Author Topic: Goolag, FB, Youtube, Amazon, Twitter, Gov censorship/propaganda via Tech Octopus  (Read 182527 times)



DougMacG

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https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_a0ffff5c-1f7b-11ee-ae32-0768ce6c6daa.html

"Meta" (facebook, Instagram) used in human trafficking according to Florida attorney general.

They censor us. They (apparently) don't censor them.

Leftist censorship is the highest form of free speech, if you ask them. If so, do a better job.

We freed the slaves 158 years ago. Why do we have human trafficking running rampant in this country under leftist rule, or lack of enforcement?  It is beyond shameful.



Crafty_Dog

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WT: Judge unmasks staffers who stifled free speech
« Reply #1005 on: July 12, 2023, 01:57:56 AM »

https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=652f7a90b6fd689c0c4937ece40c02a9_64aea50b_6d25b5f&selDate=20230712&goTo=A01&artid=1&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=washingtontimes-E-Editions&utm_source=washingtontimes&utm_content=Read-Button

Judge unmasks staffers who stifled social posts

White House officials browbeat sites to pull content

BY SUSAN FERRECHIO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A federal judge who excoriated the Biden administration for pressuring social media platforms to censor Americans’ speech shined a light on a group of obscure but powerful White House staffers who leaned on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites to remove posts and ban users whose content they opposed.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, acting on a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by two states and a group of plaintiffs, said the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Court documents show that while top Biden administration officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci sought publicly and privately to censor social media posts over COVID-19 content, the task was more extensively carried out behind the scenes by a select band of staffers.

These aides led the administration’s efforts to squelch content they opposed, mostly by pressuring social media platforms with repeated requests for content removal, deplatforming of specific users and relentless demands for access to their internal content moderation policies and practices.

The effort began almost as soon as Mr. Biden entered the White House with a Jan. 23, 2021, email from Clarke Humphrey, then the digital director for the administration’s COVID-19 response team.

Mr. Humphrey emailed Twitter officials at 1 a.m. on Mr. Biden’s third day in office and asked them to remove a tweet posted a day earlier by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that suggested, without evidence, that the death of Hank Aaron, 86, could be tied to the coronavirus vaccine.

“Hey folks — Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” Mr. Humphrey wrote to Twitter.

The job of policing social media appeared to fall mostly to Mr. Humphrey’s White House colleague, Rob Flaherty, who recently left the administration, reportedly to take a job in President Biden’s reelection campaign.

Mr. Humphrey had looped in Mr. Flaherty on the Jan. 23 email to Twitter,

requesting he “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”

Mr. Flaherty, who served as deputy assistant to the president and director of digital strategy, subsequently led a dogged campaign to coerce Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to remove content about COVID-19 that went against the Biden administration’s policies, especially on posts and content that were skeptical of the vaccines or pandemic-related mandates.

Mr. Flaherty continually pressured Facebook to share with the White House the company’s internal policies for removing or moderating content.

He demanded Facebook take more aggressive action to censor “borderline” anti-vaccine content, which included posts that did not violate the platform’s rules but made the administration uncomfortable.

Mr. Flaherty in March 2021 sent Facebook offi cials a media report about Facebook’s internal study on the link between vaccine hesitancy and “borderline” Facebook content.

Such content included Facebook posts about experiencing or fearing severe vaccine side effects.

Mr. Flaherty accused Facebook of “hiding the ball” from the White House by not turning over the platform’s internal study information, to which Facebook responded that the media report did not accurately convey the research they are conducting.

“I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty wrote to Facebook in response. “I’ve been asking you guys pretty directly, over a series of conversations, for a clear accounting of the biggest issues you are seeing on your platform when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, and the degree to which borderline content — as you define it — is playing a role.”

In the exchange, Mr. Flaherty accused Facebook of allowing social media posts that spurred the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. He demanded to know “what actions and changes you are making to ensure you are not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.”

While Mr. Flaherty strong-armed Twitter and Facebook to cooperate with the White House, another staffer, Andy Slavitt, ramped up the effort by threatening the social media platforms with federal action.

Mr. Slavitt at the time was serving as a senior adviser to the Biden administration’s pandemic response team and was copied in on Mr. Flaherty’s emails to Facebook. He followed up with a message to the social media giant, warning them that “internally, we have been considering our options on what to do” about the platform’s failure to comply with White House demands.

Mr. Slavitt didn’t say specifically what the administration was considering.

The federal government can’t control private social media platforms but could hobble them significantly by working with Congress to eliminate their liability shield, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law protects them from legal liability over the content posted on their sites.

Mr. Slavitt also played a role in coercing Twitter to deplatform Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who during the pandemic posted questions, concerns and research about the mRNAbased vaccine’s side effects.

Mr. Berenson’s tweets also highlighted the research and data demonstrating the limited efficacy of the vaccines, lockdowns, masks and other Biden administration pandemic policies.

According to court documents, Mr. Slavitt, during a White House meeting with Twitter officials in April 2021, called Mr. Berenson “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”

Mr. Berenson was suspended by Twitter on July 16, 2021, and deplatformed on Aug. 28, 2021.

Mr. Berenson, who successfully sued Twitter to reactivate his account, is suing Mr. Slavitt and other White House officials as well as two senior board members of the vaccine maker Pfizer, over their bid to silence him.

“The White House was particularly concerned about me as someone whose questions could not be dismissed as mere conspiracy theories or paranoid delusions,” Mr. Berenson told The Washington Times. “They targeted me because — not in spite of — the fact that I presented reasonable, data-driven objections to mRNA vaccinations for young people and for mandates.”

Mr. Slavitt, who left the administration in June 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.

Upon his departure from the White House, Mr. Slavitt introduced Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to senior Facebook officials to help Dr. Murthy carry out the administration’s quest to quash COVID-19 social media content it opposed.

Eric Waldo, who is a senior adviser to Dr. Murthy, led the effort to implement Dr. Murthy’s July 2021 “health advisory on misinformation.” The advisory aimed to “stop the spread of misinformation on social media platforms” related to COVID-19.

Mr. Waldo worked to ensure Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and YouTube turned over internal company data on the content they labeled as misinformation as well as the steps taken by them to censor information that was critical of the vaccine or the Biden administration’s pandemic policies.

In August 2021, The surgeon general’s staff ramped up the pressure on Facebook, giving the platform a two-week deadline to provide the information.

Facebook responded with the report “How We’re Taking Action Against Vaccine Misinformation Superspreaders.” It included a detailed list of steps it had taken to block content posted by a White House-promoted list of users called the “Disinformation Dozen.”

The dozen social media accounts were identifi ed in March 2021 by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has ties to the left-wing British Labor Party. The group worked to get conservative commentator Katie Hopkins banned from Twitter in the United Kingdom and attempted to coerce Google into deplatforming the U.S. conservative website The Federalist.

The center’s list of a dozen offending posters included Mr. Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic who is now a Democratic presidential candidate.

The White House promoted the center’s list of a dozen offenders as part of Dr. Murthy’s “misinformation” health advisory. “There are about 12 people who are producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on July 15, 2021.

In addition to Mr. Kennedy, the list of offending users included osteopath physician Sherri Tenpenny, who the center cited for posting on Facebook a study that concluded cloth masks are ineffective and may increase the risk of infection.

