Author Topic: Goolag, FB, Youtube, Amazon, Twitter, Gov censorship/propaganda via Tech Octopus  (Read 191805 times)

objectivist1

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This is an excellent opinion piece that appeared today in The New York Post:

The left is using bogus COVID-19 research to censor their opponents

By Isaac Schorr
Published Oct. 9, 2024, 10:39 p.m. ET

How does one justify squelching free speech and censoring opponents?

By justifying it by “science.”

The authors of a new study published by the scientific journal Nature submit that “differential sharing of misinformation by people identifying with different political groups could lead to political asymmetries in enforcement, even by unbiased policies.”

In plain English: Conservatives face more punishment by social media companies because they share more misinformation.

How did they reach such a conclusion?

By grading a number of news outlets and then knocking conservative users for sharing links to sites the researchers themselves deemed were “low quality.”

Fact-check scheme

There are some glaringly obvious issues with this construction.

According to the study, outlets favored by conservatives — like The Post and Fox News — are of a lesser quality than The New York Times and CBS News, because they are less prone to being tsk-tsked by biased fact-checkers who themselves often turn out to be wrong.

It’s a rigged game built on circular logic, not objective measures.

Liberals affirming other liberals’ reporting isn’t confirmation of that reporting’s validity, it’s proof that this study is tainted by confirmation bias.

Contrary to the authors’ assumption, neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on good or bad sources.

But let’s say you give the Times the nod over The Post, too (shame on you, by the way).

How does the study account for the Gray Lady accusing Sen. Tom Cotton of repeating a “fringe theory of coronavirus origins” when he posited that COVID-19 might have escaped from the coronavirus research facility in Wuhan?

Or for the widely panned, ahistorical 1619 Project?

Or for the Trump assassination fantasy it published in its book review section?

Or any number of other either mistakes or intentional obfuscations it has made in just the last few years?

Its authors eschew evaluations of actual misinformation being spread in order to roundly dismiss right-of-center media as a whole.

The problem is that this study, written by researchers at liberal universities, will be used to justify the censoring of conservative media by social media giants.

Google will prevent ads from appearing on the news sites, Facebook will limit the sharing of articles from those publications, then say “well, researchers from Yale and Cornell said it was bad.”

This particular attempt at using “science” to the advantage of Democrats is unfortunately part of a larger trend.

A functioning democracy needs institutions it can trust to provide accurate information and use the scientific method correctly for the benefit of the entire public, rather than making a mockery of it to benefit a political party.

Yet all across American society, those institutions are betraying the public trust for nakedly political reasons.

CNN Business has a preposterous “Fear & Greed Index” that it uses to undermine faith in the free enterprise system.

Anthony Fauci sounded more like Emperor Palpatine of “Star Wars” than an earthly public servant when he pronounced that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Survey the work of any one of the many professional fact-checkers littering the Internet and you’ll find that Democrats’ false claims are sanitized as “mostly true,” while Republicans’ accurate ones are undermined by their supposed need for “context.”

Strip all of these pseudo-sophisticated attempts down to what they are and you’ll find that they’re not good-faith efforts at discerning the truth, but arguments from authority meant to elide the substantive issues Americans are eager to debate.

Like so much of social media moderation, they’re glorified methods of telling dissenters to elite opinion to “Shut up!”

Fighting back

The good news is that people are fighting back.

The left-wing establishment may think they can falsify their way to victory with poorly designed studies, ill-conceived quantifications and an endless sea of misbegotten fact-checks, but the American people see through it all.

Between COVID, the whitewash of Joe Biden’s failed presidency, and its attempt to cover first for his decline, and then for Kamala Harris’ superficial candidacy, they’ve burned their credibility to ashes.

So they can invent as many fake statistical measures as they want; the left is still stuck in an echo chamber every bit as cloistered as the one they accuse conservatives of having fallen into.

The Nature study, as it turns out, is a useful reminder — if not the one authors intended it to be.

Progressives’ professed fidelity to the truth is just another smokescreen they use to try to accrue power.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
"You have enemies?  Good.  That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Crafty_Dog

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More sneaky censorship from FB
« Reply #1101 on: October 18, 2024, 09:39:21 AM »

Body-by-Guinness

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FB Actually Protecting Right Leaning Speech?
« Reply #1102 on: October 23, 2024, 11:02:06 PM »
Well this is somewhat heartening:

From Prof. Michael McConnell: Meta Oversight Board Steps Up To Protect Conservative Political Speech

Meta's oversight board seeks comments

•The Volokh Conspiracy / by Eugene Volokh / Oct 23, 2024 at 3:49 PM

I'm delighted to pass along this item from my Hoover Institution colleague Michael McConnell, who is also a professor at Stanford Law School and the co-chair of the Facebook Oversight Board:

Increasingly, the most significant gatekeepers for political speech are not elected governments or courts, but the social media companies that control Facebook, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, X, and the like. That is why I signed on to co-chair Meta's independent Oversight Board, which handles appeals from users and referrals from the company in high-profile cases from all over the world. Necessarily, the Board cannot take a large number of cases; it decided just over 50 last year and is on track to decide a few more this year. The hope (and I think to some extent the reality) is that these high-profile cases, most of which have reversed Meta's original decision, will have an impact on the content moderation system as a whole.

Conservatives in the United States have long complained that the social media companies discriminate against right-of-center speech. It is hard to know how systemic this problem might be, because there are no good data—but there certainly are disturbing examples. Even Mark Zuckerburg has admitted that, in hindsight, the censorship of, for example, the Hunter Biden Laptop story, was wrong, and that the company has been too ready to comply with Administration demands to take down posts based on claims about misinformation and disinformation. In all likelihood, this ideological discrimination, to the extent it exists, is a product less of deliberate company policy than the tendency of on-the-ground content moderators (who are typically drawn from the Bay Area technocracy, which is not evenly divided between the parties) to make close calls in a way that skews left.

People wonder why, then, there have been relatively few interventions by the Oversight Board to protect right-of-center users from suppression of their speech on the platform. Based on my experience, there are at least two reasons. First, when users point out obvious errors in taking down legitimate posts, Meta's internal system often corrects the decision within a few days or a week. A few days or a week is long enough to do the harm; speech on political issues is usually stale after that time has passed. But if errors are corrected in that time frame, the case will never come to the Oversight Board.

Second, it is my impression that many conservatives have persuaded themselves that institutions like the Oversight Board are part of the left-progressive blob, and that it would be a pointless waste of time to appeal. A number of times when I have read complaints in the media about biased content moderation and have inquired why the users did not take their complaint to the Board, I hear some version of this response.

