Earlier this month, reacting to a decision by Indias highest court, prominent comedian Kunal Kamra tweeted that Indias Supreme Court is the most Supreme joke of this country.

The following day, local media reported that Attorney General K. K. Venugopal greenlighted court proceedings against the comedian, based on a few tweets criticizing the Supreme Court. The charge levied against him: contempt of court. Kamra has refused to apologize for his tweets and local reports indicate proceedings have yet to begin.

This should be shocking, but unfortunately its not. In India, speaking out on the Internet can be dangerous. Kamra told CoinDesk that public figures can receive threats on social media, noting that users leaked his phone number on Twitter multiple times. They dox people, they release information sometimes. Thats very normal, Kamra said.

With over 700 million internet users, Indias booming digital market collides with internet censorship or outright bans.

A similar dynamic plays out in Indias crypto market. Trade on Indian crypto exchanges exploded earlier this year after the Supreme Court ruled to reverse the decision by the countrys central bank (RBI) to ban local financial institutions from providing services to crypto firms. Now, just a few months later, the federal cabinet is reportedly discussing another potential ban.

While regulators havent clarified their stance on digital assets, they have expressed concern over the fiscal and monetary policy implications of fintech applications, including distributed ledger technology (DLT). Regulators have continued to push for local control over fintech payment platforms like WhatsApp Pay, which received approval from the Indian government only after owner Facebook agreed to store user data locally in India and not offshore.

This is part of a much broader trend. Kamras case is the latest in a series of targeted attacks on internet users in the country. In a 2019 report, Freedom House warned internet freedom in India had declined for the fourth year in a row due to increasing arrests for online activity and frequent internet shutdowns.

Localized internet shutdowns, restrictions on certain content (like pornography) and wholesale bans on select mobile applications are some of the more visible ways in which the Indian government has sought to control the internet. According to a report by local media outlet Mint, in 2017 and 2018 at least 50 individuals were arrested for comments made on social media, largely for posts considered offensive to politicians.

Digital India

Indias digital ecosystems, from cloud computing to digital payments, are expanding. According to a report by consulting firm McKinsey, core sectors of the digital economy could double their contribution to Indias GDP by 2025, adding up to $435 billion.

On Nov. 19, in his inaugural address at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his administrations governance model is technology first citing his Digital India initiative that launched five years ago.

Digital India has become a way of life, particularly for the poor, marginalized and for those in government, Prime Minister Modi said.

Yet, since 2014, government authorities have enforced about 450 regional internet shutdowns, with 134 in 2018 alone, according to a local internet shutdown tracker.

Reasons for the crackdowns range from anticipated public unrest to curbing malpractice in school examinations. This blunt-force approach can also lead to monetary loss for businesses and the disruption of web-based services.

If there is no internet, there is no cryptocurrency, there is no blockchain, there is no technology. The internet is the crux.

The longest internet shutdown ever recorded in a democracy was implemented by the Indian government in the disputed Kashmir region after the Modi government revoked the states semi-autonomous status in August 2019.

Indian officials justified the extended ban by calling it a necessary move to curb anticipated unrest that might have followed the administrative decision. While services were gradually restored, the blackout lasted over seven months and disrupted some 12 million peoples access to the internet.

Qazi Zaid, chief editor of Free Press Kashmir (FPK), a local media outlet, said his newsroom had to be shuttered during the blackout. The primarily online publication halted all coverage and risked losing its online readership of over 300,000 people, Zaid told CoinDesk.

When phone lines were restored, reporters called each other and dictated stories in an attempt to type and publish them, he added.

But then we also realized that our audience is not there, Zaid said.

While FPK managed to gradually come back online in May this year, the blackout had hit local businesses and dried up advertising revenue, Zaid said. He stressed that media censorship in Kashmir hasnt changed so much after last years decision to revoke the regions special status but it may have been further formalized under recent amendments to digital media policy, giving the government regulatory control over digital news and content providers.

Loopholes

When the Indian government wants to shut the internet down, it sometimes invokes a 135-year-old law: the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885. The act was created by the British rulers in colonial India to curb uprisings, Indian journalist Sonia Faleiro said in a recent MIT Technology Review podcast. The law gives the government authority over all forms of electronic communications (in 1885 that meant telegrams) in the event of a public emergency.

In 2017, the law was amended to specify that it allowed the temporary suspension of telecom services, Faleiro said.

One of the many problems with the law, Faleiro added, was it did not specify or define public emergency, thus allowing the government to label any incident as such and shut down communications.

Additionally, a controversial 2008 amendment to The Information Technology Act of 2000, Section 66A, allowed the government to imprison any person sending messages deemed offensive, menacing, false or causing annoyance through any electronic communications device. Using this law, in 2012 the government arrested two women for Facebook posts critical of the government.

In 2015, the Supreme Court of India shot down Section 66A, calling it unconstitutional. However, arrests over social media activity continued: In 2016, a Kashmiri man was charged with sedition for liking and sharing anti-India posts on Facebook.