Facebook in response provided Mr. Waldo with two additional reports in September 2021 on its efforts to silence the so-called misinformation on COVID policies and mute some of the pages and posts of the dozen offending platforms.

Mr. Waldo sought similar updates from Twitter, Instagram, Google and YouTube, according to court documents.

Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media director, also helped carry out the White House’s censorship scheme.

The court documents detail how she began holding weekly meetings in January 2021 with Facebook’s content mediation team to discuss “misinformation” about the vaccines. She looped in Census Bureau officials, who partnered with the CDC on the effort and wanted to discuss “misinformation topics,” including concerns about the vaccine causing side effects, infertility and death.

Ms. Crawford repeatedly emailed Facebook about specific postings that she deemed as misinformation on both Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta.

According to court documents, Facebook “began to rely on Crawford and the CDC to determine whether claims were true or false,” including whether the virus had a 99.96% survival rate, whether the vaccine caused Bells’ palsy and whether people who were administered the shot were part of a medical experiment.

Under the direction of Ms. Crawford, Facebook would remove or censor claims the CDC said were false.

Ms. Crawford also had regular contact with Twitter over posts that she and CDC experts believed were misinformation.

She sent Twitter a list of content the CDC, working with the Census Bureau, identified as false. The list included posts alleging the vaccines were not approved by the FDA, posts about “fraudulent cures,” vaccine injury data “taken out of context,” and claims the COVID shot caused infertility.

Ms. Crawford, according to the court documents, “understood she was flagging the posts for Twitter for possible censorship.”

Twitter responded to Ms. Crawford that some of the offending posts had been “reviewed and actioned.”

The behind-the-scenes efforts by the White House and the Biden administration to censor social media content were effective. The platforms began removing content and banning users almost as soon as Biden administration officials began contacting them, and they set up special portals that allowed White House and administration staffers to collaborate with the companies about content moderation.

The Biden administration is seeking to halt Judge Doughty’s injunction. White House officials defended their actions and said they were aimed at preserving public health, safety and security during a deadly pandemic.

The Justice Department on Monday filed an emergency stay motion in a federal appeals court after Judge Doughty, who was a Trump nominee, denied the department’s initial request to lift the ban on communicating with social media outlets.


Just a few days into the Biden presidency, a White House staffer asked Twitter personnel to remove a post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who posted tweeted an anti-vax opinion about Hank Aaron’s death.


U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy worked with social media companies to quash certain COVID-19 content.


Andy Slavitt, then-senior adviser to the White House COVID-19 Response Team, ramped up efforts to remove some posts. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOGRAPHS


Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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aldean is no hero

remember when during the Vegas shooting he ran of the stage faster then a bat flies over my head at dusk without even taking a few seconds to warn the crowd.

I allege he is also one who seems to sing lyrics that are same as some that disappeared out of our house

No I don't allege he steals anything - but I allege his friends do......

he is a phony.


Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: DOJ Antitrust vs. Google
« Reply #1012 on: September 12, 2023, 06:43:57 AM »
U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years
Search engine faces charges of using illegal agreements with partners such as Apple to maintain a monopoly
By
Dave Michaels
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Sept. 11, 2023 9:00 pm ET





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The Justice Department argues that Google’s exclusive deals prevent rivals from effectively competing for search business. PHOTO: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Google, the country’s dominant search engine, faces its biggest legal threat ever this week when the company goes on civil trial in Washington on allegations of violating U.S. antitrust laws.

The Justice Department’s case is aimed at Google search, and whether the company has used illegal agreements to sideline its rivals and harmed consumers and advertisers in the process. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be the default search engine on the Safari browser. 

Alphabet GOOG -0.21%decrease; red down pointing triangle-owned Google grew up during an era of more relaxed antitrust enforcement, particularly against technology companies that developed innovative—and often free—ways to explore and use the internet. Efforts to regulate Google and other technology giants have failed to advance in Congress in recent years. In the absence of such rules, the government is trying to use antitrust law to govern competition on the web and put curbs on the internet’s gatekeepers. Here are some crucial questions about the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since the government challenged Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

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Why is Google facing an antitrust lawsuit?
 The Justice Department and a group of states sued Google three years ago, alleging it illegally maintains a monopoly in online search and related advertising markets. Google has about a 90% market share in search and maintains its dominance through restrictive agreements with browser and phone partners such as Apple, Mozilla, Samsung and Verizon, according to the Justice Department. These deals, which the government says are illegal, make Google the default search engine on most U.S. phones. Google’s separate agreements with Android-based mobile-device manufacturers forbid pre-installing or promoting rival search engines if they opt to take a cut of Google’s search revenue.

Why the FTC’s Lina Khan Is Taking on Big Tech, Even if It Means Losing
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Since Lina Khan became Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021, she has taken on Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, making her a lightning rod for controversy. WSJ breaks down the battles she has picked and why she is willing to lose. Photo illustration: Xingpei Shen
What harm comes from Google’s agreements?
The Justice Department argues that Google’s exclusive deals with Apple and others prevent rivals from effectively competing for search business or improving their products. Because Google locks up all the browsers and gets all the queries, other companies such as Microsoft can’t perform enough searches to improve their product, the government says, giving it an anticompetitive scale advantage. Google’s agreements also stifle innovation, the Justice Department says, because the company doesn’t have to improve its search engine to maintain market share. Finally, Google has used its monopoly to raise prices for advertising on its search-results pages, according to the government.

How does Google explain the deals?
Google says its deals with Apple and others promote competition by supplying browser providers with what they want: a single default search option for customers. Apple and Mozilla chose Google because it continues to outstrip rival search engines, and not because they are coerced by revenue sharing or other inducements, it says. Windows users, who don’t have any Google products preloaded on their personal computers, generally opt for Google search because it is the best way to explore the internet, the company says.

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Google also points out that its agreements don’t prevent its partners from offering other search engines, because users of Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox browsers can change the default search option in their settings. And on Android phones, Google says, consumers can switch away from its preloaded search engine to other products on their own; the fact that few do so isn’t evidence of exclusionary practice, Google says, but of consumers sticking with a superior product. 

What happens if Google loses?
In theory, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta could order Google broken up but legal analysts consider that unlikely. More possible, they say, are new constraints on how Google does business, such as its ability to pay Apple, Samsung and others to be the default search engine on phones. “That seems like the most natural remedy,” said Paul Gallant, a tech-policy analyst at Cowen Washington Research Group. “Breaking up the company over unlawful payments to equipment manufacturers seems unlikely relative to the harm.”

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When did the U.S. government last challenge a big monopoly in court?
 The government sued Microsoft in 1998 over its attempt to control the market for internet browsers on Windows computers. The Justice Department prevailed in the lawsuit, which created an opening for rivals such as Google and Facebook to flourish in the future, according to the DOJ. The Justice Department says Google has emulated Microsoft’s 1990s playbook to build and maintain its own monopoly in internet search and advertising, while Google says the comparison is inapt. 

How long will the trial last and when will a verdict be reached?
 The Justice Department has one month to present its case, meaning the states and Google won’t question witnesses until October. Witness testimony is expected to conclude in November, and then the two sides will write briefs to the judge summarizing the case and arguing which way he should rule. Closing arguments and a judgment aren’t expected until next year. If Judge Mehta finds that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, he would schedule a separate trial to decide penalties. The decision is likely to be appealed, so the final outcome might be years away. 


Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, is likely to be questioned during the trial. PHOTO: HELYNN OSPINA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Who are the key witnesses in the trial?
While a complete witness list isn’t available yet, Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and some Apple executives, such as Eddy Cue, senior vice president of services, are likely to be questioned. The Justice Department is likely to call executives from Microsoft and DuckDuckGo, which operate competing search engines.

Who are the key lawyers working on the case?
 Google’s principal trial lawyer is John Schmidtlein, a partner at litigation powerhouse Williams & Connolly. Schmidtlein represented a group of states in part of the 1998 trial against Microsoft. Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker and Susan Creighton, a partner at the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini, have played key roles in dealing with the Justice Department and shaping trial strategy.

The Justice Department’s top lawyer in the courtroom is Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran of high-stakes government litigation. Dintzer began his DOJ career in the early 1990s and worked on the early Microsoft investigation. His trial colleagues include Adam Severt, Meagan Bellshaw and David Dahlquist.

—Miles Kruppa contributed to this article.

Crafty_Dog

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5th Circuit defends First Amendment from Biden-Tech collusion
« Reply #1013 on: September 12, 2023, 10:24:44 AM »
A Rebuke to Biden-Tech Censorship
The Fifth Circuit issues a landmark on collusion against free speech.
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The Editorial Board
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Sept. 11, 2023 6:38 pm ET


The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday against federal officials for colluding with tech platforms to suppress speech, but you’d hardly know it from the limited press coverage. The decision in Missouri v. Biden deserves more attention because it defines the constitutional limits to coordination between government and private actors and may be headed to the Supreme Court.

Missouri and Louisiana—joined by individuals whose posts opposing government views on Covid were censored—sued various federal officials for violating their First Amendment rights. Federal Judge Terry Doughty ruled against the government on nearly all points. The three-judge Fifth Circuit panel largely upheld his findings of fact and law while narrowing his injunction.

The unsigned 74-page opinion begins by detailing the unprecedented coordination during the pandemic between government agencies and social-media platforms. Tech employees “attended regular meetings” with government officials and “seemingly stepped-up their efforts” to remove content to appease them, the decision explains.

Platforms “gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users,” the opinion says. And they “changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials.”

The Biden Administration argued that the tech platforms acted independently, and that communications by federal officials are protected “government speech.” The Fifth Circuit disagreed, holding that officials crossed the First Amendment line by coercing platforms with threats of antitrust action and legal liability for user content under Section 230.

A private party “is ‘not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment,’” the Fifth Circuit explains. “That changes, though, when a private party is coerced or significantly encouraged by the government to such a degree that its ‘choice’” if “made by the government would be unconstitutional.” The court calls this the “close nexus test.”

Its decision analyzes in depth how government actions violate the First Amendment under this test. “Significant encouragement requires ‘omething more’ than uninvolved oversight from the government,” the ruling says, citing the Supreme Court’s Blum (1982) precedent. Yet federal officials were far from “uninvolved” in content decisions.

The Fifth Circuit distinguishes the complaints in Missouri from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit against Sen. Elizabeth Warren for asking Amazon to modify its algorithms to make his book harder to find. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that suit this year. Unlike the facts in this case, Ms. Warren’s letter was framed as a “request rather than a command” and she “lacked regulatory authority” over Amazon. The Senator’s letter also “contain[ed] no explicit reference” to “adverse consequences,” and “there was no indication that Amazon perceived the message as a threat.”

The nuanced opinion dismisses complaints against Anthony Fauci and other National Institutes of Health officials because they had merely “promoted the government’s scientific and policy views and attempted to discredit opposing ones—quintessential examples of government speech that do not run afoul of the First Amendment.”

The Fifth Circuit also narrows Judge Doughty’s injunction by spelling out how government officials can communicate with platforms without violating the First Amendment. For instance, they could ask social media companies to “Be on The Lookout” for certain posts provided there’s no intimidation.

The careful, detailed opinion sets the case up well for a Supreme Court appeal if the Biden Administration has the nerve. It may prefer to quit while it’s behind. In either case the ruling is a landmark that protects free speech from the government’s current method of laundering its censorship through private platforms.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2023, 10:28:38 AM by Crafty_Dog »

DougMacG

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Dismantle the Censorship-Industrial Complex
« Reply #1014 on: October 19, 2023, 06:30:32 AM »
https://westminsterdeclaration.org/

Matt Taibbi, et al
(Quite a list of signatories)

Body-by-Guinness

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Google Forced to Show what’s Under the Kimono
« Reply #1015 on: October 30, 2023, 06:22:03 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Sounds like CNN at airports , , ,


ccp

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Meta plot to re-engineer society
« Reply #1018 on: November 14, 2023, 12:32:49 PM »
anyone see the Charles Loughton move "Island of lost souls" early 30's

remade with Marlon Brando in the 70s or 80s ?

I am thinking justice would be for the peasants who are mind controlled rebel
and physically take the brat into the lab and hook his brain up to the Metaverse and force feed him and make him addicted to conservative values

this is getting beyond diabolically sick:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/14/exposed-metas-36-billion-plot-to-reengineer-society-and-mark-zuckerbergs-dangerous-future-plans-for-tech-addiction/

The Chinese are in a way doing this to us already with shittock

but they are too smart to let FB or meta , whatever , get away with doing it to them.

yet of course we will let FB do it to us.    :x
« Last Edit: November 14, 2023, 12:57:36 PM by Crafty_Dog »

G M

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Re: Meta plot to re-engineer society
« Reply #1019 on: November 14, 2023, 01:07:05 PM »
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-china-got-our-kids-hooked-on

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/china-s-president-xi-jinping-turns-down-mark-zuckerberg-s-request-to-name-his-unborn-child-at-white-house-dinner-a6679156.html

Grovel harder, Zuck.


anyone see the Charles Loughton move "Island of lost souls" early 30's

remade with Marlon Brando in the 70s or 80s ?

I am thinking justice would be for the peasants who are mind controlled rebel
and physically take the brat into the lab and hook his brain up to the Metaverse and force feed him and make him addicted to conservative values

this is getting beyond diabolically sick:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/14/exposed-metas-36-billion-plot-to-reengineer-society-and-mark-zuckerbergs-dangerous-future-plans-for-tech-addiction/

The Chinese are in a way doing this to us already with shittock

but they are too smart to let FB or meta , whatever , get away with doing it to them.

yet of course we will let FB do it to us.    :x

ccp

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Zuck's wife:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Chan

CCP connection ?  probably not but a thought.

" at the dinner, which included Apple’s Tim Cook and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Zuckerberg reportedly asked President Xi whether he would be able to give an honorary Chinese name to the daughter he and wife Priscilla Chan are expecting.
Page Six claims President Xi said the task would be “too much responsibility” and declined, though a spokesperson for Zuckerberg told the newspaper this was not correct."

if true, I am sure Xi would have not been smart enough to guess this was a business play from the get go.
Zuck at least would have been more honest if he simply asked if he could shine Xi's shoes.


