A 60-page advice brochure for German kindergartens instructs teachers on how to identify and deal with children from ‘far-right’ families. Critics say it encourages spying and equates wearing braids and dresses with nationalism.
Facebook exposed: Docs dumped by UK show FB whitelisted user data collection for cherry-picked firms
The entrance sign to Facebook headquarters. ©Reuters / Elijah Nouvelage
Internal Facebook documents, previously seized by Britain, confirm that the tech giant made a habit of sharing user data with other firms without user consent and tried to avoid bad publicity by obfuscating its data vacuuming.
The British Parliament on Wednesday released a trove of Facebook documents, which it took possession of amid a larger inquiry into Cambridge Analytica, a firm that used Facebook data to profile users for political purposes. MP Damian Collins, who chairs Parliament’s Digital, Culture Media and Sports Committee, said the probe established several key issues.
ALSO ON RT.COMUK MPs seize documents expected to expose Facebook’s covert data harvestingFacebook’s change of platform in 2014-2015 allowed it to enter into “whitelisting” agreements with app developers, giving them access to user data, in particularly how users are linked as friends within the platform. The documents didn’t reveal what policy Facebook used to decide which firms were worthy of the privilege and which were not.
The increased exposure of private data generated more revenue for app developers, and this outcome was the key driver behind the changes made by Facebook. The social network itself received data about how people were using third party apps in return.
The data-hungry mammoth wanted to know how people used their mobile phones, so it changed Facebook’s mobile app to enable it to harvest more information from devices it was installed on. It deliberately made it harder for users to be aware of this happening in order to avoid bad PR, the MP stressed.
Facebook also used its position as user data provider to affect the businesses of its competitors in social media, like Twitter, the report said.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
Selfie while Paris burns? Woman’s Burger King snap ‘captures spirit of the era’
The moment was captured by Russian journalist and photographer Ilya Varlamov. © Ilya Varlamov
As “urban warfare” grips the streets of Paris a photograph of a woman in a Burger King, who is incongruously grinning from ear to ear while tear gas swirls outside, is being hailed as the perfect encapsulation of modern times.
The French capital has seen a wave of protests, riots and looting in recent days after Yellow Vest demonstrations against tax hikes turned violent.
ALSO ON RT.COM‘Out of touch’: Protesting French people want to be heard – but gov’t does not listenMajor clashes between police and protesters have left hundreds of people injured and led to hundreds of arrests as street violence reaches levels unseen for decades in the European country.
CRS riot police used water cannons and tear gas in a bid to quell, what the head of the Alliance police union, Frederic Lagache, called “insurrectional climate.”
However, all of that appeared to be of little concern to the woman who was snapped happily surveying the scene from inside the fast-food outlet while seemingly taking pictures on her smartphone.
READ MORE: WATCH French students gripped by Yellow Vest protest spirit OVERTURN cars in Toulouse
Clouds of teargas, the masked man, the Burger King signage and the woman’s toothy smile give the striking scene a baroque feel and it has clearly struck a chord with many as the photo garnered more than 120,000 Reddit upvotes and nearly 4,000 comments in one day.
The moment was captured by Russian journalist and photographer Ilya Varlamov. “Rarely does a photo so accurately capture the spirit of an era,” the viral Reddit post reads.
Naturally Redditors took to memeifying the picture and it was quickly incorporated into various pieces of art such as the Banksy self shredding painting and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Elon Musk smoking a joint also got a run out.
READ MORE: Trump hijacks ‘Yellow vest’ protest to praise himself for ditching Paris climate deal
Burger King has now been the backdrop for at least two viral incidents during the unrest in Paris. Riot police were also filmed using a considerable amount of force on several Yellow Vests who were in a branch of the restaurant in the French capital.
“The demonstrators obviously forced the entrance, because the Burger King was closed, and the door was damaged when we entered,” a photographer who witnessed the incident said to Liberation.
“We enter the Burger King with about fifteen Yellow Vests, everyone suffocates, I vomit almost, so the air was loaded with tear gas. The manager passes us bottles of water so that we can rinse the face. The time to catch our breath, we see the CRS surround the Burger King. We lift our press card in the air.
They took out the protesters one by one through the entrance of the Burger King, and we saw the CRS beat all those who went out.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
JOHN STOSSEL ON CENSORSHIP: GOOGLE & FACEBOOK CROSS ‘THE CREEPY LINE’ DAILY
‘Their ability to manipulate the algorithm is something that they’ve demonstrated,’ says expert
Mac Slavo | SHTF Plan – DECEMBER 5, 2018
John Stossel has recently said that Google and Facebook aren’t just guilty of censorship, but they cross “the creepy line” of suppression of speech daily. Both companies have an obvious agenda, and they have proven that they will silence those who dissent.
“It is a company that has an agenda,” the writer of “The Creepy Line,” Peter Schweizer, says in Stossel’s latest video. Google executives do give much more money to Democrats than Republicans. Eric Schmidt even advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to a Fox News op-ed by Stossel on censorship.
“Their ability to manipulate the algorithm is something that they’ve demonstrated,” says Schweizer, and last election Google put positive stories about Hillary Clinton higher in Google searches.
Hillary Clinton may have lost by a substantially larger margin had Google not manipulated the search results in her favor. Even trending negative searches about the corrupt democrat were suppressed. According to an exclusive by Breitbart, the conclusions are based on 16 months of experiments conducted with a total of 1,800 people from all 50 U.S. states. Participants in the study came from diverse ideological backgrounds, including liberal, conservative, and moderate. In order to control prior biases, participants were asked to judge political candidates that they were unfamiliar with.