That is why the Oversight Board decision today is so important. In August, a Facebook user posted a satirical picture based on the movie "Dumb and Dumber," substituting the faces of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Facebook removed the post under its Bullying and Harassment Community Standard, apparently because the two figures were portrayed (as in the movie) touching each other's nipples through their clothing. The case was quickly brought to the Oversight Board, which used summary procedures to get a decision out before the election. The Board concluded, unsurprisingly, that this political message was protected speech, and Facebook has complied. The full decision can be found here.

I hope this will signal that people of all political stripes, including conservatives, can get help when overenforcement of Meta's content standards results in suppression of legitimate speech. And I hope that, like other Oversight Board decisions, this will reenforce to Meta content moderators that they need to be more careful when taking down political speech. The Oversight Board process may appear clunky, but it is worth the effort.

The post From Prof. Michael McConnell: Meta Oversight Board Steps Up To Protect Conservative Political Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/10/23/from-prof-michael-mcconnell-meta-oversight-board-steps-up-to-protect-conservative-political-speech/

Body-by-Guinness

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Harris/Walz Discord Server Caught Manipulating Reddit’s Community Notes
« Reply #1103 on: October 30, 2024, 09:02:45 PM »
Hey, if you can’t sway voters by persuasion, do so by creating a fake sense of consensus across Reddit/social media:

JUST IN: The Kamala Harris campaign caught manipulating Community Notes to spread left-wing propaganda on X, according to the @FDRLST.

The campaign is reportedly using a Discord server to swarm “hordes” of users to manipulate CN.

The strategy is also being used to limit Community Notes from showing up on Kamala affiliated accounts.

The goal is to “artificially manufacture consensus by making pro-Kamala Harris messages on social media appear more popular than they are.”

Kamala Harris’ account, along with the campaign’s KamalaHQ account, have received almost no Notes, despite sharing hundreds of misleading and false posts.

The reason is likely because of the Discord server, which rushes users to strike down the Community Notes before they appear.

https://x.com/collinrugg/status/1851618531814568172?s=12

Body-by-Guinness

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Zuck's Smoking Gun
« Reply #1104 on: October 31, 2024, 06:21:44 AM »
Caved to the Biden/Harris admin re Hunter's laptop & covid (to name two):

“Why We Influenced the 2020 Elections”: Facebook Files Reveal the Coordinated Effort to Bury the Laptop Story

 Recently, I spoke at an event about my book, “The Indispensable Right,” at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Appearing on the panel with me was a New York University professor and one of the Facebook board members directing “content moderation.” We had a sharp disagreement over the record of Meta/Facebook on censorship, which I described as partisan and anti-free speech. Now, Congress has released the internal communications at Facebook, showing an express effort to appease Biden officials by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.

In a new report released by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, Facebook executives are shown following the lead of the FBI, which gave them prior warnings to prepare to spike such stories before the election. The FBI knew that the laptop was authentic. They had possession of the laptop, and American intelligence concluded that it was not Russian disinformation.

One Microsoft employee wrote, “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,”

However, these communications also show a knowing effort to appease Biden and Harris and effectively assist them in their election efforts. Facebook’s then-Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg reportedly wrote to Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, “
  • bviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”


One of the most interesting communications came from a Facebook employee who recognized that they would be accused of seeking to influence the election: “When we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it.”

The Facebook files go beyond influencing the election.  At one point, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, asked, “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made.” The Vice President in charge of content policy responded, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

Notably, Democrats opposed every effort to seek this information, and Facebook only recently relented in turning over its files years after Elon Musk ordered the release of the “Twitter files.” I raised this issue during the NCC event to counter the glowing self-appraisal of Meta over its record. Despite its claims of transparency, it refused calls from many of us for years to release these files. When finally forced by the House to do so,  CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a perfunctory apology and moved on. As shown at the NCC event, it is now spinning its record as a defense of free speech.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/10/31/why-we-influenced-the-2020-elections-facebook-files-reveal-an-effort-to-appease-the-biden-harris-administration/

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Harris/Walz Discord Server Caught Manipulating Reddit’s Community Notes
« Reply #1105 on: November 01, 2024, 02:04:42 PM »
Hey, if you can’t sway voters by persuasion, do so by creating a fake sense of consensus across Reddit/social media:

JUST IN: The Kamala Harris campaign caught manipulating Community Notes to spread left-wing propaganda on X, according to the @FDRLST.

The campaign is reportedly using a Discord server to swarm “hordes” of users to manipulate CN.

The strategy is also being used to limit Community Notes from showing up on Kamala affiliated accounts.

The goal is to “artificially manufacture consensus by making pro-Kamala Harris messages on social media appear more popular than they are.”

Kamala Harris’ account, along with the campaign’s KamalaHQ account, have received almost no Notes, despite sharing hundreds of misleading and false posts.

The reason is likely because of the Discord server, which rushes users to strike down the Community Notes before they appear.

https://x.com/collinrugg/status/1851618531814568172?s=12

This effort with their Discord server now includes X:

https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/30/block-community-notes-we-dont-like-harris-campaign-caught-red-handed-manipulating-x-to-censor-criticism/

Crafty_Dog

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Seriously ominous: They are scrubbing the internet right now
« Reply #1106 on: November 09, 2024, 08:59:51 AM »
A reminder that we need to post the content as well as the link of anything we may want to find down the road!!!

==================================================

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker, Debbie Lerman   
October 30, 2024

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.


Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

Authors
Jeffrey A Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

View all posts 

Debbie Lerman
Debbie Lerman, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.


DougMacG

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Re: Goolag, Biden Harris DOJ vs Google, Chrome
« Reply #1107 on: November 21, 2024, 06:03:09 AM »
I read and post the free marketers at CTUP quite a bit and they defend Google as a great American company under attack by big government, and I cringe.

As I recall, the Obama DOJ allowed Google to buy YouTube, allowed Facebook to buy Instagram. Previously eBay was allowed to buy PayPal.

These companies get too big partly because we allow them to buy their competitors and buy up their industry.

Now DOJ wants to force Google to sell off chrome, a product they presumably developed on their own.

Besides being a great American company, Google is evil. They conspire with the communist government of China to oppress their people and have done similar things here in the United States.

What is the right answer and are these issues beyond the scope of incoming Attorney General Matt Gaetz? Or is he the right person to carry this forward. Recall that the Clinton administration / Janet Reno's attack on the greatest company then, Microsoft, triggered the tech crash of March 2000. These aren't small matters.

Our government is all too powerful, and then when we need them they are impotent. Which should it be here?

https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-should-be-forced-to-sell-chrome-browser-justice-department-says-13602df9?mod=hp_lead_pos1
« Last Edit: November 21, 2024, 06:12:15 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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someone brought up the point that Gaetz has NEVER prosecuted a case.

seems disqualifying to me for position of AG

is not that what they do?