The security argument

Amid a tense border standoff with China earlier this year, Indias government banned 60 China-based apps, including the popular social media platform Tik Tok.

When border tensions continued, leading to an Indian soldier reportedly being killed by a Chinese landmine, the Indian government restricted 118 more mobile applications from Chinese tech companies in September 2020.

The governments statement alleged it had received several reports of these applications misusing user data and surreptitiously transmitting it to servers located outside India.

Described as a move to ensure safety, security and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace in the governments September statement, the restrictions took aim at apps from WeChat, Baidu, Alipay and the popular mobile game PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds (PUBG), which had over 33 million active users in India at the time.

While the restrictions could have been a knee-jerk reaction to a geopolitical situation that has since cooled down, concerns about the integrity of user data and government surveillance on the internet have persisted as India works on the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill (2019).

According to Anirudh Burman, associate fellow at Carnegie India, the draft law, introduced in December 2019, deploys an approach quite similar to the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Burman explained that although both frameworks are based on a user-consent model, the Indian bill limits data storage outside the countrys borders and also creates compliance requirements that could burden small enterprises.

If there is a medium or small enterprise firm going to get a data protection officer or get an annual data protection audit, its a significant cost, Burman said.

The draft laws requirement to store certain types of data locally or always have a copy of it available on local servers has also stoked fears of increased state surveillance, according to a report by DW. Requiring platforms to store data locally could also afford easier access to local law enforcement which, if stored off-shore, would be subject to a different set of laws.

U.S. law permits the disclosure only of non-content data. So if you want detailed subscriber information or content data, then you have to go through the due process, said Burman. Content data here refers to data, processed or unprocessed, that can convey the substance of a communication.

The draft bill also provides for the creation of a dedicated body, the Data Protection Authority of India, to ensure compliance with the law. A portion of the legislation also grants the federal government the power to exempt any agency of Government from application of the Act, thereby creating broad loopholes for the state to duck requirements levied on private enterprises.

The draft law, Indias first attempt at creating a digital privacy and data management framework at the national level, is currently before a joint parliamentary committee. The committee also recently held discussions on law with representatives from companies including Amazon, Twitter, Mastercard, Visa and PayPal.

Reported to be in the final stages of discussion, the committee is expected to file its recommendations on the bill before the next session of parliament begins.

Sisyphus' boulder

Despite the Indian governments efforts to exercise control over cyberspace, internet policing can only go so far.

Vikram Subburaj and Arjun Vijay launched Indian crypto exchange Giottus in 2018, just a week after the central bank of India published a circular that banned crypto firms from having bank accounts. Confronted by the ban, they pivoted to setting up a peer-to-peer exchange.

In March 2020, the Supreme Court of India overruled the central bank circular and, according to the two founders, Giottus has enjoyed record growth in the last six months.

We have been growing at a phenomenal rate of 400% YTD and have been clocking a monthly trade volume of $33 million, Subburaj told CoinDesk via email.

Vijay doesnt believe internet censorship can stop web-based services from continuing to grow in India.

Censorship doesnt work with respect to the internet. With VPN and sorts, it just makes it more difficult for you to access something, but it doesnt prevent someone who wants to access it, Vijay told CoinDesk.

Even in Kashmir, where students had to make do with government-imposed low-speed internet for their online classes during the coronavirus pandemic, people found workarounds. According to an Al Jazeera report, two applications (Filo and Wise) created by educators Mubeen Masudi and Imbesat Ahmad helped students access the Internet.

Indias government seems to understand the Internet is essential for the countrys growth. While authorities sometimes lean toward stringent controls, the government will not completely stamp out digital innovation. This is good news for the crypto industry.

As Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of local crypto exchange CoinDCX, told CoinDesk, If there is no internet, there is no cryptocurrency, there is no blockchain, there is no technology. The internet is the crux.

Excerpt from:

In India, a Clash of Digital Innovation and Internet Censorship - CoinDesk - Coindesk

A group of researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have published a global database of instances of internet censorship that shows an extremely aggressive growth of online interference on a world scale over a recent 20-month period.

The team used an automated global censorship tracking platform called Censored Planet, which was developed in 2018 by UM assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science Roya Ensafi. Between August 2018 and April 2020, the team collected 21.8 billion measurements of online censorship from 221 countries.

Among the key findings of the researchpresented at the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer and Communications Security on November 10was that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries that were studied, including Norway, Japan, Italy, Israel and Poland.

A press release issued by the UM on November 17 described the findings contained in the teams research paper as The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled, which shows that even citizens of the worlds freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. It also showed that among the countries where censorship is expanding are those rated as some of the freest in the world by advocacy group Freedom House.

The research reveals that, for the most part, the increasing internet censorship is driven by organizations or internet service providers filtering content and not nationwide censorship policies such as those in China, where online content is highly restricted by direct state intervention.

