The major threat to our communities is Facebook’s dictatorship and its biased censorship! We have too many proofs for this statement. Facebook is the one who threats users’ safety and not welcoming everyone. Everyone should unwelcome Facebook’s violations against our human rights. Zuckerberg’s company faces investigations from the European Union, the FBI, the FTC, the SEC and the US Department of Justice.
Facebook violates Human Rights! Facebook destroys freedom of expression!
Facebook is a cyber rouge state that does not follow Community Standards of Human Rights and Laws. Facebook is a commercial dictatorship, surveillance capitalism that it threats, warns, bans, blocks, restricts, shadow bans, deletes, disables, unpublishes, hides, manipulates pages, news feeds, comments, posts, spying on users, leaks, sells our privacies, allows fake accounts for manipulation, promotes regime change, riots, political conflicts, terrorism and Zionism, systematically oppresses users with authorities, promotes US imperialism, terrorism, hatreds, political, religious, sexual and racial discriminations for their commercial sponsors and establishments who are highly hostile to who oppose their imperial business greed, disinformation and misdeeds. Moreover, these negative actions won’t occur for pro US establishment, pro Facebook business interest users. DOUBLE STRANDARD is its feature.
Furthermore, everything done by Facebook above mentioned is extremely one sided and without any talks. NO TALKS, NO COMMUNICATION, NO EXPLANATION while Facebook does these violations and crimes against humanity.
Facebook of “favouring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
“We have a responsibility to protect your data,” went Zuckerberg in a statement, “and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”
I agree with Zuckerberg on this issue. Exactly you don’t deserve to serve us. There are too many testimonies for this. For example, PURGE of dissident voices!
The company of attempting to suppress dissenting voices that refuse to toe the corporate line.
“The massive shutdown affected many progressive sites devoted to covering war, police brutality, and other issues neglected by the corporate media. ”
“After Facebook announced on October 10 that it shut down and removed hundreds of pages and accounts that it vaguely accused of spreading “spam” and engaging in “inauthentic behavior,” some of the individuals and organizations caught up in the social media behemoth’s dragnet disputed accusations that they were violating the platform’s rules and raised alarm that Facebook is using its enormous power to silence independent political perspectives that run counter to the corporate media’s dominant narratives. ”
While it is reasonable to assume that some of the more than 800 total pages and accounts shut down by Facebook were engaged in overtly fraudulent behavior—such as the use of fake accounts and bots to generate ad revenue—numerous independent media outlets that cover a wide array of issues say they were swept up in the massive purge despite never using such tactics.
This is a dance of confused ends and mistrustful glances, mixed with occasional moments of misplaced adoration. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has never been an empathetic sort and his testifying before the US Congress has done nothing to dispel that assessment. That stands to reason: the least sociable of types, the most awkward of individuals in engaging with beings, creates the most networked social creation on the planet. In doing so, he becomes the president and promoter of surveillance capitalism, its chief priest and sovereign.
So once government regulators begin regulating speech on the Internet, where will it end?
Will everything that we do on the Internet have to be evaluated for “truthiness” before it is allowed to be posted? And who decides what the “truth” actually is?
1. How many countries banned or restricted Facebook? Which one is the major threat to community? It’s Facebook! Ban Facebook!
24 Countries banned or restricted Facebook for National Security. These countries restricted Facebook to help keep their communities safe and welcoming for everyone.
Many countries have banned or temporarily limited access to the social networking website Facebook, including Bangladesh,[1] China (except Hong Kong, Macau),[2] Iran,[3] and North Korea.[4] Use of the website has also been restricted in other ways in other countries. As of May 2016, the only countries to ban access around the clock to the social networking site are China, Iran, and North Korea. However, since most North Korean residents have no access to the internet,[5] China and Iran are the only countries where access to Facebook is actively restricted in a wholesale manner.
Austria, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and Vietnam.
2. How Many people abandoned Facebook? Boycott Facebook!
a. The user market in North America is flat, while in Europe, FB has experienced a loss of 3 million daily active users. The process was already underway after 2015. The moment your grandparents start using a communications product with teenage enthusiasm, it’s time for a swift, contrarian change. But social media, as with other forms of communication, is a matter of demographics and class.
b. A new report from Edison Research finds Facebook's American user-base contracted for the second consecutive year in 2018, shrinking by 15,000,000, and that the biggest declines have come from the coveted 12-34 year old group. However -- cue sad trombone -- is that large numbers of these people have shifted to using Instagram, which Facebook owns. Facebook recently announced that it would be merging the back-ends of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, facilitating unified tracking and targeting across all three services.
3. Privacy Violations
Facebook will sell 5,000 pieces of information about you.
a. Facebook can collect and sell your information as long as you use the service. READ MORE: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/what-facebook-knows-about-me
b. “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-cambridge-analytica-and-surveillance-capitalism/5633039
c. Every year, Facebook gets thousands of requests for data from governments worldwide, including search warrants, subpoenas, or calls to restrict certain kinds of content. And, according to a new report, those requests are increasing at an alarming rate.
d. As the damning details of Facebook’s largest-ever data breach at the hands of pro-Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica continue to pour in—and as the social media giant’s share price continues to plummet as a result—Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Monday called on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “testify under oath” before Congress to explain why his company took so long to notify users that their information had been compromised.
e. “We are sorry.” This is what the head of public policy for Facebook in Canada has said in regards to the revelation that over 600,000 Canadians have had their privacy compromised and their data used by Cambridge Analytica. When whistle-blower Christopher Wylie revealed that Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately collected information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users, he also showed the world the incredible scale of how social media companies and data brokers are harvesting and exploiting the private social media activity of millions of people around the world.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-facebook-data-scandal-how-protected-are-canadians/5638767
4. Facebook’s Spying Activities and its Partners
Atlantic Council, PropOrNot.not, the CIA and the world's largest ad agency network, WPP (WPPGY), have been in bed together on a social media data-mining venture since at least January 2009.
