How Google & Facebook Censor Content & Demonetize Independent Media

[angelburst29]

August 29, 2018 - Conservative Facebook employees are Organizing to Attack the Liberal company's 'intolerant' Culture (FB)
Conservative Facebook employees are organizing to attack the liberal company's 'intolerant' culture (FB)

• Conservative Facebook employees are reportedly complaining internally about the company's "intolerant" liberal culture.
• According to The New York Times, more than 100 have joined the internal group "FB'ers for Political Diversity."
• Facebook has grappled with dissenting conservative employees before, and banned an anonymous group used by them in 2016.

More than 100 politically conservative Facebook employees have formed a new internal group to complain that the famously liberal company is "intolerant" of opposing political thought, according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.

The new group, "FB'ers for Political Diversity," was reportedly created in the last week, and came after senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige wrote in an internal post viewable only by company employees that "we are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views ... we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."

Amerige and Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Silicon Valley, the heart of the American tech industry, is largely liberal, and has been fraught with allegations of bias in Trump's America.

In July 2017, Google found itself at the centre of a political firestorm after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post decrying what he characterised as "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he attacked the company's diversity efforts. Some conservatives also allege, without proof, that social media firms are deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices on their platforms.

On Tuesday, President Trump accused Google, without providing evidence, of "silencing" conservative news publications in its search results.

Facebook has grappled with how to approach dissent by conservative employees before. As Business Insider previously reported in 2017, a group called "Facebook Anon" where employees could chat anonymously morphed into a hub for conservative, Trump-supporting employees during the 2016 election. It was ultimately shut down in December 2016 as the talk "turned ugly and ... alarmed management."


29.08.2018 - Trump Dubs Reports Relying on Anonymous Sources 'Fiction'
Trump Dubs Reports Relying on Anonymous Sources 'Fiction'

US President Donald Trump lashed out at the press on Wednesday, saying that many of the anonymous sources reporters use in their stories do not exist and reiterating his view that the media is the enemy of the people.

The fact is that many anonymous sources don’t even exist. They are fiction made up by the Fake News reporters… Enemy of the People!" Trump said in a Twitter message.

In a second post, Trump suggested that when readers see anonymous sources in a story, they should stop reading, because such reports are nothing but fiction.


Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

When you see “anonymous source,” stop reading the story, it is fiction!
8:41 AM - Aug 29, 2018

Trump has repeatedly called the US press "the opposition party," and refers to certain media outlets as "fake news."


28.08.2018 - Trump Slams Tech Giants Google, Facebook for 'Treading on Troubled Territory'
Trump Slams Tech Giants Google, Facebook for ‘Treading on Troubled Territory’

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter are operating in dangerous territory and should be careful.

Earlier in the day, Trump in a Twitter post accused Google and other tech companies of suppressing the views of conservatives and hiding positive news. Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow earlier in the day told reporters that the administration was "looking into" how to respond to the tech companies.

"Google and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful," Trump said. "It is not fair to large portions of the population."


Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of....
11:02 AM - Aug 28, 2018


Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
11:02 AM - Aug 28, 2018

The US president said Google is taking advantage of a lot of people and characterized the charge against the tech giants as very serious. Trump said "thousands and thousands of complaints" were coming in about the tech companies.

In turn, Google said in a statement its search function is not used to set a political agenda and does not bias results to favor any political ideology. "Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology."

Trump renewed his criticism earlier in August by saying the "fake news media" was bad for the United States. The US president’s comments came as hundreds of newspapers across the country published editorials protesting his attacks on the press.


28.08.2018 - US Considers Regulating Google After Trump's Tweet - White House
US Considers Regulating Google After Trump's Tweet - White House

The US administration looking at the possibility of regulating Google after President Donald Trump accused the search engine of rigging its results so it only showed negative stories about him, Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow told reporters on Tuesday.

When asked whether the Trump administration was looking into possible regulation for Google, Kudlow said, "We'll let you know. We're taking a look at it."

Earlier on Tuesday in a Twitter message, Trump accused Google and others of "suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good."

Trump also drew attention to the fact that the search engine controlled what people see online, saying this was a serious situation that "will be addressed."

 

[angelburst29]

Aug 7, 2018 / 14:28

The campaign to rid the nation of so-called “fake news” is fake news in itself, as censors target both left and right in their unending attempt to cover up the truth.

August 29, 2018 - Censorship Always Targets Truth
Censorship Always Targets Truth

A rising tide of censorship is drowning what is left of liberty on these shores. The censors target people on both the left and right. They claim they are just trying to stop “fake news,” but they lie. The real impetus of censorship is always the same: to cover up the truth.

The witch hunt against Alex Jones is a case in point. The mainstream media campaign against Jones would have you believe that they want to silence Jones due to his allegedly false and defamatory statements.

Has Jones ever made false and defamatory statements? Perhaps. He has certainly spread misinformation about Islam and Muslims. His fact-checking is not always what it should be, nor is the portrait of national and global events he paints entirely accurate.

But there is a simple legal remedy for false and defamatory statements: the libel courts. Jones is currently being sued for libel by individuals who say he defamed them by misrepresenting their connection to the December 2012 events at Sandy Hook Elementary. If they can prove that Jones’s statements were false and damaging, and that he should have known that they were false, they will prevail in court. But the mainstream media (MSM) campaign against Jones, which has gotten him banned from Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms, does not abide by the rules of American jurisprudence or the First Amendment. Nor is it motivated by any genuine concern about Jones’s faults. This horrendous, illegal, unconstitutional censorship campaign is going after Jones for one reason and one reason only: because Jones tells too much truth about certain sensitive issues that the mainstream is charged with covering up.

Every MSM attack on Jones charges him with spreading “9/11 conspiracy theories.” What they leave out is the fact that these theories—which blame neocons not Muslims for 9/11—are true. As Jones has repeatedly stated, 9/11 was an “inside job,” in the same way that a bank heist assisted by insiders is an inside job. In the case of 9/11, the neocon insiders helped the “bank robbers”—Israel—pull off the attack.

