Tag: wrongthink

Twitter Files: Sen. Angus King Targeted ‘Suspicious’ Americans for Blacklisting

According to the latest drop of the Twitter Files, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) flagged accounts his office disliked to the social media platform, accusing Americans of being “suspicious” for reasons including being excited by a Sen. Rand Paul visit, mentioning immigration in their tweets, or being followed by a political rival.

Twitter users have been sharing their ideas, opinions, and thoughts on the platform for a long time. But in recent years, the government’s role in policing this content has come under scrutiny. An intricate system of government involvement in Twitter moderation has been exposed by the Twitter Files, with journalist Matt Taibbi compiling a collection of thousands of moderation requests.

The Twitter Files have revealed a number of details about the internal workings of the social media platform in recent months. According to the latest batch released over the weekend, it has been discovered that government officials frequently misidentify Americans as fictitious Russians. Further complicating the role of governments in online content moderation is the discovery that Twitter has given the “U.S. intelligence community,” moderation authority.

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Police told to keep record of ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘communists’

The Queensland police are required to report interactions with people who “allegedly hold a range of ideological beliefs” including “conspiracy theorists” according to an email sent to all members of the Queensland Police Service on Thursday and seen by ABC News.

Police must record interactions with such individuals in the state’s QPrime database “at the first available opportunity,” the email states, explaining that in addition to “conspiracy theorists,” “religious, social or political extremists and sovereign citizens, as well as people with ideologies relating to capitalism, communism, socialism or Marxism” also fit the bill.

Officers were also told to report “all matters that indicate concerning or escalating behavior due to ideological beliefs, including religious and single-issue ideologies” and advised of the “risks” inherent in dealing with these groups.

The guidance comes after a deadly shooting in Wieambilla in December left two officers and a civilian dead, in addition to the three shooters. Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train reportedly gunned down constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold and injured two other officers on their property, also killing neighbor Alan Dare when he was drawn to the scene by the noise. The Trains were then killed by specialist police following an hours-long standoff.  

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The New York City Department of Health created “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor social media

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene set up a “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor what it would determine to be “dangerous misinformation” posted on social media, non-US sites, and non-English media in the US.

This “misinformation” mostly had to do with Covid vaccination – the Department was determined to drive vaccination rates up by spreading its word, and in this gathered over 100 partners whose job was to craft positive messaging around the controversial subject.

Among those the dedicated new unit is working with is Public Good Projects, otherwise known for receiving funding from a lobbying group representing two major Covid vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna.

Their “good” work here also included sending Twitter, on a weekly basis, lists of posts slated for censorship.

In an article published by the NEJM Catalyst journal, those behind the effort are now assessing the Unit’s work as successful, what with it being able to “rapidly identify messages” deemed as containing inaccurate information about the virus, vaccines, treatment, etc.

And although admitting that “vaccine hesitancy” remains high around the world even two years after the vaccines were first introduced – and this is something attributed to “disinformation and misinformation” and continues to worry the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Surgeon General, as well as “medical experts” – the New York City Health Department thinks that it did well in getting its own narrative out, particularly in traditional media.

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Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news

Well-funded “disinformation” tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars, a Washington Examiner investigation found.

Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly “nonpartisan” groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online “disinformation.” These same “disinformation” monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Brands, which have been seeking to promote products online through multiple websites to expand their digital footprint, are turning to corporate digital ad companies keyed into global markets. In turn, some of these companies are contracting “disinformation” trackers to obtain private information about which websites they should purportedly “defund.”

The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups sharing similar board members, is one entity shaping the ad world behind the scenes. GDI’s CEO is Clare Melford, former senior vice president for MTV Networks, and its executive director is Daniel Rogers, a tech advisory board member for Human Rights First, a left-leaning nonprofit group that says disinformation fuels “violent extremism and public health crises.”

“It’s devastating,” Mike Benz, the State Department’s ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner. “The implementation of ad revenue crushing sentinels like Newsguard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like has completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and the New York Times.”

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Feds Adapting A.I. Used to Track ISIS to Combat American Dissent on Vaccines, Elections

The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.

DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago.

The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms.

DARPA set four specific goals for the program:

  1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
  2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
  3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
  4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

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WHO: Anti-Vaccine Activism Is Deadlier Than Global Terrorism

The World Health Organization shared a video on Twitter promoting the claim that anti-vaccine activism is deadlier than global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and gun violence.

Yes, really.

The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”

Hotez went on to assert that 200,000 Americans died from COVID because they refused to get the vaccine, a claim that isn’t backed up by any source.

“And now the anti-vaccine activism is expanding across the world, even into low and middle income countries,” added Hotez.

Once again with providing any source for his dubious claims, Hotez asserted that “anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation or cyber attacks.”

The doctor went on to complain about how anti-vaccine skepticism had now become a “political movement” linked to “far-right extremism” in both the United States and Germany.

Hotez ominously called for “political solutions to address this.”

Unsurprisingly, respondents to the tweet completely savaged the WHO for sharing the video, with one pointing to stats that suggest, “Doctors and “medicine” kill more people than car accidents and guns.”

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Who Determines What’s ‘Disinformation’?

Why are we being bombarded by fact-checks and “anti-disinformation” efforts in our timeline scrolls? When reading the news, we too often find that so-called experts are behind whatever claim media professionals make, no matter how outlandish or disconnected from reality such claims may be.

Through his concept and exploration of spectacle, a totalizing, negating force over our lives that results in what is really “unlife,” French Philosopher Guy Debord’s famous Society of the Spectacle (1967) and his follow-up booklet, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), provide insights into these and related phenomena. 

When it comes to “fact-checks” and “experts,” Debord is clear: in a society subjugated by the economy, where “everything that was once directly lived has faded into representation,” such professionals do not exist to provide us the truth — they exist to serve the state and media through lies and distortions spun into what appears as true. If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public learns and articulates that their job is to systematically lie.

“Disinformation” appears as one of the biggest bogeymen in today’s increasingly online world. Governments warn of the dangers it apparently poses to society and democracy, and mainstream media organizations in turn direct resources to counter-disinformation and to fact-checking. In the name of “being informed,” people cannot often go online without being bombarded by fact-checks or warnings about what content to consume and share with their social and professional networks.

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Jordan Peterson ordered to enter ‘re-education’ program in Canada over his comments, speech that ‘may cause harm.’ He’s refusing to comply.

Jordan Peterson has been ordered by a Canadian psychology governing body to enter what Peterson called a “re-education” program reportedly over his past comments and speech that “may cause harm.”

Not surprisingly, Peterson said Wednesday he “formally indicated” his “refusal to comply” with the demands of the College of Psychologists of Ontario.

What are the details?

Peterson posted to Twitter parts of a document from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that outlined its concern over his “public statements made on social media and during a January 25, 2022, podcast appearance” that “may have lacked professionalism.”

The document indicates that Peterson is to work with another professional to “review, reflect on, and ameliorate [his] professionalism in public statements” and complete a “Coaching Program.”

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America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

[T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

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