“Israeli security agencies monitor Facebook and send the company posts they consider incitement. Facebook has responded by removing most of them.” Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.
NSA and its British counterpart — the GCHQ, short for Government Communications Headquarters — had siphoned off data transfers by tapping directly into undersea cable networks. Edward Snowden had earlier revealed that the NSA’s notorious PRISM program had provided access to a number of US tech companies and social media services, including Facebook.
Facebook, Apple and Google have argued they had no idea the NSA was illegally vacuuming up customer data. Last year, however, Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel, said the companies knew about the practice. In 2009, Mark Zuckerberg told the world Facebook is in essence a platform for harvesting data and conducting surveillance.
Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($500,000) came from former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC. The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defense.
“Facebook may as well be called Stasibook,” I noted in 2012 when the corporation rolled out its IPO. “It is the most effective surveillance tool the world has ever known. Nearly a billion people love to be not so secretly data-mined, every chat and friend connection tucked into super-computer data reservoirs at the NSA.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies. Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), “Hamilton 68”, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the German Foreign Office (known in German as the Auswärtiges Amt)
In the name of fighting fake news and targeting “inauthentic behavior” and “misleading users”, Facebook has essentially indulged in what was in 1934 Germany called the “Gleichschaltung” of the media – a synchronised out-phasing of dissident voices in the media and a consolidation of political opinions.
Stamos was speaking at CyCon, a conference sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on cyberwar and psychological operations. The very presence of a social media company at such an event, just a few hundred miles from NATO’s heavily-militarized border with Russia, makes clear the extent to which the US technology giants have been integrated into the US military-intelligence apparatus and its international operations.
Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).
Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept (12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.
Now, this sort of talk would be fine if Facebook had assembled a diverse group, comprised of stakeholders from a wide range of democracies. But, by selecting a clearly biased actor to police “misinformation and foreign interference” during “elections and other highly sensitive moments” and also work to “help educate citizens as well as civil society,” Mark Zuckerberg’s team has essentially made their company a tool of the US military agenda.
Just look at who funds the Atlantic Council: donors include military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, all of whom directly profit from tensions with powers like Russia and China. Meanwhile, in addition to NATO itself, there are also payments made by the US State Department, along with bungs from the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines.
Other major paymasters include the government of the United Arab Emirates, which is, of course, an absolute monarchy. And more UAE cash comes via the Abu Dhabi state oil company and Crescent Petroleum. Not to be outdone, Morocco, again not noted for its freedoms, also throws significant coin into the bucket.
Monika Bickert, head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, told lawmakers that the social media giant now employs a security team of 10,000 people, 7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content,” and that, “by the end of 2018 we will more than double” the security team. This group includes “a dedicated counterterrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism.” In other words, there is a revolving door between the technology giants and the state intelligence and police forces, with one increasingly indistinguishable from the other.
Bickert pointed to the growing use of artificial intelligence to flag content, saying Facebook does not “wait for these… bad actors to upload content to Facebook before placing it into our detection systems,” bragging that much of the “propaganda” removed from Facebook “is content that we identify ourselves before anybody” else has a chance to view it.
She added that Facebook has partnered with over a dozen other companies to maintain a blacklist of content, based on “unique digital fingerprints.” This means that if a piece of content, whether a video, image, or written statement, is flagged by any one of these companies, it will be banned from all social media. This database now includes some 50,000 pieces of content and is constantly growing, officials said.
In other words, the technology giants have created an all-pervasive system of censorship in which machines, trained to collaborate with the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies, are able to flag and block content even before it is posted.
Other supporters include:
§ Wealthy Gulf Arab emirs and magnates including the government of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., Crescent Petroleum (Sharjah), Lebanese-Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri, the International Petroleum Investment Company (Abu Dhabi), and various other groups and individuals.
§ Major multinational corporations like 21st Century Fox, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Crescent Petroleum, Dow Chemicals, ExxonMobil, Google, Hanes, Microsoft, Panasonic, Pfizer, QUALCOMM, Royal Dutch Shell, Saab, Sony, and Walmart, among others.
§ Asset management/consultancy firms and banks, including Bank of America, The Blackstone Group, HSBC Holdings, JPMorgan Chase & Co., MetLife, and Zurich Insurance Group Ltd.
§ Top military contractors like Airbus, Beretta USA, Boeing, Elbit Systems of America (a subsidiary of the Israeli firm), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Safran of France.
§ In a new attack on free speech, the European Union (EU) is calling on major social media and Internet firms including Facebook, Twitter and Google to automatically and immediately censor online material.
a. Facebook announced that it was officially partnering with the Atlantic Council in the form of an “election partnership […] to prevent [their] service from being abused during elections.” Indeed, the US midterm elections are only a couple of weeks away, so the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab are now going at it with full force, closing Facebook accounts left and right that they personally deem could be fake accounts, or accounts spreading misinformation, based on very shady criteria.
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b. The report starts off with “Facebook could be listening to its user’s conversations through smartphone microphones, Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie says. He appeared in front of a committee of British parliamentarians on Tuesday, and in his nearly four hours of testimony, he used words like “fraud” and “cheat” to describe the use of Facebook data to affect the outcomes of Brexit. He also addressed the longstanding internet theory that Facebook spies on its users to shape their advertising.”
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c. A CBS news article published in 2011 entitled “Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA. Seriously” reveals the “unspoken truth” which the mainstream media including CBS have failed to address. According to CBS, the CIA is “using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people.”
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d. Edward Snowden had earlier revealed that the NSA’s notorious PRISM program had provided access to a number of US tech companies and social media services, including Facebook. Facebook, Apple and Google have argued they had no idea the NSA was illegally vacuuming up customer data. Last year, however, Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel, said the companies knew about the practice.
e. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies.