The MSM is dominated by Zionists. It includes plenty of Operation Mockingbird CIA assets. These people are charged with covering up the truth of 9/11. As the audience for alternative media like Jones and AFP grows, while the MSM audience shrinks, the truth about 9/11 and other explosive issues has been steadily leaking out. The censorship campaign against Jones is part of the larger campaign to plug those leaks by taking down the alternative media.

It isn’t just conservatives like Jones who are being censored and silenced. In Berkeley, Calif., home of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, left-leaning radio host Bonnie Faulkner has been banned by KPFA radio, flagship of the Pacifica Radio Network.

Kevin Cartwright of KPFA management recently announced: “After an avalanche of negative calls and emails from listeners about the airing of views of a holocaust denier, climate change denial and casting the Parkland mass shooting survivors as crisis actors. [sic] KPFA cannot defend this content. Please direct all comments to KPFA’s comment line at comments@KPFA.org or 510-848-6767 ext. 622.”

Cartwright’s illiterate statement (please learn to write complete sentences!) toes the MSM propaganda line: He pretends that the “avalanche of calls and emails” was driven by concern that Ms. Faulkner’s show sometimes includes guests who make false statements about current or historical events. The reality is precisely the opposite: The “avalanche” was orchestrated by Israeli government pressure groups who hate Ms. Faulkner not because of any untruths uttered on her show but because so many of her guests tell the truth about Israel and its crimes, including the 9/11 false-flag operation.

If a guest on Ms. Faulkner’s “Guns and Butter,” or any other radio show, makes false statements, the remedy is simple and obvious: Bring on another guest to expose the lies and explain what the truth is and how we know it is the truth. Free and unfettered debate is the only context in which truth can emerge.

The current MSM moral panic over “fake news” is really a panic over “true news.” It is the scandalous truths—that 9/11 was a neocon-Zionist inside job, that Robert Mueller is a serial coverup criminal and deep state operative, that Jeffrey Epstein’s Israeli pedophile/blackmail ring has compromised America’s top leadership, that Bill Clinton is a Jeffrey Epstein client and credibly accused serial rapist, that the CIA is the world’s biggest drug dealer, that our elections are fake spectacles controlled by rigged voting machines, that America’s best leaders are assassinated by the deep state, and so on—that are the problem.

Censors never fear lies. They only fear truth.

 

[angelburst29]

Sun, Sep 2, 2018 -

Incompetent Facebook Identifies Former British Ambassador as Russian Troll, Deletes His Post History
Incompetent Facebook Identifies Former British Ambassador as Russian Troll, Deletes His Post History

Beware, the Atlantic Council is now in charge of curating your social media content

• Craig Murray is a former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan

Facebook has deleted all of my posts from July 2017 to last week because I am, apparently, a Russian Bot. For a while I could not add any new posts either, but we recently found a way around that, at least for now. To those of you tempted to say “So what?”, I would point out that over two thirds of visitors to my website arrive via my posting of the articles to Facebook and Twitter. Social media outlets like this blog, which offer an alternative to MSM propaganda, are hugely at the mercy of these corporate gatekeepers.

Facebook’s plunge into censorship is completely open and admitted, as is the fact it is operated for Facebook by the Atlantic Council – the extreme neo-con group part funded by NATO and whose board includes serial war criminal Henry Kissinger, Former CIA Heads Michael Hayden and Michael Morrell, and George Bush’s chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, among a whole list of horrors.

The staff are worse than the Board. Their lead expert on Russian bot detection is an obsessed nutter named Ben Nimmo, whose fragile grip on reality has been completely broken by his elevation to be the internet’s Witchfinder-General.

Nimmo, grandly titled “Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab”, is the go-to man for Establishment rubbishing of citizen journalists, and as with Joseph McCarthy or Matthew Clarke, one day society will sufficiently recover its balance for it to be generally acknowledged that this kind of witch-hunt nonsense was not just an aberration, but a manifestation of the evil it claimed to fight.

There is no Establishment cause Nimmo will not aid by labeling its opponents as Bots. This from the Herald newspaper two days ago, where Nimmo uncovers the secret web of Scottish Nationalist bots that dominate the internet, and had the temerity to question the stitch-up of Alex Salmond.

Nimmo’s proof? 2,000 people had used the hashtag #Dissolvetheunion on a total of 10,000 tweets in a week. That’s five tweets per person on average. In a week. Obviously a massive bot-plot, eh?

When Ben’s great expose for the Herald was met with widespread ridicule, he doubled down on it by producing his evidence – a list of the top ten bots he had uncovered in this research. Except that they are almost all, to my certain knowledge, not bots but people. But do not decry Ben’s fantastic forensic skills, for which NATO and the CIA fund the Atlantic Council. Ben’s number one suspect was definitely a bot. He had got the evil kingpin. He had seen through its identity despite its cunning disguise. That disguise included its name, IsthisAB0T, and its profile, where it called itself a bot for retweets on Independence. Thank goodness for Ben Nimmo, or nobody would ever have seen through that evil, presumably Kremlin-hatched, plan.

No wonder the Atlantic Council advertise Nimmo and his team as “Digital Sherlocks”\

Nimmo’s track record is simply appalling. In this report for the Atlantic Council website, he falsely identified British pensioner @Ian56789 as a “Russian troll farm”, which led to Ian being named as such by the British government, and to perhaps the most surreal Sky News interview of all time. Perhaps still more remarkably, Nimmo searches for use of the phrase “cui bono?” in reference to the Skripal and fake Douma chemical weapons attacks. Nimmo characterises use of the phrase cui bono as evidence of pro-Assad and pro-Kremlin bots and trolls – he really does. Most people would think to consider cui bono indicates a smattering more commonsense than Nimmo himself displays.

Published on Apr 20, 2018 (7:37 min.)