The UM press release says Assistant Professor Ensafi noted that, while the uptick in blocking activity in the US was small, the groundwork for such blocking has been put in place in the United States.

Ensafi explained further: When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for internet service providers to interfere with or block internet traffic. She added, The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.

The five-member US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 on December 14, 2017 in favor of ending net neutrality, and the new policy took effect on June 11, 2018, approximately two months before the Censored Planet data collection began. Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs)the companies that own the hardware infrastructure connecting consumers to the internet in the form of wired and wireless services, routers, switches and serversmust treat all content on their systems equally.

While the proponents of abolishing net neutrality argued that the change was necessary to modernize FCC policies and remove anti-competitive government intrusion into the corporate internet marketplace, the UM research shows that the logic of capitalist private property and nation-state-based interests in the global information infrastructure leads inexorably to undemocratic and repressive restrictions on public access to online content in a range of forms.

As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, the tech monopolies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, have been engaged in censorship both within the US and internationally by targeting left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites and publishers with various types of internet content blocking, throttling and manipulation.

The WSWS itself and its affiliated organizations have been the target of this increasing censorship in the form of s uppression of search results by Google, banning and de-whitelisting by Reddit, account suspension by Twitter and event blocking by Facebook.

Another of the UM researchers, Ram Sundara Raman, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering, said, What we see from our study is that no country is completely free. Today, many countries start with legislation that compels internet service providers to block something thats obviously bad like child sex abuse material. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and its usually a very opaque process. Thats why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.

In Norway, for example, laws were passed in early 2018 that require internet service providers to block some gambling and pornographic content. The Censored Planet data shows evidence of network inconsistencies across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like match.com in Norway.

The Censored Planet automated monitoring platform is a novel approach to tracking online censorship. It uses public internet servers around the globe as data gathering nodes that monitor and report when access to websites is being blocked. It also uses artificial intelligence algorithms to filter the data, remove noise and recognize trends.

Previous censorship tracking methods have relied upon human activists to gather data manually. As the UM press release explains, Manual monitoring can be dangerous for volunteers, who may face reprisals from governments. The limited scope of these approaches also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar.

The #KeepItOn campaign of the digital rights organization AccessNow, for example, tracks incidents of internet shutdowns annually in countries around the world. It uses some technical measurement tools and also relies upon news reports and personal accounts through a coalition of 210 organizations from 75 countries. The organization published its last report in 2019, which noted, The constraints of our methodology mean that there may be cases of internet shutdowns that have gone unnoticed or unreported, and numbers are likely to change if and when new information becomes available.

In describing their longitudinal censorship observatory, the UM researchers explain that they used four remote measurement techniques (Augur, Satellite/Iris, Quack, and Hyperquack) on six internet protocols to detect 15 prominent censorship events, two-thirds of which have not been reported previously. The reference to longitudinal measurement means that data points are gathered multiple times over an extended period of time.

Among the censorship methods that Censored Planet detects are internet shutdowns, Domain Name Server (DNS) manipulation, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) blocking and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) layer interference. Among the countries that were studied for specific censorship events by Censored Planet (in addition to the countries mentioned above) were Egypt, Iran, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, India, Sudan and Cameroon.

The instance of censorship in Sri Lanka, following a series of bombings on April 21, 2019 that killed more than 250 people, highlights the power of Censored Planet platform. To previous reports of social media censorship, the study says, We observed 22 domains (compared to 7 reported previously) being blocked, including domains like twitter.com that were not reported. Five out of these 22 domains were only from the Alexa test list, showing that variety in test lists is important. After the initial peak, HTTPS censorship remained unusually high through April, and then spiked again in the week of May 12, 2019. This contrasts with most reports claiming that the social media ban was lifted by May 1st.

It is significant that amid the near-continuous reporting in the corporate media of the false allegations from right-wing organizations and individuals that conservatives are being singled out for online censorship, including US President Trumps complaints regarding the imposition of fact-checking labels on his Twitter account, not one of the major news organizations has reported on the Censored Planet study.

Along with publishing their methodology and disclosing the tools they are using for data collection, the UM researchers are making their data set available for further analysis by others. As Ensafi explained, We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference. While Censored Planet does not attribute censorship to a particular entity, we hope that the massive data weve collected can help political and legal scholars determine intent.

Continued here:

Censored Planet: University of Michigan research finds worldwide increase in internet censorship - WSWS

'Kennedy' host and panel break down hearing on Big Tech election interference and censorship

Twitter claims it has reversed its censorship of a link to the lawsuit filed by attorney Sidney Powell that seeks to change the outcome of Georgias 2020 election results.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday evening, alleges multiple constitutional violations, citing experts, fact witnesses and statistical improbabilities within the results. The plaintiffs seek to decertify the 2020 election results in the state and have Trump declared the winner.

The URL referenced was mistakenly marked under our unsafe links policy this action has now been reversed, a Twitter spokesperson told FOX Business. The warning still appeared when FOX Business clicked on the link.