How about Andrew McCarthy ( GM would be outraged at this thought )

Crafty_Dog

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The argument would be effective during normal times with a DOJ essentially committed to the Rule of Law.

Gaetz is bright (I have watched lengthy questioning by him of witnesses) and has the fire in the belly that taking on the subversives in the DOJ requires.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2024, 01:11:15 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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no prosecutorial experience less important than fire in the belly?

well, we will see how he does with Senate hearings.  if he can demonstrate the ability and his baggage

WAIT my wife just walked in and tells me Gaetz withdrew due to the 17 yo. girl alleged statutory rape .

« Last Edit: November 21, 2024, 01:11:49 PM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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Yes I edited to delete the mis-wording.

Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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Malone: Psywar Glossary
« Reply #1113 on: December 14, 2024, 06:03:04 AM »


The Psywar Glossary
Excerpt from the book PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order
Robert W Malone MD, MS
Dec 11

 




READ IN APP
 

By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms… elections, parliaments, supreme courts and all the rest… will remain.

The underlying substance will be a new kind of Totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly like they were in the good old days. Democracy & freedom will be the theme of every broadcast & editorial. Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite will quietly run the show as they see fit.

-Aldous Huxley, 1962

“I know it when I see it”
In the 1964 Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, - which was about pornography in the movie industry, the concurring opinion stated,

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [‘hard-core pornography’], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.’

And with that statement, one of the most infamous phrases in the American lexicon was born.

PsyWar and Psyops operations are like that also. The problem is that people often have to be taught to “see it.”

The US Department of Defense (DoD) 2004 and 2010 Counterinsurgency Operations Reports define “psyops” as the following:

Psychological operations: Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives. Also called PYSOP.

When authorized, PSYOP forces may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population.

Psychological warfare (PsyWar) involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence opposition groups' opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior. PsyWar is when psyops is used by governments against a foreign population or even against the citizens of a government (domestically) in a coordinated fashion.

The book PsyWar was specifically written to provide armor against PsyWar being deployed by governments and the globalists against we, the people.

In the back of that book, there is a list of terms associated with PsyWar, in the hopes that if people can understand the concepts, methods, and groups involved in PsyWar campaigns, they will “know it when they see it.”

PsyWar is an excellent present for the older teen or anyone really who wishes to understand better the political world they were born into.

Below is the full PsyWar Glossary from the book PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order.

A PsyWar Glossary
Administrative state is a term used to describe the phenomenon of executive branch administrative agencies exercising the power to create, adjudicate, and enforce their own rules. The administrative state uses nondelegation, judicial deference, executive control of agencies, procedural rights, and agency dynamics to assert control above the republic and democratic principles.

Advocacy journalism is a subset of journalism that adopts a nonobjective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose.

Algorithms on social media and in search engines are computational processes. Online platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X use algorithms to predict what users are interested in seeing, isolate users who break “community standards” or government censorship rules and maximize revenues. Algorithms filter and prioritizes the content that the user receives, based on their individual user history. Algorithms can isolate different user groups into echo chambers and away from other others or bring users together.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that focuses on creating machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. A key characteristic of AI is that it can learn from data and improve performance over time. AI systems learn from experience, understand natural language, recognize patterns, solve problems, and make decisions.

Astroturfing (ergo, fake grass roots) is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. Astroturfing gives organizations credibility by hiding information about the source's financial or governmental connections. An Astroturf organization is an organization that is hiding its real origins, in order to deceive the public about its true intentions.

Asymmetric warfare is a type of war between opponents whose relative military power, strategy, or tactics differ significantly. It often involves insurgents or a resistance movement against a standing army or a more traditional force.

Advocacy journalism is journalism that advocates a cause or expresses a viewpoint with a specific agenda. It is often designed to increase or decrease the Overton window. It is a form of propaganda.

Bad-jacketing. Rumors and gossip meant to disenfranchise and destroy a movement or quell enthusiasm.

Black ops is an abbreviation for "black operations," which are covert or clandestine activities that cannot be linked to the organization that undertakes them.

Black propaganda falsely claims a message, image, or video was created by the opposition in order to discredit them.

Bot is an automated account programmed to interact like a user on social media. Bots are used to push narratives, amplify misleading messaging, and distort online discourse. The name “bot” came from a shortened version of the name robot.

Botnet is a network of devices infected with malware, controlled by an attacker to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or spread malware.

Chaos agents are a person or people that purposefully causes chaos or mischief within a group, for their own personal entertainment or as a tool to cause organizational fragmentation. It is a tool often used by intelligence agencies.

Community technology is the practice of synergizing the efforts of individuals, community technology centers and national organizations with federal policy initiatives around broadband, information access, education, and economic development” (Wikipedia)

Computational propaganda: is an “emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the internet” (Woolley and Howard, 2018, p. 3). This type of propaganda is often executed through data mining and algorithmic bots, which are usually created and controlled by advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Computational propaganda (EU Parliament definition): “the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.” These activities can feed into influence campaigns: coordinated, illegitimate efforts of a third state or non-state agent to affect democratic processes and political decision-making, including (but not limited to) election interference. It is asserted that disinformation (deliberately deceptive information) turns one of democracy's greatest assets—free and open debate—into a vulnerability. The use of algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence is boosting the scope and the efficiency of disinformation campaigns and related cyber-activities.

Computer algorithms—to control access or speech. Example: Algorithms to enable X’s policy of “Freedom of speech, not reach”

Controlled opposition, disruptors and chaos agents. Historically, these tactics involves a protest movement that is actually being led by government agents. Nearly all governments in history have employed this technique to trick and subdue their adversaries. However, in fifth-gen warfare, controlled opposition often may come in the form of disruptors and chaos agents. Either “real” people or bots that generate outrageous claims that delegitimize a movement (examples currently may (or may not be); “snake venom in the water” or “everyone is going to die who took the vaccine within two years.” Another tactic is placing agents of chaos whose job is to basically disrupt organizations and events. This may also come in the form of “reporters” who assert fake or highly exaggerated news stories, and who most likely are funded by the opposition. “Undermine the order from the shadows" is the tactic here.

Cryptographic backdoors are methods that allows an entity to bypass encryption and gain access to a system.

Cyberattack is an attempt by an individual or organization to hack into another individual or organization's information system. The attacker seeks to disrupt, damage, or destroy the system, often for personal gain, political motives, or harm. Cyberattacks can include the use of botnet, denial-of-service, DNS tunneling, malware, man-in-the-middle attacks, phishing, ransomware, SQL injection, and zero-day exploitation.

Cyberstalking involves the use of technology (most often, the internet!) to make someone else afraid or concerned about their safety. Generally speaking, this conduct is threatening or otherwise fear-inducing, involves an invasion of a person’s relative right to privacy, and manifests in repeated actions over time. Most of the time, those who cyberstalk use social media, internet databases, search engines, and other online resources to intimidate, follow, and cause anxiety or terror to others.