It is at least obvious cui bono from Nimmo’s witchfinding – the capacious, NATO and CIA stuffed pockets of Ben Nimmo himself. That Facebook allows this utterly discredited neo-conservative charlatan the run of its censorship operations needs, given Facebook’s pivotal role in social media intercourse, to concern everybody. The freedom of the internet is under fundamental attack.


bluewater vard koskoh • 2 days ago
grandson of David Rockefeller
View Hide

 

[Gawan]

The newest "development" of Facebook is, that the page you admin doesn't show any more the number how many people are reached with a single post and you need to click on "insights" first of each post.

In that sense and on a funny note:

 

[angelburst29]

The newest "development" of Facebook is, that the page you admin doesn't show any more the number how many people are reached with a single post and you need to click on "insights" first of each post.

In that sense and on a funny note:

That guy is "half-Wolf"! Look at those set of teeth, especially at the (2:10 min,) mark - pointed canine cuspids?

 

[angelburst29]

Sept. 22, 2018 - The White House is considering an antitrust investigation into 'online platform bias' at Google and Facebook — read the leaked document here
The White House is considering an an antitrust investigation into 'online platform bias' at Google and Facebook

• Business Insider has obtained a copy of a proposed executive order for President Trump that would ask federal law enforcement to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws," to "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias."
• Trump has previously said, "Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices."
• He has also stated, wrongly, that Google discriminated against his State of the Union speech.
• There is no evidence that either Google or Facebook systematically discriminate against conservatives.

The White House has drafted a text of a proposed executive order for President Donald Trump that would trigger an antitrust investigation into Google and Facebook, according to a copy of the document obtained by Business Insider. The existence of the draft was first reported by Capital Forum.

The proposed text focuses on "bias" at the companies:

"Whether reading news or looking for local businesses, citizens rely on search, social media, and other online platforms to provide objective and reliable information to shape a host of decisions ranging from consumer purchases to votes in elections. Because of their critical role in American society, it is essential that American citizens are protected from anticompetitive acts by dominant online platforms. Vibrant competition in the online ecosystem is essential to ensuring accountability for the platforms that hold so much sway over our economy and democratic process."

"… Executive departments and agencies with authorities that could be used to enhance competition among online platforms (agencies) shall, where consistent with other laws, use those authorities to promote competition and ensure that no online platform exercises market power in a way that harms consumers, including through the exercise of bias."

"... Not later than 30 days from the date of this order, agencies shall submit to the Director of the National Economic Council an initial list of (1) actions each agency can potentially take to protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias."
The order also commands federal agencies to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws."

The president and other conservatives have repeatedly complained that they believe Facebook and Google (owned by corporate parent Alphabet) bias the way they show news to users by dampening down conservative voices or outlets. In August, Trump tweeted, "Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won't let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others......."

Trump later claimed that Google did not highlight his State of the Union speech on its front page even though it had always done that for President Obama. But that allegation turned out to be entirely false. Google promoted Trump's State of the Union event in the same way it did for Obama.

Facebook has removed some conservative commentators from its platform, such as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, after they broke Facebook's rules against "glorifying violence" and "hate speech" against minorities. Many conservatives believe that shows the platforms do not give them a fair shake.

But there is no evidence that either Facebook or Google systematically discriminates left or right.

The draft order is in its preliminary stages.

While the political bias aspect of the order would likely be the most controversial aspect, it would also be the least threatening to either Google or Facebook. The First Amendment to the US Constitution bans the government from restricting or imposing speech. Federal authorities cannot require any company to publish views it favors.

The more worrying aspect of the draft, from the point of view of the companies, is the antitrust aspect. That could cost the companies real money. The European Union recently fined Google $5 billion for abusing its power over phone manufacturers through its dominance of Android; and $2 billion for its distortion of shopping search results that favored Google's own properties over superior independent results.
Google has a dominance of the search market that approaches 90% or more in many markets. And between them, Google and Facebook receive 90% of all new advertising dollars spent on the web. Facebook and Google capture 71% of all digital ad spending in Europe, according to analyst Brian Weiser at Pivotal Research.

Here is the full text of the draft order seen by Business Insider:

EXECUTIVE ORDER TO PROTECT COMPETITON AND SMALL BUSINESSES FROM BIAS IN ONLINE PLATFORMS

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to protect American consumers and workers and encourage competition in the U.S. economy, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. Online platforms are central to American commerce and the free flow of news and information. Whether reading news or looking for local businesses, citizens rely on search, social media, and other online platforms to provide objective and reliable information to shape a host of decisions ranging from consumer purchases to votes in elections. Because of their critical role in American society, it is essential that American citizens are protected from anticompetitive acts by dominant online platforms. Vibrant competition in the online ecosystem is essential to ensuring accountability for the platforms that hold so much sway over our economy and democratic process.

[Can expand this section, if necessary, to provide more detail on role of platforms and the importance of competition]

Section 2. Agency Responsibilities. (a) Executive departments and agencies with authorities that could be used to enhance competition among online platforms (agencies) shall, where consistent with other laws, use those authorities to promote competition and ensure that no online platform exercises market power in a way that harms consumers, including through the exercise of bias.
(b) Agencies with authority to investigate anticompetitive conduct shall thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws, as defined in subsection (a) of the first section of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. § 12, or any other law intended to protect competition.

(c) Should an agency learn of possible or actual anticompetitive conduct by a platform that the agency lacks the authority to investigate and/or prosecute, the matter should be referred to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission.

(d) Not later than 30 days from the date of this order, agencies shall submit to the Director of the National Economic Council an initial list of (1) actions each agency can potentially take to protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias; (2) any relevant authorities and tools potentially available to enhance competition among and protect the users of online platforms.
(e) Not later than 60 days from the date of this order, agencies shall report to the President, through the Director of the National Economic Council, recommendations on agency-specific actions in response to paragraphs (d) of this section. Such recommendations shall include a list of priority actions, including rulemakings, as well as timelines for completing those actions.