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f. Facebook and the National Endowment for Democracy have agreed to stop the spread of what the United States government and its corporate media denounce as misinformation, that is to say information in conflict with the establishment narrative.
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g. Facebook has 20 million users worldwide, is worth billions of dollars and, if internet sources are to be believed, was started by the CIA.
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h. Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). READ MORE:
i. “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”
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j. If Facebook truly wanted to “protect democracy and elections worldwide,” it would build a broad coalition of experts and activists from a wide and disparate range of the countries it serves. Instead, the American social media giant has outsourced the task to NATO’s propaganda wing.
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k. Monika Bickert, head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, told lawmakers that the social media giant now employs a security team of 10,000 people, 7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content,” and that, “by the end of 2018 we will more than double” the security team.
READ MORE:
l. The partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council is an attempt to ensure the grip of dominant imperialist powers – militaries, multinationals, banks, and philanthropists – who feel threatened by the unrestricted flow of information and anti-systemic narratives on social media.
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m. In a new attack on free speech, the European Union (EU) is calling on major social media and Internet firms including Facebook, Twitter and Google to automatically and immediately censor online material.
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n. Alternative online media sites are gaining popularity at the expense of unreliable mainstream sources of news, information and analysis – notably during the US presidential election coverage, concluded last week, along with every time America goes to war.
o. Months after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans lawlessly. Sweeping surveillance followed without court-approved warrants. Doing so violates core constitutional protections. Conditions now are worse than then.
p. Google and Facebook have discussed – and possibly built – special portals for the U.S. government to snoop on user data, according to revelations sparked by an investigative series of articles by Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. The Guardian followed this up by revealing an NSA program named Prism that allowed the government to review contents of emails as well as audio and video conversations. A slide from a 41 page presentation made in April 2013, lists Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Paltalk and Yahoo and even provided the dates that the companies “joined” the scheme. It also mentions a project called “Upstream” that allows the NSA to collect information from “fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”
q. Facebook’s press release states that “people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” Facebook has proven since the very early days that they are anything but trustworthy – from Mark Zuckerberg’s eager collaboration with the NSA’s PRISM program to the partnership with the pro-NATO Atlantic Council to the platform’s ultimate admission that basically everyone’s data has been compromised at this point. Anyone who “shares” on Facebook at this point is deliberately ignoring reams of proof that the platform is not “a place for friends.”
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/mainstream-media-drives-getaway-car-for-alt-media-purge/5657123
r. “Is Facebook really working with the police to create a kill switch to stop activists from using the website to mobilize support for political demonstrations?” the PrivacySOS blog asked. “How would such a switch function? Would Facebook, which reportedly hands over our data to government agencies at no cost, block users from posting on its website simply because the police ask them to? The company has been criticized before for blocking environmentalist and anti-GMO activists from posting, but Facebook said those were mistakes. Let’s hope this is a misunderstanding, too.”
s. The Obama administration is close to announcing its support for a law that would force Google, Facebook and other Internet communications companies to build back doors for government wiretaps, according to an article in the New York Times Wednesday.
4. Ban, Deletion, Restriction, Disabling, Regulation etc.
a. A 2016 report from the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms detailed how extensive the Facebook censorship was: Pages and personal accounts that were filtered and blocked: Palestinian Dialogue Network (PALDF.net) Gaza now, Jerusalem News Network, Shihab agency, Radio Bethlehem 2000, Orient Radio Network, page Mesh Heck, Ramallah news, journalist Huzaifa Jamous from Abu Dis, activist Qassam Bedier, activist Mohammed Ghannam, journalist Kamel Jbeil, administrative accounts for Al Quds Page, administrative accounts Shihab agency, activist Abdel-Qader al-Titi, youth activist Hussein Shajaeih, Ramah Mubarak (account is activated), Ahmed Abdel Aal (account is activated), Mohammad Za’anin (still deleted), Amer Abu Arafa (still deleted), Abdulrahman al-Kahlout (still deleted).Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.
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b. Media outlets removed by Facebook on Thursday, in a massive purge of 800 accounts and pages, had previously been targeted in a blacklist of oppositional sites promoted by the Washington Post in November 2016.The organizations censored by Facebook include The Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, The Free Thought Project, with 3.1 million followers, and Counter Current News, with 500,000 followers. All three of these groups had been on the blacklist.
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c. 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.
d. After Facebook announced on October 10 that it shut down and removed hundreds of pages and accounts that it vaguely accused of spreading “spam” and engaging in “inauthentic behavior,” some of the individuals and organizations caught up in the social media behemoth’s dragnet disputed accusations that they were violating the platform’s rules and raised alarm that Facebook is using its enormous power to silence independent political perspectives that run counter to the corporate media’s dominant narratives.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-accused-of-full-frontal-suppression-of-dissent-after-independent-media-swept-up-in-mass-purge/5656967 (best)
e. Facebook is now top donor to Neocon Atlantic Council. Its Digital Forensic Research Lab is led a former Obama National Security Council advisor. The Lab told Facebook what pages are "fake." Last week they shut down page of people organizing Aug. 12 anti-Nazi rally in DC.
f. Prominent political critics confirmed to us that their accounts had been suspended or inactivated yesterday in a coordinated purge. But after we – and others – slammed the censorship, the activists’ accounts have been reinstated.
g. Responding to a request by the government of Turkey, social media giant Facebook is now censoring images of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. Turkey promised to block the popular website if it did not comply with an order handed down by the Golbasi Duty Magistrate Court on Sunday in Ankara, the capital.