Crafty_Dog

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Body-by-Guinness

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Zuck’s Science AI Unplugged 2 Days Later
« Reply #1023 on: November 14, 2023, 04:16:46 PM »
« Last Edit: November 14, 2023, 07:39:39 PM by Body-by-Guinness »




Crafty_Dog

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Body-by-Guinness

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Snopes Gets Backwards Backward
« Reply #1029 on: January 28, 2024, 10:58:57 AM »
Add “Snopes” to the topic line for this to fit, but it’s a lovely case in point of a website carrying water for a Democrat despite an obvious error, and ought to be all anyone needs to know about the veracity of that site:

https://www.mediaite.com/news/snopes-fact-check-calls-true-biden-story-false-despite-photos-they-included-in-post-then-reverses-it/

Body-by-Guinness

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An Easy Fix to Prevent CACA from Losing the Climate Debate:
« Reply #1030 on: January 28, 2024, 09:25:01 PM »
Censor "deniers" on social media! Oh, and create an AI to scour social media for heretics the Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse can burn at the digital stake so as to protect their CACA canons.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/23/our-best-climate-realism-communicators/

Body-by-Guinness

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Higher Ed Outsources Censorship for Biden/Feds
« Reply #1031 on: February 07, 2024, 12:28:54 PM »
This could go more than one place, but given the censorship involved I'm dropping it here. Jaw dropping stuff:


“Externalizing the Difficult Responsibility of Censorship”: Higher Education in the Censorship Triad

Jonathan Turley, Feb. 7, 2024

 This week, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a new report on the Biden Administration’s massive censorship system. The ongoing investigation has exposed the coordination in a system of blacklisting, throttling, and suspensions of targeted citizens and groups. Now, it appears that the Biden White House also pushed for Amazon to target dissenting books to suppress sales by blocking promotions. After all, why burn books when you can bury them?

The apparently successful effort by the White House was little surprise given what a federal court called Biden’s “Orwellian” and unprecedented censorship efforts. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” Biden is now unquestionably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams.

What is new is the details on how academic institutions are critical to this censorship system and the coordination with the government to deal with the backlash from the public. The disclosed emails show how government officials orchestrated media campaigns to shield the system, and their academic partners, from attacks over free speech. The report includes discussions in response to my own past writing denouncing this system.

Some of us have been raising the alarm over the role of universities in this censorship system. While faculty and students once opposed any academic research supporting the military industrial complex, there has been no such opposition to researchers supporting a censorship system targeting dissenting views and supplying blacklists to government and corporate partners.

There has long been a narrative in the media that portrayed academics working in this system as victims hounded by critics. For example, one article featured the work of Kate Starbird, director and co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public. The University of Washington is one of the most important partners in the academic-corporate-government triad. Other key institutions include Stanford University, University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. The article discussed how “her attempt to promote factual information and strengthen democracy has gotten her sued, blasted by congressional inquiries and subjected to a death threat.”

The internal messages revealed by the House show how such media campaigns were coordinated to frame the coverage. While these researchers actively work to target others, they often object to criticism of their work as bullying and the work of disinformers.

Notably, in her communications disclosed by the House, Starbird cautions against giving examples of disinformation to keep them from being used by critics, adding “since everything is politicized and disinformation inherently political, every example is bait.”

She and others reached out to grant managers in dealing with the public spin. Wisconsin Journalism Professor Michael Wagner flagged one of my columns to Michael Pozmantier, a program manager at the National Science Foundation, an independent government agency. What is striking that the two suggest that the column was wrong but do not state a single mistaken fact.  Indeed, the report confirms the extensive effort to coordinate the identification of those spreading what the researchers deemed disinformation. In another email, Pozmantier explained that “Track F is the NSF ‘Accelerator track focused on combating mis/disinformation.'”

Pozmantier also shows the sweeping agenda behind these grants, noting “Projects in Track F will pursue a convergence research agenda and leverage multi-sector partnerships to address issues of trust and authenticity in communication systems, including predicting, preventing, detecting, correcting, and mitigating the spread of inaccurate information that harms people and society.”

Other academic institutions in the report are shown marketing their own eagerness to become part of this censorship system. University of Michigan’s James Park is shown pitching that school’s WiseDex First Pitch program, promising that “our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

These emails show the fluidity of what is deemed unacceptable viewpoints for these academics and their partners. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), during prior court testimony. CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, previously declared the administration’s intent to extend its role over maintaining critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure” and combating not just mis- and disinformation but also “malinformation,” which CISA describes as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

For academic institutions, the central role played in this censorship infrastructure is alarming. Some of these programs have now pledged that they will no longer target content on the Internet. However, for years, the Biden Administration funded blacklisting systems as well as programs to target the advertisers of conservative sites.

For example, the federal government helped to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the top 10 most risky sites are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” Those top disinformation sites included Reason, a libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. However, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

Universities should be places where false claims and conspiracy theories are debated and exposed. However, there is a dangerous line that is crossed when universities partner with the government or corporations in a system targeting individuals and groups for censorship.

Here is the report: NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix

ETA Here's the link for the NSF report cited above: https://jonathanturley.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix.pdf

Executive summary for the above:

This interim report details the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) funding of AI- powered censorship and propaganda tools, and its repeated efforts to hide its actions and avoid political and media scrutiny.

In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams. The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)- powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.

Non-public documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government demonstrate that these federal bureaucrats, “disinformation” researchers, and non-profit groups understood that their actions—“content moderation” and combatting so-called misinformation—amounted to “censorship.”2 And yet, NSF forged ahead, supporting new technologies that would essentially enable the censorship of online speech “at scale.”

But NSF’s taxpayer funding for this potential automated censorship is only half of the story. The Committee and the Select Subcommittee have also obtained, via document requests and subpoenas, nonpublic emails and other documents that reveal a years-long, intentional effort by NSF to hide its role in funding these censorship and propaganda tools from media and political scrutiny. From legal scholars, such as Jonathan Turley, to conservative journalists, NSF tracked public criticisms of its work in funding these projects. NSF went so far as to develop a media strategy that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.”3 Thus, “any law or government policy that reduces that freedom on the [social media] platforms . . . violates the First Amendment.”4 To inform potential legislation, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have been investigating the Executive Branch’s collusion with third- party intermediaries, including universities, non-profits, and businesses, to censor protected speech on social media. The Committee and Subcommittee have uncovered serious violations of the First Amendment throughout the Executive Branch, including:

 The Biden White House directly coercing large social media companies, such as Facebook, to censor true information, memes, and satire, eventually leading Facebook to change its content moderation policies;5

 Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP)—created at the request of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—working with the federal government to flag thousands of links and submit recommendations directly to large social media platforms to censor Americans’ online speech in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election;6 and

 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) harassing Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X) because of Musk’s commitment to free speech, even going so far as to target certain journalists by name.7

As egregious as these violations of the First Amendment are, each still faced the same limitation: the censors were human. Senior Biden White House officials had to spend time personally berating the social media companies into changing their content moderation policies. Social media executives expended considerable time and effort responding to the White House’s threats and evaluating the flagged content. Stanford had nearly a hundred people working for the EIP in shifts flagging thousands of posts, which was only a fraction of the number of election- related posts made in the fall of 2020.8
But what happens if the censorship is automated and the censors are machines? There is no need for shifts or huge teams of people to identify and flag problematic online speech. AI- driven tools can monitor online speech at a scale that would far outmatch even the largest team of “disinformation” bureaucrats and researchers. This interim report reveals how NSF is using American taxpayer dollars to fund the tools that could usher in an even greater threat to online speech than the original efforts to censor speech on social media. The NSF-funded projects threaten to help create a censorship regime that could significantly impede the fundamental First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and potentially do so in a manner that is instantaneous and largely invisible to its victims.