Section 3. General Provisions. (a) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(b) Independent agencies are strongly encouraged to comply with the requirements of this order.

(c) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(d) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.


Sep. 21, 2018 - Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt says the internet will split in two by 2028
Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt says the internet will split in two by 2028

• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that he believes the internet will split in two within a decade.
• 
  
• He told an audience at a private event in San Francisco that he foresees a break between the Chinese-led internet and the non-Chinese led internet.
• 
  
• Google has recently come under fire over plans to expand into China with "Project Dragonfly."

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday predicted that the internet will split in two in the next decade, CNBC reports.
Speaking at a private event in San Francisco, Schmidt said that he believes China will effectively split away and create its own internet.

"I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America," he said.

"If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number.

If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc."

Schmidt has flagged up Chinese technological advancement before. In November of last year he warned the US that it would have to step up its game if it didn't want to be outgunned by China on AI, predicting that it would be a world leader in the industry by 2030.
He also said on Wednesday that other countries could end up adopting a Chinese model of the internet. "Look at the way BRI works — their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries — it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom."

The Belt and Road Initiative is China's infrastructure project to link itself to 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania with railways and shipping lanes.

Google has recently come under fire for its dealings with China over reports that current CEO Sundar Pichai held government talks about launching a censored version of Google search there. The reports sparked outrage both within and without, with some employees resigning in protest and human rights groups calling on Pichai to reverse the decision.

 

[angelburst29]

Sep 27, 2018 - Apple-1, rare model of first Apple computer from 1970s, fetches US$375,000 at auction
Apple-1, rare model of first Apple computer from 1970s, fetches US$375,000 at auction

The Apple-1 was among 175 of those sold by Mr Steve Jobs and Mr Steve Wozniak from their production in a garage in Silicon Valley in the early days of Apple.PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

An Apple-1, a rare model of the first computer produced by the now-iconic tech firm, fetched US$375,000 (S$511,725) in an auction this week, according to Boston-based RR Auction.

The computer was among 175 of those sold by Mr Steve Jobs and Mr Steve Wozniak from their production in a garage in Silicon Valley in the early days of Apple in 1976 and 1977.

The model originally went for US$666.66 when it was sold by the Byte Shop computer store in Mountain View, California in the 1970s.

Mr Jobs and Mr Wozniak initially designed the Apple-1 as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, but Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell agreed to buy 50 if they were fully assembled and did not require soldering by the buyer.

According to RR, the computer sold this week was restored to original running condition in June and included the original Apple-1 board, a cassette interface, keyboard and other equipment.

The selling price was far from a record, however: another Apple-1 computer went for US$905,000 in 2014.


Sept. 26, 2018 - Facebook shares slip after Instagram founders quit
Facebook shares slip after Instagram founders quit

Facebook shares dropped after Instagram's founders quit under unexplained circumstances.

Analysts said Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger may have left because they could not agree with Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, on how to run the company's fastest-growing revenue generator.

CFRA's equity research director Scott Kessler said: "This comes at a really pivotal time for Facebook. I think everyone is focused on Instagram, not just being the engine for growth for the company, but really being the crown jewel in what Facebook has from an asset perspective.

"And now those two founders are going to be leaving, you wonder if other people, including members of their management team are going to follow suit, and who is Facebook going to install? What approach are they going to take? Are they going to change the strategy in place? And how is that going to affect the growth trajectory and progress?"

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for US$1 billion (S$1.36 billion), when the app had 30 million active monthly users.

It kept the team small. Systrom had the freedom to add features, such as peer-to-peer messaging, video uploads, and advertising.

Now Instagram boasts over one billion active monthly users.

The sudden exit of Systrom and Krieger follows the departures of WhatsApp co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and a reshuffling of Facebook's executive ranks earlier this year.


Sept. 22, 2018 - Trump's draft executive order would crack down on Google, Facebook
Trump's draft executive order would crack down on Google, Facebook

The White House has drafted an executive order for President Donald Trump's signature that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open investigations into the business practices of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc and other social media companies.

The order is in its preliminary stages and hasn't yet been run past other government agencies, according to a White House official. Bloomberg News obtained a draft of the order.

The document instructs US antitrust authorities to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws." It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it's signed actions that could potentially "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias."

The document doesn't name any specific companies. If signed, the order would represent a significant escalation of Trump's antipathy towards Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies, whom he has publicly accused of silencing conservative voices and news sources online.

"Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices," Trump said on Twitter in August. "Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won't let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others."

Social media companies have acknowledged in congressional hearings that their efforts to enforce prohibitions against online harassment have sometimes led to erroneous punishment of political figures on both the left and right, and that once discovered those mistakes have been corrected. They say there is no systematic effort to silence conservative voices.

The draft order directs that any actions federal agencies take should be "consistent with other laws" - an apparent nod to concerns that it could threaten the traditional independence of US law enforcement or conflict with the First Amendment, which protects political views from government regulation.

"Because of their critical role in American society, it is essential that American citizens are protected from anti-competitive acts by dominant online platforms," the order says. It adds that consumer harm - a key measure in antitrust investigations- could come "through the exercise of bias."

The order's preliminary status is reflected in the text of the draft, which includes a note in red that the first section could be expanded "if necessary, to provide more detail on role of platforms and the importance of competition."

The possibility of an executive order emerged as Attorney-General Jeff Sessions prepares for a Sept 25 briefing by state attorneys-general who are already investigating the tech firms' practices.

The meeting, which will include a representative of the Justice Department's antitrust division, is intended to help Sessions decide if there's a federal case to be made against the companies, two people familiar with the matter have said. At least one of the attorneys-general participating in the meeting has indicated he seeks to break up the companies.

Growing movements on the right and left argue that companies including Google and Facebook engage in anti-competitive behaviour. The companies reject the accusation, arguing they face robust competition and that many of their products are free. Bias has not typically figured in antitrust examinations.

