24 June 2019 — WSWS
A series of recent reports—based on documents obtained from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings and other leaked information—have revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is violating the First Amendment right to free speech and assembly by gathering social media data for surveillance purposes and targeting organizations and individuals for harassment, intimidation, deportation and arrest.
22 May, 2019 — SHTFplan.com
The United States Navy wants to archive 350 billion social media posts in order to conduct “research.” What exactly does the military want to study? “Modes of collective expression.”
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15 March 2019 — WSWS
UK far-right leader Tommy Robinson has been banned from a growing list of social media outlets.
Last week, Amazon blocked the sale of Robinson’s Islamophobic diatribe on the Quran, co-authored with another far-right figure, Peter McLoughlin. In February, he was permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram, following a Twitter ban in March 2018 and a PayPal ban in November 2018. YouTube suspended advertising on his account this January and is under pressure to bar his account.
7 March 2019 — New Eastern Outlook
And the headlines read, “Putin wants his own private internet.” This genius stroke of Neanderthal mass information came from TechRadar via the golden string of stupidity that emanates from Bloomberg. This “thread” I speak of is the connective tissue of the most ominous force in the history of our planet. How’s that for sensational? Now let me show you why America’s propaganda machine will be the end of us all. Very soon, thinking at all will be a crime.
22 February 2019 — WSWS
Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) has called for the sweeping censorship of Facebook and other social media.
Reporting its 18-month investigation into “Disinformation and ‘fake news’,” the select committee’s explicitly anti-Russian agenda was clear from the outset, with a remit to tackle accusations of foreign interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 referendum on the UK’s European Union membership and the 2017 general election.
26 November 2018 — Strategic Culture Foundation
Those who have been saying that the West has turned Russia into a scapegoat to be blamed for each and every thing that goes wrong have been proved right. We have witnessed concocted stories invented to denigrate Moscow that have gone viral as directed by the secret services. The UK, the country that is spearheading the anti-Russian information campaign, offers a good example that illustrates how this is being done.
28 April 2018 — WSWS
This is the first part in a two-part series
In recent months, Google, Facebook and Twitter have signed agreements with the Mexican National Electoral Institute (INE), the organization charged with carrying out elections in Mexico, in what amounts to a massive campaign to manipulate the outcome of the July 1 general elections in the world’s tenth most populous country.
26 April 2018 — FAIR
The Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” envisions a dystopia where every human interaction is rated on social media.
There’s an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror called “Nosedive,” about a world where everyone can rate their interactions with everyone else on a scale of 1–5, and each person’s average rating determines their socioeconomic status. The moral of the episode (because most episodes of Black Mirror have a techno-moral at the end) was a warning against the dangers of mob mentality and groupthink on social media. It’s easy to see where they got the idea: you only need to look at the story of Justine Sacco, whose life was turned upside down over an offensive joke she wrote on Twitter, or Zoe Quinn, who’s life was torn apart over lies spread by a vengeful ex, to see that internet hatred and rumor-mongering is dangerous, and we haven’t figured out how to deal with it yet. It’s scary, but TV is obsessed with it.
11 April 2018 — Return of the Public
Facebook is once again in the news. Last month a joint investigation by the Observer, the New York Times and Channel 4 revealed that a UK company, Cambridge Analytica, had used information about Facebook’s users to target voters during Donald Trump’s successful campaign to become president in 2016. But the threat that the data giants’ business model poses to individual autonomy and to democratic process is not news.
10 April 2018 — FAIR
Facebook “failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals” (London Observer, 3/17/18).
After decades of regulatory neglect, Big Tech is finally coming under the microscope.
Facebook is under fire for (among other things) its involvement with Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm funded by hedge fund billionaire and major Republican party donor Robert Mercer and formerly led by President Trump’s ex–campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million Facebook profiles (up from Facebook’s original count of 50 million) without the users’ consent, according to a report by the London Observer (3/17/18) sourced to a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica until 2014.
9 April 2018 — OpenMedia
Facebook just made the stunning admission that 100 percent of its 2 billion users have likely had their personal data stolen by “malicious actors.”[1]
That’s right. One hundred percent. If you’re on Facebook, then it’s a virtual lock that your data has been stolen.
5 April 2018 — FAIR
Washington Post (4/2/18): “Wading into controversy is a key strategy for Russian propaganda bots.”
One could forgive the average reader for thinking reporters covering bots had been replaced by bots. The formula is something we’ve seen a million times now: After a controversial story breaks, media outlets insist that “Russian bots” used the controversy to “sow discord” or “exploit tensions”; a “Russian bot dashboard” is offered as proof. (These “dashboards” let one see what Russian bots—automated online persona controlled by the Kremlin—are allegedly “pushing” on social media.)
