Big Tech Continued Censorship

[GURPS]

Mintpress News, which is really doing some fantastic investigative journalism lately, ran a story yesterday headlined, “Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy.” The gist is — and this is going to shock you — Facebook has hired a whole raft of experienced CIA agents, while Twitter seems to favor the FBI for its personnel pool.

Take Aaron Berman, for example. For years he used to help craft the CIA’s daily security briefing for the President. In 2019 Berman left the Agency as a senior analytic manager and joined Meta as its senior product policy manager for… misinformation. Of course.

As Mintpress properly notes, there are rational reasons why the social media giants would want some folks with law enforcement background, to protect the platforms from abuse by various kinds of bad actors. But the sheer number of “former” agents in the media companies, at all the key positions of influence, staggers the imagination. Mintpress says it’s getting hard to tell where the government stops and the social media companies begin.

Of course, there’s another, more sinister possibility. How long would it take for the U.S. agencies to figure out that the social media companies were trying to acquire some of their talent, and devise a strategy to occupy the influential private firms? Like, how does someone like Aaron Berman go from writing critical top-secret daily security briefs for the President of the United States to a happy fun product manager at Facebook?

It feels like we don’t know the whole story. That’s all I’m saying.

I took a look at Aaron’s tweet history. His posts are bland, happy fun comments about his personal life. He offers lots of professional tips like how to write more effectively on Twitter. He sits just left of center in his political tone. On the one hand, he seems mildly concerned about climate change, but on the other hand, he observes that, no matter many gender-neutral toys he and his wife offer her, his daughter still just wants to play with Barbie. None of his posts reference elections, politicians, or direct political issues.

He’s everyman and no man.

If you’re curious, watch Aaron’s happy fun product manager video here, where he doesn’t mention his CIA history at all, for some reason.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, July 14, 2022 ☙ INTELLIGENCE 🦠

Airline bug infects Europe causing cancellations; dems stop sentence enhancement for pedos; Biden appointee arrested; rundown on Biden's failure tour; an NYT love letter to Ray Epps; and more...

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[GURPS]

Shocking New Study Shows Big Tech Censorship Is A Way Bigger Problem Than You Thought​

The Media Research Center (MRC), which defines secondhand censorship as “the number of times that users on social media had information kept from them,” found that Big Tech has engaged in direct censorship of individuals and organizations at least 4,000 times. Other users, however, were blocked from seeing these posts or videos at least 144,301,713 times in the first quarter of 2022 alone. That’s more than 36,000 times the instances of direct suppression.


By adding the followers of those censored by Big Tech, MRC calculated how many people were prevented from seeing a post or video that was removed or otherwise suppressed.

“It’s truly mind-boggling that the Silicon Valley speech police have this kind of power,” MRC founder and President Brent Bozell said. “This report gets us one step closer to understanding the real impact anti-conservative discrimination at Facebook, Twitter and others are having on speech in this country.”

Through its own CensorTrack database, MRC found Facebook to be the greatest culprit, with users undergoing secondhand censorship 86,627,526 times. YouTube was second at 23,543,230, and Twitter was close behind at 17,065,054.

When Facebook canceled sitting President Donald Trump’s account, it effectively censored his more than 90 million followers in one fell swoop. By suppressing conservative talk show host Dan Bongino’s posts about masks not working to prevent the spread of Covid-19, YouTube secondhand censored his viewers 1,764,989 times. Twitter even removed Post Millennial Editor-at-Large Andy Ngo’s post of a death threat he received on the grounds that it violated its community standards, resulting in 976,300 people affected secondhand.

 

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Court orders Google to turn over docs on choking free speech competition​

Last month, a federal judge ordered that social media companies Meta (Facebook), Twitter, and YouTube must turn over documents and answer questions in a suit alleging collusion between the companies and the Biden administration to censor "disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content" on their platforms.

Twitter let former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson back on the platform last month to settle his advancing breach-of-contract suit.

YouTube has particularly targeted videos that challenge COVID orthodoxy, removing public meetings where COVID policy is debated, science-based criticisms of COVID mitigations by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and a parent's criticisms of school COVID policy. It also labeled an anti-Biden rap song as "medical misinformation."

Rumble can now obtain internal Google documents on "algorithmic manipulation of its search engine" and requirements that "all but force" companies reliant on its infrastructure to use YouTube, lawyer Glenn Greenwald, a progressive critic of censorship and prominent Rumble user, wrote in his newsletter Saturday.

 

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Twitter stops censoring Epoch Times links following public outcry​

When users earlier last week clicked on links to Epoch stories, Twitter told them: "The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe."

By Saturday the links began working properly again, Epoch reported.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called out the social media company: "Twitter must explain itself for this outrageous act of censorship."

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called the situation "alarming."

"Twitter is censoring @EpochTimes under the guise of 'unsafe' speech. Remember what happened the last time corporate media and big tech tried to censor my investigation on Hunter Biden corruption? The truth always prevails," he wrote.

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who has been censored before for his comments about COVID-19, said: "Twitter hemorrhaging evidence of CDC collusion, malfeasance, and suppression of free speech is found to be censoring leading news outlet Epoch Times. As more censorship happens audiences are further drawn to those sources of information for the truth. Keep it up Twitter!"

 

[GURPS]

McCarthy Blasts Decision Decreasing Reach Of Facebook Political Content​

“Facebook made sure no one saw the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election,” the House Republican tweeted. “But now that America has record inflation, rising crime, & a border crisis —all as a result of Dem policies— Facebook is shutting down more ‘political content’ to hide the truth from Americans.”

Meta announced recently that it would be implementing changes around the world to decrease “political content” in users’ Facebook feeds. The company made the announcement on July 19, saying that changes to decrease the spread of political content on Facebook through a ranking system would be made around the world.