In July, for instance, Twitter algorithms limited the visibility of some Republicans in profile searches. Jack Dorsey, the company's chief executive officer, testified before Congress in September that the limits also affected some Democrats as the site tried to enforce policies against threats, hate, harassment or other forms of abusive speech. The moves were reversed.

A Pew Research Centre survey earlier this year found that 72 per cent of Americans, and 85 per cent of Republicans, think it's likely that social media companies intentionally censor political viewpoints that those companies find objectionable.

Even on the right, however, there are misgivings about a Trump administration crackdown on the companies. On Friday, libertarian-leaning groups including FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council sent a letter to Sessions expressing "fear" that his "inquiry will be to accomplish through intimidation what the First Amendment bars: interference with editorial judgment".


Sept. 21, 2018 - Google defends Gmail data sharing, gives few details on violations
Google defends Gmail data sharing, gives few details on violations

Alphabet Inc's Google gave details about its policies for third-party Gmail add-ons but stopped short of fully addressing questions from US senators about developers who break its e-mail-scanning rules.

How user data flows between big technology platforms such as Google and Facebook and their partners has faced scrutiny around the world this year since Facebook revealed it had done little to monitor such relationships.

Google said in a letter to US senators made public on Thursday (Sept 20) that it relies on automated scans and reports from security researchers to monitor add-ons after launch, but did not respond to lawmakers' request to say how many have been caught violating the company's policies.

Senators may seek further clarity on Gmail's operations at a Commerce Committee hearing about privacy practices scheduled for Sept 26 with officials from Google, Apple Inc, AT&T Inc and Twitter Inc.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gmail users must give their consent to activate extensions, which can help them send e-mails on a time delay, get price-match rebates from retailers and remove unwanted mailing lists.

Under Google's policies, software firms that create these add-ons must inform users about how they collect and share Gmail data.

The lawmakers' inquiry came after the Wall Street Journal reported in July that some add-on makers did not make clear to users that their employees could review Gmail messages and that their data could be shared with additional parties.

Software experts told Reuters in March that auditing of apps that interact with Gmail, Facebook and other services is lax.

To be sure, sharing with a fourth party is essential to the functioning of some add-ons. For instance, a trip-planning app may scan a users' e-mail for upcoming flight details and then use the data to query an airline for updated depature information.

Google told senators it has suspended apps due to "a lack of transparency to users", without identifying violators or when enforcement actions took place.

Gmail, used by 1.4 billion people, is not the only Google service drawing lawmaker questions about oversight.

House lawmakers asked Google in a separate letter in July whether smartphones with its voice assistant tool can or do collect so-called "non-triggered" audio in order to recognise phrases like "Okay Google" that activate voice controls.

The lawmakers cited media reports and said there had been suggestions that third-party applications have access to and use this non-triggered data without disclosure to users.

 

[anka]

Not sure whether this has been already posted somewhere:

Anti-Defamation League, Facebook, Google & Youtube Appoint Themselves As Official Internet Censor
Anti-Defamation League, Facebook, Google & Youtube Appoint Themselves As Official Internet Censor

If you are reading this, that means that articles that speak against the activities of the Anti-Defamation League are not being automatically scrubbed from the internet.

Yet.

In a foreboding sign that the free expression of opinion on the internet is too much of a threat to the powerful elite of our society, the Anti-Defamation League is leading the charge in turning their own subjective opinions on ‘hate speech’ into the absolute rule of Internet law. As this Cnet article reports,

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They’ll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies’ various platforms and across the internet.

“These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together.”

Wow. A Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. What heroes of selfless service to humanity.

Like Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy, who said in a statement that “some of the best minds in engineering will work alongside the ADL to help us rise to the occasion.” What occasion? The threat of the power that the proliferation of free speech on the internet is giving to individual human beings fighting for truth and justice.

Who Died And Made Them King?
It is disconcerting to me that we are moving into a time where a once free and neutral internet has suddenly come more and more under the control of powerful dictatorial forces. Yes, dictatorial. The ADL is marching into the internet cyberscape with the sense of entitlement to DICTATE what should and shouldn’t be said by the rest of us. Doesn’t this mimic that actions of a certain dictator from the past that the ADL would claim to have been zealously opposed to? (I won’t name names for fear of triggering some sophisticated ADL-Google-keyword-cyber-censoring mechanism).

The obvious fact is that the cabal of organizations that will be sitting down at the Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab will likely make little mention of the impact of cyber-bullying and online hate speech on human individuals. They will be more prone to focus on how to continue hiding crimes against humanity perpetrated by the global elite since time immemorial, crimes like massive fraud, slavery, pedophilia, torture, and murder. And why would these organizations be motivated to hide these crimes? Because they are now controlled by the very global elite who are perpetrating them in the first place.

The War On Hate
The whole narrative of a group that self-identifies as having the authority ‘to curb hate speech and abuse’ on the internet is deeply flawed and even hypocritical. And employing tactics in the same mold as the failed wars on drugs, cancer, and terrorism further gives them away. These are nothing more than tactics of obfuscation of what is really going on.

Human growth is not advanced by attempts to stifle, destroy, or eradicate darkness. As I discussed in my article ‘Let’s Discard The ‘Right’ To Be Insulted By Free Speech,’ we do not evolve by stopping people from expressing any hatred or other negative emotions that are deep inside them, we evolve by allowing people to express themselves freely and becoming immune to their ‘offensive’ remarks by learning not to take them personally.

Hate speech in itself cannot demean the object of hatred, it only reveals the unhealed emotions of its source. And the more we allow these unhealed emotions a chance to be let out, the more space we create for personal and collective healing.

In that regard, attempts to actually do something positive about human hatred through censorship is at best naive, and in most cases like this one, it turns out to be a vehicle of domination for those who would wish to maintain and expand control over information and the self-expression of individuals.