Twitter says it sometimes takes action to block links to content outside Twitter. Links are blocked if they are deemed to be malicious and used to steal personal information, spamthat mislead people or disrupt their experience or violate Twitters rules.

Twitter, and other technology companies including Facebook and Google, have in recent months come under fire from Republican lawmakers who argue the companies unfairly target posts from conservatives.

CEO Jack Dorsey testified earlier this month that between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 Twitter labeled or removed 300,000 false or misleading tweets about the election. More than 50 tweets from President Trump have been labeled since Election Day.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

Twitters censorship of conservative voices has been a boon for competing social media platform Parler, which in the days after the election shot up to No. 1 in Apples AppStore for the first time.

See original here:

Twitter claims it has reversed ban of link to Sidney Powell's Georgia election lawsuit - Fox Business

Fox News hosts MariaBartiromo and Jeanine Pirro both leveled somewhat comical claims over the weekend that they were being censored by big tech companies.

Pirro began the weekend by claiming her private text messages were censored.

I just received 2 texts from friends. At end each read Preceding msg modified, Media objects were removed WHATShouldnt my friends and I decide what we share? #censorship #outrage #BigTech, Pirro tweeted, early on Saturday morning.

Pirro did not specify which company Apple or a cellular provider? carried out the alleged censorship. There is a simpler explanation for what happened to Pirro than the vast conspiracy she is alleging. It is likely that the messages she received exceeded 160 characters, or perhaps included a large image that required a lot of data to be downloaded both instances are said to produce the fairly benign message.

On Fox and Friends Sunday morning, Bartiromo launched a big tech conspiracy theory of her own. Ahead of her interview with President Donald Trump, the Fox anchor claimed that Instagram was censoring her by preventing one of her friends from sharing a promotional post about the interview.

You know what big tech has been doing, Bartiromo said.

Ive got to tell you, last night I posted on Instagram that I was having President Trump on in this exclusive interview this morning. One of my girlfriends tried to forward that, and she was not able to. Instagram would not let her forward the promotion that I was having President Trump on this morning, on Instagram.

It is unclear what prevented Bartiromos friend from forwarding the post.

The phenomenon of claiming censorship isnt a new one for Fox News hosts. Back in October, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett floated the theory that his Wi-Fi connection cut out because he wrote a negative op-ed about Joe Biden.

Watch above, via Fox News.

Have a tip we should know? [emailprotected]

See the original post:

Jeanine Pirro Thinks Big Tech is Censoring Her Text Messages - Mediaite

The corporate media have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 the country has been warned about the dangers of fascism. It isnt difficult to see why that is the case, as he banned people from mostly Muslim nations from entering the country, separated families seeking asylum, weakened an already frayed safety net, and undid the protections provided by a variety of government regulations.

The racist right wing was certainly ascendant during his administration, but the danger of fascism wont leave Washington with Donald Trump. The obnoxious racist may be the public face of tyranny, but there is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to censor any points of view that undermine their neoliberal and imperialist narratives.

Bill Russo, deputy communications director for the Joe Biden campaign, publicly demanded that Facebook censor more often than it already does. He and others do so under the guise of preventing Trump from spreading misinformation, using the likes of Steve Bannon as a cover for something more sinister. They may accuse Facebook of shredding the fabric of democracy, but they are more interested in making sure that the small group of people who are actually leftists will have no platform with which to oppose Biden policies.

The corporate media have already made themselves clear by censoring the president himself. On November 5, 2020 Trump claimed to be a victim of election fraud at a White House news conference. Instead of allowing him to make his statement and then analyzing what he said, the television networks pronounced him a liar andcut awayfrom his remarks.

Trumps charges are unfounded, but the public should have heard him for themselves and made their own determination about the veracity of his words. But the corporate media are done with him and have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear. They are declaring themselves the arbiters of what information should be made accessible to the rest of the world.

These open attacks against Facebook do require the left to be discerning. Big technology social media platforms are certainly not our friends. They readily silence individuals and pages that question the establishment narrative. Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive. But Facebook already buckled under Democratic Party pressure that was ginned up during the Russiagate hoax. They even accepted blame for a non-existent offense. The tale of Russian government memes throwing the election to Trump was false and a useful way to silence dissent and attack another country all at once. It isnt hard to believe that they will again bend to an establishment that is now back in power.

While keeping Facebooks history in mind, we must also see through the machinations of a new group of thought police who have made clear that they expect social media to bow to their dictates. That is exactly what Twitter did in censoring a recent news story that was unflattering toHunter Biden. After protecting the Democratic candidates son, Twitters CEO showed contrition after the fact and claimed the decision was a mistake.

It isnt just corporate media who are a danger here. There are individuals on the Biden transition team who have publicly stated their support for official propaganda.Richard Stengelis the team leader for the United States Global Agency, which includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. In 2018 Stengel had this to say about official propaganda,My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. Im not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I dont necessarily think its that awful. It should be noted that Stengel worked for the State Department during the Barack Obama administration and not that of fascist Trump.