The research showed that the manipulation of results pages in search engines can shift the voting preferences of undecideds by anywhere between 20 and 80 percent, depending on the demographic –meaning Google was attempting to rig the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. -SHTFPlan
Both Google and Facebook have attempted to claim they are unbiased, yet their actions continue to show otherwise. “But they’re not using unbiased algorithms to do things like search for unacceptable content,” says psychologist Jordan Peterson in the documentary. “They’re built specifically to filter out whatever’s bad.” And “whatever’s bad” is anything that goes against the liberal agenda of a complete totalitarian and authoritarian regime where the government controls every aspect of every human beings life.
Mark Zuckerberg even testified that Facebook actively filters out “hate speech, terrorist content, nudity, anything that makes people feel unsafe.” And feelings, as anyone with two functioning brain cells to rub together knows, are highly subjective and wholly biased.
My TV channel, “Stossel TV,” will survive if YouTube won’t let young people watch some of my videos, but it’s a big setback.
My purpose in making the videos is to reach kids, to educate them about the benefits of free markets. It’s why I started StosselInTheClassroom.org, a nonprofit that provides videos, plus teachers’ guides, free to teachers.
If Google and Facebook decide adults should be “protected” from seeing those videos, too, then “Stossel TV” will go dark –John Stossel via Fox News
“Whatever the assumptions are that Google operates under are going to be the filters that determine how the world is simplified and presented,” said Peterson in the video. But what can be done? Market competition. The government should do nothing.
But “The Creepy Line” makes a compelling case that a small number of people at a few Silicon Valley companies have tremendous power to do creepy things.
CAUGHT RED HANDED! GOOGLE CENSORSHIP EXPOSED
Jon Bowne | Infowars.com – DECEMBER 3, 2018
According to internal Google communications obtained by the Daily Caller, “Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.”
This assault on Freedom Of The Press should be met with the talons of the Constitution but unfortunately Google, like Epstein and the Clinton’s, can hide their crimes behind a wall of elitist arbitration.
BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE – WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE . . .
LIBERALS RUIN EVERYTHING
Assange-Manafort fabricated story is a plot to extradite WikiLeaks founder – Max Blumenthal
The apparently fabricated report by The Guardian linking Russiagate and Manafort to WikiLeaks is laying the case to arrest and extradite Julian Assange to the US, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal told RT.
WikiLeaks is ready to sue Britain’s Guardian newspaper for a “fabricated Manafort story” that accused Julian Assange of secretly meeting President Donald Trump‘s former election campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Manafort agreed to take part in the Mueller probe over Russia’s alleged meddling into the 2016 US election but he denies co-operating with Russia or ever meeting Assange.
The author of the report, Luke Harding, based his claim on “sources” and a document “written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian,” which the newspaper didn’t publish.
Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal asks why they didn’t provide actual “evidence from the visitor logs of the Ecuadorian Embassy which are closely watched.”
“Why not show CCTV? London is the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Why not show that? Why rely on a single Ecuadorian source who appears to be an Ecuadorian intelligence source with the MI6 on the other hand of the line and the US on the other?” he said in a comment to RT.
He believes that it is a fabrication of a story to lay the case for the arrest and extradition of Julian Assange “by tying him to a figure who is hatching out a plea deal with Robert Mueller, by tying him to the Russiagate scandal in the US.”
Blumenthal noted that this story was being met with more skepticism than usual – “even in official circles in Washington” – and that “it might have failed.”
However, he added, “once the allegation is made, the damage is done.”
“Many people might have read this story and seen some commentary about it and news on CNN and judge that Assange did meet with Paul Manafort,” he pointed out.
‘Guardian has become bulletin board for fabricated national security state propaganda’
Although WikiLeaks is going to sue over this story and both WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort deny the allegations, the article is still on The Guardian’s website.
“It is a sad commentary on what The Guardian has become – basically a bulletin board for fabricated national security state propaganda,” Blumenthal said.
According to the journalist, this story brings together the Russiagate scandal in Washington with the plot to extradite Assange.
“We know that there is an indictment of Julian Assange, it may be made public tomorrow,” he said. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with the Ecuadorian foreign minister earlier in the week, which might be a sign that it could be made public, Blumenthal explained.
Recalling that Paul Manafort is working out a plea deal with Robert Mueller, Blumenthal argued that the report may have been “an attempt to put the squeeze on Manafort because he is not providing enough information.”
“This apparently fabricated story was planted through Luke Harding… in order to lay the case for the arrest and extradition of Julian Assange,” he said.
If arrested and extradited, Blumenthal explains, Assange would be the first journalist who published classified information in the US to be tried under the Espionage Act. That, he noted, would basically deprive the WikiLeaks founder of “any real legal defense or an ability to mount a defense and would see him put on trial in a district court in Northern Virginia where the conviction rate on national security prosecutions is close to 100 percent.”
ALSO ON RT.COMAll the Kremlin’s men: Farage, Moscow and six degrees of Kevin Bacon
Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon thinks the US will go to any lengths to fix charges against Assange.
“It has been an open secret for many years that there has been a secret grand jury convened in Virginia trying to find any charge or probably make up a new law just to prosecute Julian Assange as a revenge for the fact that he shone a very bright light on some very murky and dark details of what the American state was doing,” she explained.
According to Machon, it is useful for the American establishment and the Democrats “to conflate everything with one big mess: Paul Manafort, the Mueller probe, Donald Trump, WikiLeaks as all part of big Russiagate-type thing.” She added that when you actually “pick the details, none of that hangs together whatsoever.”
In her opinion, Julian Assange is becoming a pawn in “a very high stakes game within American Washington politics.”
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
Tom's Blog 