The Need To Move Off These Platforms
The ADL aside, internet corporations like Facebook that continue to delve more deeply into censorship are playing a bit of a risky game. Perhaps many of them feel that they are ‘too big to fail,’ in the sense that they believe they are too essential to the lives of most people to suddenly get abandoned en masse. Perhaps, for now, that is true. But I’m not sure that they should really be messing with an Awakening Community that is growing larger by the heartbeat.

Collective Evolution has a few interesting ideas in this regard that we will be launching soon. Stay tuned.

More insanity. They won't stop. Evil networking.

 

[Mike]

Looks like another coordinated (Facebook and twitter) purge:

EXCLUSIVE: Meet the Reporters Whose Pages Were Shut Down By Facebook

Facebook purged hundreds of pages from its platform on Thursday. But instead of the usual targets - namely Russia and Iran - Thursday’s ban shut down accounts operated by independent American reporters and activists, Sputnik News has learned.

I was like here we go and expected sott.net on both sites might be gone... but nope.

 

[angelburst29]

Looks like another coordinated (Facebook and twitter) purge:

EXCLUSIVE: Meet the Reporters Whose Pages Were Shut Down By Facebook

I was like here we go and expected sott.net on both sites might be gone... but nope.

Soro's put a heavy investment in The New York Times, a few months ago. Wouldn't surprise me - if he had something to do with this "purge"?

The New York Times played fast and loose with the facts regarding Facebook’s ban of more than 800 pages and accounts on Thursday. The Times, as well as the Washington Post, were quick to report on the purge, and their stories were finely crafted in an apparent attempt to stir up support for it.

13.10.2018 - New York Times serves as Facebook's Mouthpiece in Purge of Independent Media
New York Times Serves as Facebook's Mouthpiece in Purge of Independent Media

Both the Times and the Post stories rolled out shortly after Facebook announced its ban on the accounts in a blog post, but quotes directly from the horse's' mouth in the Times and the publication of screenshots of pages that were deleted at the time of Facebook's public announcement raise questions over whether there was coordination between the social media giant and the two most prominent liberal newspapers in the United States.

In the New York Times article, Facebook's ban is sometimes referenced in the future tense and sometimes in the past. For example, one bit reads, "The company said it would remove the pages and accounts," while another says, "Mr. Gleicher said that the accounts and pages that Facebook took down on Thursday violated its rules… "

That Mr. Gleicher is Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy — who not only authored Facebook's statement about the ban but also spoke privately with the Times at length.

The Times cited by name a few of the banned pages but did not say how it learned that those specific pages had been shut down. The Washington Post said that Facebook named five pages it had banned in its statement; however, no such information exists in the statement.

Both of the legacy papers also published screenshots of some of the banned pages. It isn't clear how the companies obtained them, however, as the pages were banned before Facebook made its announcement and thus were no longer viewable by the public. Facebook may have told the outlets of the upcoming ban or provided them with a selection of screenshots.

Either way, the examples cited are not really representative of the largest pages that were purged. The cover images on both outlets' reports show posts that are right-wing and inflammatory. The Post's cover image features a post by "Nation In Distress" which asks whether Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) is "demented?" That article was originally uploaded to a website called "Right Wing Tribune."

The Times' cover image features a post by "Right Wing News."

While there are brief mentions in the Times' story of banned left-wing pages with notable influence, such as Reverb Press and The Resistance, the only pages to have screenshots of their posts published were right-wing. Those posts covered topics ranging from support for US President Donald Trump and his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault, to anti-Muslim arguments.

Facebook made it clear that it wasn't banning the pages for their political positions but because of some form of "inauthentic behavior."

While Facebook's latest round of bans targeted a spectrum of politicized American pages, its overall portrayal in the mainstream press as a purge of the right wing is a dramatic departure from reality. Sputnik News independently uncovered a number of far more credible, left and libertarian-leaning news websites with far more influence and reach that were shut down and completely ignored in the liberal papers' write-ups.

The Post — to its credit — wrote a more balanced story than the Gray Lady, though both tried to link the behavior allegedly displayed by bad American actors to Russia, arguing, in essence, that inauthentic use of social media is not uniquely Russian, but Russian in character.

If you ask the Post, "false information" posted by foreigners is "clear-cut manipulation," but if posted by Americans, it "could be considered free speech."

It's a reassuring display of nuance from a paper which proudly proclaims that "Democracy dies in darkness."

These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that's crossing the line over free speech," Ryan Fox, co-founder of New Knowledge, told The Times. New Knowledge is a venture capital-funded cybersecurity firm.

But were these pages really trying to manufacture consensus, or are the mainstream media and Silicon Valley projecting? When it comes to coverage of international issues — say Iran, Russia, Syria or Venezuela — who manufactures consensus more demonstrably than CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The New York Times and the Washington Post?

"Multiple full-scale invasions of Syria have been prevented because of information that the alternative media made viral," John Vibes, a reporter for one of the banned media outlets, The Free Thought Project, told Sputnik News on Thursday. With these pages that commanded such massive reach now deleted, perhaps it will be that much easier to manufacture consensus for war.

Some have pointed out that websites like The Anti-Media and The Free Thought Project are competitors to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and there has been a remarkable absence of outcry over them being silenced. For all the bloviating about a free press in the Trump era, it appears that mainstream journalists are all too happy to have the pages removed, and their personal legitimacy therefore reaffirmed and bolstered.

While the pages that were banned may have sometimes gotten it wrong, the New York Times and the Post do too. Even in its reporting on this story, the Times quoted Molly McKew as an "information warfare expert," despite the fact that she has no real credentials on the topic and is a registered foreign lobbyist — which the Times failed to disclose.

While the Anti-Media, for example, did not typically post much about electoral politics, Facebook departed from its norm in explicitly mentioning the midterm elections in announcing the latest ban. "This could be an attempt by Facebook itself to affect the outcome of the coming elections," Anti-Media founder Nicholas Bernabe told Sputnik.