Data mining: is the software-driven analysis of large batches of data in order to identify meaningful patterns.

Decentralized and highly non-attributable psychological warfare (memes, fake news).

Deepfakes are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person's likeness or voice convincingly with that of another. Deepfake techniques include using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to create convincing images, audio, and video hoaxes.

Deep state is a type of governance made up of potentially secret and unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.

Denial-of-service (DoS) attack involves overwhelming a system with traffic to exhaust resources and bandwidth.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to a web property.

DNS Tunneling is the use of a domain name system (DNS) protocol to communicate non-DNS traffic, often for malicious purposes.

DoD Military Deception Missions are attempts to deliberately deceive by using psychological warfare to deliberately mislead enemy forces during a combat situation.

DoD Military Information Support Operations (MISO) Missions: Military Information Support Operations (MISO) missions involve sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens. This can include cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media. In the case of a domestic emergency, MISOs can be used on domestic populations.

DoD Interagency and Government Support Missions: shape and influence foreign decision-making and behaviors in support of US objectives by advising foreign governments.

Electronics intelligence (also called ELINT) is technical and intelligence information obtained from foreign electromagnetic emissions that are not radiated by communications equipment or by nuclear detonations and radioactive sources.

Electronic warfare (EW) is warfare that uses the electromagnetic spectrum, such as radio, infrared, or radar, to sense, protect, and communicate. At the same time, EW can disrupt, deny and degrade the adversaries' ability to use these signals.

Emotional appeal is a persuasive technique that relies on descriptive language and imagery to evoke an emotional response and convince the recipient of a particular point of view. An emotional appeal manipulates the audience's emotions, especially when there is a lack of factual evidence.

Fearporn is any type of media or narrative designed to use fear to provoke strong emotional reactions, with the purpose of nudging the audience to react to a situation based on fear. Fearporn many also be used to increase audience size or participation.

Fifth generation (fifth-gen) warfare is using non-kinetic military tactics against an opponent. This would include strategies such as manipulating social media through social engineering, misinformation, censorship cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence. It has also been described as a war of "information and perception.” Although the concept has been rejected by some scholars, it is seen as a new frontier of cyberspace and the concepts behind fifth-generation warfare are evolving, even within the field of military theory and strategy. Fifth-gen warfare is used by non-state actors as well as state actors.

Flooding is a tactic that manipulates search engine or hashtag results by coordinating large volumes of inauthentic posts. Flooding may also be referred to as “firehosing.”

Fourth industrial revolution, 4IR, or Industry 4.0, conceptualizes rapid change to technology, industries, and societal norms in the twenty-first century due to increasing interconnectivity and smart automation. This is being led by the joining of technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, advanced robotics, and transhumanism, which will blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds.

Gang stalking (cyber) is a form of cyberstalking or cyberbullying, in which a group of people target an individual online to harass them through repeated threat threats, fear-inducing behavior, bullying, teasing, intimidation, gossip and bad-jacketing.

GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers and the WEF to address the challenge of “harmful” content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising. This is done by rating social media platforms and websites. If an entity has a low score, advertisers, including aggregator sites, such as Google, are not allowed to advertise on those platforms. This is a de-monetization strategy. That has been used by governments to censor news stories that they find inconvenient, such as the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the safety and efficacy of the mRNA jab, and the origins of COVID-19. Both the participants and the terms of the GARM agreement are nontransparent.

GARM was launched at Cannes in the summer of 2019 and has been working hard to highlight the changes needed for advertisers to feel more confident about advertising on social media. As of November 2019, GARM is a flagship project of the World Economic Forum Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.

Gatekeeping is a process and propaganda technique of selecting content and blocking information to sway a specific outcome. It is often used in news production to manipulate the people by manipulating the writing, editing, positioning, scheduling, and repeating of news stories.

Generative AI means the class of AI models that emulate the structure and characteristics of input data in order to generate derived synthetic content. This can include images, videos, audio, text, and other digital content.

Gray and dark market data sets. A gray market or dark market data set is the trading of information through distribution channels that are not authorized by the original manufacturer or trademark proprietor.

Gray propaganda is communication of a false narrative or story from an unattributed or hidden source. The messenger may be known, but the true source of the message is not. By avoiding source attribution, the viewer becomes unable to determine the creator or motives behind the message. This is common practice in modern corporate media, in which unattributed sources are often cited.

The Great Reset is the name of an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its founder, Klaus Schwab in June 2020. They are using the cover of anti-COVID measures and an overstated public health crisis, as well as emergencies such as “climate change” to push an agenda to remake the world using stake-holder capitalism (a form of socialism).

Honeypots (not the sexual entrapment kind). In computer terminology, a honeypot is a computer security mechanism set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

Hypnosis is a procedure that guides one into a deep state of relaxation (sometimes described as a trancelike state) designed to characterized by heightened suggestibility and receptivity to direction. Hypnosis can be implemented it in digital media, movies, advertising and propaganda. Trance-like experiences aren’t all that uncommon. If you’ve ever zoned out while watching a movie or daydreaming, you’ve been in a similar trance-like state.

Hypnotic language patterns are used to influence and persuade by employing techniques such as lulling linguistic patterns, metaphor, and emotionally appealing words and phrases. Hypnotic language patterns and propaganda are connected through the use of persuasive and manipulative techniques to influence public opinion and highlights the powerful impact of language on shaping public perception and behavior.

Industry 4.0: The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is a term used to refer to the next generation of technological advances, where it is anticipated that the differences between physical, digital and biological technologies disappear. This is a world where machines and computers evolve independently, where new biological entities and evolutionary changes are being controlled by artificial intelligence, where brain waves can be manipulated. It is, quite literally, a brave new world.

Infodemic is the rapid and far-reaching spread of information, both accurate and inaccurate about a specific issue. The word is a conjoining of "information" and "epidemic." It is used to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This use of this technique can be deliberate and intentional.

Inverted totalitarianism is a managed democracy, where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled. Regulatory control is superimposed upon the administrative state and a nontransparent group of managers and elites run the country from within.

Limited hangout is a propaganda technique of displaying a subset of the available information. It involves deliberately revealing some information to try to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

A modified limited hangout goes further by slightly changing the information disclosed. Commercially controlled media is often a form of limited hangout, although it often also modifies information and so can represent a modified limited hangout.

Low-cost radios (ham, AM, local) Throughout less-developed technologically areas in the world, these technologies are the backbone of communications.

Mal-information is any speech that can cause mistrust of the government, even if the information is true.

Malware is malicious software that breaches a network through a vulnerability, typically when a user clicks a dangerous link or email attachment.