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h. This political satire on the U.S. relationship with Israel was censored by Facebook and — though receiving an enormous response by Daily Kos readers — deleted and banned by the media site. BREAKING NEWS: Americans required to add Star of David to U.S. flags by July 4th: Velcro stars available at most post offices.
i. This site’s visitor numbers are currently around one third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause is not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook: What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you. This hidden, never-explained, but clearly systematic, news-suppression, exemplifies the widespread and coordinated operation by the major media, against any independent sites which document things that the Establishment, the aristocracy, the “Deep State,” or however you call the controlling owners of the corporations that advertise in and own the media, hire their journalists and editors to block from reaching the public.
j. Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter. Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts.
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k. Facebook sent me a message that I was going too fast in adding friends and I had to slow down. (This message was accompanied by the annoying CAPTCHA that is used to distinguish between humans and ‘bots. I hate having to prove my humanity to a corporation!)
l. Putting power in the hands of the people has the potential to backfire. Facebook users could band together and report true stories that they disagree with as false.
m. May and Macron’s proposal is to identify and remove new extremist content. It is unclear whose rules they want Internet companies to enforce. The Facebook Files showed Facebook’s own policies are to delete a lot of legal but potentially objectionable content, often in a seemingly arbitrary way. Alternatively, if the companies are to enforce UK and French laws on hate speech and so on, that will probably be a lot less censorious than May and Macron are hoping for. The history of automated content takedown suggests removing extremist content without removing harmless content will be an enormous challenge. The mistakes made by YouTube’s ContentID system that automate takedowns of alleged copyright-infringing content on YouTube are well-documented.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/uk-and-france-propose-automated-censorship-of-online-content/5595345
n. An extremely noteworthy and negative event took place in early October, largely unreported by the corporate-controlled media: in a coordinated purge, Facebook and Twitter deactivated the accounts of hundreds of independent media pages, some of them with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, just a few weeks prior to a major election.
o. What the company means by “fake news’ and “misinformation” is shown in practice. Among the pages removed by Facebook was the official event page for last month’s anniversary protest against a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, South Carolina. The most recent batch of “fake” pages taken down by the company all expressed left-wing political views, including opposition to US and Israeli foreign policy and police violence.
5. Safety, Security Violations by Facebook
a. Former moderator Selena Scola, who worked at Facebook from June 2017 till March this year (2018), has gone so far as to sue the company for post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing content depicting graphic violence “from her cubicle in Facebook’s Silicon Valley offices”. Scola, through her legal counsel, claims that the company did not create a safe environment, instead working upon the practice of having a “revolving door of contractors”. Moderators, according to the legal suit, are “bombarded” with “thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder.”
b. Facebook plans to have its users rank news sites’ “reliability”. This decision is in reaction to the 18-month-long “fake news” scandal and is being promoted as the most “fair and balanced solution” to the issue. The idea is that the community at large would determine which sites are credible and which aren’t, and the lowest-ranking ones would somehow be penalized, possibly by appearing even less on users’ newsfeeds.
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c. First, Stamos said Facebook is seeking to combat “fake news” through “changes in the news feed that surface this content to people.” But instead of seeking to determine if a piece of news is “fake,” Facebook is carrying out mass profiling of news sources by “Look[ing] to metadata around the people who have created the account, the news site that’s running it,” to evaluate whether it is “trustworthy.” Through this Orwellian censorship regime, Facebook segregates news organizations into categories and determines how many people are able to view their postings on that basis. In other words, the company’s evaluation of whether a piece of news is “fake” is determined not by whether it is accurate, factually grounded or verifiable, but rather by who posts it. The logical implication is that if one of Facebook’s “partners” in the establishment media posts a story, no matter how inaccurate, biased, or poorly sourced, the company will still promote it as “trustworthy.”
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-security-officer-not-all-speech-is-created-equal/5643532
The very presence of a social media company at such an event, just a few hundred miles from NATO’s heavily-militarized border with Russia, makes clear the extent to which the US technology giants have been integrated into the US military-intelligence apparatus and its international operations. This Orwellian censorship regime, Facebook segregates news organizations into categories and determines how many people are able to view their postings on that basis.
In other words, the company’s evaluation of whether a piece of news is “fake” is determined not by whether it is accurate, factually grounded or verifiable, but rather by who posts it. The logical implication is that if one of Facebook’s “partners” in the establishment media posts a story, no matter how inaccurate, biased, or poorly sourced, the company will still promote it as “trustworthy.” the largest target of Facebook’s censorship measures consists of “individual participants,” who are often motivated by “legitimately held beliefs” to become “partners in information operations.” That is, millions of people who are not part of any organized political group, but who voice their agreement with the political views promoted by groups targeted by Facebook by sharing their content or voicing their support. Important: These “product enhancements” include redirecting users to content that Facebook approves of and providing “educational cues” informing them that their views are “disputed.”
Under American law, Facebook is regulated like a communications utility, similar to a phone company or a package delivery service. It has neither the “responsibility” nor the right to impose its “ideals” onto its users. Facebook has come under relentless pressure from the US government to serve as an agent of the state intelligence forces to censor and suppress oppositional views on its platform. In so doing, Facebook is acting as an agent of the American state, doing its dirty work to subvert the public’s constitutionally-protected freedoms of speech and assembly.
In perhaps his most ominous statement, Stamos concluded by calling for broader social changes in line with the measures Facebook has already taken. “Our societies overall are going to have to start to adapt to the idea that not all information is created equal,” he concluded. His conclusion harkens to the motto of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
With the vast majority of written communication taking place online, Facebook’s actions, together with other technology companies, constitute the largest, most comprehensive regime of censorship in human history. Outside of and in contradiction to fundamental constitutional and human rights, Facebook claims the right to determine what hundreds of billions of people read and say.