It is clear that Biden will be the more effective evil in this regard. There will be no buffoons like Trump or Bannon spewing obvious hatred and nonsense who can be easily dismissed. Instead we will have well spoken operatives like Stengel, who think that propaganda isnt so bad.

The people need their own platforms, like Black Agenda Report, that will dissect the lies and obfuscations of an administration greeted with a sigh of relief by millions of people weary of Trump and his policies. Already fossil fuel companies and Congress members who benefit from their largesse are on the transition team as are chemical industry representatives slated to go to the EPA. All will end up in the White House along with self-confessed propagandists. We must be ready to engage them all.

Link:

Censorship In The Biden Era - OpEd - Eurasia Review

An interview with an ex-employee who, after witnessing Googles censorship, submitted nearly 1,000 internal documents to the U.S. Department of Justices Antitrust Division.

Zach Vorhies

Software Engineer. Worked at Google until 2019.

You have released nearly 1,000 of documents describing Googles censorship regime, and this whistle-blowing created a major impact on people in Washington. Especially, there are many republicans who are concerned about Big Techs censorship, like Senator Ted Cruz. Did you get any reaction from those politicians or government officials?

Vorhies: Yes. Senator Ted Cruz is an ally. Weve been working with him to help with the questions that hes trying to ask. Specifically, what Googles page rank is on websites and individuals. And they have been asking Google what the page rank is, and Google refuses to give the page rank for websites. They will ignore this question. They will beat around the bush regarding this question. They will not answer the question. And the reason why is because if people see what the page rank is, thats going to be a very uncomfortable answer for Google. And its going to lead to more questions. And the crux of the entire ranking of the internet is Googles secret page rank score that they have for each website that exists on the internet.

The page rank score on each website reflects what Wikipedia has to say about that website. The score is broken down into three categories: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And the way that Google has instructed its employees to rank every website is that they tell them to go and see what Wikipedia has to say about that website or the person or the topic. For example, if you go to The New York Times and you look at the Wikipedia page, you will see that Wikipedia says very nice things about The New York Times. Now for those of us that are the common people, its very clear that The New York Times is the enemy of the United States. But unfortunately, the page rank for this website is very high. And therefore, the articles that are pushed out by The New York Times are ranked highest and are returned in search results. Thats Google Search, Google News, and YouTube. Im sure that there is equivalence in Japan that is being downranked and possibly websites that are pro-globalist, that are against the Japanese people, are being ranked high. The reason why this is happening is because those websites have a high page rank score because of what Wikipedia has to say. And I recommend that the Japanese government use the courts and force Google to answer what the page rank score is for the various news outlets that theyre having problems with.

There are group chats within Google that debate whether certain sites can be censored for hate speech.

In a certain presentation note, an example of scorekeeping was discussed in which the search result ranking of sites with non-mainstream opinions would be lowered.

In 2010, Google withdrew from China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service. Could you tell us what made Google transform from anti-censorship to pro-censorship?

Vorhies: It all happened when Donald Trump won the election in 2016. And within one week of Donald Trump winning the election, they had a company-wide meeting. And they talked about how they were personally offended at the election of Donald Trump, and that they hoped that populism and nationalism would be a blip in history. Towards the end of the conversation, there was a question asked by the audience about what some of the most successful things that Google had done during the election. And the CEO of Google answered that the most effective thing that Google had done during the election was to censor the fake news using machine learning. This is when I decided that I was going to determine what exactly Google meant by fake news. And then I investigated as a full-time employee and found out that the definition of fake news, the examples that they were using, all had to do with Hillary Clinton. And thats when I realized that this may not be about fake news but about controlling the political landscape.

It was stunning to me. And I didnt want to believe that because I had been working at the company for five years at that point and I didnt believe that Google would censor anything. In fact, the mission statement of the company is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. And this is still the mission statement of the company to this day. And thats the reason why I started investigating what fake news was and when I found out what they were defining fake news as, I realized that there must be a censorship system that would effectively do this censorship. And I found it. The name of this project was called machine learning fairness and you could think of it as AI censorship. You might have heard of a project called Project Dragonfly. As far as I know, Project Dragonfly is fake. Ive never seen any hint that it even exists within Google. Theres no evidence, but I see a huge body of evidence that exists for machine learning fairness. In fact, it has subcomponents like Project Purple Rain and Twiddler which reranks YouTube and also Google search. And it was being pushed out to the manager class at Google.

Although Ive never found any shred of evidence that project Dragonfly exists, Project Dragonfly may as well be called machine learning fairness because thats the real censorship engine of Google.

Is that AI censorship system a self-learning system?

Vorhies: Yes it is. This AI censorship system is a self-learning system, and the way that it works is that an army of individuals at Google is making special data for this machine-learning algorithm. What they do is that they take a website, or lets say an article, and then they classify it as either fake news or not fake news. Lets say that youve got 50,000 articles. Half of those 50,000 articles are going to be labeled as fake news. The other half are going to be labeled as real news. The AI learning system then goes through and figures out what patterns, what phrases, what words, or what journalists produce fake news. Then its able to take new information and it will classify it as either fake news or real news. These classifiers are what we call machine-learning fairness, and its being run on American websites and also Japanese websites.

