sends them cash.”

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UK government asked Twitter and Facebook to “tweak” algorithms during Covid

Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”

But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.

And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.

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FBI and CIA Connections to Twitter Exposed Amid Massive Election Interference and Censorship Operation

Former FBI and CIA operatives have been exposed as central figures in the Twitter Files‘ recent revelations that the social media platform engaged in a sweeping censorship and election interference operation.

“Exclusive: Bari doesn’t name too many names but the head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team when secret actions were taken to stifle conservative accounts happened under Jeff Carlton, who worked for both CIA & FBI,” Ngo wrote. “He just deleted his LinkedIn. But I have an archive. @elonmusk”

A Trust & Safety leader from Twitter named Ella Irwin chimed in to try to correct the record.

“This is actually false,” she claimed. “I would recommend checking information like this before posting. Jeff stepped into this role as part of Twitter 2.0.”

However, Jeff Carlton’s archived LinkedIn profile shows that he was on the Strategic Response Team, albeit in a different role prior to November 2022. (Carlton appears to have been promoted.)

He was a Senior Program Manager rom May 2021 to November 2022. The profile says he, “Built and led a programs team that optimizes intake, new workflow integration, training and quality, systems and tooling, and knowledge management for Twitter’s Strategic Response Team.”

In November 2022, he switched to a Senior Manager, where he now “leads Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees / agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalations. Manage crises and non-standard incidents in content moderation and customer support to promote ‘healthy public conversations’.”

In the archived LinkedIn page, it details Jeff Carlton’s experience in the intelligence community, including his assignments working with the FBI and CIA.

“Former Intelligence Officer transitioned to managing high-profile content moderation and customer support escalations in Social Media / Trust & Safety. Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team,” the now-scrubbed LinkedIn profile stated.

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‘Visibility Filtering:’ ‘Twitter Files’ Reveals Shadowbanning, Other Tools Used to Censor Conservatives

A new Twitter Files investigation has revealed the many tools that company executives employed to blacklist and shadowban conservative voices. The thread posted to Elon Musk’s platform reveals that the internal Twitter name for shadowbanning is “visibility filtering.”

Released by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss in yet another lengthy Twitter thread, the revelations on Thursday showed that several mainstream conservative voices, from Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino, were shadowbanned by the social media company under the rubrics of “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” At one point, Twitter even placed Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, under the label “Trends Blacklist” for arguing that coronavirus lockdowns would harm children. Per Weiss: 

Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.

Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify.”

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CDC and Census Bureau had direct access to Twitter portal where they could flag speech for censorship

Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.

The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).

On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.

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Fauci deposition: Fauci says no one from his office pushed for social media censorship. Documents show they did.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s deposition, taken as part of the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana’s Attorneys General alleging collusion between government and online platforms to censor certain viewpoints, has details about Dr. Fauci’s attitude towards Covid topics that were censored on social media platforms.

Read the full deposition transcript here.

Fauci, the retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was deposed under oath on November 23.
During the deposition, Fauci said that he did not have the expertise to say whether or not COVID-19 originated from a laboratory or nature. However, he repeatedly dismissed the lab-leak theory.

Social media companies also censored content and accounts suggesting the virus originated from a lab.

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FBI Sent Posts to Big Tech Firms for Action Ahead of Election: Agent

The FBI set up a command post ahead of the 2020 election and set up a nationwide system that conveyed election-related posts to social media platforms so the platforms could take them down, an FBI agent testified in a recent deposition.

The information would be provided by FBI field offices and the bureau’s headquarters about “disinformation,” primarily regarding the time, place, or manner of elections, according to Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch for FBI’s San Francisco Division. The posts were passed to the FBI San Francisco office’s command post, which was set up days before the election and run through election night.

The posts were then sent to Big Tech companies, Chan, the daytime commander of the post, said.

“From my recollection, we would receive some responses from the social media companies. I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service,” Chan said. “In some cases when we shared information they would provide a response to us that they had taken them down. I would not say it was a 100 percent success rate. If I had to characterize it, I would say it was like a 50 percent success rate. But that’s just from my recollection.”

The “success rate” was defined by Chan as platforms taking some type of action because a post was determined to violate a platform’s terms of service.

San Francisco FBI officials were charged by top government authorities with serving as the final link in the chain because many of the Big Tech firms are headquartered in the area.

Chan was testifying on Nov. 29 during a deposition taken as part of the case alleging collusion between Big Tech and the government in censoring users. The transcript of the deposition was made public on Dec. 6.

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Meta warns it will remove ALL news content on Facebook if Congress approves Journalism Competition and Preservation Act

Meta is threatening to remove all news content from Facebook in an apparent attempt to pressure Congress over potentially passing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that would counter market dominance by social media giants.

The act would ostensibly allow news organizations to negotiate the terms of their content distribution with Big Tech according to the Daily Mail. The move would allegedly impact Meta’s revenue and the company has its fur up over the attempt at leveling the playing field for news.

On Monday, Meta’s Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted that if Congress passes the bill, the company would be “forced” to remove all news content from Facebook and Instagram.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” the statement from Meta asserted.

“The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line – not the other way around. No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue. Put simply: the government creating a cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private entities is a terrible precedent for all American businesses,” it concludes.

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