SCL is by no means the only Global Private Military company engaged in these psychological operations. Palantir, SAIC, AggregateIQ, DataTrust and i360 Themis are all significant players. After all, Big Data is a fast-growing multi-billion dollar industry. It is a dream come true for advertisers and Intel PSYOPs experts. It’s a boom market, and U.S. Intel agencies, such as the NSA and CIA are leading the charge.
Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.
Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.
Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.
She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.
It was when a journalist lifted the lid on the DARPA’s Information Awareness Office that the public began to show concern at its information mining projects.
Wikipedia’s IAO page says: “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.”
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.
“Facebook Warriors”
The British Army will revive one of the most contentious special forces units of the second world war, the Chindits, as a new generation of “Facebook” warriors who will wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns.
Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.
Gizmodo notes:
A new group of soldiers, referred to as “Facebook Warriors” will ” wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns,” according to the Financial Times. This unit will be named the 77th battalion, whose number also has a historical significance. FT says:
The original Chindits [77th battalion] were a guerrilla unit led by the swashbuckling British commander Major General Orde Wingate, one of the pioneers of modern unconventional warfare. They operated deep behind Japanese lines in Burma between 1942 and 1945 and their missions were often of questionable success.
These Facebook warriors will be using similar atypical tactics, through non-violent means, to fight their adversary. This will mainly be achieved through “reflexive control,” an old Soviet tactic of spreading specifically curated information in order to get your opponent to react in the exact way you want them to. It’s a pretty tricky trick, and the British army will be doing just that with 1,500-person (or more) troop using Twitter and Facebook as a means to spread disinformation, real war truths, and “false flag” incidents [Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target] as well as just general intelligence gathering. The 77th battalion will reportedly begin operations in April.
‘DoD’
Was there a cover-up surrounding the Pentagon’s direct funding of Facebook’s notorious mass psychological study in order to conceal the fact that the experiment’s true purpose was part of preparations to manipulate public opinion in times of civil unrest?
However, an even more creepy connection between the Facebook experiment and the Pentagon has emerged after it was revealed that the original press release from Cornell highlighting the study included a passage at the bottom which read, “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.”
On November 22, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an alarming piece of news entitled “Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age”. The “cyber-warriors” who are headed for organizations such as the CIA, NSC, FBI, the Pentagon and so on, are trained to stalk, “rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook [emphasis added]. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cell-phones and flash drives.”
Social media services like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly likely to remove content from their networks upon request by Israeli Ministry of Justice officials, according to testimony by a government official at a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday.
‘Colonialism’
Facebook’s Indian partner in the Free Basics venture, is an Indian mega-corporation with interests in telecom, energy, food, retail, infrastructure and, of course, land. Reliance obtained land for its rural cell phone towers from the government of India and grabbed land from farmers for SEZ’s through violence and deceit. As a result and at no cost, Reliance has a huge rural, semi-urban and suburban user base — especially farmers. Although Free Basics has been banned (for the time being), Reliance continues to offer the service across its networks.
d. The social networking phenomenon started as a way of American college students to keep in touch. It is rapidly catching up with Myspace, and has left others like Bebo in its wake. But there is a dark side to the success story that’s been spreading across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother-type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defence.
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e. 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.”
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f. For example, in an opinion piece for the Guardian, U.S. Senator Al Franken proposed that it is time for the U.S. government to step in because Google, Facebook and Twitter have failed to prevent the spread of propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech…As lawmakers grapple with the revelations regarding Russia’s manipulation of social media during the 2016 election, many are shocked to learn the outsized role that the major tech companies play in so many aspects of our lives. Not only do they guide what we see, read, and buy on a regular basis, but their dominance – specifically in the market of information – now requires that we consider their role in the integrity of our democracy. Last week’s hearings demonstrated that these companies may not be up to the challenge that they’ve created for themselves. In some instances, it seems that they’ve failed to take common-sense precautions to prevent the spread of propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech. Those are very ominous words. So precisely what would constitute “propaganda”, “misinformation” or “hate speech”? When you start regulating speech, you cross a very dangerous line. There is a reason why our founders guaranteed us freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, because if we don’t have the freedom to say what we want then what do we really have left?
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g. The head of cyber unit at Israel’s State Attorney’s Office, Haim Wismonsky, reported to government ministers that 85% of government requests to remove content deemed harmful or dangerous were accepted in 2017, compared to 70% last year.
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h. Schrems’ inspiration for the complaint came after a 2011 talk by Facebook privacy lawyer Ed Palmieri that he heard while he was studying in the U.S. Schrems said his takeaway from that speech was that Facebook’s handling of user data did not comply with the European Union’s data protection laws. In its October ruling, the Court of Justice noted that “national security, public interest and law enforcement requirements of the United States prevail over the Safe [Harbor] scheme, so that United States undertakings are bound to disregard, without limitation, the protective rules laid down by that scheme where they conflict with such requirements. The United States Safe [Harbor] scheme thus enables interference, by United States public authorities, with the fundamental rights of persons.”
i. Shalabi’s husband Omar, 44, was earlier this month sentenced to nine months in an Israeli prison after an Israeli court found him guilty of “supporting terrorism” and “incitement” for comments he wrote on Facebook last December. Omar, the former secretary of Jerusalem’s branch of the Fatah political party, was one of eight Palestinians from the city arrested in December for Facebook comments. The court cited “statuses” and comments he wrote in support of armed activities against Israelis following the kidnapping and murder of 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair by Israeli settlers last July, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.Sami Deis, a 27-year-old Palestinian Jerusalemite who was arrested at the same time as Shalabi, was sentenced to eight months in prison for similar charges relating to a Facebook page – titled “Death to Israel” – that he created and administered.