The AI system came out of the Stanford University. I think it was used during the 2016 election, but it wasnt at a large scale. It was used just occasionally. But then after the election of Donald Trump, Google went ahead and fast-tracked and made this project very important and pushed it into all of its products. And by 2018, it had made its way into every single product that I knew about.

We found that content which is inconvenient for the Chinese Government is often eliminated or lowered in the rank of the search results on both Google and YouTube. Actually, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, announced that all content contradicting the WHO on the coronavirus pandemic will be removed from the video platform. It means that YouTube blocks any content accusing the Chinese government. It looks like Google and YouTube are trying not to offend the Chinese government. Could you tell us your view on why these things happen?

Vorhies: Yes, I believe that the reason why Google is censoring on behalf of WHO is because they do not want to offend China and that theyre under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Thats the only thing that explains all of their behavior and it explains their censorship and what weve seen as the Chinafication of the U.S. internet system with a Chinese-style social credit system thats being secretly inserted into all of American life. You might be seeing this happen in Japan as well. And I dont think its any mistake that this is happening because of Chinese influence. In fact, a Chinese operative by the name of Fay Fay Li was at the highest levels of Googles directorship and she was the head of their cloud AI infrastructure. And what shes said is that when it comes to AI, Google has neither boundaries nor borders. And so if you put this together with the Chinese doctrine that was set forth in 2017 stating all technology that had military applications would be adopted by the Chinese military, then its very clear that China is in bed with Google and theyre AI technology and this impacts their search algorithms and their news algorithms.

Regarding hundreds of queries, our website suddenly disappeared from Google search results. We used to show up in Google News, but recently we dont. We assume that our website is seen as fringe or geo-politically sensitive by Google. What kind of measures would you think Google Japan took?

Vorhies: What happened was that there were hit pieces that happened against your website. And those hit pieces appeared in Wikipedia. An individual working at Google did a page rank on your website. And what they did is they searched for your website on Wikipedia, and they searched for the individuals that run your website, and they see what has been written about them. And then what they do is they try to see what other places outside of Wikipedia are also saying about a thing. And because of that negative publicity your page rank score went down. And when your page rank score went down the Twiddler system, which is the subcomponent of machine-learning fairness, said that we should re-rank your website, so it appears on the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth page. It pushes it down. And if you are caught distributing what they call fake news then they can do an entire site restriction where you dont even appear on the Google search engine at all. Youre completely gone. And this has happened.

Ive seen it happen, and Ive exposed blacklists that showed that this has happened. Ive also released a YouTube controversial query blacklist that you can see at my website http://www.ZachVorhies.com. There you can see this YouTube controversial blacklist also. This was being used to down rank YouTube videos, and this exists for a bunch of different products. My mentor, Dr. Robert Epstein, has identified over nine blacklists before my disclosure showing how they were censoring websites. There is also a blacklist that is shared between Firefox and the Chrome browser that will remove websites and make them inaccessible at the browser level. So even if youre able to find the website, the browser will not show you it because its blacklisted at the client site.

A Japanese popular YouTuber who has been talking about geo-politically sensitive matters complained of a system malfunction with his channel, like being unable to put a Like Button, or suddenly disappearing from the Recommended Videos section. Is there any possibility that these bugs are actually invisible censorship?

Vorhies: I believe that the reason that this Japanese content creator is missing certain buttons and feature is that Google is deliberately sabotaging his channel. And the reason why I say that is because Google has been deliberately sabotaging channels here in the United States. They remove likes, they disable comments, they remove views. The view counter will sometimes freeze, and its not allowed to go up. And the reason why theyre trying to do this is because theyre trying to prevent content that is damaging to the deep state from rising to the top. And this is something that we see in other nations as well. Ive talked to people in Brazil. They say that theyre having similar issues and problems and Im going to guess that this is also happening in Japan. In fact, Id be surprised if its not happening in every country in the world in which YouTube operates.

Every country, every region are having historically controversial issues. For instance, What really happened during a war? Many videos covering that kind of sensitive issue have been removed or received advertising regulations from YouTube, even if they are just providing objective facts. YouTube describes the reason is because those videos advocate hate speech or justify violence. Even if you contact human moderators, nothing changes. Now, we are wondering how those moderators chose inappropriate videos?

Vorhies: The content moderators chosen by Google are extremely biased. Here in the United States, often they use foreigners who are not born in the United States to do this content moderation. They get them in by using a special immigration pass called an H-1B visa. They do not care about American culture and they are given vast control over culture. This is wrong and bad.