Meanwhile, the Times referred back to a previous purge from Facebook: a late July ban on some 30-plus pages and accounts displaying allegedly inauthentic behavior. The outlet claimed that Facebook noted the proximity in time of that ban to the midterm elections. However, Facebook never did. In fact, Facebook specifically said they banned the pages because of "what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week," referring to the Unite the Right 2.0 protest in Washington, DC, on August 12.

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post responded to requests for comment in time for this article's publication.

 

[angelburst29]

November 06, 2018 - Facebook blocks 115 accounts for alleged 'inauthentic behavior' ahead of midterm elections
Facebook blocks 115 accounts for alleged 'inauthentic behavior' ahead of midterm elections

Facebook has blocked 115 accounts on its platforms due to alleged "inauthentic behavior" ahead of the 2018 midterm elections on Tuesday.

Facebook made the announcement in a statement Monday evening, saying it blocked 30 accounts on its namesake platform and 85 on Instagram that authorities believe are linked to foreign entities tying to interfere with the closely watched U.S. elections.

The social media giant said U.S. law enforcement flagged the accounts on Sunday, citing "online activity that they recently discovered and which they believe may be linked to foreign entities," according to the statement. Facebook, which owns Instagram, said it immediately blocked accounts and opened an investigation.

Nearly all of the blocked Facebook pages appeared to be written in French or Russian, although the Instagram accounts were mostly in English, the company said, noting that some of the Instagram accounts focused on celebrities and political debate.

"Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly," Facebook said. "But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the U.S., we wanted to let people know about the action we've taken and the facts as we know them today."

Facebook said it planned to release more information as the investigation continues.

"Once we know more -- including whether these accounts are linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency or other foreign entities -- we will update this post," Facebook said.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned last quarter that the company's sales growth would slow significantly for the remainder 2018 as it ramps up spending on safety and security.

The company said it deleted 82 "bad actors" from Facebook in October due to coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran. Facebook also disclosed sophisticated attempts from Russia to interfere with elections and promote political discord in the U.S.

An internal investigation into the Iranian accounts found that more than 1 million Facebook users had followed at least one of the fraudulent pages, while about 25,000 users joined at least one of these politically oriented groups, according to a company statement.

Facebook company opened a war room earlier this year in an effort to combat election interference around the globe.

PHOTO: Employees work in Facebook's 'War Room,' during a media demonstration, Oct. 17, 2018, in Menlo Park, Calif. (Noah Berger/AFP/Getty Images)

The company said its so-called elections war room is the nerve center of the social network's fight against misinformation and political interference.

"Finding and removing abuse is a constant challenge. Our adversaries are smart and well funded, and as we improve their tactics change," the company said in October. "We prohibit coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook because we want people who use our services to be able to trust the connections they make."

 

[angelburst29]

08/12/2018 - Italy fines Facebook 10Million for misleading users over data practices
Italy fines Facebook €10million for misleading users over data practices


@ Copyright : Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook - which has been fined €10 million by Italy over data misuse

The fine is one of the largest amounts demanded from the social media giant for data misuse.

Italy's AGCM consumer authority found the company to be in violation of four of Italy's consumer codes - articles 21, 22, 24 and 25.

It said Facebook failed to clearly tell users in the signing up process about how their data is used for "commercial purposes."

"Facebook emphasizes the free nature of the service but not the commercial objectives that underlie the provision of the social network service," a statement from AGCM said.

It added the company advertises the free nature of the platform without telling users of the "profitable ends that underlie the provision of the social network."

In an investigation, the watchdog also found that Facebook forces an "aggressive practice" on users by sharing their data with third parties for commercial purposes.

It said users who decide to limit their data sharing are penalised by Facebook with restrictions on the use of the platform and third-party applications. This encourages users to keep the preset data settings, the AGCM found.

The watchdog demanded Facebook publish a declaration on the above on its website and mobile app.

Facebook has repeatedly said it does not sell users’ data.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We are reviewing the Authority’s decision and hope to work with them to resolve their concerns. This year we made our terms and policies clearer to help people understand how we use data and how our business works. We also made our privacy settings easier to find and use, and we’re continuing to improve them. You own and control your personal information on Facebook.”

Euronews contacted Facebook for further comment on the matter, but the company had not responded at the time of publication.

 

[angelburst29]

Back-dated Oct. 23, 2018 - Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media “Just the Beginning,” Says Top Neocon Insider
Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media "Just the Beginning," Says Top Neocon Insider - Grayzone Project

At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media.

This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.

Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”

In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the U.S. government and NATO. They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”

Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.

Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty member in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.

In the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears seated at the table.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1051815115362832384

The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state violence is concerned.

Jamie Fly, rise of a neocon cadre

Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.

Like so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.

In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.

By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials.”

Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.

He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.

PropOrNot sparks the alternative media panic

A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.'” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”

The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.

According to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.

Timberg’s piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.

The birth of the Russian bot tracker — with U.S. government money

By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.

The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”

Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund,
which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.

The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western governments, and largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two financial sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the U.S. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Foreign Office (known in German as the Auswärtiges Amt).
The U.S. State Department also provides more than half a million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs ministries of Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of a million dollars per year from NATO
.

The US government and NATO are top donors to the German Marshall Fund

Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a who’s who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.

Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.

During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”

Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”

What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing”

A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.”

These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.

Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.

Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.

Clint Watts has urged Congress to “quell information rebellions”

However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims about malicious Russian bot activity.

In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.

“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.

But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.

Enter the Atlantic Council

In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.

The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.

This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”

The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.

Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.

In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”

With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media censorship.

In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.

As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”

 

[angelburst29]

December, 15, 2018 - 6.8M Users’ Photos Exposed by Facebook Apps Bug
6.8M Users’ Photos Exposed by Facebook Apps Bug - Science news - Tasnim News Agency

Facebook announced on Friday that the social network had exposed the private photos of millions of users without their permission.


Reset the “days since the last Facebook privacy scandal” counter, as Facebook has just revealed a Photo API bug gave app developers too much access to the photos of up to 5.6 million users.