j. “We are sorry.” This is what the head of public policy for Facebook in Canada has said in regards to the revelation that over 600,000 Canadians have had their privacy compromised and their data used by Cambridge Analytica. When whistle-blower Christopher Wylie revealed that Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately collected information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users, he also showed the world the incredible scale of how social media companies and data brokers are harvesting and exploiting the private social media activity of millions of people around the world. And it’s shown us something else: how Canada’s privacy laws have failed to protect us, and how they have no power to help us prevent something like this from happening again. Facebook’s half-hearted apology to Canadians only makes it clearer that companies like this will never improve their practices unless the law compels them. With news of major data breaches coming almost every day now, it’s time for the government to step up and give us all the protection we deserve.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-facebook-data-scandal-how-protected-are-canadians/5638767
6. Manipulations by Facebook
a. Last year, the World Socialist Web Site reported that its another sites, including Global Research, Counterpunch, Consortium News, WikiLeaks and Truthout, saw their search traffic plunge after search giant Google implemented a change to its search ranking algorithm.
b. The Guardian explains:The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age. Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.
c. “So it seems that Facebook and the U.S. military are likely working together to study civil unrest and work on ways to manipulate the masses into apathy or misguided feelings of contentment in the face of continued banker and oligarch theft. This is extremely disturbing, but this whole affair is highly troubling in spite of this,” writes Michael Krieger.
d. Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 2 million American users during the 2012 presidential election without telling them. The manipulation led to a 3 percent increase in voter turnout, according to the company’s own data scientist.
e. Not surprisingly, less than a month later, it was rumored that Iran ’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei had started a Facebook page. The style and content of the site ruled out its authenticity, but the State Department was amused. In spite of the potential for alarm, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland jokingly expressed Washington ’s curiosity to see how many “likes’ Khamenei would receive. This is no joking matter. Any message on this page would be attributed to Khamenei with a potential for dangerous ramifications.
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f. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, along with 18 members of the House of Representatives—15 Republicans and three Democrats—has sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding that the Qatari-run Al-Jazeera television network register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The letter was issued after Al-Jazeera said it planned to air a documentary by a reporter who went undercover to look into the Israel lobby in the United States. The action by the senator and the House members follows the decision by the Justice Department to force RT America to register as a foreign agent and the imposition of algorithms by Facebook, Google and Twitter that steer traffic away from left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites, including Truthdig. It also follows December’s abolition of net neutrality.
g. Warfare is a constantly changing landscape, from the weapons that are used to the battlefields they’re fought on. Amidst mountains of Snowden leaks from the NSA and GCHQ, it’s no longer a mystery that the digital warfare is advancing quickly, and the British Army just upped its digital artillery.
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h. A single pro-Brexit group with almost no public presence spent almost £50,000 on Facebook. Britain’s Future – which does not declare its funders and has no published address – is running hundreds of very localised targeted ads pushing for ‘no deal’.
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i. Mother Jones reports that Facebook has been conducting stealthy political experiments on users, including tweaking the news feeds of almost 2 million users to boost articles shared from the top 100 media outfits. The purpose was to test voter turnout in the 2012 election.
j. The Land Destroyer Report maintained a Facebook page under the name Anthony Cartalucci. Since 2009 it was used to express my personal thoughts regarding the news of the day, as well as share relevant links with followers. Today, Facebook, without warning or opportunity to appeal, decided that the Facebook account must be changed over to a “page.” By doing so, all those following my account no longer would receive updates, because of Facebook’s “news feed” filters.
k. An Israel-based campaign to meddle in the elections of several African, Asian and Latin American countries has been uncovered by social media giant Facebook. Facebook announced today that it had deactivated dozens of accounts found to be spreading disinformation by posing as local journalists and influencers. The social media giant traced these accounts to Archimedes Group, a private company based near Tel Aviv which had engineered the campaign.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-firm-meddled-africa-asia-latin-america-elections/5677735
l. I maintain that we have good reason to fear that the business model of commercial surveillance – pioneered by Google and adopted by Facebook, among others – is serving to undermine the foundations of our democracy.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-new-despotism-in-the-era-of-surveillance-capitalism/5669034
m. In the 2010 US congressional elections, 61 million Facebook users saw a ‘social’ message encouraging them to vote, with a link to polling station information, a clickable ‘I voted’ button, a counter showing how many people had clicked ‘I voted’, and the profile pictures of six of their Facebook friends who had done so. It turned that users who saw their friends’ faces were more likely to vote than those who saw the message alone. Hundreds of thousands of votes were attributed to this one action by Facebook.
n. Several prominent figures, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, warned the EU Parliament that the measure would be “an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.”
7. Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Russiagate, Disinformation
a. “Analytica’s personality model has allowed it to create a personality profile for every adult in the U.S. – 220 millions of them, each with up to 5,000 data points.” Much of this is done through Facebook dark posts, which are only visible to those being targeted…. Bots, or fake social media profiles, have become its foot soldiers – an army of political robots used to control conversations on social media and silence and intimidate journalists and others who might undermine their messaging….
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b. “The Facebook intervention is a qualitative escalation of the McCarthyite offensive.” Facebook has assumed additional political police powers, disrupting a planned counter-demonstration against white supremacists, set for August 12th in Washington, on the grounds that it was initiated and inspired by “Russians” as part of a Kremlin campaign to “sow dissention” in the U.S. The Facebook intervention is a qualitative escalation of the McCarthyite offensive launched by the Democrat Party and elements of the national security state, and backed by most of the corporate media, initially to blame Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat on “collusion” between Wikileaks, “the Russians” and the Trump campaign to steal and publicize embarrassing Clinton campaign emails.
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c. Facebook killed the internet, and I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people didn’t even notice.
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d. “Studies” have even been published proving the effectiveness of Facebook’s unethical social engineering. In one study, the emotions of users were successfully manipulated by selectively posting only negative or only positive posts from individuals or organizations on users’ contact lists. A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” stated in its abstract that (emphasis added):We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues. Not only are the findings troubling – illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds – but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.