The Committee and the Select Subcommittee are responsible for investigating “violation of the civil liberties of citizens of the United States.”9 In accordance with this mandate, this interim staff report on NSF’s violations of the First Amendment and other unconstitutional activities fulfills the obligation to identify and report on the weaponization of the federal government against American citizens. The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s investigation remains ongoing. NSF still has not adequately complied with a request for relevant documents, and more fact-finding is necessary. In order to better inform the Committee’s legislative efforts, the Committee and Select Subcommittee will continue to investigate how the Executive Branch worked with social media platforms and other intermediaries to censor disfavored viewpoints in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ... 4
I.
II.
A.
B.
Can Lead to Censorship “At Scale”................................................................................................ 9 C. The National Science Foundation’s Funding of Censorship Tools ................................... 10
1. The National Science Foundation ...................................................................................... 10
2. NSF’s Convergence Accelerator Program ......................................................................... 11
3. NSF’s Track F: The Censorship Program.......................................................................... 11
D. Censorship and Propaganda in Action: Universities and Non-Profits Develop AI Tools and Other New Technologies to Censor at Scale with Help of Federal Funding ......................... 13
1. The University of Michigan: WiseDex .............................................................................. 14
2. Meedan: Co-Insights ... 16
3. The University of Wisconsin: CourseCorrect .................................................................... 21
4. MIT: Search Lit... 21
III. THE FEDERALLY FUNDED CENSORS: PARTISAN AND CONDESCENDING............................. 22 A. In Their Own Words, “Disinformation” Pseudo-Scientists Describe Their Work As “Political” and “Censorship” ... 23 B. NSF-Funded Researchers Believe the American Public is Not Smart Enough to Discern Fact from Fiction, Especially Conservatives, Minorities, and Veterans....................................... 25 C. NSF-Funded Researchers Understand the Leverage They Have Over Social Media Companies to Ensure the Platforms Bow to Their Demands ....................................................... 26 IV. NSF IS TRYING TO COVER UP ITS FUNDING OF AI CENSORSHIP........................................ 28 A. NSF Developed an Official Media Strategy to Hide its Track F Censorship Program from the American People ... 28
B. NSF Considered Blacklisting Conservative Media Outlets............................................... 32
C. NSF Attempted to Hide Additional Funding to Its Track F Censorship Program............. 33
D. NSF Continues to Try to Cover Up Its Funding of Censorship Tools............................... 34
E. NSF Is Attempting to Stonewall Congressional Investigations......................................... 38
V. The Role of Congress: Defund the Censorship-Industrial Complex and Fight the Next Battle to Defend Free Speech ... 38
APPENDIX A:
APPENDIX B: APPENDIX C:
APPENDIX D:
LETTER FROM THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION DIRECTOR SETHURAMAN PANCHANATHAN TO REP. JIM JORDAN, CHAIRMAN OF HOUSE COMM. ON JUDICIARY COMMITTEE (JUNE 13, 2023).
NSF’S “TRACK F MEDIA STRATEGY” DOCUMENT (NOV. 22, 2021).
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN’S WISEDEX FIRST PITCH SLIDE DECK (OCT. 26, 2021).
MIT’S SEARCH LIT PHASE I PROPOSAL TO NSF (2021).
THE HISTORICAL LIMITS OF HUMAN CENSORSHIP ............................................................... 5
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS FUNDING AI-POWERED CENSORSHIP TOOLS ..................... 7 Government Censorship Has Extended to the West, including the United States............... 8 Free Speech Advocates Have Sounded the Alarm Regarding How Artificial Intelligence
« Last Edit: February 07, 2024, 12:43:42 PM by Body-by-Guinness »

Crafty_Dog

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BBG:  Suitable thread!  Yay!  :-D

ccp

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zuck censorship begins
« Reply #1033 on: February 10, 2024, 01:33:48 PM »
one can easily see why he has an escape bunker on a relatively remote Hawaiian island...


https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2024/02/10/zuck-wants-you-distracted-instagram-threads-to-stop-recommending-political-content/

Crafty_Dog

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I disagree. Common Carrier argument makes sense to me
« Reply #1034 on: February 25, 2024, 05:00:54 PM »
This also piece fails to note the distinction between Platform and Publisher (also see Section 230)

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

Big Tech Censorship Goes to the Supreme Court
Florida and Texas want government to police free speech on social-media platforms. That never turns out well and it violates the First Amendment.
By The Editorial Board
WSJ

Can government tell Big Tech companies how to edit content and police their platforms? That’s the question before the Supreme Court on Monday in two cases with major First Amendment implications (Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton).

NetChoice, a tech industry group, is challenging Texas and Florida laws that seek to prevent social-media platforms from silencing conservatives. Republicans are rightly frustrated by censorship that often tilts against conservatives, including us. But the solution to business censorship of conservatives isn’t government censorship of business.

***
The Florida law bans large social-media platforms from removing the accounts of political candidates, or suppressing posts by or about them. Platforms also can’t take “any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast,” and they must apply their standards “in a consistent manner” among their users.

The Texas law bars platforms from making editorial decisions based on the viewpoint of a user’s expression, which isn’t clearly defined. The law is so broad it could be read to bar platforms from suppressing pro-Nazi speech or content that glorifies eating disorders. Both laws require platforms to explain in detail why posts are removed. Companies could face stiff government penalties and lawsuits.

NetChoice makes a strong case that the laws abridge First Amendment speech rights by restricting the editorial discretion of platforms. Only last term the Court ruled in 303 Creative LLC that Colorado couldn’t compel a website designer to create work that violates her values. The same principle, NetChoice says, should apply to the Texas and Florida laws.

While such social-media platforms as Instagram and YouTube aren’t traditional publishers like newspapers and broadcasters, they exercise editorial judgment when they decide what content to remove, suppress or amplify. They also exercise discretion when curating user feeds and making recommendations.

The states disagree. They claim their laws regulate business conduct, not expression. They also argue that states can prohibit businesses that open themselves to the public from discriminating against customers under the common-carrier legal doctrine that predates the U.S. Constitution.

“Common carriers have generally opened their facilities to all speakers and speech,” Florida writes in its brief. “Requiring them to open that door a crack more interferes with no expression of their own. Thus, the telephone company, internet-service provider, and delivery service have license neither to snuff out the speech they carry, nor to cancel disfavored subscribers.”

This analogy is inapt. Businesses that are regulated as common carriers like telephone companies, taxis, railroads and electric utilities don’t engage in editorial or expressive activity. Yet the states implicitly concede that social-media platforms do engage in such expression when they accuse them of discriminating against disfavored speech. Florida and Texas can’t have it both ways.

The overriding problem is that extending common-carrier regulation to social-media platforms invites more government control of speech. Do Florida and Texas want Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan dictating what can and can’t be said online? Could California pass a law requiring companies to remove posts that criticize male transgender participation in women’s sports?

