T. Belman. These giants know that what they are doing will be found by the courts to be illegal. Nevertheless they are doing it to impact the 2018 elections.
Pres Trump tweeted, “Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!”
Facebook is reportedly meeting with multiple other Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe Friday to discuss how to prevent the spread of “misinformation” across their platforms ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Business Insider reports that Silicon Valley tech giants including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Snap will be holding a meeting at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco Friday to discuss the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. According to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher invited 12 representatives from the companies to the meeting.
“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” wrote Gleicher.
The meeting will be broken up into three parts according to Gleicher. Each company will present the efforts they have made so far in combating misinformation on their platform, then it will discuss the issues that its platform faces in fighting misinformation, and finally, the group will decide whether a meeting of each Silicon Valley tech firm should take place on a regular basis.
Similar meetings between tech firms have been held before, attended by Mike Burham of the FBI’s “foreign influence” taskforce and Christopher Krebs, an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security. The meeting reportedly left the U.S. government representatives quite frustrated as the tech firms shared little information with them.
Given recent reports about foreign influence campaigns across Facebook, one issue that tech firms are on high alert for foreign influence campaigns. A report from the New York Times recently revealed that multiple countries have allegedly been employing influence campaigns across Facebook to mislead users on some topics. The activity originated from Iran and Russia according to Facebook, while many previous influence campaigns attempted to target American users, the most recently discovered campaigns focused on users in Latin America, Britain and the Middle East.
Some of the influencing campaigns focused on American users but were not aimed at disrupting midterm elections in America, according to cybersecurity firm FireEye. According to the firm, operations “extend well beyond U.S. audiences and U.S. politics.” Following Facebook’s announcement, Twitter also revealed that it deleted 284 accounts believed to be linked to disinformation campaigns.
But not all targets of the Masters of the Universe are foreign influencing operations. Social media firms also came under fire recently after the recent purge of Alex Jones and Infowars accounts from almost all online platforms — most of the meeting’s attendees — including Facebook, YouTube, Apple podcasts, LinkedIn, Vimeo and Spotify over the course of a single day which led many to accuse the tech platforms of collusion in their simultaneous decisions to ban Jones.
Conservative non-profit group PragerU also recently appeared to be the latest victims of Facebook censorship, as many recent posts from the group’s Facebook paged suffered a 99.9999 percent drop in engagement based on Facebook’s own dashboard. The social media giant also pulled down two PragerU videos, which it labeled “hate speech.”
Facebook was also recently forced to reinstate the ad campaign of Republican congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, who is running in California’s 16th congressional district seat, following Breitbart News’ report of her campaign video being blocked across Facebook’s ad platform. Heng initially revealed that the ad had been denied access to Facebook’s ad network for being “too shocking, disrespectful, or sensational” for including factual information about Cambodia under communism, which her family fled for America. The ad was also blocked on Twitter, which labeled the story of Heng’s family “obscene.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
I confess that I have not registered in any social media site, since I wish to avoid invasions of my privacy. As a result, I am not familiar with their rules and processes. Do you need to pay to set up a Facebook page? Or a twitter page? Do you have to pay to post advertisements? How do they earn their money? I would be grateful if better informed Israpundit subscribers could advise me about this matter. I would like to make suggestions about ways to defeat the social media’s conspiracy against freedom of expression, but presently lack the knowledge base about their sources of income to make any useful suggestions. I do have a hunch that laws or government regulations that would hit them in their pocketbooks if they continue to silence dissent from their owners views would probably resolve this problem. Again, any informed responses to this inquiry will be welcomed with thanks.
The ‘regulation of commerce” clause in the constitution surely gives Congress the right to ban private companies from restricting access to their goods or sevices to anyone on political grounds. And of course a Facebook page, is a good or service. I wonder whether denying members of the public access to a good or service that a merchant of business makes available to the general public as a whole, because one objects to the individuals’ political opinions, is now legal. Could any of Israpundit’s readers answer my question about this?
@ Russell:
Yes Russell, I know that, which is why I wrote as I did. He and I seem to have, over time, developed a mutually respected (I hope) sense of the ridiculous, in which we sometimes answer one comic scenario with another, even more outrageous…as the muse dictates.. All spur of the moment “inspiration”. He has a very sharp mind
indeed.
Maybe a modern day “Goldberg and Solomon”…….
@ Edgar G.:
No Edgar, Sebastian is trying (for fun) to emulate a US Liberal today. I think he swallowed a comedian and I can’t stop smiling at his post. Regards to you both.
Standard nowadays: you do something illegal and if you get caught at it, you get your knuckles whacked gently. Usually, you do it again and again until it hurts. Of course, if it’s a European company that got caught gazing at the cookie jar, they’ll be penalized for everything they’ve got and more by some judge in a secondary court. Sorry about that but a clear steady look in the mirror will show that that is true!!
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Are you writing this whilst balancing upside down with one foot on the floor and the other on the ceiling, whilst your left hand is playing Chopping’s we have no bananas today, and your jaw is cracking walnuts (courtesy of Jimmy Durante, paraphrased)
I was listening to Trump yesterday and he said that they got Cohen on something connected to one of his other clients, and he, Trump used him only occasionally,, that he has dozens pf lawyers who do much more work for him, and after putting pressure on Cohen they suddenly switched to getting something on him. The money he’s accused of paying out for blackmail was not from campaign funds. It was only to keep a plot to de-rail his campaign out of the way, being put up to it by the Democrats but eventually she couldn’t resist the money.
Civics 101 (revised): Without the Federal government threatening lawyers into accusing their former clients, there can be no democracy. Without open-ended investigations with ever-changing and undeclared scope, there can be no democracy. Without special prosecutors with an open-ended mandate refusing to provided documents to Congress, there can be no democracy. Without Conglomerate-owned media suppressing smaller dissenting voices, there can be no democracy. Without, laws being made by a small group of judges and anonymous career bureaucrats for life, preferably in other countries, there can be no democracy.
I hope you are taking this down. There will be a quiz afterwards.
@ Russell:
No, it’s perfectly legal to violate the law. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Preventing people from exercising their 1st Amendment rights is illegal. Isn’t it?