I do not know the situation in Japan, but I would assume that they are using foreigners in order to moderate their content. And they do not care about the truth or objective reality. They are interested in preserving the legacy narrative that has probably existed in Japan for quite some time. What youre probably seeing is that some of the historical fake news is being revealed as fake and that the situation is actually much more complex, and talking about it reveals that there is a global crime syndicate that has covertly taken control of Japan and is running it not for the interests of the Japanese people, but for the interests of a European and Chinese global crime syndicate now deploying a lot of pressure to prevent the emergence of this real history from appearing. If this history appears, its going to anger the Japanese people and they are going to start acting in self-interest and for their national interests. And what you see is that Google and YouTube are part of this crime syndicate. And so the suppression of this conspiracy theory is in part due to trying to preserve this globalist narrative and this globalist control over Japan.

You revealed that Google is trying to prevent President Trumps re-election. Does Google affect any other elections in foreign countries such as Japan?

Vorhies: Yes. Google is meddling in the election of every country on the planet, in my opinion. Ive seen evidence for this not only in the United States but also Ireland when they were arguing about abortion with a referendum to legalize abortion in Ireland. YouTube banned all political ads at a certain date in a surprise move. But they didnt just stop the political ads. If you see my YouTube controversial blacklist on my website, what you will see is that YouTube went so far as to ban the phrase, The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland, in order to meddle in the election because they did not want people searching for their own constitutional amendments that were established in the country (the Eighth Amendment had granted an equal right to life to the mother and the unborn child).

Also people probably find that autocomplete doesnt work for certain phrases, but it does work for other phrases that benefit the global deep state.

Ill give you an example. Hillary Clinton has an email problem. If you try to type in Hillary Clintons emails, the autocomplete doesnt work. But it does work for Donald Trumps emails even though hes never had an email scandal. This can only be answered by a concerted abuse of the system by deep state operatives in order to manipulate the search results of millions of Americans and hide the crimes of Hillary Clinton who was the deep state candidate in 2016, and also Joe Biden in 2020.

The censorship has gotten so bad, not just on YouTube but on other platforms as well such as Twitter, that one of the leading publications called The New York Post was completely kicked off of Twitter because they were talking about Hunter Bidens laptop which contained blackmailable material that he had acted sexually inappropriately with underage women in China, as well as information about him smoking crack cocaine and using drugs that were captured in the video. This is a tremendously important aspect to the election right now and the complete blackout of this information across Twitter, across YouTube, across Google, is yet more evidence that Google, YouTube, and Twitter are operating as propaganda outlets for the global crime syndicate that has taken control of the United States and lost power in 2016. And Im sure that the same story exists for Japan as well.

Could you tell us how each user can check the biases of search engines?

Vorhies: The individual users of Japan can check the censorship of Google by using Japanese first search engines and searching for the same search term. And when they see different results, then what they need to do is they need to screenshot both results and share it on their favorite social media sites and wake up your fellow Japanese citizens and show them that the Google system is biased against their country and doesnt want them to be free.

Also, what should the government do to stop the censorship by Big Tech?

Vorhies: I think its going to be really hard for the government. I dont know how the government works in Japan, but I know that the government in America has got corruption problems.

What the Japanese people need to do is they need to turn it into a cultural movement. That cultural movement will then turn into a political movement. This is what Ive done in the United States over the last year and now it looks like Google might be broken up because of that cultural pressure that I created. Japan can do the same thing. Show the Japanese people that Google is corrupt. Show the Japanese people that Google is hiding search results that are pro Japanese. Use this to create a media sensation and then use this media sensation to create pressure on businesses to pressure the corrupt politicians in order for them to act. If they start acting, then what they need to do is they need to tax Google. Google is a data collection apparatus. They are taking the information of Japanese citizens and they are selling it to the Chinese intelligence agencies. And what needs to happen if you want to stop Google, youve got to stop the export of the information of Japanese citizens to these intelligence agencies around the world. And so what needs to happen is that you need to start having taxation on the data collected on Japanese citizens. Thats the way to undo this beast.

Additionally, you need to try to make a cultural movement so that Japanese citizens only use Japanese made social media networks. They only use Japanese versions of YouTube, Japanese versions of Twitter, and start using these in order to organize your resistance towards this globalist crime syndicate.

Thank you so much for accepting our interview and giving powerful words for the Japanese people.

View original post here:

Ex-Employee Confesses! Behind-the-Scenes of Google Censorship - The Liberty Web English

Its easy to forget what a recent phenomenon freedom of expression is, even in this country. Until 1959, British publishers could be sent to jail for producing books deemed to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Back then, the things that couldnt be said were largely sexual. James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses, was banned indeed burned on the grounds of obscenity. A single line in Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (And that night they were not divided) convinced a magistrate that all copies must be destroyed, because it could induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism.

The bravery of successive generations of publishers, their mischievous insistence on thumbing their nose at the censors, helped bring about the sexual revolution, enabling us all to live and love and read more freely. The obscenity trial, 60 years ago, of Lady Chatterleys Lover (or more accurately, of its publisher, Penguin Books), is widely recognised as the moment when the gates of artistic and sexual freedom were finally blown open.