Texas and Florida lean heavily on the Court’s Pruneyard precedent (1980), which held that California could extend its constitutional free speech protections to malls because they are open to the public. But malls don’t typically engage in activities protected by the First Amendment. Pruneyard also gave short shrift to the property rights of business owners.

A more relevant precedent is Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), which overturned a Florida law requiring newspapers to offer equal space to political candidates to respond to editorials that criticize them. The Court said the law compelled and chilled speech because “editors might well conclude that the safe course is to avoid controversy.”

The Florida and Texas laws do the same. If the laws stand, companies would no doubt refrain from policing their platforms to avoid being bankrupted by litigation. Some conservatives might prefer an online free-for-all, and the free market has given birth to platforms for them. Elon Musk has taken a lighter touch to content regulation since buying X, formerly Twitter. But if you’re worried about the cultural damage from social media now, imagine if sites are obliged to let anything go.

***
These two cases, by the way, are separate from one the Court will hear in a few weeks concerning Biden Administration pressure on tech platforms to censor conservatives. That case, Murthy v. Missouri, implicates government censorship that strikes us as a First Amendment violation.

Conservatives are understandably concerned that left-leaning tech companies want to exclude their ideas. There is no easy solution to this problem. Exposure and condemnation of the censorship has helped. But it never turns out well for conservatives, or anyone else, when the supposed remedy is giving government more power to control speech. The Supreme Court can make that clear to Texas and Florida.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2024, 05:03:27 PM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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Is there any remedy when you are censored?
« Reply #1035 on: February 25, 2024, 05:57:34 PM »
A pleasnat  surprise to see that this prof is from Columbia.

Is There Any Remedy When You’re Censored?
The Supreme Court has three opportunities this term to give teeth to the First Amendment.
By Philip Hamburger
Feb. 25, 2024 3:33 pm ETA


It’s said that for every right there’s a remedy. Three cases before the Supreme Court will test whether that’s true for the freedom of speech.

In National Rifle Association v. Vullo, a New York state official took aim at gun advocacy by threatening regulatory hassle for bankers and insurers that continued to do business with the NRA. Recognizing the threat, they dumped the organization. Now that the official, Maria Vullo, is being sued, she claims that under the qualified-immunity doctrine, she can’t be ordered to pay damages.

Qualified immunity broadly protects officials from liability, so most plaintiffs who are censored don’t bother seeking damages for past suppression. Instead they seek injunctions against future censorship. In Murthy v. Missouri, however, the Biden administration is trying to foreclose that remedy, too.

Although the government pressured social-media platforms to censor users, it now claims the plaintiffs shouldn’t get an injunction because they can’t show that they are likely to be censored again. They also want injunctive protection for their ability to read other authors, but again the government objects. More seriously, even if the court sustains the injunction in Murthy, it won’t be sufficient, as it doesn’t bar the full breadth of the current censorship. Injunctions will always be inadequate in the face of secret suppression. In this case, because the government kept its role secret, it has taken more than half a decade to get an injunction against the censorship.

Americans are thus in a strange predicament. Under Supreme Court doctrine, they can’t be confident of getting either damages for past censorship or a prompt and effective injunction against future censorship. And it gets worse. In NetChoice v. Paxton, in which the justices hear oral arguments on Monday, there’s a danger the court will strike down Texas’ free-speech statute. That law treats the dominant social-media platforms as common carriers and bars them from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.

This sort of antidiscrimination law is the only effective remedy for the current regime of government censorship. It’s unlikely that federal law will adequately limit federal censorship, so state law is structurally essential to stop it. And only when common-carrier antidiscrimination rules are applied to the platforms will the federal government be fully precluded from imposing censorship through them.

A decision that state common-carrier laws can’t be used to stop federal censorship through the platforms would render such censorship all but irremediable. Damages are generally unavailable for past censorship, and injunctions are too slow and otherwise inadequate against future censorship—so a decision against an antidiscrimination rule would make it a trifecta against free speech.

This risk is especially startling because it’s only recently that Americans have needed a remedy against censorship. The government once couldn’t actually suppress speech; it could only punish the speaker, and for this it had to go to court. The government once had to go to court to charge a particular defendant with seditious libel or some other offense and prove its accusation. Now, the government can simply pressure or induce the dominant social-media platforms to suppress speech en masse. That approach doesn’t merely punish speakers; it snuffs out speech. And it places the onus of going to court on the censored individuals.

Whereas the censored once merely had to defend themselves when prosecuted, they now need to persuade a court to stop the censorship. The current federal censorship thus silences Americans and puts the burden of proof on those who wish to speak. And even when they meet that burden, as in the current cases, they usually can’t get damages or a timely and effective injunction.

Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia Law School and is CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents the individual plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri. He is author of “Courting Censorship.”
« Last Edit: February 26, 2024, 02:37:13 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Body-by-Guinness

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What Would the Woke Say if Racists Posted Pics of Black Nazis?
« Reply #1036 on: February 26, 2024, 08:18:06 PM »
Interesting essay examining the various incongruities emerging in the wake of Google’s AI debacle, with the pithiest noting the jaw-dropping idiocy required to allow an obviously flawed product that had undergone extensive beta testing with NO ONE noting its obvious issue as it appears everyone at Google is unaware of the woke water in which they swim.

https://instapundit.substack.com/p/googles-ai-debacle?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR0W9dciaBuHwBebCRnPlb9fT-KPnr4Wj8VP6WfQ0-wEf8VwFTJMTN6Jo-4&open=false

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Chinese must divest TikTok
« Reply #1037 on: March 12, 2024, 10:52:50 AM »
Tackling the TikTok Threat
A House bill to force the social-media site from Beijing’s control deserves support.
By
The Editorial Board
Follow
March 11, 2024 6:20 pm ET


The House on Wednesday is expected to vote on a bill that would give popular social-media app TikTok an ultimatum: Break up with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or break up with the U.S. It didn’t need to come to this, but Beijing and TikTok’s Chinese-owner ByteDance left Washington with no choice.

Congress has spent years debating how to mitigate the national-security risks of TikTok’s Chinese ownership that have grown with the site’s popularity. About 150 million Americans use TikTok, and the app is a top source of news and search for Generation Z.

Donald Trump tried in 2020 to force ByteDance to divest TikTok, but his executive order was blocked in court, partly because the President lacked clear authority from Congress. Legislation by Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi aims to overcome the legal obstacles.

***
Their bill would ban TikTok from app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S. if the company doesn’t divest from ByteDance. It also establishes a process by which the President can prohibit other social-media apps that are “controlled by a foreign adversary.” The bill is narrowly tailored while giving the President tools to combat future threats.


Banning TikTok should be a last resort, but ByteDance and Beijing have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted. Reams of evidence show how the Chinese government can use the platform for cyber-espionage and political influence campaigns in the U.S.

Numerous reports have found that posts about Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang province, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protests, Tibet and other politically sensitive content in China are suppressed on TikTok. A December study by the Network Contagion Research Institute found significant disparities between hashtags on Instagram and TikTok. The site also appears to amplify content that sows discord and ignorance in America. Pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones. Videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America” went viral on TikTok last autumn.