Man-in-the-middle (MitM) is an attack that interferes with a two-party transaction to steal data or inject malware.

Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. Mass formation within a population can happen suddenly.

Mass formation psychosis describes the individual under the spell of mass formation. Although this term is not found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), it is our opinion that it is just a matter of time before this amendment will be included.

Mass surveillance is the surveillance of a population or fraction of a population. This surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Often specific political groups are targeted for their beliefs and influence.

Modified limited hangout is a propaganda technique that displays only a subset of the available information, that has also been modified by changing some or all of the information disclosed (such as exaggeration or making things up). It is meant to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

Moral outbidding (see purity spiral)

NBIC is hyper-personalized targeting that integrates and exploits “neuroscience, bio-technology, information, and cognitive” (NBIC) techniques by using social media and digital networks for neuro-profiling and targeting individuals.

Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is a set of techniques that are used to improve communication, interpersonal relationships, and personal development. It is based on the idea that our thoughts, language, and behaviors are all connected. By changing one of these elements, the other elements will be altered. Hypnosis and meditation, including the use of repetitive messaging are core NLP Techniques. Other techniques including visualization, image switching, modeling of other successful people, mirroring (using body language to mirror others that you wish to gain approval of) and the use of incantations to reprogram the mind.

Nudging is any attempt at influencing people’s judgment, choice or behavior in a predictable way that is motivated because of cognitive boundaries, biases, routines, and habits in individual and social decision-making posing barriers for people to perform rationally in their own self-declared interests, and which works by making use of those boundaries, biases, routines, and habits as integral parts of such attempts. In fifth-gen warfare, nudging can take the form of images, videos or online messages.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (covert and publicly available sources) to produce actionable intelligence.

Operation Mockingbird was organized by Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer in 1950. The CIA spent about of one billion dollars a year in today’s dollars, hiring journalists from corporate media, including CBS, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and others, to promote their point of view. The original operation reportedly involved some three thousand CIA operatives and hired over four hundred journalists. In 1976, the domestic operation supposedly closed, but less than half of the media operatives were let go. Furthermore, documentary evidence shows that much of Operation Mockingbird was then offshored to escape detection. It is rumored that British intelligence picked up many of the duties of Operation Mockingbird on behalf of the US intelligence community (see the Trusted News Initiative).

Othering is a phenomenon where individuals or groups are defined, labeled and targeted as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. This is a tactic used by the deep state, politicians and the media. Chaos agents as well as propaganda are used to create a sense of divide. This influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group versus those who are seen as being part of the out-group. This can happen on both a small and very large scale.

Outrage porn, also known as outrage journalism, is a form of media or storytelling that aims to elicit strong emotional reactions to expand audiences or boost engagement.

Phishing is the practice of sending fraudulent communications that appear to come from a reputable source, aimed at stealing sensitive data or installing malware.

Propaganda is a form of manipulation of public opinion by creating a specific narrative that aligns with a political agenda. It uses techniques like repetition, emotional appeals, selective information, and hypnotic language patterns to influence the subconscious mind, bypassing critical thinking and shaping beliefs and values. Propaganda can use a form of hypnosis, whereby putting people into a receptive state where they are more prone to accepting messages.

Psychological Bioterrorism is the use of fear about a disease to manipulate individuals or populations by governments and other organizations, such as Big Pharma. Although the fear of infectious disease is an obvious example, it is not the only way psychological bioterrorism is used. Other examples include propaganda regarding environmental toxins, unsafe drinking water, soil contamination, and climate change risks. Another name for psychological bioterrorism is information bioterrorism.

Psychological warfare involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence opposition groups' opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior.

PsyWar is when psyops is used by governments against a foreign population or even against the citizens of a government (domestically) in a coordinated fashion.

Publicly available raw data and surveys used to sway public opinion by use of memes, essays and social media posts.

Purity spiral is a form of groupthink, where it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding"). Moral outbidding makes it beneficial to hold specific beliefs than to not hold them. Although a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is about purity.

Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a victim’s files and demands payment in exchange for the decryption key.

Realpolitik is political philosophy (or politics) based on practical objectives rather than on ideals. The word does not mean “real” in the English sense but rather connotes “things”—hence a politics of adaptation to things as they are. Realpolitik thus suggests a pragmatic, no-nonsense view and a disregard for ethical considerations. In diplomacy it is often associated with relentless, though realistic, pursuit of the national interest.

Repetitive messaging is a propaganda technique whereby a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously throughout media without regard for truth or consistency.

Sealioning is a trolling or harassment tactic in online discussions and blogs. It involves the attacker asking relentless and insincere questions or requests for evidence under the guise of civility and a desire for genuine debate. These requests are often tangential or previously addressed and the attacker maintains a pretense of civility and sincerity, while feigning ignorance of the subject matter. Sealioning is aimed at exhausting the patience and goodwill of the target, making them appear unreasonable.

Shadow banning (also known as stealth banning, hell-banning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting) is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some or all areas of an online community. This is done in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm.

Social credit systems: China’s social credit system is a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a “score” that can restrict the ability of individuals or corporations to function in the modern world by limiting purchases, acquiring property or taking loans based on past behaviors. Of course, how one uses the internet directly impacts the social credit score. This is the origin of the social credit system that appears to be evolving in the United States. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics are a kind of social credit system designed to coerce businesses—and, by extension, individuals and all of society—to transform their practices, behaviors and thinking.

Social engineering is any manipulation technique that exploits human behavior and error in order to gain access to sensitive or confidential information. Where some scammers would steal someone’s personal information, social engineers convince their victims to willingly hand over the requested information like usernames and passwords. “Nudge” technology is actually applied social engineering.

Social media algorithms are a set of rules and calculations used by social media platforms to prioritize the content that users see in their feeds based on their past behavior, content relevance, and the popularity of post. Social media algorithms are also used to determine which posts will or won’t get seen by other uses. “Free speech but not reach,” first coined by Elon Musk describes the use of social media algorithms on “X” and other such platforms.

Social media analytics (commercially available) is the process of gaining and evaluating data from social media networks (such as Twitter, Google, Brave or Facebook). This process helps to determine if a social media campaign’s performance was effective and make future decisions on the basis of this analysis.

Social media manipulation (data driven) involves a series of computational techniques that abuse social media algorithms and automation to manipulate public opinion.

Sophistry is the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving. It is a technique often used by the media and fact-checkers.

SQL Injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications whereby malicious SQL statements (code) are inserted into an entry field for execution.

Stovepiping is a term used in intelligence analysis, which prevents proper analysis by preventing objective analysts from drawing conclusions based on all relevant data by only providing some of the raw data without context.