Now, though, there are those who wish to drag them shut again. This time it isnt the grey elderly ones, as Lawrence described his censors, having apoplexies over the written word. Today, the blue pencil hovers in the hand of young progressives some of them, astonishingly, publishers themselves.

Staff at Penguin Random House tried this week to block the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose contempt for identity politics has earned him a huge following on the Right. At a town hall meeting at Penguins Canada office, employees argued that the publisher should not give a platform to an icon of hate speech. According to one of those present, people were crying in the meeting about how Mr Peterson has affected their lives, with one employee fretting that the publication of the book would negatively affect their non-binary friend.

To Penguins great credit, it is pressing ahead with publication. But as the social justice generation moves up the media hierarchy, this bizarre sight publishers protesting against their own publishing house for publishing a book will only become more common.

Earlier this year, the US firm Hachette dropped its plans to publish Woody Allens memoirs after staff staged a walkout. The American journalist Abigail Shrier has described how her latest book, an investigation into the rise in transgender identification among adolescent girls, was dropped by her first publishers following protests by staff. When another publisher picked it up, newspapers refused to review it. When the podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, staff at Spotify, the podcast platform, threatened to walk out. Censorship is once more in the ascendant.

They are so easily rattled, these new inspectors of literary hygiene. No sensible critic of Peterson would claim that his books constitute hate speech. (Unlike Mein Kampf, which Penguin, quite rightly, continues to publish on the grounds of public interest.) The argument against Peterson seems to be that, even if he isnt a neo-Nazi, some of his fans are. But since when did we judge a book by its readers?

If reading has any moral purpose, it is that it broadens our understanding of the world by exposing us to different ideas. This is what makes publishing an exalted profession: its whole purpose is to find ideas and set them free. A publisher should be a liberator, not a jailer.

Read more from the original source:

The attempt to censor Jordan Peterson shows the intolerance of the social justice generation - Telegraph.co.uk

PlayStation is reportedly censoring PS5 users on Twitter. Over the course of the PS4 generation, Sony came under fire from some PlayStation gamers for censoring sexual content in a few different games. Continuing this streak of censorship, it's now censoring PS5 users on Twitter, or at least that's what new reports claim. More specifically, users are reporting that the PS5's share functionality comes equipped with a built-in profanity filter that prohibits users from using certain words when tweeting from their PS5 by blocking the publication of the tweet until the word is removed. Adding to this, apparently, the filter is broken, with one user providing a concrete example of a tweet being flagged for containing problematic language, except it doesn't contain any profanity whatsoever.

Reports of the filter can be found from Twitter to Reddit, but the best example comes way of Patrick Beja. Taking to the former social media platform, Beja revealed that when trying to share a post about Astro's Playroom, full of PG praise for the game and Sony, the PS5 blocked its publication, citing issues with the text.

As you can see below, the tweet has zero profanity, though it's possible "torrent" is triggering the filter, though, for now, this is just a theory.

Oddly enough, there's no mention of this feature within the parental controls, which suggests it can not be removed.

At the moment of publishing, Sony has not commented on this feature or the backlash and speculation it has created. If this changes -- or if more information on the filter itself is provided -- we will be sure to update the story. Until then, for more coverage on the PS5 -- including all of the latest news, rumors, leaks, guides, and deals -- click here or check out the links below:

H/T, The Gamer.

Read the original:

PlayStation Reportedly Censoring PS5 Users on Twitter - ComicBook.com

Rock musician and conservative political activist Ted Nugents wife, Shemane Nugent, posted a screenshot of an Instagram censorship notification she received and reacted to Instagrams attitude towards free speech.

As you may remember, Shemane had actively supported Trump during the presidential election and often ridiculed the severity of COVID-19. Her videos from the live streams in which she was asking her followers who theyre going to vote for and why were banned before the elections.

Similarly, this time Shemane posted visual content considering COVID-19 which was banned from Instagram. After she received the notification that her post was removed as it contained false info, Shemane posted the info-warning on her Instagram and ridiculed their policy.

The message also said that to stay up to date on the latest facts, visit the World Health Organizations website which seems to have been received as a joke by Shemane who often questions the role of the government in newcasting.

Her response to Instagrams ban was to thank them ironically for informing her and sharing her happiness that Instagram is always there to censor peoples thoughts and beliefs. More than 100 people responded to her post and thanked her for trying to raise awareness even though she is being censored.

This is what the Instagram warning said:

A post you shared contained false info: We removed the post because it included harmful false information about COVID-19. To stay up to date on the latest facts, visit the World Health Organizations website.

Heres what Shemane wrote in the caption of her Instagram post:

Thanks, Instagram. I had no idea. Glad youre here to censor us.

You can check out the photo that Shemane Nugent posted below.

Read more:

Ted Nugents Wife Shemane Targets Instagram For The Recent Censor But She Puts It Again On Instagram To Find A Solution For Free Speech - Metalhead...