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Turning a Network of Information into a One-Way Propaganda Pipeline
e. Was there a cover-up surrounding the Pentagon’s direct funding of Facebook’s notorious mass psychological study in order to conceal the fact that the experiment’s true purpose was part of preparations to manipulate public opinion in times of civil unrest?
f. Despite 63 GOP lawmakers petitioning for the release of an explosive four-page memo detailing FISA warrant abuse against the Trump campaign, California Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff have fired off an embarrassing letter to the CEO’s of Twitter and Facebook, imploring the social media giants to take action against Russian bots pushing the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. (Feinstein, ironically, #ReleasedTheTranscripts of closed-door Congressional testimony by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson in early January in an effort to influence public opinion).
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g. In their letter, Feinstein and Schiff argue that “public reports” indicate that the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign is being promoted by “social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.” This claim is based entirely on one source: a supposed social media monitoring service called “Hamilton 68” operated by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
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h. This is a dance of confused ends and mistrustful glances, mixed with occasional moments of misplaced adoration. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has never been an empathetic sort and his testifying before the US Congress has done nothing to dispel that assessment. That stands to reason: the least sociable of types, the most awkward of individuals in engaging with beings, creates the most networked social creation on the planet. In doing so, he becomes the president and promoter of surveillance capitalism, its chief priest and sovereign.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/admiring-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-goes-before-congress/5635776
i. Facebook is a problem. It is undoubtedly being used by special interests to manipulate and monitor entire populations both within the United States and well beyond. It represents a tool that in no way serves the people actually using it, and instead allows special interests to use the users. It is a dream global panopticon for the abusive dictators that run Western society and presume dominion over what they call an “international order.”
j. A new study by the Mediterranean Council for Intelligence Studies’ (MCIS) 2012 Intelligence Studies Yearbook points to the use of social media as “the new cutting edge in open-source tactical intelligence collection”. IntelNews.org’s Joseph Fitsanakis, who co-authored the study, reports: We explain that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of other social networking platforms are increasingly viewed by intelligence agencies as invaluable channels of information acquisition. We base our findings on three recent case studies, which we believe highlight the intelligence function of social networking. (Joseph Fitsanakis, Research: Spies increasingly using Facebook, Twitter to gather data, intelNews.org, February 13, 2012) The MCIS study is partly based on the “Arab Spring” framework which allegedly “prompted the US government to begin developing guidelines for culling intelligence from social media networks”. (Ibid.) Again, this leaves out the fact that the U.S. Government provides “activist training” to foreign nationals to destabilize their country of origin. This tactic is detailed in Tony Cartalucci’s latest article, Egypt: US-funded Agitators on Trial: US “Democracy Promotion” = Foreign-funded Sedition. “Cyber dissidence” is sponsored among others by CIA-linked Freedom House. The First of The Bush Institute’s Human Freedom Events, Co-Sponsored by Freedom House was titled “The Conference on Cyber Dissidents: Global Successes and Challenges”.
k. It is true that Facebook and other new media platforms increasingly control how we see and understand the world. But there is nothing new about this. Such control existed long before anyone had heard of Facebook. Corporations were deciding what access we have to information, acting as gatekeepers, decades before the internet was invented. And before them, the church and its priests controlled what was considered “knowledge” in western societies.
l. On November 22, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an alarming piece of news entitled “Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age”. The “cyber-warriors” who are headed for organizations such as the CIA, NSC, FBI, the Pentagon and so on, are trained to stalk, “rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook [emphasis added]. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cell phones and flash drives.”
m. Facebook transforms who you are, your likes, dislikes, beliefs and fantasies, all of it into a commodity that it alone owns, 600 million intimate profiles of people like you and me. But behind the development of the Web was the driving force of the military and the financial sector. READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/in-your-face-the-facebook-corporate-bonanza/24982
n. All hailed Facebook – finally there was something they could build their anti-Russian campaign on. It is of course idiotic to believe that 3,000 ads for which some $100,000 was spent over two years would somehow effect a U.S. election. In a U.S. presidential election more than $2 billion is spend on advertising. Facebook’s ad revenue per year is some $27 billion. Moreover – as it now turns out these 3,000 advertisements which “appeared” to be “associated” with something “Russian” were not anti-Clinton or pro-Trump but were a mix of pro- and contra ads on various social issues: The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign. The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.
o. “When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks,” said the authors of the paper, who include researchers from Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California. The Facebook users were not notified of the experiment. However, according to Facebook’s terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), users’ data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
p. Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established accomplishment. Facebook was saying that it estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period but over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017. That, figure, in turn, was based on the estimate that 29 million people might have gotten at least one story in their Facebook feed over that same two-year period and on the assumption that they shared it with others at a particular rate. The first problem with citing those figures as evidence of impact on the 2016 election is that Facebook did not claim that all or even most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people was, in fact, election-related. But Stretch did testify that IRA content over that two–year period represented just four thousandths (.0004) of the total content of Facebook newsfeeds.
8. Fake Accounts or Multiple Accounts allowed by Facebook
a. A number of Palestinian activists on social media have published anonymous messages with Arabic names, that are asking for “names of protesters,” especially in Jerusalem, saying that it’s only “to join them in the clashes.”