How has TikTok responded to allegations that its algorithms are controlled by the Chinese government? In January it restricted researcher access to its hashtag data to make it harder to study. “Some individuals and organizations have misused the Center’s search function to draw inaccurate conclusions, so we are changing some of the features to ensure it is used for its intended purpose,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

Yet TikTok can’t explain why posts that are divisive in America go viral, while those that are sensitive for the CCP get few views. TikTok tried to ameliorate concerns about CCP wizards behind the screen with its Project Texas, which houses American user data on Oracle servers and gives the U.S. software company access to its algorithms.

But TikTok’s algorithms are still controlled by ByteDance engineers in China. The Journal reported in January that TikTok executives have said internally that they sometimes need to share protected U.S. data with ByteDance to train the algorithms and keep problematic content off the site. Like protests for democracy in Hong Kong?

***
TikTok’s other major security risk is cyber-espionage. The app vacuums up sensitive American user information, including searches, browsing histories and locations. This data can and does flow back to China. “Everything is seen in China,” a TikTok official said in a leaked internal recording reported by Buzzfeed.

ByteDance employees tried to uncover internal leakers by spying on American journalists. After this surveillance was reported, ByteDance blamed “misconduct of certain individuals” who were no longer employed. But there’s nothing to stop CCP puppets in ByteDance back-offices from spying on Americans.

Meta ignited a firestorm several years ago when it was found to have given British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to user personal data. Political campaigns used the data to target ads. TikTok’s privacy risks and malign political influence are more disturbing since it answers to Beijing.

Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s U.S. offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”

Chinese law requires ByteDance to comply with Beijing’s surveillance demands. This is why there’s no way to mitigate TikTok’s security risks besides a forced divestment. U.S. investors have expressed interest in buying TikTok, though a Chinese government official last year said it would block a sale. If TikTok is banned, users can blame Beijing.

***
Mr. Trump and some conservatives are opposing the House bill. The former President groused last week that banning TikTok would help Meta, which he called on Truth Social a “true Enemy of the People!” He’s apparently still angry that Meta banned him after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But conservatives who dislike U.S. Big Tech censorship should fear Beijing speech control even more.

In any case, the House bill doesn’t restrict First Amendment rights. It regulates national security. It also has ample precedent since U.S. law restricts foreign ownership of broadcast stations. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States forced the Chinese owners of Grindr, the gay dating app, to give up control of the company.

China has blocked U.S. social-media companies that don’t comply with its censorship regime, and the House bill would prevent Beijing from applying its political speech controls and surveillance in the U.S. Despite America’s political divisions, this ought to be a shared goal.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2024, 08:29:57 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Body-by-Guinness

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Social Media Stocking Up on Ex-Spook Hires
« Reply #1038 on: March 13, 2024, 04:45:09 PM »
Jeepers, what possible utility could Deep State intelligence types have in the world of social media?

https://thekennedybeacon.substack.com/p/meta-google-as-extensions

ccp

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DougMacG

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Re: Steve Munchin leading group to buy TikTok
« Reply #1040 on: March 14, 2024, 08:08:51 AM »
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/former-treasury-secretary-steven-mnuchin-is-putting-together-an-investor-group-to-buy-tiktok/ar-BB1jSR5o?ocid=msedgntphdr&cvid=6e57871ca42d40f9d114cfec89919d12&ei=19

seems like the best solution
if TikTok would sell......

keep millions of TikTok fans happy.

A Trump official buying tiktok.  Liberal excrement would hit the fan.

I love the idea.  We had no ownership of anything and then twitter goes to Musk and TikTok to Mnuchin.  Maybe that would bring Google and Facebook Instagram political influence down a notch.  Then they can't all "cover the big stories of the day, with a pillow, until they stop breathing".

ccp

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Good point Doug.

Ever since Musk took over twitter he has been an endless daily target from morning till night by left MSM.

Don Lemon who wanted to partner with him tries to "Stephanopolous" him by asking about drug use.........

Now goes on CNN's (Erin Burnett and I presume the DNC girl Collins likely weighed in too)

to cry about cancellation of his contract .  I am sure shysters will be gearing up to sue Musk for breach of contract and CNN carrying those headlines and having the shysters and their partisan legal analysts turning this topic into frequent topic to discuss.

Crafty_Dog

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Forward Observer: Countervailing considerations
« Reply #1042 on: March 14, 2024, 08:30:34 AM »
(2) TIKTOK BAN WILL EXPAND FEDERAL GRIP ON INTERNET: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would only commit to reviewing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which passed in a 353-65 vote in the House yesterday.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said the TikTok ban “grants undue power to the administrative state” and would allow the White House to unilaterally designate which websites and applications are subject to divestiture.

Why It Matters: Broad language in the bill would likely allow the federal government to restrict access to foreign-owned apps, websites, and social media platforms the President unilaterally determines to be “controlled by a foreign adversary.” Due to the nature of internet traffic, this would broadly block Americans’ access to information from foreign sources and give greater control to federal agencies to shape Americans’ opinions by filtering available information online. – R.C.

ccp

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I agree 100 % with Mark Levin on this from his podcast the night before last.

This is NOT a Constitutional free speech issue.
It is a security issue.
For God's sake, China as at war with us.
Fucking Schumer and the other pols on the China payroll or payroll of donors who only care about their Chinese investments @ the expense of national security.



ccp

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Mark Levin 3/12/24
« Reply #1044 on: March 14, 2024, 09:03:00 AM »
start @ 1:26:40 for the part about Tik Tok

https://www.marklevinshow.com/audio-rewind/

ccp

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appearance impropriety?
« Reply #1045 on: March 15, 2024, 02:26:05 AM »
https://nypost.com/2024/03/14/us-news/trump-considering-billionaire-tiktok-investor-jeff-yass-for-treasury-secretary-report/

1)  Trump desperate for cash
2)  Trump backed banning TikTok
3)  Trump changes his mind and does not back banning Tiktok with concern for helping FB
4)  Jeff Yass billionaire Republican donor ( Jewish too - wow) holds large stake in TikTok
5)  Trump meets with Jeff Yass just at a time Congress passes bill to ban his investment (or sell to US entity)
6)  Reports Trump considering this guy Yass for Sec of Treas.

Awful coincidental.

Of course Trump could have simply calculated he didn't want to loss his increasing support among the young.

I agree no one here likes FB.

??? -> https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=rotten+egg+image&fr=mcafee&type=E210US1494G0&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.fineartamerica.com%2Fimages-medium-large-5%2Frotten-egg-cordelia-molloyscience-photo-library.jpg#id=-1&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.fineartamerica.com%2Fimages-medium-large-5%2Frotten-egg-cordelia-molloyscience-photo-library.jpg&action=click



Body-by-Guinness

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Navigating the Digital Gulag
« Reply #1046 on: March 15, 2024, 05:48:58 AM »
America Enters the Samizdat Era
Thanking fellow honorees Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Miranda Devine, and explaining why an American Samizdat Prize is both great and scary
MATT TAIBBI
MAR 7, 2024

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. The once-mighty Soviet government was already a ghost ship and the closest thing to repression I saw was a farsovshik or black-market dealer shoved into a cop car near my school’s subway station.

Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the snitch on the “Intourist” bus (the ratio was one party snoop for every four or five travelers), or making sure to be out of earshot of the old lady sitting na lavochke (on the bench outside the apartment building) before sharing a dangerous opinion, or the stress of sharing a kommunalka, or communal apartment, with a politically orthodox family. The bloodiest period of Soviet totalitarianism ended in the fifties, but the habits remained long after, including the advanced system of alternative media that ultimately broke the state: samizdat.