The bug allowed apps users had approved to pull their timeline photos to also receive their Facebook Stories, Marketplace photos, and most worryingly, photos they’d uploaded to Facebook but never shared. Facebook says the bug ran for 12 days from September 13th to September 25th. Facebook tells TechCrunch it discovered the breach on September 25th, and informed the European Union’s privacy watchdog the Office Of The Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) on November 22nd. The IDPC has begun a statuatory inquiry into the breach, Tech Crunch reported.

Facebook provided merely a glib “We’re sorry this happened” in terms of an apology. It will provide tools next week for app developers to check if they were impacted and it will work with them to delete photos they shouldn’t have. The company plans to notify people it suspects may have been impacted by the bug via Facebook notification that will direct them to the Help Center where they’ll see if they used any apps impacted by the bug. It’s recommending users log into apps to check if they have wrongful photo access. Here’s a look at a mockup of warning notification users will see:

Facebook initially didn’t disclose when it discovered the bug, but in response to TechCrunch’s inquiry, a spokesperson says that it was discovered and fixed on September 25th. They say it took time for the company to investigate which apps and people were impacted, and build and translate the warning notification it will send impacted users. The delay could put Facebook at risk of GDPR fines for not promptly disclosing the issue within 72 hours that can go up to 20 million pounds or 4 percent of annual global revenue.

However, Facebook tells me it notified the IDPC that oversees GDPR on November 22nd, as soon as it established the bug was considered a reportable breach under GDPR guidelines. It says that it had to investigate to make that conclusion and let the IDPC know within 72 hours once it had. The head of communications for the IDPC Graham Doyle tells TechCrunch “The Irish DPC has received a number of breach notifications from Facebook since the introduction of the GDPR on May 25, 2018. With reference to these data breaches, including the breach in question, we have this week commenced a statutory inquiry examining Facebook’s compliance with the relevant provisions of the GDPR.”

Facebook tells me the bug did not impact photos privately shared through Messenger. The bug wouldn’t have exposed photos users never uploaded to Facebook from their camera roll or computer. But photos users uploaded but either decided not to post, that got interrupted by connectivity issues, or that they otherwise never finished sharing could have winded up with app developers.

The privacy failure will further weaken confidence that Facebook is a responsible steward for our private data. It follows Facebook’s massive security breach that allowed hackers to scrape 30 million people’s information back in September. There was also November’s bug allowing websites to read users’ Likes, October’s bug that mistakenly deleted people’s Live videos, and May’s bug that changed people’s status update composer privacy settings. It increasingly looks like the social network has gotten too big for the company to secure. Curiously, Facebook discovered the bug on September 25th, the same day as its 30 million user breach. Perhaps it kept a lid on the situation in hopes of not creating an even bigger scandal.

That it keeps photos you partially uploaded but never posted in the first place is creepy, but the fact that these could be exposed to third-party developers is truly unacceptable. And it seems Facebook is so tired of its failings that it couldn’t put forward even a seemingly heartfelt apology is telling. This company’s troubles are not only souring users on Facebook, but employees and the tech industry as large as well. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress earlier this year that “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” What does Facebook deserve at this point?

 

[angelburst29]

Sat Dec 22, 2018 - Twitter Blocked Hamas, Hezbollah Accounts at Israel’s Demand
Farsnews

Twitter revealed that it blocked over 20 accounts belonging to Hamas and Hezbollah to meet demands issued by Israel.

In the first half of 2018, the social media giant blocked over 20 accounts belonging to senior figures of Hamas and Hezbollah, including those of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas Spokesman Fawzi Barhoum and Rawhi Mushtaha, a close associate of Hamas’ leader in Gaza Yahya Al-Sinwar, Middle East Monitor reported.

Twitter’s decision came after it received a letter from the Cybercrime Department of Israel’s Ministry of Justice in June demanding that it “permanently close” the accounts in question. The letter – published by the Times of Israel – cited Article 24 of Israel’s Counterterror Law which “states that any act of solidarity with a terror organization, including any publication of support in its actions, is an offense punishable by three or five years’ imprisonment”.

“We would like to point out that Article 23 [of] that law states that facilitating or aiding terror organisations is also an offence,” the letter continued, before going on to provide a two-page list of the accounts Israel wanted to be blocked.

According to the Times of Israel, “13 of the accounts belonging to senior Hamas officials have [since] gone blank, save for a statement saying that the account ‘has been withheld in Israel in response to a legal demand’”.

It also seems that Hamas was disproportionately targeted by the request, with Naim Qassem, the second-in-command of Hezbollah, being the only official belonging to the Lebanese group to appear on the list.

This is not the only time Twitter has bowed to Israeli pressure to restrict content and accounts. Earlier this month it emerged that Twitter has been enforcing Israel’s gag order on details of its botched operation in Gaza, instructing a number of media outlets to remove posts revealing the identity of Israel’s undercover operatives. The Electronic Intifada (EI) disclosed that it had received a message from Twitter instructing it to delete a tweet linking to a story about the operation, despite the fact that, as a US-based organization, it is not required to comply with the gag order Israel places on its own media.

In June, Israel’s Security Minister Gilad Erdan also wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and its executive chairman, Omid Kordestani, telling the company to close Hamas and Hezbollah accounts. Erdan wrote that “giving terrorist organisations the freedom to operate and disseminate messages of incitement through your network is a violation of the Israeli law. If Twitter does not respond to the Israeli demand, it will be subject to legal measures that Israel may take against it”.

It now seems that, given the fact that the Justice Ministry’s letter was sent on June 26, Erdan’s request formed part of a targeted and coordinated campaign by various departments of the Israeli government to pressure Twitter to comply with its requests. Both Erdan and Ayelet Shaked – the Israeli Justice Minister – have effectively waged war on social media giants, passing the so-called “Facebook Bill” which would authorize Israel’s court to issue orders to delete internet content and lobbying Facebook to delete content to avoid being subject to fines or a usage block in Israel.