The messages started flowing on Friday, according to PNN, and there have been several warnings not to reply, accept friend requests, or give out any type of information. Media sources said that Israeli intelligence have launched these accounts to monitor the protesters. The accounts have Palestinian flags as their cover photos, with Arabic names, local numbers, and use the Arabic language. Israel has long used social media, especially Facebook, to monitor activists and indeed arrested a number of people for their “anti-Israel” posts.
b. EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency’s social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies. The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy. EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/homeland-security-s-covert-surveillance-of-facebook-and-twitter/28391
9. Hate Speech
a. A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive allegedly by six Israeli Jewish youths, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians. It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” Last month, Facebook removed threats of violence against pro-EU MPs made in response to a paid-for Brexit Defence Force advert. But Facebook ruled that the advert itself – which accused anti-Brexit MPs of “treason” – did not breach its community standards.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/revealed-the-dark-money-brexit-ads-flooding-social-media/5667750
b. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube are pretending, and here is the perfect evidence. While these social corporations contend the coming moves against “extremism” are based in altruism and correctness, the truth is revealed in their past actions. The best example I can give is the case of one Nedā Āghā-Soltān. Some will recall the outrage over a YouTube video showing a young Iranian woman dying in front of the camera. Shot by a sniper, the beautiful young philosophy student bled to death before our eyes. The video depicted death in its horrific finality, injustice in its banal cruelty, and more importantly the indecency the Internet has come to represent. For my part the nightmarish and soul darkening vision of life draining from this woman troubled my sleep. Make no mistake, I have seen death many times before, but never catalogued so intrusively. In the end, despite a fairly vast outcry to remove the video, Google refused. The political aspects of Neda’s death took over, the viral nature of the death on Twitter and YouTube was actually promoted, for many robbing her of her last moments was a sin. Now few raise a voice at even the most horrific scenes, and this was by design.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/google-facebook-microsoft-and-twitter-become-the-gatekeepers/5561037
c. An anonymous person immediately submitted this post to the authorities—presumably out of context—and Justin Carter was arrested at work the following day. A SWAT team later raided his apartment and confiscated his computer, which the authorities claimed contained “violent video games.” A judge vindictively set the bond for his release at $250,000, later increasing it to $500,000, and Justin Carter has remained in prison ever since. By itself, Justin Carter’s Facebook comment is, in fact, one hundred percent protected free speech. As late as 1972, US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/american-teenager-jailed-as-terrorist-for-facebook-post/5341749
d. His latest Facebook episode is a remake of the same old story. Some ill-intended ‘artist’, under the guise of freedom of speech, takes on a confrontational mission, knowing fully the response such an act would generate, and perhaps the lives that would be lost. Muslim masses, predictably, respond through angry protests, burning flags, denouncing America, Israel, Zionism, Facebook, YouTube and so on. Strangely, the very governments that are considered US allies tend to be on the forefront of condemning the ‘blasphemous’ provocations. Muslim masses are thus exploited on all fronts – by the media, by anti-Muslims, by right wing forces in the West, and their own governments.
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-and-muslim-outrage-gleaning-the-wrong-lesson-again/19541
e. Former marine Brandon Raub was carted off by the Feds and locked in a psychiatric ward for Facebook posts questioning the government’s version of 9/11.
f. Yarden Ben Yosef, chair of the IDC student union, is described as the person who initiated the war room. “Yesterday we managed to pull down a whole Facebook page that incited against Israel and called for the killing of Jews,” Ben Yosef claimed. “It had 120,000 followers and Facebook took it down after a lot of activity on our part,” Ben Yosef said. If true, that is in marked contrast to Facebook’s total inaction, despite complaints, to control the pervasive, raging incitement to racism and violence by Israelis on Facebook who support the slaughter of Palestinians.
g. Facebook’s business model has far-reaching implications, especially in terms of our ability to empathize with others – others who may not be like, or think like, ourselves. This had devastating results in Myanmar where Facebook became a tool for ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. While it certainly may not have been its intention, Facebook has become a “forum for tribalism” promoting a “simplistic version of ‘community’” while arguably “harming democracy, science and public health” – as Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests in Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Facebook has contributed its share to the deterioration of epistemic norms and has helped to usher in the era of so-called post-truth. The motivation behind this disdain for truth as such, has always been the same – namely, it serves the bottom line. As McNamee puts it: “on Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets better treatment.”
READ MORE: https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-new-despotism-in-the-era-of-surveillance-capitalism/5669034
h. You Think the Wall Street Journal has No Sense of Humor? Think Again. On the Fourth of July – Independence Day – The Journal ran a freedom-oriented story with a headline that began: “Teen Jailed for Facebook Posting….”In Texas last winter, a working 18-year-old was jailed, and is still being held on $500,000 bail, because a Canadian woman reported a single, frivolous Facebook post that he had marked “LOL” (laughing out loud) and “jk” (just kidding). Ignoring those cues, local police went ahead and charged him with “terroristic threatening” — really? That is darkly humorous even in post-terrified America.
i. The Internet was originally promoted as a completely free and uncensored mechanism for people everywhere to exchange views and communicate, but it has been observed by many users that that is not really true anymore.
j. “Drawing the line between ‘real’ and ‘inauthentic’ views is a difficult enterprise that could put everything from important political parody to genuine but outlandish views on the chopping block,” Eidelman said. “It could also chill individuals who only feel safe speaking out anonymously or pseudonymously.” Safety? Feel safe?
10. Colonialism
a. Facebook’s Indian partner in the Free Basics venture, is an Indian mega-corporation with interests in telecom, energy, food, retail, infrastructure and, of course, land. Reliance obtained land for its rural cell phone towers from the government of India and grabbed land from farmers for SEZ’s through violence and deceit.
11. Others
a. Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an example of this. Wikipedia is edited by the CIA, not only in the sense that anyone (including you) can edit what is on Wikipedia, but also in the sense that Wikipedia itself blocks edits or changes that introduce facts and evidence which disprove some of the allegations that are made in Wikipedia articles, and that Wikipedia doesn’t tell such a person why a revision or addition to the article was rejected and will not be considered by Wikipedia: the secret people who control the articles, and the secret process by which they do it, are secrets, disclosed to no outsiders, but known to the people who control Wikipedia. The perpetrators know what the key truths are, but the public do not, because the media hide the key truths.