Tonight, along with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund. Samizdat is a bit of a play on words, since like a lot of politically oppressive groups the Soviets had a mania for reducing beautiful language to state-acceptable ugly compound words (GosPlan, GULAG, etc.), so in place of GosIzdat (State-Publish, the official publisher) dissidents created Sam- or “Self” Izdat: “Self-Publish.”

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events. Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke, getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.

Jay, Miranda, and I all share a connection to the same story. When Miranda published her blockbuster New York Post exposé of October 14, 2020, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” Internet platforms Twitter and Facebook experimented for the first time with disappearing a major political story in the middle of an election year. Not only did both platforms suppress the story, but as I later found in internal correspondence, Twitter used tools previously reserved for child pornography to prevent individuals from sharing the story in direct messages — the digital version of a Cheka agent intercepting that copy of a Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich story before one person could hand it to another.

Meanwhile, when Dr. Bhattacharya conducted an experiment on his own initiative proving that the WHO had massively overstated the infection mortality rate of Covid-19, and later organized against lockdown policies he and many others felt were both ineffective and dangerous, the result was digital suppression — not because he was incorrect, but because his message was politically undesirable. Along with Bari Weiss, one of the first things I saw when Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal files was a page showing Jay had been placed on a “trends blacklist.” This was just before we discovered that the platforms were in regular contact about content with agents of the American versions of the KGB or NKVD in the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, State, and Defense, among others.

The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.

Like Jay and Miranda I’m sure, I’m honored to be chosen for the Samizdat prize, but also a little horrified that such an award is now necessary. People with dissenting ideas will now have to find alternative ways to distribute. As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.

We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all. That’s why prizes like this are important, and the agitation and resistance of people like Jay and Miranda and so many others right now are so crucial. We don’t want our speech freedoms to go gentle into that good night; we want them to go kicking and screaming, or better yet, not go at all.

The good news? As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. The more the Soviets tried to clamp down, the more power they gave to books and stories like Master and Margarita or A Circle of Friends. As depressing as things sometimes look now, those who would suppress speech have the real problem. Imagine the problem of stopping the truth in the digital age? There will always be people who’ll try, but history shows — they never succeed for long.

https://www.racket.news/p/america-enters-the-samizdat-era


Crafty_Dog

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Youtube tried blocking this documentary on Chinese penetration of Hollywood
« Reply #1048 on: March 19, 2024, 08:36:06 AM »

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/hollywood-takeover-5595342

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

News: On March 4, YouTube took down the trailer of the new NTD Original Documentary “Hollywood Takeover: China’s Control in the Film Industry” and removed the Hollywood Takeover YouTube account. The account and trailer were only reinstated two days later after a news outlet asked Youtube why and reported about this news.
“Hollywood Takeover: China’s Control in the Film Industry” is an NTD Original Documentary that pulls back the curtain on how Hollywood is helping to further a global adversary’s agenda, the consequences of that on the future, and what brave individuals are doing to change the tide.
“Hollywood Takeover” follows Chris Fenton, a former Hollywood executive, and Tiffany Meier, an investigative news reporter, on their journey to uncover the must-tell story behind Hollywood and China’s lucrative union, which didn’t happen by accident.
The survival of the United States depends on people waking up to the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless literal and cognitive takeover of our country. At this crucial historical moment, the truth may be inconvenient to many, but we all have a choice to make: will we continue to feed the red dragon?
Official website: HollywoodTakeover.com
Please give and share this documentary: HollywoodTakeover.com/share
Join us for the star-studded red carpet premiere event of “Hollywood Takeover”:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/red-carpet-premiere-hollywood-takeover-5603402
Also the panel after the red carpet premiere:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/panel-on-hollywood-takeover-5606124

Body-by-Guinness

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“Addictive by Design” Social Media v. Free Speech
« Reply #1049 on: March 23, 2024, 11:03:39 AM »
Piece looks at social media platforms designed to “addict” users, particularly young ones, in the context of public health laws meant to address negative outcomes and its impact on free speech:

Journal of Free Speech Law: "Public Health Law's Digital Frontier: Addictive Design, Section 230, and the Freedom of Speech," by Prof. Matthew Lawrence
The Volokh Conspiracy / by Eugene Volokh / Mar 22, 2024 at 8:40 PM
The article is here; the Abstract:

A new generation of claims argues that addictive design by social media companies has caused a national mental health crisis, and so seeks to join nascent state legislative efforts in making addictive design by technology companies public health law's next frontier. But the threshold, global objections of leading social media platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and YouTube) to pioneering addictive design tort lawsuits—In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction Litigation in federal court and the Social Media Cases in California—suggest that state authority to regulate addictive design (through litigation or otherwise) will depend on the resolution of a conflict between two regulatory paradigms: the public health regulatory paradigm and the internet regulatory paradigm. The public health paradigm prizes federalism, with states historically playing a lead role in safeguarding the public's health through law—including against unwitting exposure to addictive products. Under this paradigm states would be permitted to develop and implement legal responses to an emerging public health threat through their courts and legislatures, as they have done with alcohol, gambling, opioids, and tobacco. The internet paradigm, on the other hand, usually insists on a "hands off" approach to regulation online, with broad federal preemption under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and often-prohibitive constraints under the First Amendment.

In the pioneering cases, the platforms argue that the internet paradigm makes pending lawsuits asserting addictive design claims non-starters, regardless of their merits. On the section 230 and First Amendment legal theories they advance, states could not regulate content-related addictive design by providers of interactive computer services (including social media platforms and some online video game manufacturers), no matter the evidence and no matter how intentional, effective, or harmful to kids or adults. Not surprisingly, the plaintiffs offer alternative views that would permit broad state regulation of addictive design.

This Article argues that, even if courts are unpersuaded by the broadest arguments in favor of a public health approach to regulation of addictive design, they should nonetheless reject the platforms' efforts to make addictive design a public-health-law-free zone. The public health and internet paradigms can be reconciled as a policy matter because addictive design threatens both public health and innovation online. The public health and internet paradigms can also be reconciled as a legal matter because even strong theories of section 230 and the First Amendment, properly understood, leave states a safe harbor in which to regulate much addictive design. Addictive design claims allege platforms engage in what psychologists call "operant conditioning" by using content-neutral intermittent reinforcement and variable reward techniques associated with slot machines to foster compulsion in users. These techniques need not entail content moderation or "editorial expression"; indeed, such techniques are ordinarily hidden from users, who may never realize they have been conditioned by a provider. State regulation of such content-neutral platform activity is not insulated from state public health regulation even under broad theories of the reach of section 230 and the First Amendment. To make maximal use of this safe harbor, public health researchers studying the harms of addictive design, legislators devising tailored regulatory responses, and courts adjudicating novel addictive design claims should remain mindful of the value of separating content-based addictive design claims from conditioning-based claims made in advancing public health law's digital frontier.

The post Journal of Free Speech Law: "Public Health Law's Digital Frontier: Addictive Design, Section 230, and the Freedom of Speech," by Prof. Matthew Lawrence appeared first on Reason.com.

https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/lawrence.pdf