Surveillance capitalism is a business model based on the unilateral claim of human private experiences as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These personal data are then extracted, processed, and traded to predict and influence human behavior. Specific data concerning individuals is the commodity. In this version of capitalism, the prediction and influencing of behavior (political and economic) rather than production of goods and services is the primary product. The economic success of this business model is a major contributor to the profitability of Google, Facebook, TikTok and many other social media companies. The data and tools of surveillance capitalism has been exploited for political purposes by Cambridge Analytica. In many cases the surveillance state and globalist governmental organizations have fused with surveillance capitalism to yield a new form of fascism commonly known as techno-totalitarianism.

Switchboarding describes the federal government’s practice of referring requests fo the removal of content on social media from state and local election officials to the relevant social media platforms for removal.

Synergistic use of mixed media to build excitement or to create outrage.

Synthetic media is a term used for the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media, through the use of generative AI and artificial intelligence algorithms for the purpose of misleading people or changing an original meaning. Often referred to as deepfakes.

Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility. This system explicitly contrasts with representative democracy. Decision-makers are selected on the basis of specialized knowledge and performance, rather than political affiliations, parliamentary skills, or popularity.

Tracking surveillance software (such as COVID trackers, GPS and cell phone keyword searches).

Traditional protest tools can be combined with fifth-gen warfare. An example would be a large rally combined with social media tools to create synergy or opposition for a movement.

Trolls are human online agents, sometimes sponsored to harass other users or post divisive content to spark controversies as well as dis-enfranchise individuals or group members through bad-jacketing and gossip.

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)–led organization which has been actively censoring eminent doctors, academics, and those with dissenting voices that contravene the official COVID-19 narrative as well as other narratives, such as voter fraud, elections and current news not sanctioned by government. Partners in this endeavor include the major mainstream media organizations, Big Tech (such as Google and social media), governments, and nongovernmental organizations. Anything contrary to the government narrative is considered disinformation or misinformation and will be deleted, suppressed, or deplatformed.

Ultra vires (“beyond the powers”) is a Latin phrase used in law to describe an act that requires legal authority but is done without it. Its opposite, an act done under proper authority, is intra vires (“within the powers”).

Virtue signaling is sharing one's point of view on a social or political issue, often on social media or through specific dress or actions, to garner praise or acknowledgment of one’s righteousness from others who share that point of view or to rebuke those who do not.

Web crawler, also known as a spiderbot, is an automated Internet program that systematically browses the World Wide Web for specific types of information.

White propaganda is a type of propaganda where the producer of the material is marked and indicated, and the purpose of the information is transparent. White propaganda is commonly used in marketing and public relations. White propaganda involves communicating a message from a known source to a recipient (typically the public or some targeted sub-audience). White propaganda is mainly based on facts, although often, the whole truth is not told.

World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the key think tanks and meeting places for managing global capitalism and is arguably coherent enough to qualify as the leading global “deep state” organization. Under the leadership of Professor Klaus Schwab, it has played an increasingly important role in coordinating the globalized hegemony of large pools of transnational capital and associated large corporations over Western democracies during the last three decades.

Wrap-up smear is a deflection tactic in which a smear is made up and leaked to the press. The press then amplifies the smear and gives it legitimacy. Then, an author can use the press coverage of the smear as validation to write a summary story, which is the wrap-up smear.

Yellow journalism is newspaper reporting that emphasizes sensationalism over facts. Advocacy journalists who support government narratives often use it to sway public opinion.

Zero-day exploit is a technique targeting a newly discovered vulnerability before a patch is available.

Body-by-Guinness

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Don't Let the Door Hit You, but Do Keep an Eye Out for the Subpoenas
« Reply #1114 on: December 23, 2024, 10:41:13 PM »
Rats fleeing from the light:

@gekaminsky
🚨Today, the State Department's Global Engagement Center is officially set to terminate eight years after it was authorized during the Obama administration.

The GEC, which almost earned a lifeline under the first CR version, is already scattering its employees to other agencies after congressional subpoenas and lawsuits targeting its funding of entities aiming to thwart alleged disinformation in the U.S., despite the GEC's mandate to act internationally.
GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, as I reported, and was involved with the 2020 Election Integrity Partnership pressuring social media platforms to remove content before the 2020 presidential election
As
@mtaibbi
 reported, GEC stayed in close contact w/ Twitter and asked it to remove accounts it believed were linked to foreign adversaries, though were, in many cases, managed by people in the U.S.
The House Judiciary Committee under
@Jim_Jordan
 unearthed documents showing GEC's involvement with the Department of Homeland Security's CISA to create the Election Integrity Partnership with Stanford University.

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Why Trump's TikTok argument to SCOTUS is wrong
« Reply #1115 on: January 01, 2025, 04:57:31 PM »


Trump Tries to Save TikTok From the Law
He wants the Supreme Court to treat him as if he’s already President.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 31, 2024 4:25 pm ET

The drafters of the U.S. Constitution debated whether one or more chief executives was the best form of government. They settled on one at a time, which has worked out well enough for 235 years. But enter Donald Trump, who now wants the Supreme Court to treat him like a second President with Joe Biden so he can save TikTok.

That’s the essence of Mr. Trump’s amicus brief filed Friday in TikTok v. Garland, which the Supreme Court will hear on Jan. 10. The President-elect implores the Justices to give him a chance to apply his “dealmaking” skills to rescue TikTok from the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that passed Congress in April.

***
The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good. The law bans TikTok in the U.S. if it doesn’t divest from its Chinese owner ByteDance by 270 days from its enactment. The deadline happens to fall on Jan. 19. Mr. Trump wants the Court to treat him as if he’s already President before he’s inaugurated.


Yet until he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump is for legal purposes a private citizen. The Court has already denied the request by TikTok and ByteDance for a stay of the law, choosing instead to rule on the merits. To grant Mr. Trump’s request for a stay now would set a bad precedent that invites future incoming Presidents to interfere in pending Court cases.

Mr. Trump is also in essence asking the Justices to let him rewrite a law he doesn’t like. But Congress debated TikTok for years before it finally acted in bipartisan fashion. The law carefully balances national security and First Amendment concerns and passed the House 360-58 and Senate 79-18.

The President-elect nonetheless argues that “whether Congress may dictate a particular outcome by the Executive Branch on such a significant, fact-intensive question of national security raises a significant question under Article II.” But the law doesn’t handicap the President’s power to respond to national-security threats. It strengthens it.

The law sets out a process that future Presidents can use to restrict other platforms controlled by foreign adversaries. Congress wanted to give Presidents power to combat security threats as they arise. Mr. Trump complains the law ties his hands on TikTok but not other platforms. But Congress singled out TikTok in this law to provide a prompt resolution to its specific national-security concerns.