“Our tests have concluded and demonstrated that placing less emphasis on likes and shares for political content is an effective way to reduce the amount of political content people experience in their Feed. We have now implemented these changes globally,” the company announced.

The company originally announced these changes in February 2021, saying that it was hoping to decrease political content in news feeds. These changes included moves to “rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals.”

Content from the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and other health agencies were “exempt” from the tests, with the company citing their “authoritative” status.

The company’s political ranking tests were later expanded to “Facebook Watch” in December 2021, and they announced in May this year that they would be weighing comments and shares on political posts less in a continued effort to decrease the reach of political posts.

McCarthy’s criticism stems from Facebook’s limiting of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story prior to the 2020 election.

 

[GURPS]

Economist Phillip Magness slams ‘Orwellian’ Facebook for fact-checking recession post​

A prominent economist has revealed that Facebook placed a fact-checking label on a post asserting that the US has entered a recession, giving it a “partly false” rating as President Biden continues to reject the grim assessment of the economy.

Dr. Phillip Magness, the research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank, shared a screenshot from his Facebook account, showing that the social media site had “independent fact-checkers” review his post from July 24, and that they found it was “partly false.”

“We live in an Orwellian hell-scape,” Magness tweeted on Thursday. “Facebook is now ‘fact checking’ anyone who questions the White House’s word-games about the definition of a recession.”

Facebook added a notice to the post warning that “people who repeatedly share false information might have their posts moved lower in News Feed to other people are less likely to see them.”

 

[GURPS]

Document dump in Biden-Tech collusion suit reveals 'massive, sprawling' censorship: plaintiffs​

The First Amendment lawsuit by Republican attorneys general and a civil liberties group against Biden, Fauci and several other high-level officials has revealed a "massive, sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise'" related to COVID-19 and elections, the plaintiffs said in a 711-page "joint statement on discovery disputes."

"If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased" by what the defendants have already turned over, New Civil Liberties Alliance lawyer Jenin Younes said.

The Justice Department cited its 15,000-page document production to oppose the "anything but reasonably tailored" discovery requests by Missouri's Eric Schmitt, Louisiana's Jeff Landry and NCLA, which DOJ called "grossly disproportionate" to this stage of litigation. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, Google's YouTube and LinkedIn provided information separately.

The "defendants' position" left out the elephant in the room: the likelihood of even greater harm to Democratic prospects if sensitive communications including Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre are required to be divulged before the midterms. Schmitt is the GOP nominee for retiring Sen. Roy Blunt's seat.

The plaintiffs are keen to compel Fauci to discuss the "nature and content" of his oral conversations with Zuckerberg, who gave the long-serving public health bureaucrat his personal cell phone number in March 2020.

They also want all Fauci communication with social media platforms related to the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, who are represented by NCLA, as well as Trump coronavirus task force member Scott Atlas, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

[Kyle]

 

[GURPS]

Other emails confirm that Biden administration actors and agencies as wide-ranging as the surgeon general, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were all in communication with some combination of Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

In every instance, the goal was the same: to censor “misinformation” and to constrain the regime’s Overton window of permissible civilian opinion formation so as to penalize the citizenry’s (well-earned) suspicion of the regime’s proffered narratives. As Saul Alinsky said, after all, “he who controls the language controls the masses.”

Schmitt’s revelations come just two weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column, compellingly demonstrated the extent to which the Biden administration directed Twitter to ban Alex Berenson, a notable skeptic of regime orthodoxy when it came to the COVID-19-era biomedical security state.

And in the interim, in the brief time between that recent Journal op-ed and Schmitt’s unveiled love letters between Zuckerberg’s hucksters and Biden’s nomenklatura, came perhaps the biggest revelation of all.

On Aug. 25, Zuckerberg himself confided to Rogan on-air that America’s Stasi—sorry, FBI—warned Facebook in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election about the threat of “Russian misinformation,” thus effectively commandeering Facebook to algorithmically penalize, and generally conceal, the New York Post’s bombshell October 2020 story pertaining to prodigal son Hunter Biden’s infamous “laptop from hell.”

Some polls have indicated that as many as 1 in 6 Biden voters would have changed their vote in 2020 if they had known the full extent of the Post’s reporting on Hunter’s cursed laptop. Given how narrow Biden’s winning statewide margins of victory were in the states that gave him his Electoral College majority, Big Tech’s censorship was all but assuredly dispositive.

Big Tech, then, is responsible for Biden’s presidency.

Exposing Biden-Big Tech Collusion to Suppress Conservative Speech

The Schmitt-Landry lawsuit alleges that high-ranking Biden administration officials have been colluding with the oligarchs of Big Tech.

www.dailysignal.com

 

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Greenwald went on to say that the move to promote censorship had created a whole new industry — and he called out those he referred to as the worst offenders: “The worst, most vile arm of this regime are the censorship-mad liberal employees of big media corporations.”

Among those he named were CNN’s Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny and Libs of TikTok nemesis Taylor Lorenz.

“It is astonishing to watch Dems and their allies in media corporations posture as opponents of ‘fascism’ – while their main goal is to *unite state and corporate power* to censor their critics and degrade the internet into an increasingly repressive weapon of information control,” he added.

“A major myth that must be quickly dismantled: political censorship is not the by-product of autonomous choices of Big Tech companies. This is happening because DC Dems and the US Security State are threatening reprisals if they refuse,” Greenwald continued, adding, “The worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is ‘journalist’ take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. *These* are the authoritarians.”

Glenn Greenwald Unravels Democrat-Sponsored ‘Regime Of Censorship’ In Damning Thread | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

 

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[herb749]

If they have nothing to hide they cooperate but you know they will fight this for months.