Goolag, FB, Youtube, Amazon, Twitter, Gov censorship/propaganda via Tech Octopus

[objectivist1]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/411949.php

[Body-by-Guinness]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.