Those concerns are significant and were vetted in Congress. They include that Chinese law says ByteDance must turn over the personal data of TikTok’s users to the ruling Communist Party on demand. Evidence also suggests that TikTok has manipulated algorithms to suppress content politically sensitive to Beijing and to amplify division in the U.S.

An ideologically diverse panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals examined these questions and unanimously ruled in December against TikTok. It dismissed First Amendment arguments because the law doesn’t discriminate by content or viewpoint. The case the High Court is hearing is an appeal of this D.C. Circuit ruling.

The law does allow for the sitting President—in this case Mr. Biden—to grant a 90-day delay on divestiture. But that is only if the President certifies that “significant progress” has been made on divestiture and more time is needed to complete it. The law doesn’t contemplate that a new President could come in and stop divestiture on his command.

Yet Mr. Trump instructs the Court that he deserves this power because he won the election and is a wizard on social media. Really, that’s his claim. His brief says he has special standing to represent the interests of some 170 million American TikTok users because he founded the “resoundingly successful social-media platform, Truth Social” and is “one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history.”

The brief adds with trademark puffery that “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government—concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged.”

At least that last point is right. Mr. Trump tried to force TikTok’s divestiture in his first term but was blocked by the courts. Why has he changed now? The brief implies that it’s because TikTok helped him win. He and his aides have been touting his success on TikTok since the election. Mr. Trump’s last-minute intervention to save TikTok will no doubt be received well in Beijing, which by the way bans U.S. social-media platforms.

One last legal point: Mr. Trump’s brief is signed by John Sauer, his nominee to be Solicitor General. But the SG isn’t supposed to be Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, and Mr. Sauer’s brief won’t help his credibility with the Justices if he is confirmed by the Senate. We trust the Justices will ignore this amicus sophistry

ccp

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Zuck appoints an R for head of global policy
« Reply #1116 on: January 03, 2025, 12:01:02 PM »
and Jewish too  8-)

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2025/01/03/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-replaces-global-head-of-policy-nick-clegg-with-republican-joel-kaplan/

sounds like another win for us even before he takes office.

Zucks grade goes from an F to D -      :wink:

ccp

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another CEO titan bends the knees and bows
« Reply #1117 on: January 04, 2025, 12:06:59 PM »

ccp

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Zuckerberg and Dana White
« Reply #1118 on: January 07, 2025, 05:38:42 AM »
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2025/01/06/ufc-head-trump-ally-dana-white-joins-meta-board-directors/

 :-o

They have grappling in common.

Hopefully, we will have someone on OUR side who might be able to keep an eye on that Meta guy and what he is up to.


ccp

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Wow

Zuck seems to be putting his money where his mouth is.

Crafty_Dog

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His calling Trump's moment of "Fight, fight, fight" when shot as "Pretty badass" seemed genuine.

In a sense, Zuck is a fence post turtle, wondering how the F he got to where he is.

Body-by-Guinness

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Cost of Censorship
« Reply #1122 on: January 07, 2025, 02:01:35 PM »
Brownstone piece on Zuck’s announcement:

The Cost of Facebook’s Now-Repudiated Censorship
BY Josh-StylmanJOSH STYLMAN, Jeffrey A TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER   JANUARY 7, 2025   CENSORSHIP, SOCIETY, TECHNOLOGY   10 MINUTE READ
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History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.”

Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight years of increasingly aggressive content moderation, including nearly 100 fact-checking organizations operating in over 60 languages, Meta is now pivoting to a community-driven system similar to X’s model.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg first suggests that the censorship was purely a technical mistake, and then changes his tune near the end and admits what has long been litigated: “The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”

In many court cases costing millions, involving vast FOIA requests, depositions, and discoveries, the truth of this has been documented in 100,000 pages of evidence. The Murthy v. Missouri case alone uncovered substantial communications through FOIA and depositions, revealing the depth of government coordination with social media platforms. The Supreme Court considered it all but several justices simply could not comprehend the substance and scale, and thus reversed a lower court injunction to stop it all. Now we have Zuckerberg openly admitting precisely what was in dispute: the US government’s involvement in aggressive violation of the First Amendment.

This should, at least, make it easier to find redress as the cases proceed. Still, it is frustrating. Tens of millions have been spent to prove what he could have admitted years ago. But back then, the censors were still in charge, and Facebook was guarding its relationship with the powers that be.

The timing of the shift is telling: a Trump ally joining the board, Meta’s president of global affairs being replaced by a prominent Republican, and a new administration preparing to take control. But while Zuckerberg frames this as a return to free speech principles, the damage of their experiment in mass censorship can’t be undone with a simple policy change.

The irony runs deep: private companies claiming independence while acting as extensions of state power. Consider our own experience: posting Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power” – only to have Meta remove it as “misinformation.” This wasn’t just censorship; it was meta-censorship – silencing discussion about the very mechanisms of control being deployed.

While tech platforms maintained the facade of private enterprise, their synchronized actions with government agencies revealed a more troubling reality: the emergence of exactly the kind of state-corporate fusion they were trying to prevent us from discussing.


As we’ve covered before, we didn’t just cross lines – we crossed sacred Rubicons created after humanity’s darkest chapters. The First Amendment, born from revolution against tyranny, and the Nuremberg Code, established after World War II’s horrors, were meant to be unbreakable guardians of human rights. Both were systematically dismantled in the name of “safety.” The same tactics of misinformation, fear, and government overreach that our ancestors warned against were deployed with frightening efficiency.

This systematic dismantling left no topic untouched: from discussions of vaccine effects to debates about virus origins to questions about mandate policies. Scientific discourse was replaced with approved narratives. Medical researchers couldn’t share findings that diverged from institutional positions, as seen in the removal of credible discussions of Covid-19 data and policy. Even personal experiences were labeled “misinformation” if they didn’t align with official messaging – a pattern that reached absurd heights when even discussing the nature of censorship itself became grounds for censorship.

The damage rippled through every layer of society. At the individual level, careers were destroyed and professional licenses revoked simply for sharing genuine experiences. Scientists and doctors who questioned prevailing narratives found themselves professionally ostracized. Many were made to feel isolated or irrational for trusting their own eyes and experiences when platforms labeled their firsthand accounts as “misinformation.”

The destruction of family bonds may prove even more lasting. Holiday tables emptied. Grandparents missed irreplaceable moments with grandchildren. Siblings who had been close for decades stopped speaking. Years of family connections shattered not over disagreements about facts, but over the very right to discuss them.

Perhaps most insidious was the community-level damage. Local groups splintered. Neighbors turned against neighbors. Small businesses faced blacklisting. Churches divided. School board meetings devolved into battlegrounds. The social fabric that enables civil society began unraveling – not because people held different views, but because the very possibility of dialogue was deemed dangerous.

The censors won. They showed that with enough institutional power, they could break apart the social fabric that makes free discourse possible. Now that this infrastructure for suppression exists, it stands ready to be deployed again for whatever cause seems urgent enough. The absence of a public reckoning sends a chilling message: there is no line that cannot be crossed, no principle that cannot be ignored.

True reconciliation demands more than Meta’s casual policy reversal. We need a full, transparent investigation documenting every instance of censorship – from suppressed vaccine injury reports to blocked scientific debates about virus origins to silenced voices questioning mandate policies. This isn’t about vindication – it’s about creating an unassailable public record ensuring these tactics can never be deployed again.

Our Constitution’s First Amendment wasn’t a suggestion – it was a sacred covenant written in the blood of those who fought tyranny. Its principles aren’t outdated relics but vital protections against the very overreach we just witnessed. When institutions treat these foundational rights as flexible guidelines rather than inviolable boundaries, the damage ripples far beyond any single platform or policy.

Like many in our circles, we witnessed this firsthand. But personal vindication isn’t the goal. Every voice silenced, every debate suppressed, every relationship fractured in service of “approved narratives” represents a tear in our social fabric that makes us all poorer. Without a full accounting and concrete safeguards against future overreach, we’re leaving future generations vulnerable to the same autocratic impulses wearing different masks.

The question isn’t whether we can restore what was lost – we can’t. The question is whether we’ll finally recognize these rights as truly inviolable, or continue treating them as inconvenient obstacles to be swept aside whenever fear and urgency demand it. Benjamin Franklin warned that those who would surrender essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Our answer to this challenge will determine whether we leave our children a society that defends essential liberties or one that casually discards them in the name of safety.

Here is the full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement, January 7, 2024:

Hey, everyone. I wanna talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown 5 years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years.

There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content, governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I wanna make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.

Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re gonna do.

First, we’re gonna get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we’re gonna phase in a more comprehensive community note system. Second, we’re gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.

What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I wanna make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms. Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re gonna focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.

And for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re gonna dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off.

It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re gonna start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

Fifth, Fifth, we’re gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we’re gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.

Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.

But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right. And these are complex systems. They’re never gonna be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.

But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there and more to come soon.”

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-cost-of-facebooks-now-repudiated-censorship/

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Zuch's Mea Culpa
« Reply #1123 on: January 07, 2025, 05:26:58 PM »
Mark Zuckerberg’s Speech Mea Culpa
As Biden leaves office, Meta drops its censorship regime.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 7, 2025 5:51 pm ET

One result of Donald Trump’s victory is that business CEOs are rethinking their obeisance to the Democratic left. The latest example is Meta’s welcome decision this week to abandon its censorship regime.

In a mea culpa for the ages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday walked back most of the platform’s speech controls. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said in a video. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”


Well, well. Mr. Zuckerberg is rediscovering the courage of his free-speech convictions. In its early years, Facebook took a hands-off approach to moderating content. But after the 2016 election, Democrats lambasted the platform for not doing more to remove Russian disinformation, which they claimed helped Mr. Trump win.

Facebook then established an opaque system in which certified third parties, such as media outlets and nonprofits, fact-checked posts. Those rated misleading or false were demoted in user feeds. The leftwing bias in the fact checks spurred a conservative backlash and push to amend Section 230 to limit liability protections for online platforms.

Mr. Zuckerberg in 2019 tried to calm the furies by committing to free speech. “Increasingly today across the spectrum, it seems like there are more people who prioritize getting the political outcomes that they want over making sure that everyone can be heard,” he said at Georgetown University. “I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”

But as the winds in Washington blew left, so did the platform’s speech police. After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the platform banned Mr. Trump. Then it suppressed contrarian views related to Covid that Democrats deemed misinformation, often without explanation.

Facebook in March 2021 flagged a Journal op-ed by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary about the pace at which Americans would develop herd immunity. The platform also targeted the Journal’s review of climate contrarian Steven Koonin’s excellent book “Unsettled.”

Legal discovery in Murthy v. Missouri revealed how Meta executives bowed to demands by Biden officials to censor “misinformation.” The Supreme Court ruled last year that the plaintiffs didn’t prove they were censored in direct response to government pressure, but the case exposed the collusion between the Biden Administration and Big Tech.

The progressive censorship spurred Elon Musk to buy X.com (formerly Twitter) to provide a free-speech forum. To liberal shock, Mr. Musk eliminated the platform’s political speech controls and implemented a Community Notes system in which users can flag posts to provide more context. In other words, counter bad speech with more speech.

Meta on Tuesday said it will end its third-party fact-checking in the U.S. and adopt X.com’s system. “Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives,” chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan noted. “This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how.” Speech controls have “gone too far” and are “too often getting in the way of the free expression.”

“A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor,” Mr. Kaplan added. “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”

He said it will eliminate “restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.” It will also add layers of review before taking down a post and add staff to hear user appeals.

And get this—Meta will also follow Mr. Musk’s lead by moving its content review teams out of California to Texas and other U.S. locations. This may disrupt Silicon Valley group-think. Meta is also reversing a policy that suppressed political content in user feeds, which has been a particular frustration of news organizations, including us.

Such changes may be in part motivated by Meta’s desire to mend fences with Republicans who will soon control Washington and head off regulation. But Mr. Zuckerberg no doubt is also responding to the message that voters sent by electing Mr. Trump: Stop the progressive imperialism.

Some conservatives have called for increased regulation of social-media platforms on grounds that they are de facto public squares. But Messrs. Musk and Zuckerberg are showing how markets, including the political markets, are solving the censorship problem. More government speech control would make it worse.

DougMacG

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Re: WSJ: Zuch's Mea Culpa
« Reply #1124 on: January 08, 2025, 04:02:46 AM »
American "Glasnost", after 20 years of Soviet style rule. I'll believe it after I've seen it over a period of time.

He can't cooperate with the regime anymore - because the regime is gone, no thanks to him.

When will Google and other search engines and browsers stop rigging results?
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PJ Media, 'Zuch has a bad case of musk Envy.'   He he.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2025/01/08/the-morning-briefing-mark-zuckerberg-has-a-bad-case-of-musk-envy-n4935761
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Musk, Bezos, now Zuch shaping up, even Tim Cook at Apple.  Disney paying up. No word from Google yet - how do I SEARCH THAT?

Like Instapundit likes to say, 'don't get cocky' . We still need to govern.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2025, 07:28:04 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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interesting on take of possible Zuck changing sides
« Reply #1125 on: January 08, 2025, 07:38:23 AM »
psychological

aside from the obvious business strategy perhaps - envy - plays a role.

no doubt among the tech titans

all competing personalities:

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2025/01/08/the-morning-briefing-mark-zuckerberg-has-a-bad-case-of-musk-envy-n4935761